Making “music at the margins"? A social and cultural analysis ofXinyaoin Singapore

Popular cultural cringe: language as signifier of authenticity and quality in the Singaporean popular music market

“…It's just plain boring! This response supports the findings by Phua (1993) and Kong (1996) who studied the reflection of place and space in local Singaporean music and argued that Singaporean popular music for much of the time projects images of Singapore, depicts the relationship of Singaporeans to the local and are environmentally concerned.…”

Habituation and choice in the process of consumption: a case study of popular music in Singapore

“…It began around 1980 with groups of youths in junior colleges who composed their own songs and gave informal presentations to one another. See Kong (1996) for an analysis of this genre. 10 The capitalised letters in these words denote "the impossibility of a 'complete' understanding of phenomena that do not belong to one's own culture, both for philosophical reasons and for reasons of academic politeness" (Gumbrecht 1997, 253).…”

Popular music in a transnational world: the construction of local identities in Singapore

“…Through this analysis, therefore, I hope to contribute to an evolving retheorised cultural geography, in which questions of global and local identities have become important. By focusing on popular music, I hope also to place this hitherto somewhat neglected cultural form more firmly on the agenda of cultural geographical research (see Smith's (1994) and Kong's (1995) discussion of this relative neglect).…”

“…This approach to analysing popular music departs from existing analyses in that an explicit attempt is here made to engage with the larger social and cultural contexts within which music is produced and consumed (see Kong, 1995). This differs from existing geographical research on music which reflects broader cultural geographical interests in the tradition of Berkeley cultural geography (see a recent review by Nash and Carney, 1996).…”