Give Me Back My Youth --- by Ma Shihfang

Mandarin Version

It’s been 20 years since the founding of the LTK Commune. In other words, half of the lives of me and a group from my generation have been under the shadow of the LTK Commune. Fuck! What the hell happened?

Of course I remember what happened in those days. Back then I was only half my age. I can put it this way: If I could have, I would have started my own band and put the LTK Commune out of the way. The problem was, when I saw one of their outdoor campus performances, I knew it would be impossible. My dream of starting a band was scared away by “The Cartoon Pistols”, although I heard that several little bastards had started their own bands because of the LTK Commune.

Anyway, a group from my generation and I can never go back to the innocent years after being scared by them. We can never go back. Damn you LTK Commune, give me back my youth!

Back then, I pretended to work for a campus publication and met the LTK Commune in a teahouse called “Humanity Space” for an interview on the ecology of campus creative works and underground cultures. At that time, the LTK Commune was just campus group using the Sight and Sound Club as their base for messing around. And rock-and-roll was just one of their pranks. I can’t remember what we talked about during the interview. The only thing I can recall is the scene of Blackgold Ko eating instant noodles from I don’t know where and the Left having no intention to answer my questions seriously with a spurious smile on his face throughout the interview. I pretended to be cool and indifferent while I cared a lot in fact. Fuck, I was only 20 years old, what could I have done? My guess is they did care about me so they pretended to be even cooler than I was. We were all so young then. The only way for us to hide our emptiness and fear is to pretend to be cool. The crazy joy and darkness of rock-and-roll sweeping across the world were like those of having sex for the first time. We didn’t know what kind of punishments and rewards every related thing would bring to the rest of our lives.

Finally, time has treated all of us alike and made us older. When coming to this age, people from my generation usually have a few stories worth telling. Some of the stories make them proud, while some make them embarrassed. Thinking about the past, I realized that the anxiety and fear I had when I was 20 were never the reasons why we are what we are today. No matter how heroic a revolution business is, after being stretched into a year-after-year homework, there will definitely a smell of habit and staleness. However, that didn’t happen to the LTK Commune. 20 years have passed. Perhaps the LTK Commune has done something really stupid and annoying, recorded some songs which couldn’t even please themselves, and been through some ups and downs like people from the same generation have. But, thank god, the LTK Commune has never been stale. And, at some point of time, they stopped to be unreal.

Many years later – long after you, all the LTK Commune members, and I die, probably there will be a little bastard who just celebrated his 16-year-old birthday hearing the ancient recording of the LTK Commune’s music through his future stereo. Like you, I also want to know if that little bastard will be too excited to sleep at night and how he will describe in his diary this turning point of his life. Will his life become emptier or richer? Angrier or happier?

I can’t answer these questions for him. But I believe that ancient music will still come with a fresh and offensive smell like the first sperms gushed out during puberty, flashing the light of resplendency and danger.

(The author of this article attended NTU in the same year as Blackgold Ko and the Left . He saw the LTK Commune’s performance for the first time in 1990.)