Shazaming the Streets of Taiwan
I'm bringing these songs home as souvenirs
Shazam is my ultimate inspiration. The app is an incredible feat of technology to record a few seconds of audio and identify whatever song is playing in the background. It’s one of favorite ways to find new music. My friends and family can attest that whenever I’m out in public somewhere with background music, I’m paying as much attention the music as the conversation. When I hear songs at a restaurants or blasting out of cars, I often stop in my tracks to see if I know it. I’ve found some interesting trends. Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us, for example, was last year’s song of choice for someone in my neighborhood with very loud car speakers. Or a few months ago, I went to a Thai restaurant that was playing exclusively songs that were popular in 2021. I do this a lot when I travel, too. The habit is particularly bad in Latin America. I follow the Latin charts, but I’m not connected enough to the culture or to really feel what the big hits are. A trip to Mexico gives me a sense of that.
My partner and I went to Taiwan in April. I spent two weeks there, visiting cities across the island and eating lots of great food. But I don’t know much about Taiwanese music. The Spotify charts tell me to expect a mix of K-pop and Chinese music, with a few western hits here and there. Naturally, I had Shazam going for most of the trip.
I started this Substack as a place to ramble about music and to write travel stories. The two travel stories I have posted are both about navigating my queerness in the post-Soviet world. They’re the culmination of the four months I spent in the region and I’m quite proud of them. I think they’re more insightful than anything I could write about a two-week vacation. Look at this delicious food! The transit system is so easy to navigate! The people are so friendly! All of that is true, but I don’t think it makes for an interesting story.
Still, my friends and family keep asking me to write more travel stories, and I want to write more of them too. So, this post is something a little different: A playlist of the songs I Shazamed in Taiwan. I’m hoping that for the people in my personal life, this will provide a bit more color to my answer when you next see me and ask, “So how was your trip?” And I’m hoping there’s enough music here that I don’t alienate my three subscribers that don’t know me in real life (shoutout to y’all).
I’ve saved these songs into a Spotify playlist here:
1. APT. by Rosé and Bruno Mars
I never Shazamed this one, but I didn’t need to. I recognized it myself, and I recognized it everywhere. Not a day went by in Taiwan that Rosé and Bruno didn’t invite me to the APT from a restaurant, convenience store, or tea house. Spotify tells me it was the 9th most popular song in Taiwan during the trip, whereas Apple Music puts it at number 3. Personally, it felt like a runaway number 1.
Honorable mention to another Bruno Mars duet, Fat, Juicy, and Wet with Sexyy Red. I didn’t hear it, but it was advertised on a very prominent Billboard in Taipei Main Station (I wish I thought to take a picture of that billboard). Also, my partner wants me to write about the TikTok trend of babies that love APT. It seems to be a very popular song in the baby community.
2. Summer Riot by The Rampage from Exile Tribe
I heard this list’s first proper Shazam while wandering the labyrinth of shopping plazas surrounding and underneath Taipei Main Station, trying desperately to find an exit. The city’s (and therefore the country’s) central node for trains and busses is adjacent to several above-ground shopping malls, to which it is connected by a dizzying network of underground tunnels that are also shopping malls in and of themselves. I think this song was coming from a bookstore. I don’t have any pictures of the complex, but a quick YouTube search will provide hours of walking tours.
This is a fun song by a Japanese boy group. I don’t have very much to say about it except that it’s a good addition to my playlist of songs in different languages that have a reggaeton beat. I’ve been listening to it a lot this week.
3. Taidada by Zutomayo
One thing I’ve noticed about the (little) J-pop I’ve listened to is that there’s a lot more key changes than in western pop music. Some of them strike me as gimmicky – abruptly shifting the whole song up in pitch to keep the energy rising – but I like how it’s done here. And Taidada does it twice. I like this song quite a bit. I need to listen to more J-pop.
I Shazamed Taidada still within the purgatory of the underground mall, fifteen minutes after Summer Riot, still looking for an exit to the surface. The song’s frenzy was a good instrumental for my quest. When I eventually did find the exit, I wound up about a mile north of where I started, somewhere along the red line. If I wanted to get from that point back to Taipei Main Station where I started, it was about three stops away on the metro.
4. 病嬌の愛 by Yawnisher3x♡ and Siick
“Is that Bladee???” I thought to myself as I heard this song from outside an open-air electronics store in Taipei. It wasn’t Bladee. Chinese Bladee maybe, idk. I don’t really like Bladee. I like this song though. It’s got a fun melody and a few English lyrics for some reason. And I like Yawnisher3x♡’s voice MUCH more than Bladee’s horrible yarl. Yarjak on Genius describes Yawnisher3x♡ as a “Hyperpop – Hip-Hop – Emocore artist from Hong Kong,” but this song doesn’t have lyrics so I can’t Google translate much of the song beyond the title: “Love of Illness”.
