In some respects, the lyrics of popular songs could be considered a
type of contemporary literature. Popular songs are simple and easy to
understand. Even though they are commercial commodities intentionally
mass produced under the mechanism of capitalism, they nevertheless
bespeak the minds of successive generations of people. Over the past
seven decades, Taiwanese popular songs have sung out the sentiments and
moods of the generations of people in Taiwan and also expressed their
various desires, fantasies and dreams. These pop songs have vividly
portrayed the relations between people and the times in which they
lived and have not only become the collective unconsciousness at the
bottom of the hearts of Taiwanese people, but also a reflection of
literary aesthetics.
The first song that could safely be called a
“popular Taiwanese hit” was a song named “Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of
Blood” (桃花泣血記) released by Columbia Records in 1932. This song
originated from a black and white silent movie by the same title
released by Shanghai Lian-hua Studio starring Ruan Ling-yu (阮玲玉), a
very famous leading actress at that time. When “Peach Blossom” was
released, Taiwan was still a colony of Japan, but many movies were
imported from China. In order to promote the movie in Taiwan, a
well-known Taiwan literary figure named Zhan Tian-ma (詹天馬) wrote the
lyrics and a hitherto unknown composer, Wang Yun-feng (王雲峰), wrote the
music for an accompanying song. “Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood”
was sung in the streets and alleys of Taipei to arouse the public’s
interest in the movie. The lyrics basically narrated the broad outline
of the movie’s story, but the denouement was intentionally left
unresolved to lure people into the cinemas.
The plot of the movie was very simple: it was
about a failed romance between a girl from a poor family and a
well-bred young man raised in a wealthy environment. This type of
subject matter was in keeping with the trend at the time which called
for free love. The lyrics written by Zhan used some faddish phrases to
attract the masses, such as “love should not be divided by class; the
most important thing is true passion,” and “in a civilized new society,
freedom of love is what should be.” Words and phrases such as “class,”
“civilization,” “freedom of love,” “family revolution” and “to be
restrained by the teachings of ethics is to be non-modern” bore the
vestiges of the enlightenment movement and even carried a leftist
revolutionary tinge, but, like many literary works of the period, the
words were reduced to embellishments of a fashionable trend. That these
kind of melodramatic songs with a revolutionary touch were well
received by the public was indicative of the way the Taiwanese people
in the thirties fancied love and identified with the fashionable
vernacular of the time.
As the forties were ushered in, the specter of
war lingered in Taiwan. At the initial stage of World War II Taiwan was
not a battle zone, but many Taiwanese men were coerced into military
service by the Japanese army to fight in the war against China.
Consequently, many popular Taiwanese songs of the thirties kept their
original melodies, but had their lyrics changed to become tools of
propaganda for Japanese militarism. For instance, the tender and
elegant song “Yearning for Spring Wind” (望春風) (1933) that originally
sung of a young girl’s longing for a love affair as if she were
yearning for the spring wind was, during the war period, changed into a
Japanese language version of “Mother Earth is Calling on You” (大地在召喚)
to promote the Japanese policy of “Greater East Asian Cooperation”
(大東亞共榮圈).
Another example was “Flower in the Rainy
Night” (雨夜花) (1934) which described the plight of women as if they were
flowers battered by rain, scattered about and withering at night. The
song was adapted into a Japanese version called “The Honorable Soldier”
(榮譽的軍伕), for the purpose of mobilizing the Taiwanese populace to carry
out chores for the Japanese army. Naturally, these kind of makeshift
revisions served only expedient purposes and when the War was over, all
these revised Japanese songs soon fell into oblivion, leaving only the
Taiwanese lyrics, which were beautiful in their textual rendering or
which described the sorrows of love, surviving and remaining popular.
The peace and stability after the Second World
War did not last very long. After the Chinese Nationalist Government
claimed Taiwan, it was engaged in a bitter battle with the Communist
Party on the mainland. After the Nationalist army was badly defeated in
1949, two million soldiers and civilians had retreated to the island of
Taiwan. These new immigrants bore strong nostalgic feelings for their
lost homelands, but as time passed, they began to look at the beauty of
Taiwan with a new eye. In 1954, two youngsters who had come from the
mainland, Pan Ying-jie (潘英杰) and Zhou Lan-ping (周藍萍), composed a
beautiful song in their Taipei dormitory. The song used the beautiful
island of Formosa as its subject matter. Titled “The Green Island
Serenade” (綠島小夜曲), it started with these words: “This green island is
like a boat, rocking to and fro in the moonlit night. Oh, girl, you are
also floating in the sea of my heart.”
