KJ
Encounters
Painting
by Tang Min Sho
Biung Home Again
Scott Ezell, KJ #58
Fish
festival in a cement tiled plaza downtown Taidong. I hadn’t seen
Biung for two years, but when I got there at 7:30 to hear his gig canned
music blared beneath pink neon lights and a sashimi contest was underway,
skinny men with fat ties wolfing raw meat, embarrassing their wives
and delighting their children. I wandered away and drank a cup of coffee
at a shop where sullen counter girls spent 15 minutes trying to make
the espresso machine spurt until finally a middle-management humpty-dumpty
rolled in wearing a sweat-stained undershirt and navy blue trousers.
He handled the nozzle like a pro. I wondered what there is to do in
Taidong on a Friday night and the answer was nothing, so I wandered
back to the show.
It was a variety show of sad and broken flesh, a love bath of naked
meat drawn and quartered by neon lights, old matrons in bumblebee corsets
danced the fandango, little girls with microphones strapped to their
teeth recited speeches, someone played a song on a kazoo, the em-cee
made tired jokes about farting and his own corpulence. The jokes tried
to limp away unnoticed but the crowd ran them down and beat them to
a bloody pulp with their dull, distracted cachinnation.
I saw a brass-haired singer from Biung’s band sitting on a concrete
wall drinking beer, wearing a rugby shirt, about as wide as a steer,
steel teeth stained red with betelnut. What’re you doing here,
I asked him. Nothing, he said, just whacking the bongos with Biung.
He gave me a bean, pinch of fiber ‘tween my cheek and gum, and
I spat the juice in the soil of a potted palm. Biung called on the phone,
“My friend, my friend,” he said, “yes yes yes”.
I played blues harp on Biung’s second album, but I hadn’t
seen him in two years. He showed up in Taipei a skinny kid trying to
get attention with a new CD, playing the pubs and festivals. He and
I played consecutively at the Ho-Hi-Yan festival in 2000, and he did
the longest sound check I’ve ever seen, checking and rechecking
the levels of four backup vocalists and his guitar, all decked out in
bright abo threads. (Bunong “eight-step” harmony is unique
in the music of Taiwan’s tribes.) Biung had a jittery enthusiasm
when he talked to people that made some shy away — I once saw
him jump up and hug guitarist Dong Yun-chang, who pushed him away and
ran — it may have been the first time Dong had ever been hugged
— but on stage that came across as passion, openness, reaching
out to bring the audience into his songs. His first album did well,
his shows grew more popular, and by the time his second album came out
he had a following, though his band still always called around to borrow
guitars every time they had a gig. His second album was produced with
studio players, some midi computer music, and professionally arranged,
but it listed only vaguely into mainstream pop. That album won a golden
melody award and sealed his career, but I hadn’t seen him in the
two years since I moved from Taipei to Taidong.
I sat waiting at the back edge of the crowd on a plastic stool, lurid
purple light show spiraling the stage. A washed up Liberace in a checkered
beret and fuzzy pink stole with a belly like a cord of firewood falling
crooned Spanish madrigals and pranced about the stage. He was a relic
from an age of sumptuous cabaret saturnalia, and put on one hell of
a show — which I would have appreciated even more if I was 63
and gay in Rio de Janeiro.
Worn raw from the strident rictus of the stage I had given up hope of
seeing my old friend when the MC announced the “song king”
was ready to play. Biung walked out with his guitar and the crowd let
out a squeal of collective orgasm. He walked slow, hunched over a little,
like his spine was tired, but he still managed a bit of strut, wearing
a knit cap and the plain t-shirt of fashion disregard that only stars
and bums can afford. You’re too far away, he cooed, his hips shivering
like a hair-trigger assignation, fluttering like the iridescent wings
of some insect-god of love. They ran to press themselves against the
stage.
I once asked the wood sculptor E-ki if it was hard to come home again
after he’d worked in Taipei for years. What’s hard about
it, he said looking out across the sea, I always know this is home,
that can never change, I know I was born here and I know I’ll
die here, who cares where you wander in between.
Biung is from Hong-ye, half an hour north of Taidong City along the
valley road, and his albums are everywhere in villages along the coast
and up the central rift valley. Aboriginal dance groups from all tribes
practice and perform to his songs. He’s got a TV show, all the
kids can play his songs on the guitar and when they talk about him they
shake their heads and grin and say the words idol, star.
He hunch-strutted to the center of the stage and the girls all hollered
hello, and he plugged in his guitar. Here’s a new song from my
new album, he said, what’s the matter you all didn’t bring
your hands, put ‘em together for me so I feel like I’ve
come home will you? They didn’t clap but screamed, and a scratchy
beat started up from some canned music he’d brought, a music bed
without the vocals, a flock of very hip slashing guitars cut in, and
Biung strummed his acoustic over them — I remembered his sidekick
guitarist as shy and bashful kid, but now he had a mop of pink hair
and grinned and strummed the cultivated aloofness of a guitar hero —
the sound system was terrible, Biung’s voice too low in the mix
but it still came through, and the rugby shirted walrus whaled away,
the bongos thwacking like the sound of wooden dildoes slapping the hull
of a ship — Biung shook his ass like an epileptic love letter
electro-pulsed over telegraph wires, and raised his hands above his
head to lead the crowd in clapping. He played a couple of songs from
his second album, and invited members of the audience up on stage to
sing, they knew all the words, and the crowd stood up and danced. I
got a new TV show and a new album all coming out, he said, come on babies,
give it up a little for a neighbor, you all know it’s not easy
for a local boy to make good up in Taipei town, give it up for me, where
are your hands!
Biung is signed with a big label now, and the songs he played from his
new album sounded like hip hop with acoustic guitar an afterthought,
a long way from the earnest innocence of his first CD with its heavy
tribal chants. The new songs were pop music, not Biung’s music,
not music derived from a place or tribe, as I heard him describe his
first album on a radio interview. Not music of culture, but music of
marketing.
But he twitched that ass, and he stood tall even though he stooped a
bit, and he sang to the people, and the sound got better as the show
went on, the voice emerging from the mud of the mix, surer and clearer,
and when the audience shouted for an old song, one from his first album,
he sort of looked lost for a moment and scratched his head, saying,
I don’t know, I haven’t played that song for a long, long
time, don’t know if I can remember, you may have to help —
but he played it, with no karaoke bed, and the crowd helped, singing
with him, buoying, and then at the front of the stage they started the
traditional dance, hands linked, dancing in a line that spirals into
a circle, and they danced right up onto the stage and circled around,
slowly stepping to the rhythm of the song, wreathing Biung in bodies
until he was small, lost among the revolving ring of fans, barely visible
with his guitar, cut off from his pink-grinned guitarist, only the thwapping
drummer ensconced there with him — this is what the people love
and what they came for and what they got, I don’t know if they
watch his TV show or if they’ll like the music of his new album,
but I don’t think it matters, I don’t think they care, they
will never accuse him of selling out because he never will, he can’t,
his voice cuts through all the bullshit, whatever city style is stuck
to him will ultimately fall away, they know that he belongs to them
and he always will, he is of this place and would be nothing without
it, nothing without them, he is always coming home.
Scott
Ezell is an American writer and musician who until reacently lived in
Dulan Village, an aboriginal community in the mountains of Taiwan's
Pacific coast. See also his story "The Chief is Dead" in KJ
#57.
Copyright
held by the author
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