Mango Jam: The Wackiest Band in the World – One Listen and You Can’t Stop (Part 1)
Meow meow, hello everyone and welcome back, I’m Mydondon! Welcome back to this week’s weekly recommended playlist! Today I want to introduce you to the band I’ve been obsessed with lately – Mango Jam (芒果醬)!!! If, like me, you’re curious about their backstory or the meaning behind every song, then hurry up and join us! But before we dive in, let me drop the playlist links first!
YouTube playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRRUz5Ks1DvS3R0UOLK_hxPBSqNC6xgI2&si=vKDu6INhUzOpOPgu
Spotify playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3cOyWQdJya6YvKcyb3ILXj?si=1d3c5e2203ef47bf
If we’re going to talk about Mango Jam, we have to go all the way back to the very beginning. Believe it or not, Mango Jam started out as the committee members of Tamkang University’s guitar club. As club officers, they were obviously all people who really loved music, and it was through that guitar club that they became really close friends. But as time went by, lead singer Zoji was already a senior about to graduate. Maybe because he didn’t want to leave with any regrets, he decided to enter Tamkang’s Golden Melody Award (Jinshao Award) under a band name. To enter you absolutely needed a drummer, a guitarist, and all those essential band roles, so he rounded up the people he knew best at the time – Youlun, Huangda, and Shengzhi – and they formed a band together.
For that competition, the song they brought to the stage was “Sorry” (抱歉). The story behind how “Sorry” came about: “A friend” started living with his girlfriend. Everything was great before they moved in together, but afterwards a lot of unhappy things started happening – like water and fire, which might be fine apart, but the moment they touch, everything changes. “Fire foolishly stretches out its arms, once believing, once believing that a sincere heart could embrace the rain. We are two brave hearts, using time to cross the truth that fire and water can never coexist.” That line is honestly amazing. The beauty you once believed in – look back a few years later and maybe it’s no longer like that at all. The person you once thought was the love of your life may, in the end, have just been a passerby on the road. Maybe water and fire were never meant to be together in the first place.
After the success of the Golden Melody Award, everyone got the feeling that they should keep doing this – maybe because they still had a bit of that winner’s momentum left, plus a touch of foolish stubbornness? They went on to compete at other campuses too. NCCU’s Golden Melody Award (Jinxuan Award) was a stage they took on twice, and at the 38th Jinxuan Award they actually made it into the finals. Unfortunately they didn’t take home a prize that time, but they did leave behind a song everyone now knows by heart – the song they competed with back then was “Little Purple aka Gimme Money” (小紫aka給我錢)!
This song gives off a really wacky vibe at first – you’d wonder why anyone would want to listen to such a weird song – and it’s super memorable, so once you’ve heard it you’ll definitely remember it. On the surface it sounds like a really energetic, upbeat song, but listening to it also leaves you with this sense of helplessness. It’s just like them in their scrappy early days: full of ideals (or full of girlfriends), but “I have no money, my ideals will starve me to death on the roadside. I have no money, and the one I love says she wants to eat Ruth’s Chris.” Wrapping your own grievances in lively music – honestly that’s so me right now, boo hoo, why does a single meal cost so much these days~
It was frustrating to come away from the NCCU Jinxuan Award empty-handed, but what they never expected was that a miracle would land on them not long after. Just over half a month after the competition ended, the Jinxuan Award organizers reached out to Mango Jam themselves and asked the band to write the theme song for the next edition – and that became the spark that gave birth to “Mangtaro” (芒太郎). My favorite part of this song is: “My love, I’m on a blue, lonely planet. There’s plenty of oxygen but a shortage of courage, we drift apart from each other, never having developed superpowers – the ability to love.” It always gives me the feeling of floating alone in space, unable to return to Earth and yet still thinking of the lover I can never meet again. Sometimes, even though we can never meet, you still take out that diary and write down, one by one, just how much you love her. Maybe there will never be a chance to meet again, but you’ll still keep her wonderfulness in mind.
There’s an interesting story behind this song, too. Actually, the melody of “Mangtaro” had been sitting in their hearts for a long time before the song existed – they only started writing the lyrics after the Jinxuan Award invitation came. The content was also shaped to fit that year’s creative theme of “wandering, lost,” sketching out Mangtaro’s own story.
