A Cornellian at home surveys the Singaporean music scene
Many Singaporeans listen to a cosmopolitan mix of music, yet struggle to sing along to local musicians. Events like Baybeats, one of Singapore’s biggest local music festivals, are a sorely needed chance to spotlight our homegrown talent.
Due to Covid-19, the nine acts of Baybeats Unplugged have been uprooted from their usual location, the Esplanade, Singapore’s premier performance location which resembles an overturned half of a durian, the fifteen minute acoustic sets posted instead on the event Facebook page. Annette Lee, the first act, has perfectly serviceable vocals, but her lyrics are at once bland and oversaturated with saccharine pep. The seasonal metaphor in “Spring Will Always Come” quickly comes unmoored as she warbles how “it’s pretty cold” in the winter of life while I melt in tropical Singapore’s 95F heat.
I want to like Mannequins, a rock band with a 90s sound and goofy humour. But their anthems can’t achieve liftoff and I wince as their frontman unleashes a gem of tautology, “I know I think I thought I knew,” clinching the dubious honour of the festival’s most insipid lyric.
At this point, I am ready to give up on Baybeats. But the Facebook algorithm gods do me a solid, shepherding me towards Bakers in Space, a refreshingly experimental surprise landing in the ballpark of indie-rock and psychedelia. The chromatic action in “Citrus” strings tension throughout the song with hovering, disoriented harmonies, perfectly describing a bewildering love affair. The post-chorus offers tantalising nuggets of resolution, only to flicker back into confusion as it alternates between two chords. Their second piece, “Autumn,” is mired in self reflection. Lead vocal Eugene Soh pulls the audience into a swirl of doubt, the harmony brooding. He concludes, “my mind is going,” followed by an instrumental breakdown recalling the innocence of a lullaby. The addictive bass line and crunchy guitar riffs on their third piece, “Mindfield,” affirm this is a band with an abundance of ideas who bear repeated listening.
Finally, the long-awaited headline act. Baybeats park their best act in the literal basement, the regionally acclaimed Charlie Lim performing in the Esplanade’s garage. He opens with a personal favourite, “Choices.” His voice simmers with tension and heartache, papered over by a gentle calm as he begins a late-night conversation with an old lover, coaxing “keep your eyes on me darling, I’m not a magic trick.” He lets a plaintive edge bleed into the second verse, imploring “I can take complication, if I can comprehend.” Deftly walking the line between plainspoken and poetic, he unravels what it means to nurse love through differences. He employs the same articulate honesty and understated delivery in “Least of You,” a more forthrightly pining ballad. His final song, “Pedestal,” is the mischievous counterpoint to the previous two, a sarcastic, bluesy anti-love song subverting the trope of elevating lovers. He showcases his versatility, taking his voice a notch more theatrical and playing adroitly with rhythm, even swinging easily into a guitar solo.
I came into Baybeats looking to survey local music. But what is Singaporean music supposed to sound like? The debate is not new. Singapore’s periodic spasms of identity crisis are particularly afflicted by self-doubt, owing to our short independent history, multicultural constitution and colonial hang-ups, among other factors. It’s telling that one of our most visceral manifestations of identity, Singlish, a creole of English, Malay and Chinese dialects, is seen as out of place in most public and professional settings, explaining the dissonance between the performer’s quasi-American accented singing and speaking voices.
It is unreasonable to throw the full burden of resolving this interminable debate on local artists. At campus music events, I’ve never asked performers to prove their Cornellian or American credentials. Yet, I held Baybeats to a higher standard of crafting a unique, culturally-specific cool without falling into tacky cliches, on top of music-making’s routine complexity. Perhaps, as musicians already know and I am belatedly realising, rather than trying to make good Singaporean music, it is enough to make good music, unabashed of who we are.