dec2023 update: I should talk about wooten, werner, mayer, the beatles, paramore, guns n roses…
In my cornerstone post The Library Ethos, I mentioned in passing that there’s a sideplot about music and musicians. I feel like I’m on a roll here so let’s write that one too, hot off the press.
While both my parents were readers, nobody in my family was particularly musical. There were no musical instruments, nobody sings, nobody dances. Except “Happy Birthday,” I guess. People do have their favorite songs – my dad liked several old Tamil songs that he insists are profound and meaningful, while my mum particularly enjoyed her ABCs – Abba, The Bee Gees, and The Carpenters. My older brother generally liked the songs that the WWE wrestlers would use as entrance music. (The Undertaker used to walk out to Limp Bizkit, remember that?)
There are a few entry points for my exposure to music. I remember catching whiffs of Michael Jackson as a kid. I remember hating music classes in school, because they were completely soulless and tried to get us to learn notation when we didn’t even understand what we were doing.
The first few bands that I really got into though were… Disturbed (via a flash video website called Stickdeath.com), Avril Lavigne (via MTV), Radiohead (via my English teacher)… and then I started sorta-idolizing a bunch of older guys at school who would play guitar, and they were into more classic rock and metal music – Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, all that good stuff. I borrowed a friend’s old guitar to try and teach myself how to play, and I would learn the basics from internet tabs (this was a little bit before youtube started to become a thing). I’m vaguely remembering now how some of the frets were worn in certain places, so the strings would buzz. Though maybe that was also because I didn’t quite have the finger strength yet to fret the notes properly.
I’m not really a musician. I don’t have the chops, I don’t have the background, I can’t sightread, and when I was starting out, I could barely keep time or stay in tune. But I wanted to be some kind of rockstar anyway, and I dove into it. I borrowed guitars, I saved up and bought a bass of my own, and I lingered around older and cooler musicians, hoping some of it would rub off on me.
The first couple of bands I joined and started didn’t quite work out, and it was mostly my own fault. I was solipsistic with poor social skills, clumsily imposing my inarticulate vision onto others. This was the source of some of my earliest grief and heartbreak. I’m not sure anything has ever hurt more than getting kicked out of a band. But I loved it all harder for it. Those early bands were volatile and sketchy – we had no idea what we were doing, but about once a week we would get into a room and make a lot of noise together, and it tasted like freedom.
Eventually I would find Ahmad and Boon, and we started Armchair Critic, and we would lug our equipment around to play any gig at any venue to anybody who would politely listen. (You can find some of the grainy videos of these moments on YouTube). We designed our MySpace page, made friends and fans, pissed off some people. We wrote songs and co-authored dreams of stardom. When we couldn’t find gigs to play, we organised our own, confidently approaching venue managers with “proposals”. We literally typed these out ourselves on Microsoft Word. Those were extremely real, eye-opening experiences, and I felt very alive in those moments.
There’s an entire novel worth of ideas to be explored here (I’ve written a draft of one!) – but if I could only say a couple of things, they would be: community, and education. Participating in the music scene was the first time I really felt like I belonged – I had found, in supposedly-sterile Singapore, an intimate, varied community of musicians, all with different ideas and perspectives, goals and interests, and amongst them I felt like I was home. It wasn’t perfect; it had its share of needless drama and politics, like all scenes and communities invariably do. But it was home.
I also look back on these experiences as the most formative, substantial part of my education. I learned to deal with people. I learned to sell. I learned to do marketing. I learned to talk to a crowd. Project management. I learned how to think about what is valuable, what is good, what matters. I learned to cultivate my taste. Many of the things about myself that I’m proud of, I developed in the crucible of the local music scene.
I’m still not really a musician, and I’ll probably never be a rockstar. But to this day, whenever I see a kid lugging around a guitar, or I hear a band soundchecking at a shopping center, I can’t help but feel a kindred warmth. In the midst of air-conditioned, predictable bureaucracy, I can feel the wild longings of their beating hearts, bursting like wildflowers from cracks in the concrete.
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There are several other anecdotes I want to share. There are a bunch of videos of musicians that I’ve encountered over the years that have shaped me very deeply. A diverse group of musicians around the world performing Stand By Me together. Bobby McFerrin. Victor Wooten. This twitter thread captures most of it. I also mention some of them in my post about my influences.
