Miaoju JianThe two venues faced the same difficult situations, especially in the way they ran their busi-
ness and adjusted to the changing environment, including survival under urban regeneration
laws and other regulations. As urban live scenes, although these non-profit venues were able to
incubate the music style they appreciated, they also showed a tragic side to their urban indie
culture role. These legendary scenes rarely gained any interest from the music industry or critics,
due to their incompetence or disinterest in making a profit. Without a promising business strat-
egy, these unique yet scarce scenes easily turned into closed circles as time accrued. Meanwhile,
as live venues became a more popular urban entertainment activity, the strict and institutional-
ized regulations became much harder to follow by these smaller grassroots venues. Nor would
they be able to compete with better-quality venues that had more investments and resources.
Despite the shared difficulties, due to the differences of the music environment in the two
locales, the destinies of the two venues were not the same. What Underworld faced was a
rise of the local live house industry, in which unique venues were being replaced by larger,
government-endorsed venues. Additionally, operating solely as a music venue without any
affiliated music businesses, Underworld was doomed to fail, ultimately becoming a historical
display object in music/art exhibitions (Lo 2014). D22 and XP were different from Underworld.
Under the emergent local trend of online music sites and the live music market, they too, were
closed. Maybe Mars transformed to focus on its own label business instead and recruited one of
its co-founders, Yang Hai Song, as CEO. Yang restructured the label’s copyright resources, and
concentrated on scouting for new talented musicians and music works. In other words, although
Underworld and D22 showed two similar trends of the music industry in their particular social
context, they still manifested two distinct music subjectivities. Without a profitable operations
strategy, live venues could hardly survive, however, values of the musicians and their music would
remain significant in many other ways.
Certainly, notable people and unusual stories always abound in these legendary places.
However, is it precisely the uniqueness and exclusionism that these places engender that make
their participants easy targets for attack? For example, Underworld was criticized as “not favored
by every band” (Yeh 2014). Similarly, D22 was deemed narrow and elitist, and far from the
social reality of China. Underworld was like an underground tunnel, digging deeper and deeper;
D22 was like a kite, flying higher and higher—both unreachable to broader audiences. Although
the two venues weren’t concerned with the opinions of outsiders, the unitedness of these indie
communities was surely under challenge as living conditions became inflexible. The one thing
that remains constant is that the development of a live venue is always in flux. The end of
legendary scenes is inevitable, as new emergent energy is lying restlessly just below the surface.
Following the pace of gentrification, the lively subcultural scenes were forced to vaporize as a
legendary history. After all, an ongoing music making process, rather than a ‘scenic’ venue itself,
might be a sustainable music subjectivity to survive in the process.
Notes
1 My observation of these two music scenes is based on research conducted during 2010–2015, which
includes continuous field observations, interviews with musicians and key persons, and relative doc-
ument materials. In 2015 I interviewed notable operators in the music scene including Tunghung
Ho (何東洪) and Showyao Yao (小搖/姚良彥); the vocal and guitarist of the band 88 Guava Seeds,
Jon Balaz (阿強), who had the experience of performing both in Underworld and D-22; the key par-
ticipants of D22 and Maybe Mars, musician Yang Hai Song (楊海崧) and Zhu Wen Bo (朱文博); and
renowned music critic, musician and experimental music show planner Yan Jun (顏峻).
2 Here, the specification of different rock generations in Taiwan is based on the general understanding of
the scene, rather than having a precise definition. I use the word generation to depict the developing