You know, I've been thinking about the reasons why whenever I am told that a piece of art or product, or anything in general is Singaporean; I immediately assume it's utter shit and only mediocre at best.
You'd think that being from Singapore, I should have an inflated sense of the quality of stuff that comes out of here. Maybe it's down to reputation, maybe it's just because I really hate this place and can't really exactly work with most of her people.
Maybe it's how we like to pride ourselves on being the best at following the road well traveled.
I always felt that was the biggest weakness of the common Singaporean. We spend so much of our early years being taught that we have to "Follow this, do that because that how it's done." We are rarely allowed to question why. By the time we get to adolescence and are allowed to open the floodgates, we pretty much already have had this anti-question mindset hardwired in our brains. If we do have questions we don't even dare ask anymore. (This could be purely personal but considering I grew up the same way as 80% of Singaporeans this could be a pretty common occurrence) For awhile I had to really fight against this ingrained mentality to come up with my best ideas. Even now I find myself fearing mockery when I went against the status quo and pursued something unconventional, more so than I feel I would if I had grown up elsewhere, in a place that encourages creativity from a young age.
I also found that most of those who actually try to break of from that hardwired mindset seem to pursue creativity the wrong way. They would push ideas for the sake of pushing ideas.
If it were a product, it would be a solution to a problem that didn't exist, a feature that was never and would never ever be asked for. If it were a script to a performance be it live or on camera it would be absurd and out of place. Like how they pretty much just shoehorn family values into almost all Mediacorp dramas at one point.
Absurd is alright, but if only it were entertainingly so. If not, it belongs at a brainstorm session and not on the film set.
Music wise, it's all about what sells, or what they think sell. Most people just sound exactly like the last hot thing that came out. It's all about appearances and shit. Sure there are a bunch that sound really fresh that I know of, but those are geniuses who also happened to win the genetic lottery.
And I doubt it's even just me, I find that I find quite a large number of us like that too. We keep lamenting that local artists don't get enough support and recognition and when given the choice between a local and a foreign piece of work, we immediately flock to the foreign one.
It's going to be quite a road to break that.
