Adulation

Come June 12, millions of people around the world will be tuning in to their TV screens – and if they’re lucky, heading towards the stadiums – to catch their national teams play live. Even people with no vested interest (Singaporeans come to mind) are going to pay exorbitant amounts to watch thirty-two nations battle it out for honour, glory, and a trophy no taller than 36cm.

Meanwhile, around the world, screaming fans of a markedly different sort gather at various concert venues to sing their hearts out along with their musical idols, whether it be a boyband, a girlband, or a mega-Korean-group with more people than the fans they are going to play for. And still more people will be on the prowl in London, stalking Benedict Cumberbatch’s every move as the BBC rushes to get Sherlock Season 4 out by Christmas.

Sports fans, TV show fans and musical fans have an understandable dislike for each other. The first group consists mainly of drunken angry men with four-letter dictionaries, frowned upon for their tendencies to Hulk-smash when penalties are awarded. The second are classified under ‘nerds’ for their relentless literary analysis of the Doctor’s bowtie colour and their ability to recap any given Friends episode from the title alone. And the last are stereotyped as a bunch of tweenage girls who really need to grow up and stop caring about what Harry ate for breakfast today.

As a fan of all three (I have my fingers in an unfortunate number of pies) I can tell you that deep down they’re all the same. All of them have an inexplicable, unfathomably deep attachment to people that they have never met and will probably never meet. They would all sacrifice a great deal of things, queue up for an insane number of hours, and enter a boatload of competitions just to get something that their idols perhaps once touched. People spend millions of dollars on something sweaty and stale and old just because the person who wore it was famous.

To me this is one of the greatest mysteries of life, right up there with whether there are aliens on Mars and exactly what happened to Amanda Bynes. Why do we get so attached to people we don’t know – why do we care so much about things that have nothing to do with us – and why is it even upon this realisation we persist in our adulation?

I’ve a friend who seriously questions the need for such passions and involvement in other peoples’ lives and on a certain level I would have to agree with her. It seems ridiculous to start crying over the retirement of a man you have never seen play and is thousands of miles away, as I myself have recently. The fact that I considered going to the University of Manchester just because it offers discounted match tickets speaks volumes for the irrationality that comes with being passionate about something. I know people who’ve flown to London from Singapore just to attend a Gary Barlow concert. (I would have too, but that’s besides the point.)

Having idols, and being a fan of something, I think is an integral part of life, because it is through these idols and these people that we come to believe both in them and in ourselves. The fundamental thing about humanity is that we always need something greater than ourselves to depend on. This is often found in religion, the belief that there is an omnipresent God, or Buddha, or what your religion dictates, and to me an idol is no different. You’ll often hear football being labelled a religion, and it is. We watch matches hoping and believing in our teams; the weekly contests, the rollercoaster of emotions, and the sheer euphoria of winning is something that gives us hope, something to look forward to. Fans worship the ground the football players walk on; we literally sing their praises; we follow their rules and hate other clubs just as some religions hate others. Week after week we keep the faith (fair-weathered fans aside) and never fear.

It’s the same with having musical idols, or television ones, or any sort of people you look up to at all. You want to believe in them, and you love them because you see something in them that you see in yourself. They are the people who are living your dream, the people who you could be and want to be. My musical hero is Gary Barlow, and not just because he writes great songs and looks fantastic in a suit. (Although he does.) It’s because of how he fell spectacularly from grace in 1997 but never gave up. It’s how he endured weekly Gary-bashings, not least from his erstwhile best friend turned enemy Robbie Williams, how he shut himself up in his house but still couldn’t quite leave the industry he loved even though it had turned on him. It was his conscious decision to start anew, to improve himself tremendously and – with the three other boys – stage one of the greatest comebacks in pop history. Gary never gave up on his dream, no matter what it did to him, and whenever I feel like giving up history (because it’s too hard, because I’m no good at it, because what does it matter anyway) I always remind myself of his unquenchable spirit. Through idols, we dare to dream again. We become better people, we really do. You’ll see how some people say that ‘this person saved my life’, even though they’ve never met them – and they wouldn’t be lying. I know. I’ve been there.

And the other great thing about being a fan is that it gives you a place to belong. I’ve always felt a little bit excluded – partly because of my awful social skills, partly because of myself in general – but when it came to things that I loved, I was accepted immediately. I would never have dreamed of something I made garnering more than 10000 notes on tumblr. I’d never have imagined having so many friends in the football fandom, who stay up with me at weird hours of the night exchanging ridiculous lack-of-sleep match commentary. One of the best feelings in the world is when you’re at (or listening to, in the case of sad people like me) a concert and the band asks you to sing the lyrics, and thousands of voices just swell up as one. It doesn’t matter whether you can’t sing, because at that moment you’re part of something bigger and better than yourself. When you raise your scarves high and belt out your club anthem. When you read meta and analysis and you nod enthusiastically and engage in literary and philosophical discussions because you can and you want to and other people want to as well. Knowing that there are other people out there like you, and being able to extend a hand to them – I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend my life.