5. Dream by Lisa
I was in a bit of a hurry getting from my hostel near the train station in Hualien to the Dongdamen Night Market for dinner. Hualien is on Taiwan’s less populated east coast and is a center of indigenous Taiwanese culture, and I was excited (hungry, even) to try some indigenous Taiwanese food. But I heard this song coming from small bar (with four taps and even fewer seats) and thought I recognized it.
This is the last song (excluding remixes) on Alter Ego, Lisa’s (from Blackpink) debut solo album released earlier this year. I listened to Alter Ego when it came out, but to be honest, I’m not sure I recognized Dream from the album. I think it sounded familiar because the chorus has the same melody as F2F by SZA. Strange.
6. Bingo (ASSA) by The Turtles
I don’t remember this song at all. Maybe it was a mis-Shazam?
7. Muy Lento by Lawd Ito
I wondered if I’d hear any music in Spanish this trip. This was the only one. I heard it at a clothes store Hualien, and I wonder how it got there. Lawd Ito has close to the fewest monthly listeners of anyone on this list, and this isn’t even one of his bigger songs. Probably TikTok or something, idk.
Most people who visit Hualien are there for Taroko Gorge National Park. But after an earthquake damaged the park last year, it’s still quite difficult to visit without a car or scooter, and I’m not one to drive in a foreign country. There was plenty to do in Hualien otherwise, and my hostel suggested I rent a bicycle for the day. They showed me an ArcGIS StoryMap with different bike route suggestions and I took the blue route. I rode about twenty miles through fields, past a couple temples, and along Qixingtan Beach. It was a stony beach, but I noticed a spot where some families were stacking rock towers, and I tried my hand at rock stacking as well. The ocean was a stunning blue and the mountains towered over the city. Then I took a detour to the Taiwan Aboriginal Culture Museum and learned about the indigenous hunting rituals.
8. Love Me Not by Ravyn Lenae
I wasn’t expecting this to be the first English-language non-K-pop song I heard in Taiwan.
9. Blue by Yung Kai
I’m not a big ballad guy, but I was kinda surprised I didn’t hear this one earlier in my trip. It’s been a huge Spotify hit across Asia all year, at one point peaking in the top 25 on the global charts. One slightly unusual thing about its success is that despite charting across southeast Asia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Canada, it hasn’t cracked the US at all. On the one hand, I’m surprised by that since Yung Kai is based in Canada and sings the song entirely in English. But he seems to be doing just fine without us.
10. 你的微笑 by F.I.R.
Finally, an artist that’s actually from Taiwan! I heard this song over lunch on a very bright, very hot, very sunny, very humid day in Kaohsiung. I don’t remember that afternoon well because the weather was making me a bit delirious.
The song, whose title translates to “Your Smile,” was a single from the band’s 2004 self-titled debut album, the 3rd bestselling album in Taiwan that year. There’s a fun mix of pop and rock here – I feel like F.I.R. is drawing on different elements of the two genres than most artists that I would think of as “pop-rock”. I really like the harmonic minor guitar solos. And, of course, there’s a key change halfway through.
11. Love to Dream by Doja Cat
“Oh, what’s this Chinese song?” I asked myself, standing on a busy street outside a mall in Tainan with the Shazam app open. Doja Cat. It was Doja Cat.
(I also heard Born Again, her collaboration with Lisa and Raye, a couple times out and about.)
12. Cheers by Muque
We left Kaohsiung and Tainan after a couple days to head to the mountains. We knew that Alishan was the place to be, but we worried that Alishan would be busier and touristier than we liked. Instead, we opted to stay in Fenqihu, the village best known as the bento box stop on the way to Alishan. Mountains are mountains, we figured. It shouldn’t make a huge difference which ones we see. But to get to Fenqihu or Alishan from Kaohsiung, we had to take the train to Chiayi and catch the bus.
Our transfer was only an hour I’m not sure if there’s much to do in Chiayi besides leave for the mountains and eat turkey rice. But the boba shop down the block from the train station had immaculate taste in music – this song went directly into my playlist. Muque don’t seem like a particularly famous band, and I can’t find any records of their songs charting anywhere. But they’ve got 25k monthly listeners in Tokyo, 11k in their native Fukuoka, 6k in Taipei, and now, one in Portland.
13. Movin’ On by Josh Ross
My partner and I were sitting by the train station in Fenqihu, admiring the mountains, watching the day-trippers, and eating some delicious oolong ice cream when we heard it: the store next to us was BLASTING American country music. On the one hand, I’m well aware that country isn’t just the soundtrack of rural Americans (or more accurately, suburbanites cosplaying as rural Americans). But I’m still always surprised to hear the genre outside North America. And I hear it everywhere I go. I didn’t mind the country playlist. It was country music for the countryside. But this song, however, has a really heavy trap beat that made it stick out from the other, acoustic guitar-focused, songs in a really jarring way. Country artists should never have been allowed to use trap beats – I’m always saying this.
