No Party for Cao Dong: Twelve Years from a Yangmingshan Street Corner to Two Golden Melody Best Band Awards

30-second overview: No Party for Cao Dong is a four-piece independent band founded in 2012 at the intersection of Jianxian Street and Caodong Street in Yangmingshan, Taipei. In 2016 they self-pressed 2,000 handmade CDs that sold out in three days; in 2017 at the 28th Golden Melody Awards they won Best Band (defeating Mayday), Best New Artist, and Song of the Year (〈The Big Wind Blows〉) with first-round votes of 19, 19, and 18. On October 30, 2021, drummer Fan Fan (Tsai Yi-Fan, age 26) was found dead in a Taipei quarantine hotel, and the band fell into nearly two years of silence. On May 20, 2023, they released their second album Whe·Re (瓦合) — "whe·re" (瓦合) appears in the Shiji's "Confucian Scholars" chapter, and its extended meaning "broken tiles fitted together, though gathered they are not uniform" comes from Tang dynasty scholar Yan Shigu's annotation to the Book of Han.¹ In 2024 Whe·Re won the 35th Golden Melody Awards' Album of the Year, Best Mandarin Album, and Best Band — a triple crown. The band was absent that evening; their manager accepted on their behalf and declared: "No Party for Cao Dong has never been only the 4 people standing on stage." This is a twelve-year story whose core is loss, silence, return — then loss again, silence again, return again.

On the evening of June 29, 2024, at the 35th Golden Melody Awards ceremony, No Party for Cao Dong took home three major trophies: Album of the Year, Best Mandarin Album, and Best Band. But no one walked on stage.²

The band was performing that night at Bubble Island Music Festival in Guiyang, China, and was not present. Their manager stepped up in their place and said:

"In our hearts, No Party for Cao Dong has never been only the 4 people standing on stage, but every person who wholeheartedly participates in those 6 characters."²

Those words landed in silence. Everyone who knew their story understood that "not only 4 people" was not a rote acceptance speech — it was a band's direct acknowledgment of a member who had died three years earlier.

This is the best entry point for understanding No Party for Cao Dong's twelve years: not the night in 2017 when they beat Mayday, but the night in 2024 when they didn't show up to collect their own awards.

📝 Curator's note: Cao Dong's story is not the arc of "rise, success, sustain." It is the story of "explosion, disappearance, return — interrupted by death — then return again." Understanding this rhythm is the only way to understand why they are the most important voice in Mandarin independent music over the past decade.

High school classmates drifting around Yangmingshan on motorcycles

The story begins on June 9, 2012.³ At the intersection of Jianxian Street and Caodong Street on Yangmingshan in Taipei (near Lane 34, Alley 245, Yonggong Road), a group of students with arts-school backgrounds who loved playing instruments gathered together. Wudu (birth name Lin Keng-Yu) and Zhuzhu (Chan Wei-Zhu) were high school classmates who often rode motorcycles together around Yangmingshan and messed around with instruments.

The band's name went through three stages: it started as "Left Turn at Caodong Street," then became "Caodong Street Party," and finally settled into "No Party for Cao Dong" in 2014.³ The first version was a dance-punk sound inspired by Two Door Cinema Club; after the 2014 rename, the music shifted: from dance-punk toward grunge and post-rock influenced by Nirvana.

The name change itself was a declaration: the party is over.

Liu Li, Sam, Fan Fan: the band across four drummers

To understand Cao Dong's current four-person lineup, you first need to understand how the lineup evolved.

The original drummer was Liu Li, who later shifted to full-time work in band filmmaking and cinema production. He never actually left Cao Dong — his role just changed from drummer to documentarian.³ The second bassist was Sam, who caused the band to halt for almost a year when he was called up for mandatory military service.

In 2016, the drummer position was taken over by Fan Fan (Tsai Yi-Fan), who came from another independent band, Triple Deer. Fan Fan's official debut with Cao Dong was at the "Not Born the Same" 2.0 concert on May 21, 2016.³

In 2023, original bassist Yang Shih-Hsuan announced an indefinite suspension from public activity; original drummer Niaoren (Huang Shih-Wei) came back to fill in. The current (2026) lineup is four people:

• Wudu (Lin Keng-Yu): lead vocals, guitar, primary songwriter
• Zhuzhu (Chan Wei-Zhu): rhythm guitar, backing vocals
• Niaoren (Huang Shih-Wei): drums
• Dennis (Chang Hao-Tang): bass

The most important position in the middle — drummer — changed four times in 12 years. And the third one, Fan Fan, died in 2021.

Those 2,000 handmade CDs

On February 19, 2016, Ugly Girl (醜奴兒) was released digitally; on March 11 the physical CD dropped, pressed only 2,000 copies, all handmade, stocked exclusively at 11 independent coffee shops and record stores across Taiwan.⁴

Sold out in three days.

The album has 12 songs, 38 minutes and 57 seconds. Producer: Li Hsiao-Tsu; mixing engineer: Andy Baker (USA); mastering engineer: Joel Hatstat (Georgia, USA). Total production time: four months.⁴ Funding came from a Ministry of Culture grant — no label, no management, no mainstream distribution.

One unusual sonic detail in this album's design: 〈The Big Wind Blows〉 specifically layers live audience voices over studio-recorded tracks — allowing two kinds of "space" to coexist in the same song: the space of being watched, and the space of being alone.⁴ This technical choice foreshadowed the band's entire aesthetic: the surface addresses the world, the interior is self-talk.

"The Big Wind Blows" as wound documentation

〈The Big Wind Blows〉 hit 95,000 YouTube views six months after release and broke 500,000 within a year.⁵ But the song's impact lies not in numbers but in how it became the common language of a generation.

The song was written against the backdrop of the 2015 Taiwan anti-curriculum-adjustment movement: students took to the streets; a student leader died by suicide.⁶ Wudu compressed those memories, along with his own experience of school bullying, into a single set of lyrics.

On the surface the lyrics reference the children's game "Musical Chairs" (大風吹); underneath are three distinct stories: a generational metaphor of resource competition, an existential feeling of being trapped in time ("Blame it on time / it gave us a starting point / blame it on time / it gave us an ending point"), and Wudu's personal experience of being bullied.⁶

Music critic Ma Shih-Fang later framed Cao Dong's generation as the "loser generation":

"Lyrics sharp as knives, a bottomless nihilism at their core — they became verse cherished and shared by the 'collapsing generation' of youth."⁷

This framing became fact over the following decade: at NTUST, a poll asking "which song best represents my generation" placed 〈The Big Wind Blows〉 at the top for six consecutive years; MC HotDog sampled the song; NTU sociology assistant professor Li Ming-Tsung's Fall 2017 course "Sociology of Failure" packed 600+ students into a room.⁸ A song can do all of this not because it sounds good, but because it speaks what an entire generation could not say for themselves.

The night of "these people are geniuses"

June 24, 2017: the 28th Golden Melody Awards. No Party for Cao Dong was nominated for 6 awards and won 3, with first-round votes that were overwhelmingly decisive: Best New Artist 19 votes, Best Band 19 votes, Song of the Year 〈The Big Wind Blows〉 18 votes.⁷

Awards committee chair Huang Yun-Ling described the band as "an outburst from the suffocated generation": "They brought a tremendous impact, shattering everyone's understanding of what sound can be."⁷

The most storied detail from that night was Mayday frontman Ashin's reaction. After hearing Cao Dong's songs, he told bassist Masa backstage: "Should we go say hi? These people are geniuses!"⁹

The media quickly simplified the story to "generational handover": an independent band that self-pressed their CDs beat the giants of Mandarin rock. But Ashin himself rejected that narrative: "It has nothing to do with generational handover. Always being positive and upbeat is exhausting — it's also great to have a different kind of energy to let loose sometimes."⁹

When Wudu accepted the Best Band award, he also refused the narrative. He said: "This award belongs to everyone." At Best New Artist, fighting back tears: "We're very fortunate that there's always a group of people, amid all this nothingness, who keep working hard to find their own sound." And on Mayday:

"We're not looking at this as a competition. Mayday's place is irreplaceable."⁹

Two generations of bands in the same evening, each making room for the other — this should have been the emotional peak of the night. But the media grabbed the "beat Mayday" headline and missed the moment of mutual recognition.

📝 Curator's note: Cao Dong and Mayday were never rivals. They are two answers from two generations to the question "what can rock do?": Mayday says it's a public embrace; Cao Dong says it's a private pain. Both answers are correct.

Potato, 14 years, 15 hours

October 30, 2021.

Drummer Tsai Yi-Fan (Fan Fan) was found dead in a Taipei quarantine hotel at age 26.¹⁰ She had returned from a mainland tour on October 25 and checked into the hotel, expecting to quarantine for 14 days. Her dog "Potato" had come into her life when she was 14 and had been with her for 12 years. In late October, Potato was 14 years old and critically ill.

On the evening of October 29, quarantined Fan Fan wrote her last public words on Instagram:

"What breaks my heart most is that I'm in quarantine and can't be by your side, can't even see you one last time. I've cried myself to breaking and I don't know how to face any of this... The first thing Older Sister will do when quarantine ends is grab all her luggage and run to your side, to be with you in the last of your life. Older Sister loves you."¹⁰

Fifteen hours later, she was found dead in her hotel room.

