The Audioscapes of the Contemporary Chinese-Speaking World II - Who Will the Wind Blow Next?
By Ella Eagle Davies
Album art for The Servantile (醜奴兒) album (Image via No Party for Cao Dong’s Facebook page)
From vast mountain ranges, to childhood classrooms, to bustling night markets, performances of landscapes can be found everywhere in music from across Sinophone communities. In The Audioscapes of the Chinese-Speaking World, columnist Ella Eagle Davies takes the reader on a whirlwind trip through these musical worlds, examining instances where concepts of place, youth, and identity collide to produce sometimes explosive, sometimes subtle, and often weirdly wonderful negotiations of contemporary Chinese youth. In this instalment, Ella explores the emotional significance of setting in memory through the lens of Taiwanese indie-rock band No Party for Cao Dong, in particular their song “Simon Says”.
What exactly is a landscape?
According to No Party for Cao Dong, it is “romantic relationships, observations, and chance encounters…basically all people and things within life” . In other words, a landscape is not just physical geography, but also the corporeal and social experiences of those who traverse the environment. It is just as much projections of imagination and meaning as it is mountains, river and sea. And that is what inhabits the heart of Cao Dong’s music: how salient parts of our daily lives make the landscapes around us.
Leading the wave of world-weary (厭世, yanshi) lyricism in East Asian indie rock, Taiwanese band No Party for Cao Dong (草東沒有派對 in Chinese) glides between genres with ease, encompassing aspects of grunge, garage rock, punk, and even disco. The band consists of members Wood Lin, Chu Chu, Sam Yang, and the late Fan Tsai, who sadly took her own life on 30th October 2021. The outpouring of messages of support and heartbreak from fans in the past year has been a testament to the band’s significance and resonance with listeners.
With this new perspective of remembrance, it is clear that the importance of place in memory permeates every aspect of their music. “Our earliest band name was ‘Party for Cao Dong Street’,” the band explain in an interview with Wonderland. “Cao Dong Street is actually a real street name in a mountain in Taipei. The origin of that band came from a couple of our young selves who enjoyed hanging out [there].”
The band draws their inspiration exclusively from their lives growing up in Taiwan. And yet, they are proving to be a significant force in music worlds across the globe, including mainland China. Their poetic, moody metaphors and critiques on society, dispersed between capricious riffs of electric guitar, have penetrated Chinese charts and have awarded them a representativeness that crosses borders.
《大風吹著誰？誰就倒霉？》 “Who will the wind blow next? Who will be the unlucky one?”
The game Dafengchui (大風吹 in Chinese), which acts as the central motif of the song discussed here, is interestingly translated as ‘Simon Says’ in the English lyrics. However, this playground game is a little bit different to the Simon Says we know and love. Let me set the scene. A circle of chairs is made, with one less chair than the number of people playing. One person is chosen to be the gui (ghost), who is awarded the gift of controlling the wind. If the gui generates a huge gust of wind (dafeng), then the people with x attribute must get up and swap seats. If all he can muster is a gentle breeze (xiaofeng) then those without x attribute are forced to do the same. After a few rounds, whoever is left without a seat must become the gui. And so it goes, until one unlucky child is ‘punished’ for receiving the mantle of gui three times.
We have all been in similar situations as a child. The thought of losing in front of our classmates is humiliating and soul-crushing, and yet, all we can do is stand there and try to tolerate it. But Cao Dong’s version of Dafengchui speaks of something more sinister, a pervading sense of inadequacy that persists from the primary school playground right through to adulthood.
The sports ground of Xiang-Lin Elementary School, Alishan, Taiwan (Image: © CEphoto, Uwe Aranas , via Wikimedia Commons)
《哭啊、喊啊，叫你媽媽帶你去買玩具啊》 “Cry and scream, beg your mum to take you shopping for a new toy.”
For this song, vocalist Wood Lin takes on the persona of a child on the losing end of a game of dafengchui, and in doing so imbues the memory of childhood places with dynamism and humanity. Facing ridicule from his classmates, the child cries and begs his mother to take him shopping for a new toy to show off. The next day, he brings it to school, only to be met with smirking faces. Wood Lin’s morose vocals imitate the children’s laugh as they shout: “don’t you know, that sort of thing is so last year!” With this, the playground becomes a battleground in which we are destined to lose.
“When I first listened to Dafengchui, all the anger and injustice I felt deep down came bursting out.” One member of a Cao Dong fan group writes. “Because all I could think of was the young me, introverted and isolated but desperate to join in.” In this sense, the song embodies a universal experience of disappointment that elicits a similar response regardless of sociocultural background. The emotions build up through the piece. You can feel it just below the surface of the melody, but it’s not until the final verse that the previously soft vocals descend into cries of rage and anguish, breaking the veneer of harmless childhood memory. The guitars swell and the tantrum of a once innocent child becomes an explosion of pent-up anger, originating from an overwhelmed ‘grown-up’ who has always been a loser, no matter the landscape he traverses.
The members of No Party for Cao Dong posing with a ‘Cao Dong street’ sign (Image via their Facebook page)
《一樣又醉了，一樣又掉眼淚；一樣的屈辱， 一樣的感覺》 “The same old booze again, the same old tears; the same old shame again, the same old feelings.”
But do we ever become ‘grown-ups’? Dangfengchui inherently challenges this idea that we ever lose our inner child. The song’s bleak articulation of adulthood apathy and fatigue is at once individual and universal and is inherently tied to the playground setting of the song. The landscapes associated with our youth coalesce with the ones that define and derive meaning from our adult lives. In other words, Cao Dong blur the line between the stages of our personal histories, bringing back the sensations and emotions tied to places from our childhood.
This common experience of many listeners, who discuss their reactions to the song in hundreds of online fan groups, speaks to the legibility of the landscape they perform - that is, the aural measure of the ease with which listeners can recognise its parts and envision them into coherent patterns of individual understanding. Listeners clearly contextualise Cao Dong’s metaphors alongside the repercussions of contemporary socio-economic currents. Online discourse in these forums often designates Taiwan as a ‘ghost island’ (鬼島, guidao), in reference to what Taiwanese fans perceive as the country’s declining economic growth, stifling workplace and educational culture, controversial political status, and uncertain future. There is a widespread feeling that life is mundane and non-descript, a never-ending march to the beat of another’s song, just like a game of dafengchui in the playground.
But one question remains: which unlucky person will the wind blow next?
Find No Party for Cao Dong’s discography on Spotify and Youtube. For a moody exploration of grunge, see ‘Wayfarer’ (山海). If in need of something more upbeat, have a listen to ‘Wimpish’ (爛泥). Finally, my favourite: ‘Emma’ (艾瑪), a short number that exposes life as a process of ‘make-believe’.