Garbage trucks in Taipei play an electronic, pre-programmed rendition of Beethoven's "Für Elise"; the melody beckons residents to the passing vehicles, which follow slow, deliberate routes through congested streets that exude an odor of fuel and frying tofu. At times, the melody can be heard simultaneously from different directions, occasionally in fugue, at other times in a dissonant musical contest, broadcasting a mechanical weltschmerz across the city.
In the eyes of the Western visitor, Taipei offers a comforting blindness to irony, seclusion, or any of the darker contingencies of adult life. Anthropomorphic animals, cartoon characters resembling the Japanese "Hello Kitty", appear in various forms throughout the city. The culture appears to delight in the spirit of the jejune, a flight from industrial ugliness into the utopian realm of virtuous youth. The images lighten an antic atmosphere where walkways seethe with people and aggressive motor scooters travel in swarms, evading traffic lights and risking collisions with endless columns of traffic. The music of Taiwan also fetishizes a Westernized vision of carefree adolescence, and can be heard in congested shops selling food, clothing and electronics. Beats collide as shopkeepers offer cheap DVDs and T-shirts imprinted with bizarre latinizations such as "Panther Rock and Roll" or "Come to From Japan."
Karaoke is one of the most popular pastimes in Taipei and allows the participant to fuse completely with the surrounding fantasia of childhood whimsy, unrelenting electronica and perpetual movement. Few Western-style bars are visible on the streets; the Taiwanese prefer to center their social lives on group activities, and the "Party World" chain offers a rarefied, luxurious karaoke experience, a Luxor to the pleasures of semi-public performance. The facilities are grandiose, with the height and gravity of a luxury hotel, their lobbies decorated in marble and mirrors tinted in Age of Aquarius earth tones. Unlike American karaoke, where participants risk public embarrassment, singers perform only for an audience of their friends, a model known the Karaoke Box, KTV or Noraebang. Groups rent rooms by the hour; food and libations are provided, as well as access to state of the art sound systems.
The Japanese word "karaoke" means, improbably, "empty orchestra," derived from the words "kara," or "empty," and "oke," an abbreviation of "okesutora," or "orchestra." Like many fashionable pastimes, karaoke came into popularity as soon as emerging technology was able to fulfill a latent public desire. Japanese singer Daisuke Inoue traditionally receives credit for popularizing the pastime. In the early 1970s, he began selling vocal-free versions of his hits, first on cassette and then on machines that played single songs for 100 yen, a remarkably high cost for the brevity of the experience. An adventurous musicologist might note the parallel emergence of Jamaican dub reggae, a genre founded on singles with vocals removed, or "dubbed," from the original recording. Where karaoke invites the participation of the public, dub relies on a DJ or producer as an auteur; instrumental tracks are re-mixed and laden with effects, usually in service of an ominous, trance-like ambiance. Of the two innovations, karaoke is both the more popular and disreputable; Daisuke Inoue received the 2004 Ig Nobel prize, a satirical award designed to highlight dubious achievements, for his innovations.
On a recent visit to Taipei, a Taiwanese friend suggested that I attend a karaoke party at Party World hosted by the cryptically named "International Hospitality Club," a group of young business professionals. On the night before, returning to Taipei from Hualien by train, a bored attendant in a plumed indigenous costume sat in the dining car by an abandoned karaoke machine, her lethargic head performing a bored totentanz to the rhythm of the tracks. Party World offered a more energetic ambiance; our rented room included a small stage, flat screen monitors and a bar stocked with beer, breaded squid eyes, and a pitcher of sweetened tea recommended portentously as an elixir to "heal the voice." By the time I arrived, the party had been in progress for at least an hour, and our Taiwanese hosts had assembled a lengthy queue of Chinese language pop songs. These were invariably ballads, an Asian variant on regressive European pop featuring stabbing keyboard flourishes, slow drum machines, and yearning vocals. The first ballad accompanied a video of a crashing motor scooter on the streets of Taipei; the fictional "singer," longing for her boyfriend's recovery, dramatically pounded at the keys of a grand piano as petals descended like eiderdown through a studio breeze. A well-dressed young woman took the mic on the small stage, performing with extraordinary skill, adding a grace note of sincerity to the acrobatic vocal.
