Questions & Answers: Pulp Chen
I spoke to the director behind the cult classic film that documented the most notorious band of the 1990s Taiwanese underground music scene. Pulp Chen talks about what it was like partying in the 90s, what the cultural landscape was like, and why the rebellion in music died down in the recent decade.
It was the year 2000 at the near end of the 20th Century. With an election, Taiwan had just ended five decades of one-party rule, and trouble was brewing in the air. The phrase “the era of the band has arrived” was on all newspaper headlines. Pulp Chen, then a final-year radio and TV student at the National Cheng Chi University, got a phone call that eventually led to one of the greatest documentaries about the Taiwanese underground music scene. There isn’t an underground music scene anymore — Taiwanese independent music has been industrialised and is now heavily commercialised — but fortunately Chen’s documentary L.T.K. survived time to offer rare moving image evidence of the band LTK Commune’s notoriety.
LTK Commune wouldn’t last a second in today’s political climate (with the cancelling culture out there). In fact, they only lasted five minutes at the 2000 Spring Scream Music Festival as the performance got a little bit out of control (nine guitars were smashed). These are the same people who burned down equipment and used yoghurt for enemas on stage. These are also the same people who pledged to always stand with the grassroots and any other marginalised community. Everything was captured on Chen’s DV tape camcorder. On the 20th anniversary of the documentary, Chen and his co-director Mao made it free and available in the public domain.
Today, Chen is an author of several best-selling books and a mountaineering enthusiast. Just a few days after Chen’s trip to Seattle to host an exhibition about Taiwanese music at the University of Washington, he sat down and answered my questions.
Anderson Hung: How did LTK Commune get in touch for the L.T.K. documentary?
Pulp Chen: My friend and I majored in Radio and TV and we teamed up for our graduation project. We were into subcultures so we wanted to shoot a band documentary. We distributed flyers at record stores and cafes and also put ads on forums to see if any band was interested, but no one reached out. Around October, our tutor told us we needed to come up with a plan B. So we agreed that if no one reached out to us within two weeks, we would start our own band and shoot ourselves. I played the guitar and my friend played the bass, so all we needed was a drummer. The world wouldn’t have cared for a documentary about ourselves, though. But a week later when I was on my motorbike I got a phone call from a woman, who told me that she saw our ad and asked if we knew who LTK Commune was.
AH: How did it feel like getting that call?
PC: I felt that the world stopped moving. If we had the choice, LTK Commune would hands-down have been our first pick. But it seemed impossible. They were very violent on stage and went into tirades all the time, and with their influence and notoriety, they were the epitome of the Taiwanese underground. Neither did we know how we could even reach them. Then we learned that the person who called was the girlfriend of Jen-Chien Ke, the band’s vocalist who saw our ad. In 2000, Taiwan hosted a Documentary Biennale, where band documentaries like The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter were screened. Ke saw them and thought LTK Commune could have their own too.
AH: What was the most memorable part of L.T.K.’s production?
PC: We were there for every practice and gig, including a tour around Taiwan. They welcomed us as if we were part of the band, and we regularly hung out with other bands like The Clippers, Anarchy in Taiwan, 1976, and Tolaku at the live house Underworld. Ko and guitarist Hai-en Tsai were eight years older than us — they were in their early thirties and we were in our early twenties — so it felt like we advanced into a circle that we didn’t belong to. All of a sudden we were hanging out with the musicians we admired and learning about what that circle was like. It was a very genuine circle that didn’t care about fame nor profit and was all about helping each other out. There weren’t a lot of people doing what they were doing and everyone knew it was tough to run an underground band. LTK Commune was very different off-stage as well — they were a bunch of well-educated hipsters.
AH: Why did a bunch of well-educated hipsters call themselves Taike, a usually derogatory term that suggests otherwise, in their own music?
PC: Taike was derogatory, so they were appropriating it for parody. They were intellectuals from an elite university, where they acquired the agency to play with the notion of this term. The actual “Taikes” were the grassroots people doing hard labour in rural areas, who probably didn’t have the cultural capital to speak on these matters. So LTK Commune was trying to give them a voice. In 2024, I don’t think the word carries much meaning. Its connotation is neither positive nor negative. That era is long gone.
AH: What were they trying to bring to the Taiwan underground, and what made their music so contagious?
PC: They didn’t overthink it. If they actually had the idea of “bringing something to Taiwanese society” in mind, they would end up being pretty lame. Of course, they had things to say, but it was more of a youthful disaffection. These were the rage and political ideals expressed through punk music, as well as their mid-performance, controversial skits when Tsai was still in the band. A lot of fans went to their gigs just for the skits, for the raw, rebellious attitude, and it makes sense as young people were drawn to rebellious things. But if they were rebelling just for the sake of rebelling they would be kind of boring too. Although they were not as polished, they were raw and powerful, and at the same time they also sounded nice. They had profoundness, attitude, and good music: all three of which are equally as important.
AH: Do you think this kind of energy still exists today, in the Taiwanese music scene?
