When punk rocks started back in England in the late 1970s, it was all about disaffected youth, the decline of the nuclear family and other volatile societal trends. Now Taiwan, after decades of economic miracles, infrastructure development and WTO lobbying, is finally going through the same phase.
The hotbed of the local punk movement is Taichung, home of a club or a gang or just a group of kids called the Feirenbang (廢人幫), which could be roughly translated as "Wasted youth", though they, using perfect English vernacular, prefer to call themselves something that's unprintable in this newspaper.
A movement unto itself, the Feirenbang has produced a bunch of bands. Some are good and some suck, but they all have a kind of raw punk rock energy that just doesn't seem care about much. Tonight at 9pm at Zeitgeist, what's probably the purest punk group or the lot, Reproduction (複製人), will play with two other bands, Bacteriophage (噬菌體) and Wang Fu (旺福).
Reproduction's most prominent figure is the guitarist, a 17-year-old dropout named Hsiao-hsin (小鑫) who could be considered Taiwan's closest thing to Darby Crash. He's young, has ridiculous haircuts and really believes in punk rock. Fortunately, his happy-go-lucky attitude and a relative dearth of hard drugs on the island mean he'll probably live past 20.
Zeitgeist is located in the basement at 122 Chunghsiao E. Rd., Sec. 2, Admission is NT$250.
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