Yang Kui and the Young Taiwanese Protest Singer Chu Yueh-Hsin

In the mid-1980s, Chu Yueh-Hsin, who often sang covers of songs such as “Hometown in the Twilight” and “New Kan-Mong-Gua” in support of the complete election of the National Assembly and the party-outsiders’ campaign speeches, released his first album “Chu Yueh-Hsin’s Live Works Collection II” (1991, Crystal Records). This album was hailed as “Taiwan’s first protest album,” and Chu Yueh-Hsin was dubbed the “young Taiwanese protest singer.”

In the same year, Crystal Records, which had already launched the new Taiwanese folk song movement, invited its singers to release a compilation album “Roadside Banquet(I)” (1991, PolyGram Records). Chu Yueh-Hsin composed the music for the song “Rose” based on Yang Kui’s work “The Indomitable Rose,” with lyrics by Lin Lianche.

After the 1992 “The Respective of Yang Kui and Zhong Li-he,” Chu Yueh-Hsin further planned a Yang Kui music album in response to the music concert and the lyrics and performances by Chun-Chieh Chen, Shiao Fu-Tr, and Eason Lee Kun-Cheng. After much persuasion, Crystal Records finally recorded the album in a live recording format. This proposal for a “Yang Kui Music Album” led to Crystal Records launching the “Literature Voice” series project, as well as a live music concert at the NTU Audio-Visual Center Theater—the album was recorded through live performance. This section selects the 30-second radio commercial from Crystal Records in 1993, in which the music director of Crystal Records, Ho Yingyi, “speaks,” so that you can listen to the sound image that Crystal Records hopes to convey to the market when the album “Yang Kui: Mother Goose Gets Married” is released.

“The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains” was written by Yang Kui, the original piece was titled “Three Cobblers,” in response to the composition of Li Shuang-tze, claiming “Sing Our Own Songs”and it was a song that was sung at the 1992 and 1993 concerts, which led to the audience singing along. In the 1993 concert, Eason Lee Kun-Cheng joined the performance. Eason Lee Kun-Cheng sometimes sounded like a storyteller, and sometimes he sounded like a voice-over. In the interludes between songs, Eason Lee Kun-Cheng would occasionally describe the context in which Yang Kui wrote the article in a report-like tone, or the stage of life Yang Kui was in when he wrote it. Alternatively, Eason Lee Kun-Cheng would use an actor’s tone to interpret the lyrics in a spoken-word manner. Eason Lee Kun-Cheng’s speech interpretation in the song highlights the understanding of Taiwanese new literature by young people in the 1990s: when adapting Yang Kui’s works into songs, they deliberately left blank passages without lyrics, which were interpreted in Taiwanese by a single person. The purpose is to present Yang Kui’s “grassroots literature” spirit, and it also appropriately highlights the characteristics of Crystal Records’ creative singers’ “live” singing and “improvisation” to heat up the atmosphere on the spot. For example, in the song “When Chrysanthemums Bloom,” singer Chen Ming Chang improvised to sing the previous paragraph after Eason Lee Kun-Cheng’s spoken-word performance. This improvisational skill that can only be achieved in a live performance all mark the uniqueness of this 1993 concert, which is so different from the song tone of the campus folk song movement at the end of the 1970s—for example, the song “Wild Chrysanthemums in Autumn” by theVernacular Quartet (1977, lyrics by Vent Teng, music by Calvin Teng ).