Intermittent rain over Taipei couldn't dampen the atmosphere for approximately 2,000 screaming fans who turned up last night outside the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall to watch their favorite pop singers arrive at the 15th Golden Melody Awards, where Taiwanese singer Jay Chou (周杰倫) took the top honors for best album of the year.
His capturing the award came as little surprise to spectators and fans, who have watched Chou come to dominate the Chinese pop-music scene with four albums. Chou has won Golden Melody Awards each of the past three years. In accepting the award, Chou thanked his mother, after whom his winning album was named.
Much of the evening's excitement took place on the red carpet outside the venue, where the wild throng of mostly teenagers pressed against guard rails screaming at the sight of almost the entire pantheon of Mando-pop and Canto-pop stars who filed into the hall.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
For most fans, however, the Golden Melody Awards marks the high point on the Mandarin pop music calendar.
At one point, an unidentified man stormed onto the red carpet to try to confront the Korean singer Boa, who performed at the ceremony, but was immediately pushed back and after a short scuffle with security personnel, the man disappeared into the crowd.
The Golden Melody Awards -- Taiwan's equivalent of the Grammys -- recognize the best singers, bands and music professionals whose work is done in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka and Taiwan's Aboriginal languages. Nominees for the awards come from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand and are reviewed by a panel of 30 judges made up of music industry professionals.
PHOTO: TAIPIE TIMES
Along with best album, other major categories at the awards include best male and female singers, best singing group and best band.
In the night's biggest surprise, Sky Wu (
Hong Kong Mando-pop diva Faye Wong (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Mandarin female singer for her album To Love (
As many expected, pop rock group Mayday (
The best band category, however, is the only one that recognizes work by rock 'n' roll bands. "We needed this award. It tells us that we didn't choose the wrong path in making our kind of music," A-hsin said backstage.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The second big surprise of the evening, after Sky Wu winning the best Mandarin male singer award, came with the relatively new duo Ah-bao (
The mother of the best lyricist awardee, Shawn Song (
Peng Shui-kuang (
Popular music garners the greatest amount of attention at the awards, with 16 categories, but 10 awards are also given to artists working in religious music, children's music, and classical styles of music.
This year's awards tried to put the best face on an industry that has seen its revenues decline by almost two thirds since its peak in 1998.
The decline in album sales as a result of pirating is the most important issue facing the industry, but no mention of these ills throughout the evening's proceedings.
15th Golden MelodyAward Winners
Best Album: Yeh Huei-mei by Jay Chou (
Best musical director: Kuang Sheng (
Best instrumental album: Crystal Boys (
Best composer: Hsieh Hsiao-juan (
Best lyricist: Shawn Song (
Best arrangement: Chong Hsing-min (
Best producer: Lee Hom Wang (
Best Mandarin male singer: Sky Wu (
Best Taiwanese male singer: Chang Yu-wei (
Best Mandarin female singer: Faye Wong (
Best Taiwanese female singer: Showlen Maya (
Best Hakka singer: Xie Yu-wei (
Best Aboriginal singer: Peng Shui-kuang (
Best band: Mayday (
Best singing group: Ah-bao (
Best newcomer: Lin Junjie (
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS