Manufacturing and Consuming Culture: Fakesong in Singapore

Abstract

Sing Singapore is a biennial, government-sponsored, mass-song competition held in this young island-state (est. 1965) in celebration of its national day with a view to fostering a pan-national identity among its multi-racial citizens of Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian origins. Through press reports, personal experience and interviews with former participants of the competition-festival, this paper tracks the history and evolution of the music competition's aims over 14 years of its existence. Beginning as a propaganda campaign re-inventing ideas of modern Singapore through music in 1988, it has evolved from assembling – through essentializing attributes of folksongs or local songs – an artificial mosaic of the republic's individual ethnic groups, into an art-song choral competition and, eventually, a slick pop festival reminiscent of the Eurovision song contest. The trajectories taken by the song campaign reflect changing social-political beliefs on the engineering of race issues in multi-cultural Singapore. Reception of the campaign by its intended mass audience has been largely successful – if, however, successful beyond its intended aims. In the 1990s, the surfacing of alternative versions of official songs on the Internet featuring whimsical, ironic and self-deprecatory parodies show that Singaporeans had begun to appropriate the campaign for their own ideas of officially unacknowledged local identity – facets of which include government bashing. In recent years, in the hands of another generation of celebrants, the campaign has, through private and official singing events, moved beyond simple anti-government cynicism into the postmodern realm of embracing the “anti-cool”: propaganda-style forging of national identity through song has been embraced and celebrated for its sheer kitsch value.