Eighteen days after that, on November 17, 2021, Wudu wrote publicly to Fan Fan on Instagram:

"My thoughts have been in chaos for days, trapped in a loop of self-doubt and regret... I'm sorry I couldn't give better companionship."¹¹

The band went into nearly two years of complete silence. No new music, no interviews, no performances. In 2023, original bassist Yang Shih-Hsuan announced an indefinite hiatus.³ During that period, Cao Dong looked like it was entirely over.

📝 Curator's note: A band entering quarantine after a tour and losing a bandmate — this is a narrative unique to the COVID era. Not a heroic death, but a loss under administrative rules: quarantine policy separated Fan Fan from her dying dog, so that when death came she was alone.

Seven years of waiting for "Bed"

On April 7, 2023, No Party for Cao Dong released the single 〈Bed〉 with a lyric video.¹² This was the first new song from the band since Fan Fan's death.

But this song had actually been in their live sets for seven years. They'd been performing it since 2016 but never recorded it.¹² The reason they chose this song as the comeback single in 2023 wasn't that it was well-written — it was because it had already traveled with them for seven years, pre-existing this loss.

〈Bed〉 is not an elegy. It doesn't directly reference Fan Fan, contains no tears, no accusations. The narrative stays low: a person lying in bed unable to wake up but unable to sleep either, sung in a tone almost entirely without emotional peaks.

The band processed loss through low pressure — "there's no going back to that time" — rather than dramatic grief. This choice is exactly what makes Cao Dong Cao Dong: they never exploit tragedy.

Broken tiles fitted together: the two-layer allusion from the Shiji to Yan Shigu's annotation to the Book of Han

On May 20, 2023, Whe·Re was released, seven years after Ugly Girl.¹³

The album title's allusion has two layers — a distinction worth clarifying precisely, because it defines what the title actually means.

First layer: the characters "瓦合" (whe·re) appear in the Shiji's "Confucian Scholars" chapter — "Chen She rose from among commoners, driving together disbanded conscripts (瓦合謫戍) and became king of Chu within a month."¹³

Second layer (more critical): the extended meaning "like broken tiles fitted together, though gathered they are not uniform" is not in the Shiji original text. It comes from Tang dynasty scholar Yan Shigu's annotation to the Book of Han's "Biographies of Li, Lu, Zhu, Liu, and Shusun."¹

Music critic Tsai-Yu (采郁) fully documented both layers of this allusion in her 2023 review of Whe·Re.¹ The distinction matters because the literal meaning — "a group of broken tiles gathered together" — taken alone is just the pejorative "rabble" (烏合之眾); it is only with Yan Shigu's extension "though gathered they are not uniform" that it becomes broken individuals gathered together, each retaining their own irregularity. This annotative layer is what Cao Dong actually points to in choosing this name — not "repairing the fracture," not "uniting as one," but continuing to coexist while remaining broken.

Producer Chou Yi-Tun said in an interview:

"This is an album expressing regret and the various disappointments of life."¹⁴

The album's dedication page reads: "This album is dedicated to Fan Fan."¹³ The final new track is 〈Damn〉: the vocalist nearly screams "I love you," dedicated to Fan Fan.¹⁴

In an interview related to Whe·Re, Wudu spoke of how the band continued making music after Fan Fan's death:

"Life is inherently fragile. The death of all things is never an end, but the continuation of companionship in another form."¹

This sentence explains why Whe·Re doesn't sound like "getting through grief" — it sounds like continuing to make music while living inside grief.

〈Urn〉 and 〈Empty〉: the only remaining critical works

Ugly Girl was dense with social critique: 〈Mud〉, 〈The Brave〉, 〈The Big Wind Blows〉, 〈Us〉 — music critic Tsai-Yu counted it up and found that in Whe·Re, works where you can clearly feel "critique and confrontation with society" have been reduced to just two: 〈Urn〉 and 〈Empty〉.¹

The chorus of 〈Urn〉 is the moment on this album that comes closest to the sharp-knife feeling of 2017 Cao Dong:

"So I smashed the dyeing vat / smashed the dyeing vat / only to see the sea stretching vast / and you and I still don't know where we stand"¹

The preceding section builds anticipation through delay-guitar effects and accelerating drum rhythms, then drags out a heavy guitar tone, forming a sonic contrast of "expectation and disappointment."¹ The song's biggest hook — "smashed the dyeing vat" — lands at the very end, a structural arrangement absent from Ugly Girl.

The direction of Whe·Re's other tracks, summarized in Tsai-Yu's words: "From 〈Cavern Mountain〉 onward the album turns inward and closes off — compared to the past of raising the 'world-weary' banner and shouting, of colliding against a system that couldn't fulfill 'dreams,' it's like two completely different landscapes."¹

This shift from "world-weary and outward-projecting" to "world-weary and inward-turning" is a structural turn in Cao Dong's twelve years. Tsai-Yu frames it as "the end of the youth generation": Cao Dong along with their audience are preparing to enter the next phase.¹ No longer writing social critiques in the style of 〈Mud〉 — instead writing songs like 〈White Daydream〉, 〈Bed〉, 〈Old Zhang〉, 〈Sprout〉, and 〈Damn〉 that face the emotional gaps between themselves and their nearest people.

