Ah, my heart is half drunk and half awake, and I know it well.
Every time I go to speak my mind, I take a drink and gulp it down.
Ah, my friends think I'm making a fuss, I always smile and hold back my tears.
Falling in love is either moaning about a lack of hurt or getting hurt too much.
--Chiang Huei's "Half Drunk and Half Awake," 1999
This year, Chiang Huei yet again won a Golden Melody Award, Taiwan's Grammy, for best Holo pop album with Dreamer Fish, which she sang and co-produced. With an armful of similar titles, Chiang won her latest prize by a hair's breadth over Two-faced Man, written, sung and produced by Wu Bai, who made do with the best male Holo singer award.
Wu Bai is more a smart performer, says music critic and former radio host Kung Ming-sio, than a singer known for the quality of his voice. "In contrast to Wu Bai's fairly avant-garde style," Kung says, "Chiang's songs are closer to ordinary people." Indeed, during the last two decades, Wu Bai and Chiang have followed two quite different paths of stylistic evolution on the Holo pop scene, but both have significantly influenced the genre.
In 1992, Wu Bai released his first album Falling for Someone Is a Happy Thing. This collection of Holo and Mandarin songs played a major role in the great surge of Holo pop songs in the early 1990s that broke free from the typical slow and sad style. With new styles, such as the energetic acoustic rock of Lim Giong's bestselling album Marching Forward (1990), Holo pop music leaped into Taiwan's mainstream music scene.
In the meantime, the melancholy of traditional Holo songs was refined by a diverse range of creative talent crossing over from Mandarin pop (Mandopop). "Musicians really started exploring the possibilities of Holo songs after the 1987 lifting of martial law," says Huang Yu-yuan, who published Taiwan A-Go-Go, a history of Taiwanese pop songs, last year. Michelle Pan, a Mandopop singer, for example, released a highly acclaimed Holo album The Way of Love in 1988. At that time, however, most of the Holo songs that sold well were new versions of old numbers or those sung to Western tunes. "Chiang's 1992 album was the first to crack open an entire market for creative Holo songs," Huang says.
The album Drunken Confession, which sold more than 1 million copies, is widely recognized as a major landmark in the journey of Holo songs from rural to urban communities and from the old to the young. It was a sudden, dramatic leap for many of Chiang's fans like Tina Chang, a culture worker. "It was the first of Chiang's albums that I think can be called pop music--in that it's supposed to reflect social trends and appeal to a great number of people," she says.
Members of Drunken Confession's production team had been working with Mandopop for years and so influenced the style. Huang points out that while Chiang still sang about the luckless love and the hard life characteristic of the old genre, it was all recast through the more urbane, lyrical mode of Mandarin songs. "The 1992 album's composition, writing and publicity rivaled those of any Mandopop album," says Winston Teng, operator of a Web site on Taiwanese folk culture, where Kung regularly writes reviews of newly released Holo albums. "Chiang's popularity crossed the boundaries of social class, ethnicity, region and age and created a whole new market." Her achievement, together with that of other singers and songwriters such as Lim Giong and Wu Bai, clearly set Holo songs up as serious commercial rivals to mainstream Mandopop.
The winning album, sung in the language of Taiwan's largest ethnic group, has brought the Holo genre a long way from its golden age in the 1930s during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945). In the 1980s, Chiang had already played a prominent role in a smaller-scale resurgence of Holo songs after a decline in their popularity in the 1970s. The demise was partly due to a downturn in Holo movies in the late 1960s and the government's ban on glove puppetry, which had become a runaway success on television in the early 1970s. Both movies and puppet shows had been lavishly accompanied by Holo songs that were created or borrowed from Japanese and Western melodies. In 1984, the album Farewell Coast established Chiang as a pop star who began being invited to appear on popular TV shows in the then Mandarin-dominated entertainment world.
The Holo songs of the 1980s revival were characterized by their portrayal of the suffering of the underclass--those without the patronage of the regime or privilege of money. "Who Knows My Heart?" (1982), for example, depicts the endless struggle of a man making a living in a society where "men have tears but dare not cry." The song soon became a hit. Duh Wen-jinq, a writer and researcher of Taiwanese ballads, points out that many politicians have used "Fighting to Win" (1985) as their election campaign song and that this, along with the huge popularity of "Who Knows My Heart?," helped pave the way for the acceptance of Holo songs throughout society.