The backstory behind Mangtaro, plus some little Easter eggs
When Mango Jam first got the invitation, they were still a bunch of nobodies, so they must have been absolutely thrilled when it came in. But this hugely important competition also put no small amount of pressure on Zoji, who was writing the lyrics at the time. In a Jinxuan Award interview, he revealed that in order to get Mangtaro to the best state he had in his mind, he revised the lyrics over and over, and even spent many days sitting in a cafe just to write a single short verse. I guess it’s exactly that perfectionism about the song that lets him write something so good.
There’s actually a line in Mangtaro that goes “My love, where are you?” – but the original lyric was “I killed off all my lovers.” When Zoji was working on it, he felt writing it that way had a real Scoop (草東沒有派對) flavor to it. I haven’t really listened to much Scoop, so I can’t say for sure how alike it is. But because the competition theme was supposed to evoke a sense of wandering and drifting, he changed it to “My love, where are you?” The inspiration for this song came from the heroine of “Millennium Actress” (千年女優). In the film, the heroine spends her entire life chasing after the person she loves, but only realizes before she dies that the one she truly loved wasn’t actually the man she’d chased her whole life – it was her own self, the self who kept striving and working hard to pursue a dream.
As Zoji mentioned in the Jinxuan Award interview, “Mangtaro” might look like a super stirring, passionate song. When you first listen, you might think it’s a song written for a lover, about the endless process of chasing after that lover and the regret that follows. But what’s really being chased is a dream, and the “superpower” that’s gradually being lost refers to courage and love. (These three elements show up in several of their other songs too – it’s a tribute to “Akazukin Chacha” / Little Red Riding Hood Chacha.) The protagonist Mangtaro slowly loses his superpowers in the process of chasing his love, yet is willing to give up everything to chase his dream.
The connection between Hahatai and Mango Jam
A lot of “Mango fans” actually first got to know Mango Jam through Hahatai (哈哈台), but right from the start this was all done on purpose. To tell this story we have to go back a year or two after the band was founded. Back then Mango Jam were still studying at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), and they heard that Hahatai was coming to TNUA to do street interviews. When they heard the news, they figured this would be a great chance to boost their exposure – if they could get interviewed by Hahatai and plug their songs on it, maybe they’d pick up a bunch of new audiences. And sure enough, they managed to grab Hahatai’s attention with their oddball antics.
When they successfully made it into a Hahatai video, they came out with the slogan they still use to this day: “the invincible mega-band that’s going to surpass both Mayday and Scoop (草東沒有派對)” – that’s where that line came from. Even crazier, Hahatai’s channel had a playlist literally titled “If Mango Jam doesn’t blow up, my balls explode” (the line came from a viewer’s comment under a YouTube video). Oh, and after pulling it off the first time, they went back again and again, and every single time was absolutely ridiculous. I really recommend all you Mydon-fans go check it out.
The clip of Mango Jam on Hahatai’s street interview:
https://youtu.be/gJTu3UnEVRo?si=MzfRfuZsV-KYBmkD
After riding the Hahatai wave so many times, Mango Jam kept gaining more and more attention, yet they still hadn’t put out an album. The main reason was simple – no money~~ Over the five years from 2017 to 2022 they kept applying for grants from the Ministry of Culture, but they never got approved, so they could never release an album. Then one day, while Zoji was taking singing lessons at Yinfumen (陰府門) in Ximen, he happened to run into Lin Yi-chi, who had also been a senior in the Tamkang guitar club. The two knew each other, so naturally they got talking. Mango Jam already had their own demos by then, and Lin Yi-chi had heard them – he even gave the verdict that “their songs felt pretty corny.”
Naturally, you can probably guess what happened next – he decided to help Mango Jam write the grant application together and became their producer, and in the end their first album was born smoothly!
(Whoa, how did this come out at such low resolution after uploading?)
My favorite song on this album has got to be “Achilles” (阿基里斯). The chorus of this song is seriously the catchiest thing ever – one listen and it’ll be stuck in your head for life: “Warrior god, warrior god, warrior god Achilles, how could you die before you even rode into battle with me, warrior god, warrior god, warrior god Achilles, I still want to work out for a hundred years, how could you go and die first.” Achilles here means the Achilles tendon, and the song is about someone heading out for a late-night ride who ends up rupturing their Achilles tendon.
There’s a charm to cheesy pop songs too
This kind of catchy, cheesy-pop song can pull in tons of listeners. Their songs also tend to feature really pretty leading ladies, and along with the Hahatai stunt mentioned above, these were all their ways of getting exposure – and it worked, helping them rise to fame quickly over the past few years. But behind all that traffic, they often took flak from haters who said their songs had no substance, that they sounded like a high school showcase, and even complained that their MVs looked low-quality (how could they!).
