The 20th Golden Melody Awards (金曲獎) ceremony has come and gone with the notable absence of some celebrities, questionable performances by others and rumors of backroom sleaze.
The Apple Daily reported that this was the fifth year that Jay Chou (周杰倫) failed to make an appearance at the ceremony, where he took top honors for Best Mandarin Male Singer, Best Song of the Year and Best Music Video. He was busy with concerts in China. The Chairman’s ex-lover and Mando-pop diva, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), didn’t show up either. Apparently she was in Shanghai getting ready to open up her own clothing store.
Their absence led a quick-witted reporter from NOWnews (今日新聞) to suggest that these artists are more interested in making a buck in China than supporting Taiwan’s music industry.
Bloggers, on the other hand, questioned whether Chou should have won the best singer award in the first place. It turns out that some music fans feel that the Chairman’s Mandarin pronunciation is too, er, taike (台客). One blogger went so far as to warn those learning Mandarin as a second language to avoid Chou’s songs.
Meanwhile, the much-anticipated performance by Huang Yi-ling (黃乙玲), who took home the Best Taiwanese Female Singer award, turned out to be mediocre. The singer and producer apparently had a throat condition and gave what the Apple Daily called one of her worst performances, ever.
Perhaps Chan and Chou should follow in the footsteps of Korean boy band Super Junior. The 13-member band reportedly lip-synched its way through its Golden Melody sets to the squeals of adoring teenage fans.
In other Golden Melody news, the China Times wrote that one of the organizers for the awards ceremony, Chen Le-jung (陳樂融), is also a judge for Super Idol (超級偶像) — a reality “talent” show. When former Super Idol judge Shandee Chen (陳珊妮) won the award for Best Mandarin Female Singer, the China Times speculated that there might be some back room dealings going on. When asked for comment, Chen Le-jung said he wouldn’t dare pressure any of the judges.
It looks like Gary Tsao (曹格), winner of last year’s Golden Melody Award for Best Mandarin Male Singer, is something of a lush who can’t hold his liquor. “Tsao gets blindly drunk and suffers a beating (曹格被爆喝茫挨打),” screamed a headline in Wednesday’s Apple Daily. The report said Tsao was admitted to the hospital with a puffy face and cut pinky finger after celebrating his 30th birthday at Person, a Taipei nightspot.
The gossip rag even provided a list of Tsao’s past drunken indiscretions, which included kicking a sign (2006), scowling at reporters (October last year), scaring his friends (same month) and getting bitten (November last year). Small wonder, Apple reported, that Tsao’s wife doesn’t let him hold their baby when he’s drinking.
Recalling the latter 2008 incident, paparazzi asked Tsao if the wound on his pinky finger was the result of a bite. The singer’s agent emphatically denied the suggestion and said he cut his finger on broken glass. He added that Tsao stayed at a hospital overnight because he was too drunk to be anesthetized when he was first admitted.
Chinese actress and singer Zhou Xun (周迅) has split with her Taiwanese lover, stylist Lee Da-chi (李大齊). In a statement released to the media, Zhou said the break up was due to irreconcilable differences. Her lack of specifics, however, sent the rumor mill into overdrive with Apple quoting a Chinese gossip Web site that said Zhou had dumped Lee for renowned Chinese novelist Wang Shuo (王朔), who apparently gave The Banquet (豪門夜宴) star a Rolls Royce. The pair are said to have shacked up in Beijing.
VIEW THIS PAGE Noah Buchan
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
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