Introduction: There’s little, if not none, doubt that culture is the foundation of the identity of any ethnic group. The meaning of the word “culture”, when concerning identity issues, actually includes many elements. For example, language is definitely a very important element of culture. Then there’s food & drink, philosophy towards life…etc. There’s also a very obvious, or audible, element is music.
Especially for we Formosans, the progress of the evolution & development of local popular music style is somehow synchronized with the development and changes of local society and culture. And certainly, with the changes in our culture comes the changes in our identity. That suggests the progress of the construction of our identity may be observed by looking at the changes of what kind of music people on this island listen to.
Yet, we must remember that the idea of “we” was and still is under construction. So we can keep a fairly open mind while examining the facts, the changes in our music, culture and ultimately our identity. Now, if we want to discuss such question, the question about the construction of our own identity, we must first recognize one very important fact. That is we Formosans are a relatively new “group of people” (should we call ourselves as a race?), we can still see the scars of those changes in our society and of course our culture very clearly in modern history. In the past 100 years, we had been strongly influenced by at least two different cultures. First was the Japanese colonization, then, especially in recent years, the invasion of American & Western culture that comes with the unstoppable train of so called Globalization. In these two cases, we can see what happened when this young and still developing culture of ours meets the challenge of such fully grown and dominating cultures - they, the American and Japanese culture steam rolled over our culture, reshaped it and left some permanent marks in our identity.