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(oct2022) When I was a teenager I discovered music and it really opened something up for me. I still love music and I hope I always will, but I’m not sure it’s my thing. Encountering other people who are “real musicians” made it very apparent for me. My thing is words. Have always loved words, have deep expertise in words, will continue to be obsessed with words for the rest of my life. (Have to be careful then about being prescriptive about writing as a solution to problems. It certainly works for me, but it might not necessarily work for you in the same way. Maybe you’re supposed to be a musician more than I was!)
Playing music for me was emotional catharsis, participating in the local music scene was a sort of emotional coregulation. I was eager to write my own songs, share them with others, hear them sing my words back to me, to share in the creation of a beautiful shared world. I wanted to be good at this. At the time I was troubled by what I considered to be predatory or at least selfish practices by concert promoters who were cynically only interested in fleecing naive young bands for $. I tried to organise my own gigs, and I actually had some success with them. Being a hormonal young teenager I got swept up with big dreams of wanting to make a bigger difference, wanting to be a rock star. At some point I remember having a serious conversation with my bandmates about trying to tour the region. In retrospect it kinda all feels like role playing, but isn’t that most of life, really? I’ve been married almost 10 years – role-playing a husband. Seems to be working out. Maybe we’ll have kids and I can try role-playing being a good dad.
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Almost everything good about me, I learned from musicians
Almost all of the issues I have, I’ve learned to discern via the issues that arise when I play music
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busker
an intrusive thought I’ve had for a while is that I’m basically a net busker. a web busker? digital busker? twitter busker? I’m a busker, whatever the leading adjective is. e-busker?
it’s a sweet thought for me bc of my live music background – once spent a couple of days busking for charity and it was a very memorable experience. exhausting but also very human and intimate. hours & hours, we got very sweaty. the interesting part was paying attention to people.
I can’t remember the specific $ amount we raised but I remember being kind of surprised by how much it was – definitely more than I expected. probably not 10x more, but like 5-6x more. I wanna say… over a thousand bucks…? I can’t remember =\ less than 3k for sure. 1.5k-ish..?
it took me a very long time to get to this point, but I have reached a stage where… if I wanted to I think I could actually make a living just tweeting, vlogging &selling ebooks. it’s not a huge amount (made ~US$10k in sales in 1 year) but it’s not small/insignificant either.
I wanna take a moment to celebrate myself for that because hardly anybody in my life ever believed me when I said I was going to do it. they all thought I would give up and join The System eventually. I won’t claim to be a perfect rebel but hey, I am still here, busking.
and going from $10k to $100k is a lot easier than going from $0 to $10k. if I really needed the $ I could find a way to make it happen. I don’t need it, so I’m not asking yet, but I feel psychologically/socially wealthy just confident in the knowledge that my people have my back.
I do think I’m overdue for a home renovation, which I can afford but am nervous about because mentally-psychologically I basically do still live like a ratty musician who just turned 20. it’s not v fair to my wife who has been enduring a lower standard of living than she deserves. (but also she knows who/hat she married lol. luv u bb)
where am I going with this… ah yeah: I swear I was like 7 years old when I felt/believed that this was going to be true in some way. it was of course very vague, like “wow the internet is the coolest thing on earth”, i didn’t know if/when/how I would make a living from it, but… it just seemed *obvious* to me, as a library nerd, that the internet was a hyperlibrary that I could participate directly in. and like, if people can make a living writing books for regular libraries, then surely one can make a living writing for the internet.
I’ll admit there’s some revisionist history going on here, because I don’t think I can point to a single old blogpost where I specifically wrote “I will make a living on the internet”. The blog that I wrote in from ages 12-16 is sadly lost forever, so there’s this gap that I can’t investigate.
the busking analogy still sticks: lots of people think “well I have a twitter account and I don’t make any $ from it” – yea, everyone can tell jokes, not everyone can do standup for a live, paying audience for 1.5 hrs straight. you can’t escape the craftmanship that goes into it.
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I went looking for some old blogposts… here’s one from 2010, aged 20. A couple of quotes: “I never understood why other kids were so hesitant to answer questions in class”, and “I’ve always been able to make friends easily, though, and I don’t have a ready explanation for this.”