Like a female counterpart to "Who Knows My Heart?," the title song of Farewell Coast mourns lost love: "I come alone to the unchanged scene of yesterday's coast, the restless waves are like my restless mind." Huang says that most of the Holo hits of the 1980s tended to present physical scenes, as in the seaside in "Farewell Coast." "Each word in the lyrics was articulated very clearly," he says. "The singing and melody followed the tempo and accompaniment, not the other way around." This theatrical rendering of songs, reminiscent of a scene from Taiwanese opera or glove puppetry, took its cues from Japanese enka, a form of melodramatic singing.
This somewhat affected, "worldly" style, which nowadays still surfaces in quite a few Holo songs, largely appealed to blue-collar, older people who usually bought them in night markets rather than record stores. When Chiang's fame as a studio-recording singer was growing, she kept on touring the singing parlors, dance halls and restaurants that provided her with a living. Many Holo singers have had to follow the same hectic tour schedule on their long bumpy roads to stardom, including Huang Yi-ling, who won this year's Golden Melody Award for best female Holo singer.
Born in 1961 in Kaohsiung, Chiang Huei, the stage name of Chiang Shu-huei, learned to sing after her father, a glove-puppet maker, moved the family to Taipei's Beitou district when she was nine. Prostitution was a government-licensed business in Beitou until 1979, and the place had a lot of hot-spring hotels that attracted crowds of Japanese tourists. Expecting her to help support the family, Chiang's father sent her to a music teacher who, like many other musicians, ran between hotels as part of a nakasi group. Such bands usually consisted of a singer, guitarist and drummer and derive their name from the Japanese word nagashi, which means "flow." The term nakasi describes both the musical style and the musicians' incessantly mobile lifestyle.
Not surprisingly, the first complete piece that Chiang could sing was Japanese, and she soon found herself singing nakasi with her teacher for Japanese tourists. She remembers that her father, following his working habit, used to dress and make her up like a glove puppet. "I had to lie flat--like a puppet--when my father put cosmetics on my face," she says.
After the Chiang family moved to the Sanchong City in Taipei County, the little singer continued to run between tea houses and bars in Sanchong, Keelung and Danshuei before she went on to perform with her younger sister, Chiang Shu-na, in downtown Taipei. At the age of 13, Chiang and her sister went back to Beitou to perform as independent nakasi singers.
In the early 1980s, the popular "Who Knows My Heart?" was one of Chiang's early recordings. Her first hit was the title song of the album You Must Go On (1983), which sold well at night markets. At that time, the performance of Holo songs was still tightly controlled by the Government Information Office, and a "tasteless" Holo singer had little chance of exposure to TV audiences. Therefore, her record company booked appearances on radio programs in central and southern Taiwan to promote her new album, and she had to give up her nakasi job for the time being.
Once looked down upon as low culture, nakasi and enka are now regarded as traditional pop music styles of Taiwan. In her transformation from a nakasi singer to a popular celebrity, Chiang personifies the cultural turn-around that has taken place in Taiwan. "Her significant and unique role in the development of Holo pop songs is multi-layered," says Huang. "It's defined not only by her continuous high sales since the 1992 album, but also by her enka style on Farewell Coast and the connection she makes between older and younger generations in Holo and Mandarin-speaking communities." That connection, he adds, is a rare phenomenon in Taiwan's fast changing and largely splintered popular-music and social history.
Chiang continues to attract creative talent from both the Holo and Mandarin musical traditions. Jay Chou, a huge pop star in the Chinese-language world, for example, composed the title song of Dreamer Fish, and her record company held a lyrics contest for her new album scheduled for release toward the end of this year. Deeply involved in the production of her work, she has never distracted herself with other entertainment jobs such as acting or hosting TV shows. "She's got a good feel for poetic lyrics that express universal feelings," says Duh, referring to "Sound of Firecrackers" from Dreamer Fish. This song describes the mixed feelings of a bride on the way from her childhood home to the car that will take her to her wedding ceremony.
The young woman, wavering between her memories of daughterhood and her desires as the wife she is about to become, evokes a new breed of Holo songs that draws deeply from its grassroots tradition and looks forward to a more complex and exciting future. And like the musical genre that has been set free, Chiang Huei's young bride sings of "the sound of firecrackers urging me on."