Sonic City

Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore

Steve Ferzacca

• Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789813251472
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities, ages, and generations to make a sonic way of life. Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this multi-modal (text, musical composition, social media, performance) sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life in Singapore. The heart and soul of this community is English Language rock and roll music pioneered in Singapore by several members of the 1960s legendary "beats and blues" band, The Straydogs, who continue to engage this community in a sonic way of life.Grounded in debates from sound studies, Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour's ideas of the social—continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, "associations of heterogeneous elements" of human and non-human "mediators and intermediaries"—to portray a community entangled in the confounding relations between vernacular and national heritage projects. Music shops, music gear, music genres, sound, urban space, neighborhoods, State presence, performance venues, practice spaces, regional travel, local, national, regional, and sonic histories afford expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning, in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this deep sound is fiercely cosmopolitan, yet entirely Singaporean. What emerges is a vernacular heritage drawing upon Singapore's unique place in Southeast Asian and world history.

Chapter One

Crossroads

If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little ’fore 12 that night so you know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself… A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.¹⁸

Figure 3. The Peninsula Shopping Centre, Coleman Street entrance. Photo by author, 2012.

Cosmopolitanism and the Social in a Southeast Asian Place

Crossroads is a reference to Singapore as S Rajaratnam’s (1972) “Global City.” A city he said “is the child of modern technology. It is the city that electronic communications, supersonic planes, giant tankers and modern economic and industrial organization have made inevitable” (ibid. p. 225). A city linked “through the tentacles of technology” to a “world-wide system” (ibid. p. 226). A “global port” that “makes the world its hinterland” (ibid. p. 227). As a global port Singapore has drawn people from all over the region and world, some passing through, and some who have remained on this small island located at a crossroads in the Asian maritime trade network. Crossroads also refers to the guitar shops located in the basement of the Peninsula and Excelsior Shopping Centres located on Coleman Street in Singapore’s downtown central business district. And crossroads also refers to the cultural and social exchanges that I have observed taking place in this sonic city. But perhaps most importantly, crossroads is a musical reference well known to rock and blues musicians. In this chapter, the character of the community and its vernacular heritage centered on cosmopolitan conviviality is developed in both the literal and figurative sense of the crossroads.

It seems for all people at all times, crossroads are a place marked in some way as special among human places. Crossroads (or crossways) are found in Vedic literature, Pali texts, Chinese medical treatises and hagiography, as well as Southeast Asian tales and histories, and are described as places where “meritorious public works” (for example the building of stupas) can occur alongside the public flogging of criminals. The Buddha and Buddhists erect stupas at crossroads (Kosambi 1962). In Vedic literature crossroads were homes to Mother-Goddesses (“Mothers-companions”), who because of their ability to speak different languages offered wanderers opportunities for domestic offerings to be made to family deities and ancestors, therefore localizing a stranger’s experience (ibid.). At the confluences of human movement that include but are not limited to roads and waterways, people often encountered “great harmonizers,” gate-watchers, keepers, teachers, monks in contemplation, “guardians of the boundaries,” devils, and other harmful entities.¹⁹ Attention is paid to crossroads and crossways because of this potential. And so such places, in the classic and modern sense, are often located at the outskirts of sedentary human settlement, are envisioned and experienced as inauspicious places where goddesses, devils, enchanters, guides, gift givers carry on as human movements activate their presence. While crossroads are artifacts and perhaps even maps of and for human movements, crossroads and crossways are always local sites “made to do something” among the emergent connections that not only haunt but make up these places (Latour 2005: 191).

For musicians and connoisseurs of American blues music, the crossroads refers to a mythic tale of a Faustian bargain. As the story goes, the father of blues music, Robert Johnson, received the ability to play the blues on his guitar after selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. In fact, the story should be attributed to a blues player also from the early 20th century, Tommy Johnson, who, when interviewed, provided the basic gist of the story. The devil, in Tommy Johnson’s rendition, is a teacher who Tommy “jams” with as he learned to play the blues on his guitar. While this storied version of the crossroads reflects African and African-American histories and sensibilities, many features of the crossroads found elsewhere around the world appear. In 1936, Robert Johnson recorded “Crossroad Blues” which is not a story of a Faustian bargain, but rather begins with a verse that has someone kneeling in despair begging forgiveness, followed by an anxious verse as failed attempts to hitch a ride evoke resignation and fear with nightfall approaching. “Crossroads Blues” reveals the potential of the crossroads to harmonize and vex human lives.