When it comes down to it, I wouldn’t give any of my passions up for the world. To me, being passionate about something is what makes life worth living – and that’s saying something, because ordinarily I don’t think life is worth living in the first place. How can you say that you’re truly alive without ever having felt the surge of emotions watching your favourite band walk onto the stage, or the welling up of your throat as you sing to your favourite football club from the stands? How can you feel complete without ever crying at the loss of a fictional character, or burst with Feelings at climatic points of your show (as I will always during Théoden’s Pelennor Field speech)? I am well aware that to logical people, rational people, all of this might seem silly. I did a personality test yesterday for a scholarship, and there were multiple questions asking whether ‘I have ever jumped for joy literally’ or ‘I often feel a lot of emotion’. I don’t know whether the scholarship providers look for that sort of people, but I answered strongly agree to all of them, because if they reject me based on this, then I wouldn’t have wanted to work for them anyway.

On the 13th of June at 4am I’ll be one of the millions tuning in to the greatest sporting spectacle on earth. I’ll wake up not because I feel the need to fit in with other people, not because I’m doing it for the sake of doing it. I’ll wake up because I want to. Because this love, this passion I have for something I will never truly know, completes me. Because, in the immortal words of one of those millions,

it makes me feel alive.

No National Day Song? No Fun

Since the only thing remotely interesting this summer is the World Cup (spoken from a non-biased point of view), and since Singapore’s only claim to fame in that area is being a ridiculously expensive country to watch the games in, the only thing to be done is to run a front-page story on the fact that there will be no new national day song this year. The chairman of the executive committee has decided that having no national day song will suit the theme ‘Our People, Our Home’ quite well, despite the fact that all previous national day themes sound exactly the same and yet no one ever thought of doing that. Nevertheless, there has been much rejoicing in the streets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were flash mobs on Orchard Road going ‘Woooah-oh-oh! Woah ohh-oh!’ 

(Yes, jokes regarding previous national day songs are going to fly fast and furious. Humour is just Where I Belong.)

Given all the flak that the other songs have copped in previous years, far outweighing any given Fairey Battle in World War Two (I’m equally enthusiastic about nerdy jokes), it’s only natural to view this as a sensible decision. But I’m putting my foot down on behalf of My Island Home and saying that this is the wrong way to go. Contrary to popular belief, I think that the new-national-day-song-every-year was actually one of the best ideas that anyone could come up with.

“Have you completely gone out of your mind?” I can hear you asking. According to Hilary Putnam, if I had, I would cease to exist, so I should think that I haven’t. There are three very pertinent reasons as to why these Moments of Magic should remain, and I will do my best to explain why.

1. It’s a Risk We Have To Take

Imagine a National Day Parade where there are thousands of people swaying in multiple directions as they sing “this is home, truly…” and your heart will melt with a fondness for Singapore you don’t feel 364 other days in a year. Now imagine a National Day Parade where there are thousands of people swaying in multiple directions as they don’t sing anything at all, and you will end up judging a bunch of uncoordinated weirdos. There have been some great songs over the years; personally, I loved Where I Belong and We Will Get There. And the truth of the matter is that we would never have had these songs if we’d simply said ‘all right, folks, nothing’s ever going to measure up to Home, so let’s just shut up and count on ‘Count On Me, Singapore’ ‘. There could have been an absolute gem this year, but now we’ll never know. That’s a real waste – and since we’re so concerned with turning real waste into water, what’s wrong with trying to turn it into a song while we’re at it?

Waaa-aa-ter! Waaa waa-ter!

2. The Argument That Works For Everything: Local Talent

Hardly anyone ever saw Electrico before their 2009 cracker. Hardly anyone still sees them, but hey – at least they were famous for a couple months, and at least they made some sort of mark. It’s true that they’ve been trying to give local acts some sort of exposure, but two pages of Life just isn’t cutting it; most people nowadays just flip to the back for the TWO comics that remain (such a travesty). A shot at the national day song gives people a chance to hope of being discovered, a way to write their names in the books, and also a way to make sure that they won’t churn out anything crappy again once they’ve seen the comments on Stomp. Something to raise our local music profile and quality control? Remind me why the song has been scrapped again?

3. It Turns Us Into One Singapore

The year is 2005. I’m in Henry Park Primary School, standing in the music room, the projector on, the screen down. I’m watching Taufik Batisah and Rui En perform an absolutely ridiculous dance which is a combination of Saturday Night Fever, baseball and the tai chi that old people do in the morning. My friends and I are laughing at it until we are told that we’ll have to do it too, as part of that Great Cause of Patriotism. So we do it, but as a small show of protest we do it with our fingers instead. There’s no way we’re going to contort our bodies to please the gods.

You know what? Let’s not.

Come national day, all of us are watching our TVs, and unknowingly our fingers follow the movements on screen.

This is one of the most vivid memories I have of primary school life, and for good reason; it was in that moment, making fun of Reach Out For The Skies, that I found something to talk about with my peers, something I could use to connect with any given person who sat through the same horror I did. I still do it sometimes when there’s a break in conversation and I’m desperately trying to socialise. And it usually gets a laugh, meaning that people still remember it. That’s the thing about awful songs; people remember them, people talk about them, people get together to make fun of them. I’ve never seen a Singapore as united as it was in its ridicule of last year’s song. In Secondary School someone scrawled ‘What Do You See’ on a classroom wall and we all spent time answering. (I think I wrote ‘vandalism’, but I can’t really remember.) Google ‘Reach Out For The Skies dance steps’ and there are still videos of people doing them in 2013. Bad national day songs give all of us a common identity, and since we spent so much time harping on that during JC Southeast Asian History, I think that’s an important point. Without a song to ridicule this year, there just won’t be the same sense of belonging.

So I say bring back the national day song, and make it as stupid as possible. If we have to pay $112 for world cup matches, then we’re going to need something significantly cheaper to scream at.