Warning: National Day entry coming up, so it may not be relevant to non-Singaporeans.
I just sat through a medley of various National Day songs, and I finally pinpointed what it was that was bugging me.
Taking only the perennials, we can use Electrico's What do you see as a watershed of sorts. Prior to that, the perennials are, bluntly put, cringeworthily bad from a musical point of view: naive, straightforward music of the round-the-campfire sort^. And after...
After it, it becomes a lot smoother, a lot more musically accomplished.
And I prefer the older ones.
It's not just nostalgia.
See, (and I recognise I'm entering the realm of literary analysis, which is why this goes into this book rather than my usual rant book), the older songs have something the newer ones don't.
They demand something from the listener. They tell the listener we're in this together, and I want *you to get up and do something to make your country better*.
The newer ones are paens and hymms to a benevolent and perfect entity called "Singapore". They require that the listener merely sit back and devolve back into infancy; to become special and important people by dint of being Singaporean, and to allow their mother to take care of their every need.
And of course, they all reach out to something in the listener.
Which is why, perhaps, I am not as surprised as I should be at the way that the listeners of the latter are more likely to throw a stroppy wobbler^^ when their mother doesn't give them exactly what they want, right now.
We think we choose the stories we like because they reflect what we are, and that is true, in the narrow aspects we choose the story for. But in so doing, we allow all the other aspects of the story in through our back door, and if we do it often enough and consistently enough, then they reshape us, and like all such things, we instantly cease to forget what it was like before we were such.^^^
(That, incidentally, is why fundamentalists burn books. What they fear the most is the possibility that their children will grow up tolerant towards people not exactly like themselves.)
When I say stories, I don't just mean fiction. I mean any narrative. Anything you chose to share, any book or magazine you choose to read-- have you ever really looked under the surface to see what implicit premises you're absorbing?
So, too, with music.
So tomorrow, on National Day, I ask of you this:
Choose your songs wisely. Choose songs that demand much of you, that implicitly believe that you have the power and the duty to matter. Choose songs that force you to take up the mantle of responsibility to your country, rather than lie back in the laurel wreaths of your privileges.
Choose work, choose effort, choose striving and toil, because these are the things that will make you greater, and these are the things that will make you matter, because whether your country loves you unconditionally or not doesn't matter. What matters is whether you would be worthy of such love, and whether you love it enough to make yourself worthy.
Your country needs you. Your country always needs you. And what it needs of you is not your adoration.
It needs your strength.
^which of course puts it about three steps ahead of a lot of modern pop.
^^temper tantrum
^^^Obligatory Magic reference Source: Gatherer
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