Last Night Poptart Saved My Life...Again!!

And the life of one of my honours classmates too. His first time at the indie disco event, he was instantly converted to the church of Pop. All through the supper that followed, he couldn't stop grinning and raving about it. He was a man reduced to a slobbering boy; any happier and he'd have to whack himself off to calm down. Knowing him, he probably did. What a great guy, and what a great night!



It was Poptart's 1st Birthday bash to ostensibly celebrate a year of "group hugs, wet kisses, body surfing, silly poses, and pure drunken unadulterated raw-as-fuck dancefloor madness". It was just like any other Poptart, except much better. The mania began with a free flow of beer and poorly-poured housepours from 10 to 11. Popsluts and opportunistic newbies alike thronged around the bar as if it Zaidi, Jah and wee.like.me were serving their tunes on tap.



The Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" got things off to a rousing start, and in surprisingly little time guest DJ Joe Ng (The Padres, Mee Pok Man, Localbarboy etc) took to the decks. True to his diehard local-loving heart, he played a set consisting almost entirely of local music. It did two things: (1) reminded everyone what these songs sound like (Joe covers many of them with Localbarboy), (2) showed that Singapore indie stands up damn well against UK and US stuff.

In an unexpected turn he even spun The Padres' November '91! Having sworn off covering his former band with Localbarboy because of the self-indulgence factor, this was quite a treat. Since I am not above a little self-indulgence myself, let me show off my knowledge of his playlist:

1. Force Vomit - Siti
2. Serenaide - The Girl from Katong (listen)
3. Stoned Revivals - Goodil
4. Humpback Oak - Lower Girl
5. Concave Scream - Driven
6. The Padres - November '91
7. The Flaming Lips - Race for the Prize
8. The Observatory - This Sad Song (a remix!!! a friggin' remix!!!)
9. (didn't recognise this one)
10. Astreal - Snowflake
11. The Boredphucks - Ai Sio Kan Mai?
12. Sugarflies - Yoshiki



wee.like.me took over, and again the music went from one high to the next. I swear this Poptart saw the highest bodysurfing count in its one-year history. And continuing a night of firsts, wee.like.me stopped his set to speak to his congregation to thank us for being "fucking awesome". He got us to sing birthday songs for both Poptart and Jah, who was next to spin. My honours mates and I pogo-ed and sang our hearts out, climaxing with a five-song burst of Morrissey's "First of the Gang to Die", Manic Street Preachers' "Motorcycle Emptiness", The Smashing Pumpkins' "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", Green Day's "Basket Case" and The Killers' "Mr Brightside". (Screw all who say this is populist drivel; the middle three songs transported us to the days of way back when, and that alone was worth the admission and midnight cab fare home.)

Thus we were spent, and headed out for supper. This brings me back to the start of my post, where the Poptart initiate among us kept gushing as if he'd seen the face of God. Then, in true faux-manly fashion, we began talking about manly things like bukkake in front of our female classmate, grossing her out. But more importantly, we made a pact to return to every Poptart in the forseeable future. And that was the sweetest end to a night which began rather awkwardly, with me turning up alone as I did the last time, not expecting to meet anyone. My posse is back, and December 24th couldn't come sooner.

Respect Your Elders

I was walking along the road today, minding my own business, when I saw this.



Damn you, Singapore Design Festival publicity team!! How dare you diss Kraftwerk, my all-time favourite electronic musicians!! How could you be so callous as to equate their Man-Machine and The Mix-era images with mindless conformity!! How could you bring yourself to imply, by association, that they are lacking in "design"?!? Don't you know that they have put more thought into their image than you have into your publicity campaign?? Are you aware that their 1978 Man-Machine album sleeve, for all its "conformity", was based on the constructionist art of El Lissitzky?? How much more "design" can you get than THAT, huh?? Well I'll tell you how much more. Kraftwerk are so "design" that even their MUSIC is designed...their elegant, minimalist compositions are so tight and precise that they don't have a single excess note, beat or rest. And how about this: while most bands are happy to record original-sounding pieces of music in professional studios, Kraftwerk's music was so ahead of its time that they had to BUILD their own studio (Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf), and DESIGN it such that the whole thing could be brought out for their performances!! I kid you not!!

Do you know that Kraftwerk have had more influence on the music in this universe than your puny little poster will ever have on anything?? Has anyone told you how much historical gravitas the group has, its members having been born in postwar Germany, reflecting the hope and anxiety of their generation in their carefully-DESIGNED concept albums?? I did not extend my stay in New York City this year and fork out S$500 for accommodation, flight changing and ticket fees just to watch a bunch of "conformists"; I paid to watch people who INVENTED the template for all their slobbering successors to conform to. In other words, Kraftwerk weren't just "creating the edge" as your festival hopes to do--they PUSHED the edge so far that modern music has never looked back. Now, BOW IN RESPECT TO THEM AND APOLOGISE!!

And so I carried on walking, minding my own business.

Take a Bootleggin' and Keep on Kicking

The launch of Depeche Mode's current world tour in Florida was attended by 8,600 fans. The number participating in it, however, was far greater. As the show unfolded, audience members fed text and multimedia handphone messages to their friends, who in turn uploaded their contents to various DM-themed online forums throughout cyberspace.

The result: real-time, piecemeal reports of the event. They captured some of the experiences that make rock concerts so thrilling--identifying each song as it is played; and being able to see the performers, knowing they are there that very instant.

By the next morning, the official Depeche Mode Message Board was flooded not only with responses to these reports, but also links to high-quality audio and video clips. Anyone that spent more than a few minutes on the board would be able to provide an account of the concert as if he or she were really there--from the mannerisms of frontman Dave Gahan, to how the band screwed up their 1983 hit "Everything Counts" so badly that they had to re-start it.


Being able to take in all this information makes me feel a little better about being unable to fly New York City in December to catch Depeche Mode (and opening act The Bravery) at Madison Square Garden. More significantly, though, it also situates me as a member of a tech-savvy generation in a tech-heavy era.

Digital photography and web publishing have made journalists of the everyman, and spectacles of the everyday. Where people were once content with experiencing life, they are now obsessed with capturing, documenting and preserving it. It isn't because life has gotten any more newsworthy--it is, rather, because the act of documentation itself transforms the mundane into the extraordinary. It is an offer few can refuse...an offer that speaks to our inner celebrities.

Squared with the practice of keeping diaries, this phenomenon gives rise to blogging, with all its exhibitionist undertones. Squared with pop music, this gives rise to bootlegging on a grand scale. It isn't enough to have heard a 'live' recording of a band anymore--now you have to be able to hear the exact concert you went to over and over again. And guess what, you can, you will--and so will everyone else. The internet will be bogged down with more photos and videos than the world has use for.

This practice is so rampant that it surely has legal implications--not implications for the bootleggers, but implications for the law itself. Like it or not, covert phototaking and recording is here to stay. And yet, life goes on. Perhaps it's time for lawmakers to stop thinking about how to protect businesses so much, and business people to start thinking of alternative business models that won't have lawmakers breathing down the necks of average joes.

But hey, being an average joe myself, I'm not about to embark on a treatise on intellectual property and pop culture. My clever-arse student days are over. Now, I'm just going to hit 'play' on my Windows Media Player again and wait for Dave to say "what the fuck was that!!" when he realises he's singing on the wrong bar of "Everything Counts"...