Book Description
Enter the basement of Peninsular Plaza, a shopping mall in central Singapore, and you'll descend into rock history. Since the days of the now-legendary group The Straydogs, this area has served as the locus for amateur and semi-professional musicians. For the bands and their fans, rock music defines their lives in Singapore. It is not uncommon to see legends from the 1960s jamming out with new up-and-coming artists, and the basement venue has afforded expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this community is simultaneously fiercely cosmopolitan, and entirely Singaporean. Sonic City is an ethnography of the community centered around these musicians, their family, friends, and fans, and the way they make music and a way of life. It considers the aesthetic dispositions, cultural values, ideologies, and identities within the constraints of urban life in the city. Grounded in debates from sound studies and based on five years of deeply participatory sonic ethnography, Steve Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour's ideas of the social continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, associations of heterogeneous elements of human and non-human mediators and intermediaries to portray a community entangled in vernacular and national heritage projects. What emerges is a vernacular heritage drawing upon Singapore's unique place in Southeast Asian and World history.