📝 Curator's note: Whe·Re is not a weakened album. It's an album that moved from "speaking for a generation" to "processing one's own interior." The courage Cao Dong summoned for this turn is something the 〈The Big Wind Blows〉-era Cao Dong of 2017 could not have managed.

Music critics later also defined Whe·Re as "an album by suicide loss survivors."¹⁵ The first three tracks progressively advance themes of death (drowning, self-destruction imagery); the middle instrumental interlude creates an atmosphere of "ethereal and ungraspable"; the ending turns away from anger toward "quiet mourning"; the final track 〈Damn〉 has the vocalist nearly screaming, expressing longing and the determination to keep living.

The moment the manager accepted on their behalf

June 29, 2024: the 35th Golden Melody Awards. The Best Band category in which No Party for Cao Dong was nominated was dubbed the "group of death" by the media — also in the group were Fire EX, Sunset Rollercoaster, and four other powerhouse bands.¹⁶ Cao Dong took three trophies: Album of the Year, Best Mandarin Album, and Best Band (second time).²

But the band was performing that evening at Bubble Island Music Festival in Guiyang, China — not at the ceremony. The manager accepted on stage and said the words "No Party for Cao Dong has never been only the 4 people standing on stage, but every person who wholeheartedly participates in those 6 characters"² — which in the moment was understood to mean "including deceased member Fan Fan."

The "absent victory" itself was a statement from Cao Dong: we do not treat winning awards as the climax of our lives. They kept performing in Guiyang, turning the Best Band acceptance into a "ritual of absence."

In the history of Mandarin popular music, a band winning Best Band at Golden Melody twice is already rare. Cao Dong's second win came seven years after their first, spanning one member's death and two years of near-total silence. From the high-profile moment of beating Mayday in 2017 to the low-key moment of the manager accepting on their behalf in 2024, this band is redefining the meaning of "success" on its own terms.

Why they don't do interviews

From debut to the present, No Party for Cao Dong has done almost no formal press interviews.¹⁷ Wudu has given extremely few interviews (primarily to Blow Music in 2016), but the band as a whole maintains a near-closed posture toward the media.

This is not cool posturing — it is professional ethics. They refuse to mold themselves into "consumable personalities": they refuse to sell daily life on Instagram, refuse crossover variety show appearances, refuse to turn Fan Fan's death into narrative capital. One of Wudu's quotes sums up their creative stance:

"Many of our works sound violent, but they're actually all full of... love."¹⁷

This is the key distinction between Cao Dong and most Taiwanese bands of the late 2010s: they believe the content of a song should be larger than the personality of the singer. A fan can recognize the chords of 〈The Big Wind Blows〉 without necessarily recognizing Wudu's face — and that distance is something the band intentionally preserves.

This is an album by suicide loss survivors

Twelve years. Four drummers. Two albums. Two Golden Melody Best Band awards. One death. Two years of silence. One manager accepting on their behalf.

What No Party for Cao Dong leaves behind is not "a rise story" — it is a story about how to piece yourself back together in loss. The dance-punk kids on Yangmingshan's Caodong Street in 2012; the self-pressed 2,000-CD triple-crown Golden Melody beaters of 2016–17; the band that lost drummer Fan Fan in 2021; the 2023 return with 〈Bed〉; and the 2024 triple crown at Golden Melody 35 with Whe·Re — a word for losers from the Shiji.

They have also proven something harder: a band can lose a member and survive, but the survival will not look like it did before. The name Whe·Re says it all on its own. Incomplete, unrepaired — just together: continuing on with the fractures.

The manager said on the Golden Melody stage in 2024:

"In our hearts, No Party for Cao Dong has never been only the 4 people standing on stage."

In that moment, no one in the hall laughed or stood up to cheer. Everyone went quiet for five seconds.

Then the camera cut to the next award.

Further reading:

• Wei Ru-Xuan (zh only) — also belongs to the 2010s independent music ecosystem; the counterpart along the female vocal path
• Constant and Change — also on the post-rock spectrum, but taking the lyrical narration path
• Cicada (zh only) — takes the all-instrumental no-vocal path, the exact opposite of Cao Dong's "lyrics as sociology"
• Crowd Lu (zh only) — another path in independent music: the compositional singer across the three major awards
• Popular Music and Golden Melody Awards (zh only) — the stage coordinates where Cao Dong won Best Band twice
• Taiwan Independent Music (zh only) — the independent music evolution from 1976 to Cao Dong to Sunset Rollercoaster
• Taiwan Popular Music (zh only) — the Mandarin popular music industry environment

References