On Wednesday night at The Queens, a plush, LED-festooned club on the 12th floor of the Core Pacific (京華城) mall that hosts live bands every night of the week, a group of more than 40 people gathered for what looked like a corporate party. Most of them were in their late thirties or older, and the men were wearing jackets and ties - not the kind of audience you'd expect to turn up for a show by Rabbit Is Rich (兔子很有錢), a raw, New York-style garage-rock band influenced by The Strokes, The Hives and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But several songs into the set, as the group's petite singer Andrea Huang (黃盈誼) screeched, yelped and strutted around in a black mini-dress with a glittering silver-studded belt, nearly everyone was on the dance floor, bobbing like pogo sticks and flailing their hands in the air as she sang, "I'm gonna, gonna, gonnna kick your ass. I'm gonna, gonna, gonnna kick your ass."
Arriving on the Taipei pub circuit last year with a gloriously blunt sound that distills powerful grunge chords through short and simple songs, Rabbit Is Rich is an echo of the garage-band revival that swept the West around the turn of the century. Guitarist and band founder Ethan Fang (方奕勝), bass player Adam Kuo (郭漢威) and drummer Roxy Lin (林志軒) rip off a bristling wall of sound with brittle guitar riffs, spiky bass lines and bouncing beats to frame Huang's exuberantly aggressive singing and freak-rock prancing and hair-shaking. The result is one of the most electrifying bands to come out of the college rock scene in recent years.
"They have energy," said The Queen's manager, who gave his name as Cool Jay (小傑). Speaking outside the club after Rabbit Is Rich's set, while a band of 50-year-olds covered classic-rock hits, he said he booked the foursome after seeing them play earlier this month at The Wall (這牆). "I like grunge, but now few bands do grunge. It's all punk."
PHOTO: COURTESY OF RABBIT IS RICH
Rabbit Is Rich takes its name from the title of a John Updike novel. No one in the band has read the book; they just wanted a sentence for a name and thought this one sounded funny. The band's lyrics, written in English by Huang, are equally straightforward. I'm Gonnna Kick Your Ass was inspired by an annoying person, Rabbit Is Rich by a dream Huang had in which she was followed around by an anthropomorphic rabbit, and What I Hear is a song about "how some people always lie," said Huang, which makes you feel "uh huh, uh huh." Band members are all college students, aged 21 to 22. Fang met Lin in junior high school, Kuo in high school and Huang in college. Their favorite gig so far was at last summer's Formoz rock festival (野台開唱), because, Fang said, he got to wear a furry rabbit mask (he also has one made out of cardboard). Their least favorite performance was earlier this year at Longshan Temple, when they played in front of a bunch of senior citizens who sat around eating fruit and wanted to hear traditional Taiwanese songs.
Band members say they hope to stay together after they graduate from college but didn't let on to having many loftier goals. "We hope to play overseas later," said Huang. "If we can make a living by this, that's good," said Lin. "But if we can't, we see it as our interest."
To listen to Rabbit Is Rich's music and find out about upcoming shows, visit www.myspace.com/rabbitisrichsound
- Ron Brownlow
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS