Old Article: "Hit Music" (熱門音樂) - Taiwanese cover bands in the 1960s

The following is a brief article I wrote for the December 2007 issue of Fountain, a magazine on Taiwan culture published by a government agency. That issue focused on Taiwanese popular music, and I wrote several articles for it, including one on Taiwanese aboriginal pop and one on Taiwanese popular music from WWII to the end of the 1960s (I'm not sure if the latter article is still online, so I may repost it here in the future). I've done a fair amount of research on these Taiwanese cover bands, a very few of which did make records (one even made a record of original songs in Mandarin) and someday I hope to publish a much more lengthy and up-to-date article on the subject. I have added a very brief list of a few key bands from the period in question, though a comprehensive list would be many times longer. Note: In Fountain, the article was titled "Rock and Roll Cover Bands".

Though mainstream Taiwanese popular music in the 1960s was worlds away from the rock and roll sounds of Elvis and the Beatles which dominated the West at the time, the latter did not go unheard among Taiwan's youth. As early as the late 1950s, several groups were formed by young people in Taiwan to perform Western songs. In Chinese, these Western pop songs were called "remen yinyue" (熱門音樂, literally "trendy music" or "hot music"), here translated as "hit music", and the whole scene became known by that name. In terms of hit records or immediate impact on Chinese-language pop in Taiwan, "hit music" had little obvious influence. Though many young Taiwanese formed groups in the sixties and early seventies and performed in hotels, nightclubs and other live venues, few of them made records, and most performed covers of English songs exclusively. But "hit music" was actually quite influential in the long run, for two reasons. The first was that the interest of young people in Western pop during this period was a direct precursor of the "modern folk song movement" of the seventies. The second was that many of the songwriters, musicians, and performers who dominated Taiwan pop in the seventies and eighties got their start in "hit music".

One major factor in the growth of the "hit music" scene was the presence of American soldiers in Taiwan. The clubs and nightspots frequented by American soldiers and the hotels used by American visitors provided venues for "hit music" singers and groups. Of course Americans were by no means the only audience for "hit music"; its fans were predominantly Taiwanese youth, especially in Taipei but also in the central and southern parts of Taiwan, and frequent concerts aimed entirely at Taiwanese young people were held involving multiple artists. But the foreign presence played an important role financially, and the chief goal for most groups was to get a position as the resident band at some international hotel.

The "hit music" scene peaked in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after which "campus folk songs" surpassed it in popularity among Taiwan's youth. But it left behind a legacy in the folk song movement itself, which started largely as a reaction to "hit music", and in singers and musicians like Huang Yingying (黃鶯鶯), Su Rui (蘇芮), Chen Zhiyuan (陳志遠), Weng Xiaoliang (翁孝良), Wu Shengzhi (吳盛智) and Luo Dayou (羅大佑), all of whom began their music careers performing "hit music".

Some key "hit music" groups from the late 1960s and early 1970s:
雷蒙合唱團 The Ritmos Combo
電星樂隊 The Telstars Combo
陽光合唱團 The Sunshine
石器時代的人類合唱團 Stone Agers
愛克遜合唱團 Action
雷鳥合唱團 Thunderbird