The comparison of Taiwan to a boat-like green
island rocking to and fro in a moonlit night had a romantic flavor,
contrasted starkly with the gruesome slogans of “Down with communism
and save our nation!” which were prevalent at the time. Although this
song was also about love, it was love perceived from a man’s angle, and
therefore somewhat different from the love songs during the Japanese
occupation period which were mostly written from a woman’s viewpoint.
In this particular song, Taiwan was not only the background where the
love story took place, but through the technique of parallel
description, Taiwan was compared to a girl whom the male singer held
fondly in his heart. Therefore, Taiwan was like an enchanting girl, who
“without saying a word” was beautiful, shy and mysterious. “The Green
Island Serenade” of the fifties can thus be considered a pioneering
work among the Mandarin songs that became popular in Taiwan.
Although Mandarin popular hits had a fixed
market share in Taiwan, from the 1950’s on, young people became
fascinated with Western popular songs. To them, Western songs defined
real music. This Westernization trend met with some opposition from
young students in the seventies, who advocated a return to the native
with the slogan “to sing our own songs”, (唱我們的歌) which further developed into a
campus folk song movement. During this movement, many Chinese modern
poems created by modern poets were adapted into popular songs that were
widely circulated.
In 1974, a modern poem entitled “Four Stanzas
on Homesickness” (鄉愁四韻), written by a poet by the name of Yu
Guang-zhong (余光中) was rendered into music by the famous
singer/songwriter Luo Da-you (羅大佑), and the tremendous popularity of
this piece blazed the trail for the campus folk song movement. Actually,
the “homesickness” in “Four Stanzas on Homesickness” did not refer to
Taiwan, but to China. In the lyrics of the song, “the water of the
Yangtze River” (長江水), “red begonia ” (海棠紅), “the fragrant winter plum”
(臘梅香) and “the white snowflakes” (雪花白) were all emblems of “mother
China”. They recounted in detail the poet’s fond memories of his native
land. Having fled to Taiwan as a refugee over twenty years earlier,
perhaps what the poet missed in the seventies was not so much China as
a political entity, but rather a romanticized notion of Chinese
cultural tradition.
This call to return to one’s cultural
tradition made people reflect upon their environment, and made the
increasingly urbanized and Westernized youth look to their roots. In
1982 Luo wrote a song called “The Small Township of Lukang” (鹿港小鎮),
which was about a young man leaving his declining hometown in central
Taiwan to seek employment in metropolitan Taipei. The song described
the young man’s profound memories of his simple and traditional country
life, with Luo yelling out loudly: “Taipei is not my hometown; there
are no neon lights in my hometown.” Interestingly enough, although this
song attracted widespread response and became a smash hit, in reality
Luo was a bona fide born and bred Taipei city kid. Here the nostalgia for a lost home was truly an imagined type of homesickness.
Come the nineties, this reverie-type homesickness encountered a
different response. In 1990 a young singer by the name of Lim Giong
(林強) galvanized the island with a Taiwanese song called “March Forward”
(向前行). This song, with music and lyrics both by Lim Giong, and sung by him
as well, described the sentiments of a youth from the southern part of
Taiwan who bids farewell to his hometown and takes a train to Taipei to
seek his fortune. The aura of the lyrics was optimistic, because the
young man believed his future in Taipei was full of hope, as he had
heard that all the best things were in Taipei. So, harboring the
courage of “I should be afraid of nothing”, this young man decided to
“march forward.” When he arrived in Taipei, he recalled that “people
used to say that Taipei was not my home”, but he didn’t feel that way
at all. “March Forward” advocated an attitude of pro-activeness and
thrust that corresponded to the mentality of the youth of that era who
believed they could achieve anything as long as they tried hard enough.
This kind of positive attitude was part of the driving force behind
Taiwan’s fast economic growth and urbanization.
The rapid economic and social growth of Taiwan
made the new generation of youth capable of casting their sights
farther. In 2001 the young pop star Jay Chou (周杰倫) sang a song called
“Love Before A.D.” (愛在西元前) which displays a totally different attitude
and viewpoint from the songs that came before. With lyrics written by
Vincent Fang (方文山), Jay Chou’s “Love Before A.D.” is still a love song,
but its background is no longer the beautiful island of Formosa in “The
Green Island Serenade,” but rather the plains of ancient Mesopotamia.
Jay Chou sings: “my love for you was written before Christ, buried deep
in the Mesopotamia plains, engraved with cuneiform characters to mark
eternity, after a thousand years our oaths were weather-beaten, so
everything started over again.” Using the ancient Mesopotamia plains to
vouch for unchanging love is a fantasized notion that has transcended
geography/space and history/time, perhaps signifying that the latest
generation of Taiwanese people has a broader scope of imagination that
reaches beyond the traditional, native, and practical aspects of life.
Written by Chun-yu Lu
for culture.tw
Translated by Victor Yang
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