In 1989, when Crystal Records released the album Song of Madness, I was only a six-grader. I remember one day at the night market, my father bought a mysterious cassette called Song of Madness No. 2 that had a similar cover. He played it in the car for the first time on a family road trip.

As I vaguely recall, there was an incredibly sexy song named ‘French Kiss.’ About halfway through it, I started hearing muffled sounds of a woman moaning in the background, and thought it was only an ornamental sampling. But as it gradually took over the main track, the atmosphere inside the car became very awkward. After what was perhaps the longest five minutes of my life, my mother, having reached the limits of her patience, shut down the speakers right before the arrival of the climax.

It was only after a while that I realized the cassette was only a trend-following pirate copy of the real thing. When I finally heard the real Song of Madness by Blacklist Studio, I was already in junior high.

This delay in knowledge somehow frustrated me. Many years later, I slowly started to understand the historical significance of Song of Madness through various interpretations, particularly surrounding how this album was closely aligned with Taiwan’s social atmosphere before and after the lifting of the Martial Law, as well as how it ground-breakingly established a milestone for the New Taiwanese Song Movement. However, for me this album has always been attached to its own small narratives of piracy, pornography, and family drama. All this seems out of place with the particular context that most people associate with the album—one realizes his absence from this grand social landscape.

“Excerpted from the first paragraph of this article.” 

This article is published in Broken Spectre catalog.

Read more:
1.捕捉文化史的鬼影：「破身影」展覽（2017/07/01-09/17）
2.〈[ET@T Forum] 重新破裂，或如何從漫長的九〇年代離開？〉，在地實驗影音檔案庫，2017/07/09
3.「過於喧囂的孤獨－－台灣九〇年代的文化轉型」，在地實驗影音檔案庫