The state of the performing arts and entertainment in Singapore is often associated with a projection of artificiality. Gleaming skyscrapers and pristine streets set the stage for extravagant musicals, theatre performances and popular music concerts in prestigious venues such as the Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay. The island-state, however, has a history, dating back to its colonial past, of restricting and regulating the unruly sounds and convivial spaces of its residents. Such control extended to the silencing, often by means of containment, of ritual processions (for example, Thaipusam festivities), religious sounds (such as the Muslim call to prayer) and ‘noisy’ music (rock, heavy metal) in public spaces. Ferzacca's book explores such spaces of contained sonic practices as he joins the musicians who defiantly continue to make their music.
The book was written while Ferzacca, an anthropologist of Indonesia, was on a visiting fellowship at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore. He also plays the blues guitar. While perusing the guitar shops in the basement of the Peninsula Shopping Centre on Coleman Street, Ferzacca met Lim Kiang, bassist of a legendary Singaporean rock band from the 1970s, the Straydogs. Connecting over a blues ‘jam’ with Kiang in his own guitar shop, Ferzacca is introduced to a subaltern social world of ‘happy hour jam sessions’ at Guitar 77 and The Doghouse (p. 46). These sessions are ‘loud gregarious affairs in which sonic presences are exchanged and food and alcohol are consumed’; where ‘domestic rituals in which sound, sustenance, and consciousness are central to the minute self-transitions from an everyday life of work, to one of being-in-the-world as a (“jamming”) musician’, resulting in ‘a cosmopolitan commitment fostered by song repertoire and gear as something uniquely Singaporean’ (p. 46).
Thus begins Ferzacca's journey as participant-observer in a subaltern ethnography of social practices and place-making. He details the making of music in a Singapore that is grounded in a rich cosmopolitan and postcolonial history yet mired in the authoritarian state regulation of youth culture (pp. 38–50). Thus, Singapore's location in Southeast Asia (and the Malay world) is read as a ‘crossroads’ of cultural production; global trends and fluid regional borders collide with localised experiences (pp. 45–9). It provides the conditions for ‘local Singaporean musicians and bands’ to make a ‘cosmopolitan music (of) their own, domesticating it for both non-local and local audiences’ to reflect a ‘kind of mimetic alterity that was and continues to be something more than mere imitation’ (p. 43).
Ferzacca explores such music on a deeper level, providing an ethnography of the Straydogs’ origins in Katong, a suburban neighbourhood characterised as a ‘mixed ethnic business community’ that offered an ‘atmosphere of openness’ crucial to the group's formation (p. 53). The reader then follows Ferzacca's experiences as an ‘adopted’ guitarist for the Straydogs and Blues 77; forming close relationships with the group and interacting in the sonic spaces of Singapore (Katong, Hood Bar & Café, The Esplanade) and the wider region (Ho Chi Minh, Melaka). These spaces and places are detailed in his ethnography of ‘sonic circuits’ in chapter 4, in which issues of conviviality, mobility, ageing and masculinity are suitably unpacked (pp. 97–115). Singaporean musicians naturally feel a greater sense of freedom overseas, which they relate to a less restrictive era of music-making in the island-state.
The vibrant cultural authenticity found in Singaporean rock groups from the 1960s and 1970s is now appreciated in retrospect as ‘heritage’, reproduced in sanitised cultural spaces like the Esplanade and elsewhere, recalling the nostalgia of the period from a ‘safe distance’ (pp. 118–19). However, the subaltern spaces and convivial community of guitar shop jam sessions and one-off pub performances represent an alternative heritage to the one envisioned by the Singaporean state. This is the value of Ferzacca's ethnography in which, alternative imaginings of Singaporean culture are given voice, and with much-needed amplification. Such amplification is especially important in highlighting the intangible contributions of informants (more so, collaborators) such as Kiang and his counterparts to the daily expression of an authentic, and locally grounded (and sounded) Singaporean identity. Sonic City is an important reminder to Singaporean authorities that the noisemaking of its citizens should not be repressed; but rather, must be heard in order to foster a more democratic, ethical and creative public.
However, some readers might find Ferzacca's close investment in the ‘informants’ of this study problematic. As an explicitly participating music-maker, Ferzacca admits a contestation between the need for critical distance—imposed by conventional academia—and intimacy with the subjects of research, which implies a potential for exploitative power dynamics (pp. 135–41). In citing relevant anthropological literature, Sonic City reminds readers that this conundrum has always been at the centre of anthropological study, and the exhange and interpretation of experiences—via difference and similarity—between informant(s) and researcher is where the value of the study lies (pp. 136–41). This is a process that generates the most informed insights of a society, culture or community, that cannot be found in other, supposedly more ‘distanced’, academic discplinary approaches (pp. 136–41). Ferzacca reminds readers, it is through globalised conditions of music-making ‘embodied in human relationships, ultimately, that humans affectively and instrumentally, make their worlds’ (p. 141).
In summary, Sonic City contends that Singapore must be understood—beyond official narratives furnished by the nation-state—through the sonic experiences (such as rock) and assemblages (for example, guitars) and spaces (underground shoplots) of its citizens. The author draws attention to citizens—in this case musicians—who exist as counterpoints and contestations to the rigid schema, as defined by the nation-state, of who a model Singaporean should be. In doing so, the author highlights how a truly authentic Singapore can be discerned from the ‘deep sound’(pp. 14–18)—the multiple assemblages of music-making, social activities, instruments and spaces of social interaction—produced and expressed by its citizens.
