Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore
Steve Ferzacca
NUS Press: 2020
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If you were a teenager in Singapore in the 1990s, your experience of pop culture and the arts would have been strangely dissonant. On the one hand, you would have seen a burst of grassroots creativity. The first local films were being made after a fifteen-year hiatus; an avant-garde theatre and live music venue called The Substation opened its doors; cassettes and CDs of local bands could be bought in shops, and several, including the Oddfellows, Humpback Oak and Naked, produced hits that topped radio charts.

At the same time, you would have hated how everything was banned. By everything, I mean the stuff that teenagers would have considered interesting in our heyday: graffiti art and drug culture; magazines like Playboy and Cosmopolitan; a novel by Salman Rushdie and albums by Janet Jackson; movies by Kubrick, Scorsese and Monty Python, among many others.

• Tags: Issue 23, Ken Kwek, Singapore, Steve Ferzacca, The Straydogs