It is soooo interesting to see all these signs and tells jump out at me. it took hundreds of conversations with people for me to properly appreciate what’s unique/unusual about me
my blogposts from 10 years ago are still good actually. I have always had this Big Picture Sensibility. The writing is clunky & overwrought, but my observations were spot on. It’s weird that I was intellectually right about so much, because it means that my problems were always emotional, procedural, etc.
anyway, thank u all for hanging out. ❤️
I would still be doing this even if nobody were here. but it is very cool and very blessed that so many of u are here from all over the world. you make me wanna do more audacious, ambitious, weird things.
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2024aug6: I’d like to be posting something while I continue rummaging in my drafts, so I’ve decided to start asking my friends to prompt me. R asked me, ”What happened with music, or your journey with playing music? It seems from the outside that you used to put a lot of time into it and a lot of yourself into it, and that now you have moved beyond that or past that, and i’m curious about the transition for you.”
Great question, a lot to get into, and a lot of different ways I could try to answer that question.
Here’s an anecdote I often bring up. Around 2007 or so, my band (Armchair Critic) and I played a gig– it was on the rooftop of an industrial estate building, and I think we had a hand in organizing it– and there was this other band that played that just blew me away. I could just feel how much they were deeply in the moment, deeply attuned to the music they were playing, how much it meant to them to be doing precisely what they were doing. And while we had had moments like that ourselves, in that moment it just struck me that we weren’t quite that. As I write about it now, I wonder if I might’ve been too harsh on ourselves, and if I was comparing our inward doubts to someone else’s sublime moment. Maybe my perceptions weren’t precisely accurate. But it’s like that story someone told about how, when the couple at the next table saw how happy her husband was to see her, they broke up, because they realized that they didn’t have it.
I feel like going into some backstory. My family wasn’t musical. Nobody played a musical instrument, nobody particularly sang or danced. My mother liked ABBA, Bee Gees and The Carpenters (the ABCs). My dad liked some old Tamil music. My brothers and sister liked different elements of contemporary Tamil music. We all vaguely heard some pop music, like we’d see Michael Jackson on TV and marvel at the king of pop, like everyone else did at the time. But there wasn’t much more going on than that.
Things really opened up for me was when we got cable TV around 1999 or so, and I discovered MTV, which at the time for me as a Singaporean kid was such a blast of pop culture. I had something of a sexual awakening to Holly Valance’s Kiss Kiss. Around that time I also discovered some music via the Internet, one of the most memorable paths being Stickdeath.com introducing me to Disturbed and System of a Down. The two first albums I bought, which I’m very proud of because they’re so good to this day, are Avril Lavigne’s debut album Let Go, and Disturbed’s sophomore album Believe. I bought the CDs and I would play them on a Discman that one of my brothers gifted me for my birthday. I think I might’ve gotten Evanescence’s Fallen soon after. Through my English teacher at school, Mr. Koh, I’d get into Radiohead, and I bought OK Computer (1997) secondhand at a Cash Converters for S$5, which my girlfriend (now wife) spotted for me when we were loitering around together. I remember my primary school classmates being into boybands, Britney Spears, Bardot, Atomic Kitten… pop stuff on the radio, basically. In secondary school things got more interesting– there were some older boys who’d sit around after school with guitars, and I thought they were the coolest. And they were very into a lot of classic rock and metal. Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, that sort of thing. Different guys had different tastes, I had a bit more of an affinity with those who liked Oasis. I had some other friends who were committed to cultivating interesting music taste, and through them over MSN Messenger I discovered Nick Cave, Moist, Matthew Good Band.
My first band actually happened because of some overlap between a local internet forum I’d hang out on, an offshoot of GameFAQs Singapore Gamers Social Board (SGSB), and a couple of friends-of-friends from school. I can’t remember precisely, but I think there was a drummer who was looking for a guitarist, and I offered to make the introduction, and I kinda fell into playing bass, which I was terrible at. I got kicked out of that band for both being the weakest link musically and generally being presumptuous about what “we” ought to be doing. It was one of my earliest experiences of a social faux pas or failure, and it haunted me for years. Later I started another band via bringing together musicians…
tbc