“Crossroad Blues” by Robert Johnson

Recording of November 27, 1936

San Antonio, Texas

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees

Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please”

Mmmm, standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride

Standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride

Didn’t nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by

Mmmm, the sun goin’ down, boy, dark gon’ catch me here

Oooo, eeee, boy, dark gon’ catch me here

I haven’t got no lovin’ sweet woman that love and feel my care

You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown

You can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown

Lord I’m standin’ at the crossroad, babe, I believe I’m sinkin’ down.

It is at a crossroads where this project began, and of course it is at a crossroads where this project remains. In this chapter I explore a local place in Singapore that itself has been commonly characterized as a “crossroads to the East.” The sonic experiences that I explore in this book are situated in an urban cosmopolitanism that is the history and historicity of modern Singapore, both as a colony and city state. From “Straits Settlement” to “Global City” Singapore is the meeting place of numerous ethnic groups who came to the island to seek prosperity. This plural society was rationalized during the colonial period into a rubric that includes Chinese, Malay, Indians, Eurasians, and Others, referred to by the acronym CMIEO (Siddique 1989), that continues today. The Malay ethnic group is the only ethnic group indigenous to the island. All of the other ethnic groups and nationalities, including those glossed over by the “other” category (everyone outside the other four classifications) are imports. “Foreign talent” attracted to this crossroads of the East that became the hub of the Asian Maritime Trade Network after its establishment as a station of Britain’s East India Company in 1819 included diverse groups attached to numerous networks of trade in Asia and the world. The longue durée of this island trading port city is its location along trade routes connected by waters, straits, surrounding seas and oceans (Guan, Heng, and Yong 2009). Singapore’s pluriverse community reflected its location along the Straits of Melaka as a shipping lane and fluid trade route linking the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. As a crossroads of trade and commerce, Singapore has always been cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is its nature and its history.

Encounter and Discovery: Singapore, October 30, 2011

I arrived in Singapore on September 1. I had been invited to a dinner and passed a small mosque (mesjid) along the way. A muffled call for prayer seemed less like a sound system with the mute turned on than a resounding of Koranic Arabic turned inward on itself. A week later the cityscape around Raffles City Mall was turned into a Formula One racetrack for the highly anticipated weekend race. Formula One racing cars make a great deal of noise. Several dozen of these machines screaming around the city produced a roar that could be heard well beyond the fences covered with tarpaulin that had been constructed around the city circuit. The Straits Times published many stories prior to, during, and after the race. One story noted the social qualities of the scream of the track as “sexy, successful.”²⁰ The majority of the Straits Times articles that appeared after the September 25 race pondered the appropriateness of formula racing in Singapore because of the noise.

The muted voice of the mesjid is perhaps the subject of an “urban utopia,” sonic rationality, properly resonant in and for the modern city in which respect for the “privacy of the citizen” reflects the engineering and management of civil society so to speak. This muted human activity abates the possibility of cultural and social disintegration.²¹ The scream of racing car engines is equally modern, roaring the heavy metal of technological advancement. The power chords of the racing car roar to remind everyone who can hear it of Singapore’s amazing history of development: always a cyborg-nation of machine, human sense, and skill, at high velocity through space and in time.

Searching for an anchor, a familiarity I could use to settle my arrival anxiety, I headed for some guitar shops I had located using online searches before leaving my prairie home. I had been to Singapore before, and so knew enough to buy a transport pass for use on the trains and buses that network this small island city. Taking nothing with me except a pocketful of guitar picks, I headed “downtown” – a locater that is entirely my own. Arising from the subterranean chute of screech and halt, through which moving masses of hand-held device holding locals and “others” assemble and flow, the sun and heat greet me without compromise – at least today.

Take it slow, I say to myself as I walk, knowing that I sweat easily, which, added to the unease of new encounters, leaves me dripping, drenched, and sloppy. A whitewashed St. Andrews Cathedral stands just outside the glassy mall from which I ascended. Soon I enter another less glassy, not-quite-so- contemporary shopping mall combined with a hotel of towers that compete with the density of towering buildings, scraping the sky as they say. Big city sounds, traffic, and scores of people off to somewhere or another. The guitar shops are in the basement and I find them after filing through corridors of knock-offs – jeans, shoes, cowboy boots, belts, and used camera shops. A tattoo parlor is busy. I turn a corner and the first shops appear, loaded with guitars (Figure 2). It becomes apparent that the basement holds a cluster of guitar stores, and before long familiar sounds, songs, and sights excite me. Even though I am so far from home, I can find all of my favorite guitars and amplifiers, famous and not-so-famous, conventional and “boutique” brands, in great abundance. It is a feast, and I plan to indulge.