PC: The band No Party for Cao Dong’s first album, The Servile, was exactly that, and that’s why The Servile is my favourite album in the post-LTK Commune era. I think they were trying a bit too hard in their second album, though. The energy that came with not giving a damn was astonishing in The Servile. As I said about having profoundness, attitude, and music, rarely does a band strike all three of them. Another band that comes close is Wayne’s So Sad.
AH: How did you get into Taiwanese underground music?
PC: I came across Channel [V] when I was in high school, and they had a programme called You Rock that documented bands of the Taiwanese underground, including Ladybug and Groupie. Print publications like the supplement of China Times and Entertainment Weekly also did the same. There was also a magazine called Non-Classical that reviews both Taiwanese and international bands.
AH: What was it like going to gigs in the 90s?
PC: After I moved to Taipei from Tainan in 1997, I started going to Vibe, a live house in a basement across the street from the gas station on Jinshan South Road. I also frequented Eslite Music near National Taiwan University and cafes like Norwegian Woods. People part of the underground subcultures would hang out at these spots. Every generation has their own hubs like these ones. The record label Taiwan Colors Music hosted a concert in 1998 with bands like The Chairman, Tolaku, and Mayday. The concert was recorded and later made into an iconic compilation album. It was at Huashan Creative Park when it was still a wasteland. I was nineteen at the time and a member of the rock music club at my university. We were always on our motorbikes, on our way to see these gigs together.
AH: You write a lot about the 90s in your books. What was the 90s like in Taiwan?
PC: In 1987 the martial law was lifted. Society started looking for new directions and adapting to a new sense of creativity. Pioneers of the New Taiwanese Song movement like Blacklist Studio and Giong Lim gained momentum in the early 90s. Although the same party was ruling, President Teng-Hui Lee was still gradually democratising Taiwan. Media and press started to embrace diversity and the stock market rocketed. Taiwanese society was filled with an air of infinite opportunities and possibilities. Of course, the 90s had its own problems, but it was still very optimistic. Music-wise, the 90s hosted the first-ever Golden Melody Awards, but platforms for underground music were still very limited. Bands had to perform on campuses to expand their reach. But then online forums became a thing and fans started to build an online community. Edward Yang’s films A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996) perfectly captured the energy of shedding conventions and trying to be different, which defined the creatives of 1990s Taipei. It also wasn’t a very politically correct era, so artists had the room to make mistakes.
AH: How did this atmosphere infect you? What was your exploration of the era like?
PC: In 2000 I went to the Spring Scream Music Festival for the first time and saw the notorious performance by LTK Commune. (The band only lasted five minutes on stage because of how hysterical the crowd went) The freedom of the air infected me, but there was also some uncertainty in the freedom. Everything was very pure, though. That was an era free of social media and smartphones, so when you’re at music festivals you’re actually there — you wouldn’t let your smartphone carry you away. People interacted with each other more, and it was less of a show-off. Of course, people who listen to underground music feel good about themselves, the 90s and now alike, but back then you didn’t have to express that on the spot. After a few days, you might casually bring it up to your friends that you saw a band live, but nowadays people feel the need to record everything and share them online right away. Back then it was pure — when you saw something you liked and you would just go after it and find your own community — this is what infected me.
AH: How was it like spending a summer in 1999 Britain?
PC: I did a short-term study programme in Nottingham and afterwards I went to Reading Festival and V Festival. I was 20 years old and everything was very inspiring. In 1999 not a lot of people in Taiwan had the chance to go to music festivals abroad. I barely saw any racial minorities there, let alone Taiwanese people. At first, I felt a little bit out of place but music was a universal language. Everyone there was curious about who I was but also so friendly. So I ended up moshing with the crowd and enjoying the moment without treating myself as an outlander.
AH: Do you think the present-day Taiwanese independent music scene lacks political rebelliousness?
PC: Young people listen to this kind of music mainly because it feels good. Even back in the 90s, we went to music festivals because it felt good to enjoy a breath of fresh air from pop culture’s mundanity. And I think it’s still the same today. In the 90s, we were ready to vote a new party into the government so we had a shared enemy, hence the collective rebelliousness in underground music. But after that’s done, new aesthetics, discussions, and values started emerging. Of course, we still have a public enemy number one that is China, but everyone knows that China is a potential threat and there’s really nothing we can do about it with music. Independent artists generally lean towards the current ruling party’s ideology so there isn’t a shared enemy at this moment. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t critique the current regime, though.
AH: What do you think the future looks like for the scene?
PC: We might circle back to politics in music in five or ten years, it’s hard to say. No matter which party rules, when people are dissatisfied, there might well be another Island’s Sunrise. (The unofficial anthem of the 2014 Sunflower Movement protests) But the post-Sunflower Movement era has been politically stable and most people don’t have an immediate reason to protest. When we oscillate to the stable side of history our music goes back to talking about life. The absence of a political message doesn’t make a song any less great. But a mediocre song will be remembered if it has a great political message. There will also be melodic masterpieces with a timeless political message — and these are the songs that were written to last.
Note: This interview happened on the 8th of May, 2024, two weeks before nearly 100,000 people took the streets in front of the Taiwanese parliament to protest against an incident of procedural injustice in the parliament. Many compared the 2024 protest to the 2014 Sunflower Movement, when protestors occupied the Taiwanese parliament for 24 days.