The march of faceless ballads continued for over an hour as I grew restless, craving a chthonian impulse to break through the saccharine monotony, to feel the pull of the id familiar to rock and roll. The closest thing to an electric guitar I had heard in a week had been the ring tone of a cell phone, the recorded shriek of a Joe Satriani solo, in the Taipei History Museum (the receiver belonged to a shaven Buddhist monk in an orange robe who answered the electronic burst with collected poise).
My hosts gracefully allowed me to break into the song queue. I chose from a small selection of English language songs, which were identified by title only. I chose "Bitch," which I assumed to be the Rolling Stones chestnut as well as "Run to You," presumed to be the familiar Brian Adams rocker. In both cases I was disappointed; the titles were attached to unfamiliar ballads. I reached hurriedly for the "cancel" button and impulsively chose Guns `n' Roses' 1987 hard rock hit "Paradise City." The backing tracks were deafening, lifelike and clearly drawn from the original recording. Video monitors filled with images of generic American menace: tattoos, motorcycles, bandanas, all filtered through an abstract 16 mm gauze.
I stepped up to the microphone and began the Axl Rose vocal, following the subtitles at the bottom of the screen, comfortably lowering the pitch of the original melody by an octave. I was stranded in a disorienting trough between Wagnerian hard rock and the meeker world of my vocal efforts as mechanized skulls grinned from the monitors and plumes of smoke rose from ashtrays. The world of public performance is unforgiving to the self-conscious; in the realm of karaoke, which celebrates the imperfections of the amateur, personal tics are amplified in the mind of the performer. Entering the song's middle passage, faced with a lengthy guitar solo, I sympathized with generations of hard rock front men saddled with the task of entertaining the faithful during interminable instrumental passages. Who was it that took to inaudibly playing the bongos? I weakly clenched my fist, occasionally wielding the microphone like a leaden drumstick in a desultory attempt at air drumming Finally, my hosts clapped politely as I weathered the overlong coda and uttered a few good-natured shouts of "Good night Taipei!"
Later I was joined onstage by an American friend for Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." Again, I was forced to perform against images of bleak Americana. Dylan's lyrics evoked a charming surrealism, the mild glow of counterculture past, now coupled with an oppressively literal Taiwanese video: tramps wandered roads and jumped from trains, the images doused in desolate Walker Evans sepia tones. The endless tossing of rucksacks onto boxcars generated its own rhythm against our dissonant performance, barely a duet, roughening an already coarse melody. Meanwhile, our hosts had retreated to the bar, bemused. The breaded squid eyes, eaten reflexively and chased with cold tea, had nearly disappeared.
The streets outside Party World were covered with the unmistakable evidence of betel nut, a common and disreputable natural stimulant chewed like tobacco; deep red stains littered the concrete, the sputum leading to scantily clad girls sitting in transparent booths, wrapping the nuts in leaves for passing buyers. We avoided the temptation and hailed a taxi, which offered its own music on cassette, the subterranean mantra of monks performing in the unmistakable Central Asian style of overtone singing. One of my American friends coughed violently, discarding a cigarette from the open window as the driver expressed his unblinking concern for his health. The low rumblings of a Tibetan pharynx filled the night.
The following day, I found myself wandering through the halls of the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, where the paintings closely resemble the work of Western artists. The images are carefully modulated, but not enough to hide their influences; Georgia O'Keefes hang next to more angular Mondrian pastiches. I finally noticed a work that seemed to speak to its local origins, a large-scale rendering of a Taipei street at dusk, ominously emptied of vehicles and pedestrians. At the center, its surface radiating a garish, cupric orange stood the façade of Party World, a luminous beacon in an apocalyptic landscape.
© 2005 by Sten Johnson.