All the online abuse actually hurt them quite a bit, but the truth is they don’t think sounding commercial or cheesy is a bad thing. That’s because after graduating university, Zoji went to TNUA to study music-related programs, and in a few of his classes a professor said that the lyrics you write should, as much as possible, be dressed up like a story many people have lived through – that’s the only way to move a lot of people. And if more people can be moved or comforted by a song, then its contribution to society is even better and even greater. Maybe it’s because that line stuck with him that Zoji writes lyrics – and melodies – that can be embraced by a wider audience.
Honestly, the reason I got into these songs in the first place was just that they’re so easy to sing along to, and the bits in the middle are so goofy – that’s how I fell for Mango Jam. Back then I had no idea there were so many untold stories behind those songs, and I only half-understood the meanings they were trying to convey. Even when I first came across these songs without knowing the deeper meaning, they always made me feel – the moment I heard them – like they were singing out my own story. I guess that’s exactly what makes Mango Jam so amazing!
But deep down, my all-time favorite is still “Summer Night Breeze” (夏夜晚風), because exactly as I said earlier, it brings back my own past, so I always put it on when it’s late and quiet and I’m having a solo emo moment. “But the moment I see the moon, in the end I still think of you, a sudden flutter of my heart throws my summer into disarray. And in this panicked instant, the wind gently stirs the lake’s surface, and I, lost in the memory, lose all sense of feeling.” Every single time I listen to this song it makes me think of her, damn it!!!
That said, if we’re talking about the band members’ own favorite song, it’s got to be “Bitter Sweet.” Bitter Sweet was actually the name of a cafe where Zoji worked part-time during university. Even though the cafe owner could have held a much higher-paying job, he resolutely quit his original work to chase what he truly loved instead – opening a cafe of his own. Choosing your ideals in the tug-of-war between dreams and reality – it’s just like Mango Jam in their scrappy early days, who could have gone out and found better jobs but chose to keep walking the hard road of music instead. That really takes a lot of courage and conviction.
My favorite part of this song is this stretch: “Hey! Coffee boy, don’t give up, you once said you’d be the best in the world. Even if there’s too much pressure in reality, you still have to bravely march on.” Sometimes when things are tough and not going my way, hearing this song always gives me the strength to keep pushing forward. Maybe you’re going through a rough patch too right now, maybe there are a lot of things weighing on you right now, but even if there’s too much pressure in real life, you still have to bravely march on.
The last song I want to introduce today is “Chen Xiaoyu aka Your Heart My Heart” (陳小魚 aka 你的心我的心). The reason I like this song is purely that lately, even when I’m on the MRT without my earphones in, I can still hear it everywhere – so I just had to put it up here. “Clearly your heart and my heart can still trust each other, oh how come your heart and my heart both choose to part. Oh, I dirtied this patch of grass, and the brave you, but I’ll never forget that downpour on Yangmingshan.” The fun fact is that Chen Xiaoyu is actually a real person! And “Chen Xiaoyu” is literally the name on her ID card. Anyone curious can go look it up.
That said, I haven’t been able to dig up much info on this song so far – including the backstory behind it, which is still a mystery. The only thing I know for sure is that this song really has been stuck in my head nonstop lately.
There are actually plenty of other little Easter eggs and origin stories in New・Treasure Island Boy (新・寶島少年?) that I haven’t explained to you all yet, but I think I’ll stop here for this week! I’m off to go listen to their show~~~
Heh heh heh~ thanks everyone for reading all the way to here. If you enjoyed this week’s recommended playlist, feel free to hit like and save! And if you don’t want to miss next week’s recommended playlist, feel free to hit follow too – and we’ll see each other next week! Oh, and right, next week is the second part of the Mango Jam piece, which I’ve actually already written, and I’ve already been a week late on updates, so… if this post gets more than 200 likes, let’s speed up and post the next part! See you in the next one!
Mydondon’s new recommended playlist family bucket (the full-leg combo):
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Uet444O5wiNEoCRPYqhDc?si=2c11c12627c44210
YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRRUz5Ks1DvR93efV9ViecRSPsS5GNUQj&si=THmSYcOnD7bApzQV
Other recommended playlists: https://mydondon.net/category/entertainment/playlist/
Don’t feel like reading an article with this many words? My IG has curated picture-and-text posts: https://www.instagram.com/hikids1010/