Abstract
In the current climate when Singapore is gaining awareness of its own version of “Chineseness” (not to forget Malayness, Indianness and Eurasianness of course), it is an opportunity to redefine these concepts from the ground up. Younger generations are leading the way in the formation of our nation’s new contemporary identities, and it is their voices that we must hear. Since music is a potent means by which people—both creators and listeners—express their identity and define their own culture, this chapter sets out to discover what several young, emerging music groups have to say about their own Chinese identity and how they express it in their music. We focus on a few case studies of Singaporean Chinese musicians in Singapore and abroad. On the home front, which is the focus of the first part of the chapter, we examine several contemporary Chinese instrumentalist ensembles, notably Nen 念, MUSA and SA(仨), who are engaging, in various ways, with top-down constructs of Chinese “highbrow” culture while being extremely plugged into local youth-driven pop culture and its notions of cool. They navigate Singapore’s system of “racial” and cultural classification in ways that allow them to create alternative spaces for the expression of hybrid identities. In a sense, they are playing an interesting role of bridging the gap between policymakers and young people’s interests and identities. In the second part of the chapter, we consider expatriated Singaporean Chinese musicians who are also actively exploring and deploying their own Chinese cultural capital in their discourse and music. The music groups I focus on, namely, Yllis and TZECHAR, bring the discussion to a new level with their perspectives on identity politics in relation to wider geopolitical questions. They also contribute their views on representing Chineseness and honouring their “roots” while embracing a kind of postmodern nondeterminism.
The Chinese Singaporean is proud of his Chinese culture – but also increasingly conscious that his ‘Chineseness’ is different from the Chineseness of the Malaysian and Indonesian Chinese, or the Chineseness of the people in China or Hong Kong or Taiwan. … For a country that is just over 50 years old, which is a very short time compared to the ancient civilisations from which we spring, this is quite an achievement.
– Lee Hsien Loong (2017)
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Notes
- 1.
What comes to be considered “traditional” Chinese music deserves extensive research in itself. Sometimes what is seen as a traditional convention is actually quite a recent development. The modern Chinese orchestra is one example. Having emerged in the 1920s, it actually takes the form, structure and principles of the Western symphony orchestra but uses Chinese instruments. One should also remember the considerable impact of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese arts today: the Chinese government effectively cherry picked the traditional cultural forms to revive, and this choice was always economically and ideologically motivated (Stanzel 2016).
- 2.
When modern popular music, in the form of the blues and rockabilly, was introduced to Singapore from the West after World War II, through the radio and phonographs, this led to the first generation of popular musicians who marketed themselves as “imitators” of Western artists (Fu and Liew 2006). They played covers of Western acts, they emulated, and original compositions are written in the same style. There were the Quests who copied The Shadows, The Cyclones who were the “Beatles of Singapore,” Wilson David who was the Singaporean version of Elvis Presley and Rahim Hamid, a Nat King Cole imitator (Kong 1999, p.16). The success of these artists even depended on how accurately they imitated their Western role models.
- 3.
Historically, the concept of cool has its roots in slavery in relation to slaves’ attitude of self-control, because at the time, any sign of aggression by a slave would be punishable, so projecting an attitude of composure was a means to disguise or suppress one’s intention and a way to cope with exploitation (Botz-Bornstein 2010). The concept developed and blossomed within black American jazz culture in the early twentieth century, where it continued to be associated with a low-profile means of survival and the ability to stay collected under duress. Finally, it was co-opted and spread through Hollywood movies and rock ‘n roll in the 1950s, quickly becoming one of the core aspects of youth culture (Pountain and Robins 2000; Gerber and Geiman 2012; Belk et al. 2010). By that time, cool had evolved into a status symbol representing the opposition to the establishment and to conformism, and society was divided between what Mailer describes as the hip (rebels) and the square (conformists) (Mailer 1957).
- 4.
98.7 FM is an English-language radio station, while YES 93.3 FM is a Mandarin one.
- 5.
Channel 5 is a 24-hour English news and entertainment television channel in Singapore, and Channel 8 is Singapore’s first free-to-air Mandarin television channel.
- 6.
The electronic music and culture channel of VICE.
- 7.
Called the “China Cool Hunt survey,” it was conducted by Hill and Knowlton in 2004.
- 8.
Based on Western notions of cool.
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Lizeray, J.YM. (2018). Chinese Identity and the Quest for Cool Among Singaporean Chinese Musicians. In: Semionauts of Tradition. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1011-9_6
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