I’ve just completed my Disquiet Mix of Jui-Chuan Chang‘s track Hey, Kid. The original is off his 2006 release Joe: Genesis on Adia’s label. If you’re reading this blog on moshang.net, it’s the first track in the “MoShang Radio” sidebar player.
I don’t consider myself to be a particularly political person. I pretty much go about my daily life here in Taiwan teaching and making these tunes whilst preaching the gospel of chilling out. In reality though, we live in a baby democracy just a piddle in the pond away from a communist giant that is pretty unambiguous about it’s intentions of swallowing Taiwan whole. I’ll hand you over to Jui-Chuan who thinks about these things long and hard, and then presents his thoughts elegantly, eloquently and contagiously passionately in both English and Taiwanese raps.
My name is 張睿銓 (Jui-Chuan Chang). I grew up in Taiwan, where English is a foreign language. This English name “Joe” best substantiates that my mind had been colonized by American culture massively and willingly since I started learning English at the age of twelve. I keep the trail, admit it, and contemplate it.
Although Adia and I had our first spark in his last album I am Human, it is the creating process of the blueprint for his latest album Balance, along with honest experience collected later from my living and studying in the United States of America, that made me think, as a “human,” an “Oriental” that lives on this East-Asian island-country where new and old beliefs confront one another and diverse cultures coexist, as well as where the necessity of protecting modern democracy fights against the desperation of old-time dictatorship for regaining power, what I am supposed to identify with and how I can make sense of myself. Who am I?
Everyone spends their entire life looking for a niche in which they fit, no matter what they do. After returning to my country, I began teaching academic writing in college. I make use of various ways of thinking along with critical logic and reasoning to help the young, impressionable students question traditions and trends, yet I am glad to see them challenge all disciplines and authorities with courage and intuition. I always have this funny feeling: whether I make music or teach writing, God leads me to walk the same path.
I try hard to walk the path. Everything I carry along with me on the path—language, music, scars, history, temptation, struggle, surrender—belongs to no one else but me. It is me. Deconstructed and reconstructed, I am the genesis of a new identity. So is everyone.
Liner notes for Hey, Kid:
This is the first rap (and might be the first musical composition, to my limited knowledge) ever that explicitly depicts the February 28 Massacre of 1947 in Taiwan, launched by Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese Kuomintang (KMT, also known as the Chinese Nationalist Party), and the thirty-eight-year martial-law era that followed the Massacre. More than twenty thousand people disappeared or were slaughtered in the Massacre, countless more in the martial-law era, as is typical of extreme political persecution and witch hunts (generally referred to as “White Terror” in Taiwan). The song is a tribute to all those brave souls – both Formosan and newcomers – who died fighting the KMT and its dictatorial government, which was finally ended by Taiwan’s fledgling democracy in 2000.
