Nobody in Singapore December 29th, 2009
There are places in the world where dance crazes still pop up. This is good news to people who love pop culture, because the idea of a dance craze is something that we all want to see in our lifetimes, but haven’t found anything worthy of a craze. It may just be a cultural moment, however, and it might take a place as sophisticated about being ironic as Singapore, to bring all the right ingredients together and at the exact temperature too. Singapore has a splendid way of quoting the world at large, and is enormously responsive when other countries make the right quotations in just the right way. This might be part of the remix phenomenon in general, where everything is already out and has been lying under the sun for a bit too long, so the ingenuity has to come through revision and repetition, to use Suzan-Lori Park’s notion of the term.
This idea of renovation is actually very useful in considering cuisine as well. In Singapore, there are multiple cultures living here in one small island city state, and restaurants in Singapore offer a stunning variety of food from all over the world. The best restaurants seem to have a flair for cooking up traditional tastes with contemporary touches and twists. This is good to consider when looking at the latest and greatest dance craze. The song Nobody, by the Wonder Girls, from Korea is responsible for a whole generation of girls in Singapore spending hours learning the dance moves from their infectious video.
It is dangerously infectious, too, and it’s very difficult to get the track out of your head. The song is a fairly straight-forward pop song, written to be a bubble gum hit, and the video is a quotation of girl bands from decades gone by. This kind of instant nostalgia is very interesting to see these days, because it’s never as light as it seems. There is a terrific complexity here that speaks to a kind of mistrust of nostalgia in general, while quoting it in an attempt to rewrite it correctly the first time. Add to this another layer, and local Singapore singer Jillian-Marie Thomas covers the song with brilliance and a melancholy that is completely unexpected. Her quotation of a quotation makes a new invention that is nothing less than a work of art.
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- Posted by Cliff
- Tagged Arts & Culture
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