Luckily, the ice cream was tasty, and the view was dazzling. It was wonderful cooling down for a bit after the oppressive heat in Kaohsiung, and the mountain detour brought some much-needed tranquility as well. The town bustled during the day, but once the afternoon’s last train departed, only a dozen or so foreign visitors spent the night, and we wandered the town as the locals closed their shops for the evening, leaving us to enjoy the countryside, the mountain air, and fireflies.
14. Cosmic by Red Velvet
After Fenqihu, we took the train back up to Taipei, where we based ourselves for the last four days of the trip. There is so much to do in the city, not to mention a plethora of potential day trips, that we could’ve spent the entire trip there without getting bored.
I don’t remember where in Taipei I was when this song came on. But it’s fun and I like it.
15. Sensational by Chris Brown, Davido, and Lojay
I wondered if I was going to hear any Afrobeats this trip, and words cannot express my disappointment that the one Afrobeats song I got was a Chris Brown song. This came on at a hot pot restaurant in Ximending. At least the food was good.
16. What is Love? by Twice
This song came on at a gift ship atop of the Maokong Gondola. I was having phone troubles for the latter half of the trip, and the battery kept dying unexpectedly. I had my partner Shazam this one for me. Luckily, he also brought a portable charger that I could monopolize. We walked a mile or so from the top of the gondola to a tea house overlooking the mountains, tea farms, and Taipei 101, which protruded starkly from the Earth and could be seen from anywhere in the surrounding hills. Built in 2004, Taipei 101 was once the tallest building in the world (though it no longer ranks among the top 10) and while it’s hard to get a sense of its scale from the luxury mall comprising its bottom half dozen floors, a trip to the viewing decks or neighboring mountains puts it into perspective. It feels strikingly unnatural and almost unearthly how it dominates the skyline from the hills, when every other connection to the city, save the 20-minute gondola ride, is imperceptibly distant. Taipei 101 stands on its own, like the valley’s thumb telling the mountains they’re doing a good job.
17. I still by Milet
We got off the mountains later than we planned and made it back to our hotel even later. By the time we were ready to head back out again for dinner not much was still open besides night markets, and we were both too tired to for the adventure. We ended up at a Japanese fast-food place which was exactly what we needed. They were playing only Japanese music, but I thought this one sounded familiar.
Apparently, this song only came out this year, alongside a movie. It’s reached the top 20 on the official Japanese charts, but I’m not sure where my déjà vu could have come from. Maybe I know a song with a similar melody in the chorus? If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
18. New Genesis by Ado
Another song from the Japanese restaurant. I don’t remember why I picked out this song, but I felt satisfied that I recognized the artist – I listened another one of her songs in college.
19. 往后余生 by 孙莞
The Rest of my Life by Sun Wan. I can’t find anything else about this song. But it’s cute! I heard it on our last night in Taipei while eating a delicious dinner of fried chicken, fried tofu, fried squid, fried fishcake, and fried green beans tossed in garlic and chili at the Shida night market. I like the little synth countermelodies in the background.
20. Dancing Diva by Jolin Tsai
Probably my favorite song on this list. I Shazamed it on our last night in Taiwan as we wandered Yongkang Street looking to finalize our souvenir collections. We were busy during our time in Taipei. We visited the National Palace Museum, and the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial. We took a day trip to Jiufen and to Houtong cat village. We were too busy to buy souvenirs, and apparently, I was too busy to Shazam much.
I knew Taiwan had a strong Japanese influence, and that K-pop is popular across Asia, but I’m surprised just how few songs on this list are actually in Chinese. This is only the fourth one and (spoiler alert), I didn’t hear any more after this. So maybe it’s fitting that the last Chinese song I heard was by Jolin Tsai, the queen of C-pop. I won’t pretend I knew who she was before I googled her from back in the US, but just from this song I could tell she was important.
21. Easy by Le Sserafim
I’m surprised I hadn’t heard this song before. Le Sserafim are a big group, and this song seems like one of Le Sserafim’s biggest. But it also came out before I was paying any attention to K-pop. Either way, it’s a catchy bop.
22. How Sweet by NewJeans
One last song, and while I only finally Shazamed it at Raohe Night market, I’d heard it a few other times around Taiwan and listened to it on repeat when it came out last year. I love NewJeans and I’ve always felt like this song was underrated, so I was glad to hear it getting some recognition, and surprised it was the only NewJeans song I heard this trip. I know NewJeans are involved in a legal battle with their label. I’ve tried a couple times to read up on what’s going on, but every source I find leaves me even more confused than I was before. I’m just sad their musical journey might be over.
I was sad to leave Taiwan. I had a lot of fun this trip and it was a great bit of escapism for the everything that is happening right now. I’d love to go back some day and see more – Keelung, Taitung, Taichung, Alishan, Sun Moon Lake – but I know it’s impossible to ever see everything. I’m grateful for the memories.
I also love discovering music out in the wild! I'm excited to hear your discoveries