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1999

Sheng Jie Venue First to Call Itself a ‘Live House’

聖界首次使用Live House自我命名

Source: Listen to a Rock Song, Sing a Generation: The Musical Memory of Taipei Live Houses
From: Womany
Date: 2015/07/08 · Author: Rechal

Because live performances mostly happen at night, live houses have long been conflated with nightclubs. In 1996, when Chen Shui-bian was Taipei mayor, a large-scale anti-vice sweep ensnared live pubs including Scum, B-Side, and Boogie. Around 2000, as Next magazine and Apple Daily entered Taiwan, the media landscape was radically disrupted — tabloid and celebrity-gossip formats were introduced, and the word “nightclub,” loaded with associations and innuendo, began appearing frequently in the press. To avoid being caught up in the next sweep, many people started working to draw a clear line between live houses and nightclubs. In 1999, Freddy, lead singer of Chthonic, opened “Shengjie Live House” — the first time “Live House” appeared in a venue’s name — precisely to signal to everyone that a live house is a music-centred space, not the den of iniquity or neon-lit vice venue depicted in media coverage.

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