Despite my low tolerance for anything horror, I enjoyed more than anything the passion in this album. Although avant-grade, this album was by no means inaccessible, which is one of its greatest areas of success. Despite the complex themes discussed, Amit has managed to put her words across in a way that pairs well with the music and is easy to understand, discussing feminism, perfection in modern society, drug abuse, and everything else in between.
Then Amit begins to sing to the backdrop of metal-influenced arrangements and Aboriginal chants which soon after descend into devil-like, metal-influenced screams that die off, leaving listeners stunned but intrigued.
Although on the surface, the lyrics seem to describe the thrill of watching unnatural beings at the circus, one realizes soon enough that the lyrics are entirely ironic due to the overly dark sound of the song. But even more interesting to me is how A-mei made a poignant commentary on the spectacle that the tabloids in Taiwan have turned celebrities into so artfully.
To me, it is a pioneering effort at feminism that refuses to be softened by the collectivist nature of Taiwanese society and the noncritical nature of most Taiwanese pop.
Not saying all those songs about girls sticking together are necessarily a bad thing, but at some point, shock tactics have got to come into play to make society realize that females are just as capable-if not more so-than men. And this is the perfect song to do so while being taken seriously. This time heavily influenced by Rock, I felt the arrangement and melody complemented each other perfectly, creating atmospheric spaces and using classical piano to create an eerie, mentally unstable state in the verses before coming in strong in the choruses with resilient, resolute chords on the electric guitar, hinting at a method within the madness.
Amit sings aggressively, with the passion and experience of a woman who has been put down time and again by society, and is willing to take a stand for the happiness of herself and women everywhere. The melody is heartwarming as Amit sings of the conflicting themes that make humans who they are; incomplete and always curious, thus making everything around us conflicting, be it our concept of time, the universe, faith, languages, or music.
It is ironic for me to review this song as it says that the soul of art is hard to put into words, and thus rather than analysing such works, one should go out and feel what it truly means to be present, to be yourself; as that is the key to creativity. However, I think the melody and arrangement fit perfectly with the lyrics, starting off serene like clear waters untouched by pigments or colours, before bit by bit layers are added and taken away to create a beautiful work of art.
The arrangement follows suit, adding in grungy rock-influenced riffs on the guitar to create a muted, yet energized feel for the song, and adding a layer of drums in the next chorus to give the song yet another layer of alertness as it progresses. Here, Amit sings of her flaws and internal conflicts that many, including myself understand all too well. Simply done, but perfectly executed. Once again critiquing the superficiality of society, this song acts as a last note from Amit pertaining to the current state of humanity.
The album has come full circle, with the return to heavy metal influences in this song indicative of that fact. The option for them is none other than to obey and embrace the social order brought by the settlers. Covering a famous Mandopop song and adapting the lyrics, Suming called to the Han people, in an ironic comic manner, to return the lost land.
Looking historically at the structural making of the settler colony on the island would lead us to see that the dichotomous relationship between the Han settlers and the indigenous has never come as natural as in its Western counterparts; rather, it is a product of imperialist colonial rule from multiple regimes, each of whose policies has continually inscribed the marginality of the indigenous. Before the seventeenth century, Taiwan, as a volcanic uplift from the sea, was not seen on maps of China.
It was the European commerce traders who first found its geographical value in connecting Southeast Asia Malaysia and East Asia Japan around s. The Manchu empire, the last imperial dynasty of China, took it as its own in and later ceded the island to Japan after being defeated in the first Sino-Japanese War in During the s, the Japanese intensified imperial subjectification kominka in order to speed up the transformation of Taiwanese into colonial subjects.
With the Japanese on the top of the pyramid, the indigenous were also put under the Han Chinese. Many of them— often the daughters of tribe leaders— married outside their tribes and became the go-between interpreters between the colonizer and the indigenous.
As Maile Arvin and her co-authors have pointed out, the settler colonial domination has often been a gendered process in which the indigenous women are reorganized into the heteropatriarchal order—as shown by indigenous wives.
To make their indigenous feminist intervention, the authors write against the privilege of whiteness in the mainstream feminist discourse in the Western world. The inclusiveness of white-centered feminism has failed to create a level ground for women of color and indigeneity to voice their resistance to social repression based on their particular historical experience.
By such an overlook, the logic of settler colonialism is reinforced. Seeing from the brief outline I present above, we find that inter-ethnic marriage has played a role in connecting the colonizers— be them the Japanese or the Chinese— with the colonized indigenous in Taiwan.
This marriage system made possible the communication with and transformation of the indigenous. This colonial project of repressing the indigenous continued in a different fashion as the Nationalist regime suffered a defeat in the Chinese civil war against the communists after the Second World War and eventually relocated in Taiwan. Going into the twenty-first century, although the Japanese have left the picture as an empire, the political tension between China and Taiwan has continued while Taiwan has evolved from a colony to a democratic nation-state.
At the inauguration ceremony, Chang was invited to perform the Taiwan national anthem, which agitated the authority in Beijing. Consequently, Chang was banned from mainland China as a scapegoat of the political contestation between the two governments.
Having lost the Chinese market made Chang rethink her career and identity. When she came back to the Chinese stage in , a new mode of music production had been brewing in her, which was to bring the indigeneity to the front of her stardom image rather than merely as an accessory-like decoration.
In June , Chang issued her fifteenth studio album, Amit. This time, Chang Hui-mei has disappeared from the cover of the album. What her audience see instead is a flame-red-hair woman, dressed in a white chiffon dress. She sits on a blood-red throne, looking to the right side of the frame. A ray of light catches her face and projects a deer-shaped, totem-like shadow on the back of the throne.
The album integrates a wide range of musical styles, including heavy metal, punk and pop rock, and would shock anyone who is familiar with the A-mei idolized by thousands of fans. After a series of Sadomasochism-themed images flesh back and forth, the music video, produced for the song, comes to the climax at which Amit beheads a man and walks into a door behind her. If the first album was to break the ice for Chang to re-present herself via a rebellious voice-making and visuality, her second experiment then pushes the boundary further.
Six years after her debut, Amit released her second studio album, Amit 2 , in Compared to the former one, Amit 2 is more elaborate and coherent in forming an overarching meta-articulation surrounding the artist and her music. The song presents a straightforward resistance against the social gendering of the female. Meanwhile, the imagery of the son indicates the patriarchal obsession with carrying on the male lineage with a male offspring. The crude-ness of the language employed in the lyrics is devoid of the sentimental mannerism in apolitical Mandopop music.
The beginning sequence captures Amit standing amid a cluster of red smoke. Slowly raising her head towards the light above, she is shown to wear a mask featuring indigenous totem patterns. Subsequently, the image shifts to a computer-generated sequence depicting a fetus growing in a uterus. As the fetus dissolves into a heart bumping rhythmically, a group of pregnant woman slaves appear working in the setting of a slum-like camp.
They all have coal-dark skin and white hair, dressed in dirty robes. Several huge, swine-like men move among the women characters as overseers.
Intercutting between the image of Amit, the fetus and the woman labor camp, the video goes on with a twist. Blood splashes like fireworks.
Then, the women pile the corpse up and light a fire on it. As the bodies burn, all the women go into labor.
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