The first two years of my adolescence were terrible years. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that terrible experience, and when I looked back from various points in time, there were various explanations for what went wrong. But enough of that. One of the main reasons why those two years came to an end was that I discovered the arts. It was the arts that saved me. I wasn’t doing as well in school as I had hoped, but I found a consolation in the arts. I was good at something else, and that something else had kept me sane. It made my life brighter, it gave me something to look forward to.
And at the same time, it wasn’t an unalloyed blessing. I had that rich inner life. My appreciation for music was a strong inner buttress for me. For the longest time, I thought that as long as I had books and music, everything was going to be alright.
Well, it wasn’t exactly all right. I wrote school plays, and on the 25th anniversary of those plays, I wrote a retrospective of those experiences, and I came to this conclusion: I didn’t have a problem with artistic integrity. I wrote whatever I felt like writing. I was true to myself. I took risks whenever I thought I could. I tried to express who I really was. That was OK.
What was not OK was that I hardly engaged anybody around me. I wasn’t writing for an audience, I wasn’t representing a larger community. I wasn’t involved in some kind of conversation with anybody else about what the world was like. To the extent that art was something collaborative, I had failed.
So when they said the Substation was closing down, I looked at the news with a form of bemusement. I thought that at some point I was going to be involved with the local arts scene. I thought that something was going to happen with the Substation. It never did happen. I’m not saying goodbye to a friend. I’m saying farewell to a friend I coulda shoulda had but didn’t.
It was one of those things that I had given up when I decided to pack my bags and go live overseas for a few years. And that experience ended up being a little bit like Groundhog day. I knew that the road not taken was what would have happened to my life if I had remained in Singapore. I would have had to face many challenges that I didn’t face. And at the same time, I would have tried to make a name for myself in the arts scene.
I’m not under any illusions. It’s hard to survive in the arts world. I don’t know how far I’d have made it. I would be gunning for something music related, and the scene would have changed so much since I was a big indie rock fan in the 90s. I would have written a shit load of 3 minute wonders, only to find out that people don’t write like that anymore.
But that’s besides the point. Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, and thought about my current existential crisis. I have some vague idea of who I was as a teenager, and I was pretty strident about defending who I really was. But that guy doesn’t exist anymore. I can only talk about him in the third person.
Likewise various versions of myself at 20, 25, 30, maybe even 35. They were all different people, and I find that because, through all these periods of time, I was such a hard person to get to know, not a real trace exists of these people. They are gone. They could be dead, for all I care. Some parody of these earlier selves exists in the form of a 40-something washed up geezer. Minus one or two or many of the redeeming features he used to have. The person that I used to be could have been pieced together from other peoples’ recollections of me, but that’s pretty hard to do if you’re going to be keeping to yourself all the time.
Who am I? I ask myself over and over again. I am the sum total of the daydreaming that I used to do all the time. I am the sum total of all those afternoons I lost in the company of big bookstores like Borders, Kinokuniya and Harris. Of Tower and HMV and Music Power House (remember them?) I would grab books and music by the shelf full and promise myself, “I’ll read all of this, I’ll listen to all of this”, and somehow my music and book collection would keep growing and growing, but my brain would stop growing.
I’ll look back on my life and see a lot of promised lands, but no fruition. I have read 500 books, and barely have a recollection of any of them. I’m starting to wonder if I should read any more books at all. I’ve been telling myself that I am working towards a grandeur that I will never achieve.
I don’t know if I’m finished as a musician. One of the greatest traits you can have as a musician is that you have this instinctive connection to the music. The beats just bring something out in you. Music makes you feel good all over, and it is the closest form of art to some kind of drug. But will the drug wear off? Will you reach an age where the drugs no longer have that kind of effect on you? Are you only good for a certain number of trips, and then that’s it, music could not possibly do anything else for you? I’m starting to wonder if that’s it for me, if that’s the reason why so many rockers hang up their guitars in middle age, or have to operate with diminished powers past a certain age.
Armenian Road was my favourite place because of what used to be in the vicinity. Now ACPS is gone, MPH is gone, the National Library is gone, and the Substation is gone. Maybe it was something that I stupidly took for granted. Singapore, for those of you too young to remember, was almost universally derided as a boring place in the 1980s. There was a non-existent arts scene. People just worked or relaxed. Merely having access to interesting books and music actually was a luxury in the 1990s, and that was why megastores like Borders and Tower thrived in that environment – they were catering to a big amount of pent-up demand. The thing is, they flamed out within 15 years. HMV barely made it to 20 years. Herein lies the great paradox of Singapore being a retail paradise – Singapore is too small to be a true retail paradise. Land costs were just going to kill everything.
But this is to say – it may not have been the right thing to do to be hoarding all that stuff, but a lot of it came about because I did fall in love with the arts scene in the first place. It didn’t matter what, I just wanted to be a part of it. Maybe one day I’ll again be able to articulate yet again what it is I truly love about it. Maybe books and music has been a distraction because it was a shiny new thing after another, over and over again.
How much of art is about shiny new things, and how much of it is about a deeper abiding love? Am I going to have to go through rehab, to wean my brain off shiny new things, in order to fix the attention back where it belongs? Or was it really only ever about shiny new things?
At this point in time, a triad of things seem to be deserting me. My appreciation for art seems to be waning. (Or at least, nothing seems to be fresh and new anymore.) The stuff that I’ve filled my homes up with is around 10 years old, a lot of hoarding of stuff that no longer seems fresh. And art spaces are closing down in Singapore. To be replaced by cheap plasticky zoom live sessions. I don’t know if it’s the old, curmudgeoun thing happening to me, but a lot of what passes as new music these days is just so unremittingly awful.
10 years ago, I was at the crossroads. I could stay in Singapore, in which case, I might have tried to go get involved in the arts scene. In the aftermath of the 2011 elections, it seemed as though Singapore were a place that was more transformed. Strange as it might sound now, it seemed as though Singapore were becoming more democratic. It was some kind of springtime for the arts in Singapore. Arts spaces in Singapore were sprouting up: You had the National Gallery Singapore, the Gilman barracks. The Esplanade already existed.
What the Substation seems to represent, though, correct me if wrong, is an arts scene which is indigenous, and centered around the grassroots. In a way, it’s almost a community centre that isn’t run by the PA. It’s not one that necessarily revolves around importing bigger names from abroad (ie like Esplanade). Not one that necessarily caters to wealthy patrons. Or corporate patrons. A citizen’s initiative, and something that may be a throwback to the interim post-Cold War unitary period when people still believed that citizen republics were the destiny of mankind. (Rather than the techno-feudalism we have today.)
Something has changed. The Substation and what it represents is the closest thing to what I believed in when I started having a relationship with art. And now I see that it is fading away.
Music Composition 