After some time in Davis Guitar, I venture onward and discover a “vintage” shop with gems from guitar history (Figure 3). There are guitars of all ages, representing the milestones in music history associated with the amplified “electric” guitar. Acoustic guitars are available as well, but my interest is in the loud and amplified. To say I was surprised would have been an understatement. I had not counted on a treasure hunt, but there I was, looking at some really amazing artifacts in various conditions. Obviously the guitar had history in Singapore, history, and the history of guitar gear that I have accumulated over the years provided a ethnocentricity just waiting to be opened to other guitar histories. I spent some time in Guitar Connection looking and then asking to try out those guitars more easily accessed.

Figure 4. Davis Guitar, the oldest and largest guitar store in the basement of the Peninsula Shopping Centre. Photo by author, 2011.

Figure 5. Guitar Connection has an amazing collection of vintage instruments. Photo by author, 2011.

Actually communicating with store personnel led to equally familiar questions and exchanges I have had elsewhere. The language of guitars and amplifiers is global, and gear talk sounds the same, with local history, desire, needs, and contingencies vibrating right along with the steel strings. While strolling Guitar Connection I met Wayne, a guitar tech working on an instrument in a small room at the rear of the store. Long-haired, young, skinny, wearing jeans and T-shirt; once again, a uniform that makes sense for the electric guitar corp. We strike up a conversation, and Wayne hooks me up with a few antiques that I play through equally antique amplifiers. I lose track of time and place for a few brief moments while reflecting on this unexpected encounter. I laugh at myself – Well, what did you expect? This is Singapore. I chuckle as I consider the sense of exotica that informed my own surprise to find guitar shops stocked with the same guitar good life that I too desire and know.

Thanking Wayne, and leaving Wayne’s World, vowing to return ASAP, I head off, following the sound of “shredding” pulsating from inside another shop, actually a second shop space of Davis Guitar. Hunched over a purple-blue Greco Les Paul solid body guitar, screaming at low volume in complete overdrive is Burn, an employee of this small addition to the larger store. T-shirt and jeans, long-haired and skinny, this time bespectacled, adorned with chains and marked up with body tattoos, Burn shreds, that is, he plays heavy metal music, dense and thick with distortion, squealing, squeezed harmonics, dark and destructive sound meant to be in your face, ears, and body.

Figure 6. Guitar shops in the basement of the Peninsula Shopping Centre, Singapore. Photo by author, 2017.

I listen for some time and then strike up a conversation. I expected to hear this genre – I knew metal was popular in Asia from past experience, and from an emerging scholarship (Wallach 2008) on youth and popular culture in Southeast Asia. I ask Burn if he is in a band. He says he is, and I return with, “Where do you play?” “We don’t,” he replies. “I hate Singapore,” he adds. As quick and sharp as his shredding, Burn tells me that Singapore doesn’t allow “noise pollution.” It turns out he is in a band for which there are few opportunities for gigs. Burn plays in a band that doesn’t perform, at least in public venues.

Singaporeans often say that their island nation is densely inhabited by ghosts who are frequently disturbed by the never-ending construction that reshapes infrastructure and social life. On my first day in the basement of a shopping mall, among a collection of guitar shops and music stores, I encountered the ghosts of “yellow culture,” disturbed not by the youth culture of the 1960s, but by the youth culture of the 21st century. On this very first day, I began a friendship and musical collaboration, I discovered a feature of local history, and was provided some insight on contemporary cultural politics in this urban nation. At the time I did not realize that I would turn my personal encounters in this sonic city into an anthropology of rock music and urban life. At the time I did not realize that I would become deeply engaged in “participant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Overture: Deep Sound, Sonic Ethnography
• Chapter One: Crossroads
• Chapter Two: Katong
• Chapter Three: Sonic Scales and Urban Life
• Chapter Four: Sonic Circuits
• Chapter Five: Heritage
• Coda: Tiger, Horse, Dog
• Endnotes
• Bibliography