This headline on CNA Lifestyle totally cracked me up. RIGHT. WHY. 'From Westlife to Michael Learns To Rock: Why do evergreen bands love coming to Singapore?' They just keep coming year after year. Sorry, I'm not a fan of any of these bands and don't particularly fancy their songs.
And Singaporeans apparently really really love karaoke. Sure. We always seek out the music with we grow up with, and whoever possess the highest spending power in that age group, leads the demand for the type of products and shows coming into this small city.
Nostalgia for their music and Singapore's positioning as a premier concert destination are often the reasons cited. But perhaps we've overlooked a more fundamental factor: Our indisputable obsession with karaoke and the KTV-friendly songs these bands have produced.
The article flagged Westlife's sold-out shows for three nights in February 2023. At least MLTR bothered to do fund-raising for the Dementia Society when they came in September. Well, it isn't always about replenishing these musicians' retirement funds. Many genuinely love what they do and enjoy performing, and would like to do it as long as they can, and there's a demand. I can see the brilliance in writing karaoke hits. It's that simple melody that's so difficult to churn out. But as a singer or a songwriter, when you hear a line, especially the chorus, you know it. The producers know it. We know it. You know whenever you've got a winner.
A Reddit user on subreddit community r/popheads put it best in response to what Western songs seemed to have significant cultural impact in the 2000s: “Basically anyone with good ballads and songs that are easy to sing along to will always have us Southeast Asians in a chokehold.”
When we have only these few radio stations, a patriarchal government, what on earth are we exposed to? People-friendly tunes. I'm not a fan, and certainly I do not buy their albums, but in those days, when someone has a radio playing in the background and all, and someone always would, these boyband/girl group songs blared over the speakers non-stop, all day, every day. I was bombarded with them till I could recognize these songs and inevitably catch some lyrics, as much as I didn't want to. I could even play some of these songs on the piano and the guitar by ear, and I'm not particularly good at that (playing by ear and jamming). SO. I stopped listening to the local radio stations, except for LUSH 99.5 when it launched in December 2004, and I was sad to see it shut down in September 2017.
I love my indie rock and metal. I'm not so much a Mandopop person although I know some of the 'famous' songs. I do know Cantopop because I needed to learn the language, and watching Cantonese shows and listening to the songs is the fastest way for me to pick it up. Out of necessity, I know the olden-day evergreen Chinese hits, and a few Malay songs. It's those songs defined as 'getai' favs. Haha. It's a bonus to know them to get through to my old folks on the roster; it's fastest way to break the ice. I can listen to Mayday but not Jay Chou or Eric Chou. I still prefer slightly less mainstream indie songwriters and alternative rock bands.
Obviously there's a reason why our music scene is just... pedestrian with Mandopop and English boybands taking the bulk of the population's love. NKOTB forever? Everything else is given to K-Pop and Taylor Swift. Our own music scene is sad. It used to be non-existent. In one fell swoop, our government killed indie rock in the 1960s by banning long hair on men and all visitors, and the 1990s saw the newspapers screaming 'Parents, would you let you child do this' with a photo of a mosh pit. wtf How absolutely puritanical.
We have progressed a little and diversified our music tastes. Esplanade and the staunch indie scene have soldiered on. We've got more indie bands stopping here for small gigs, repeated visits from some bands, and we've got MONO and Thom Yorke coming in next month too. We gotta keep it that way. Everybody should get something in a city that claims to be among the 'best' show of capitalism in the world.
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