My Old Blogs at Yahoo!360 / MTP

* CLICK to see the original article from the Chinese newspaper.

The title was somewhat difficult for me to translate. I'll pass. The article was about the American pop music as seen through the eyes of a Taiwanese, with the main focus on MJ. I saw this in my Chinese newspaper on Sunday, Aug-2-2009 but could not find the web version. I have no intention of translating the whole article but will mention only the parts that attracted my attention.

The author, Guo chiang-sheng (or if written in the pin-yin method, Guo qiang-sheng), obviously lived in Taiwan during the time I was there. Guo mentioned Bee Gees and ABBA and the coming of disco so I guess he was in high school and college the same time as I.

Guo said most high school kids in Taiwan in those days merely enjoyed listening to the American pop songs without relating the music to its historical background. I agreed with him on this. Before disco most of the songs were harmonious and beautiful. Then there came the rock-and-roll and all the oh-so-noisy stuff. We did not realize why the change of the music style was so drastic - although we did know it was the time of Viet Nam war.

It was the time young men in the States were CONSCRIPTED into the army, an obligation very difficult to get away with. Many of them were sent to Vietnam. Some never returned. Most returned with wounds either physically or psychologically. It was the matter of life and death for them. But these had nothing to do with us. We were not old enough or interested enough. We did not try to look deeper into the meanings in the anti-war lyrics. Those "GI" that we sometimes saw in our cities looked so crazy and with so bad discipline. We only felt that we did not like them. They often got drunk. Some smoked pot. The most horrible thing is they liked to "buy" our women - women from poor families in Taiwan, Thailand, Saigon, and in Japan. The women that walked with them were viewed as lowly and dirty - that was what we were told. We did not analyze why those grown-ups were like that.

In a word, we were too young and too simple-minded.

Come to think of it now, those GI were only a few days or a few months older than my older son right now. It would have been horrible for me to send my son to risk his life for whatever reason in the land so far away from home without any guarantee that he will come back alive and well.

Anyways, what impressed us the most were not the GI but the long-haired hippie singers and the English words that they "yelled". Frankly, I had always thought them weird. In those days students in Taiwan started to learn English when they were in middle school. I was from Thailand and my English lessons started 6 years earlier than theirs, but that's all. I myself did not know much, either, of the American or British culture. Some of the American songs were "pleasant" for us simply because they "sounded nice". Some of us thought it "cool" to be able to play the guitar and sing a few "western" pop songs. Some were viewed as totally cool when they could yell and wiggle like those hippie singers.

I can go on and on but I think I will stop for now. Will continue ... maybe tomorrow.