I’ve been thinking recently. In Singapore we have alot of little subculture/scenes or groups of people that need support. We have our musicians, our dancers, our theatre, our film-makers, our sportsmen.

Don’t you think that these people would identify more with the struggles of one another than the general bo-chup singaporean and be more likely to support each other?

I’m thinking of trying to find a way to sort of bring everybody together- Though it calls for more maturity on everybody’s part than i think we actually have, and it’s a bigger project than any one person can handle.

If i could somehow be a part of something that somehow accomplishes that i would be a very happy bunny.

What bands do is to befriend other bands and fill up the “good crowd” at each other’s shows. Be enthusiastic, cheer, enjoy themselves- good crowd grows by itself because people have fun watching other people have fun.

And eventually you have so many people having fun that it’s just one nice big happy family. To motivate people to invest in an industry such as the music scene, they will want to see bigger crowds. That is always a step in the right direction isn’t it?

We can’t change population size but we can increase the size of the target markets within it. I mean we still have 4.86 million people. You could have a 1k people buying CDs out of 4 million, or 10k people buying CDs out of 50k.

If we could have 40,000 people packing a show i’m sure corporate would sit up and notice. Latvia has a smaller population than Singapore, I think, but they have a pretty decent soccer team! What does this suggest?

Self-sustainability is an ideal that we many never be able to reach, but my hope is that from the time people like us start what we do till we’re gone we get as close as we can bring it.

I love local music and I’ve always wanted to add value to it, to leave the scene better off than when i got into it. What i grew to think was that there are two elements, quality and quantity. How much it impacts people, and how many people it impacts. The more people you impact and the deeper the impression you leave, the more local music makes its mark, and the better it is for us all!

What I’ve recently come to realise though, is that there is positive impact and negative impact. What’s the point if the whole country knows about local music, if they think we’re all smokers, druggies and school dropouts?

What I’ve recently come to realise though, is that there is positive impact and negative impact. What’s the point if the whole country knows about local music, if they think we’re all smokers, druggies and school dropouts?

By actively sharing music and putting music in a positive light and making it a socially positive thing, you will make the scene a better place.

Sometimes glam rock bands like glamourizing booze and smoking and stuff. It’s hard enough getting people to support music for quality, much less getting people to appreciate it for musical value when they see all the social crap that comes with it.

It sucks to be drinking every day, getting blasted and having memory loss, and at the end of the day you get dependent on it as a form of perpetual escapism. It’s a great way to be irresponsible, but it still screws you up and all your friends too.

We don’t want to tell people what to do or what not to do, but we do want people to take care of themselves. People don’t need to be uber healthy or whatever, but everything in moderation, and there’s nothing glamorous about being a drunk or smelling like cigarettes all the time.

If we can all just encourage each other to promote music by focusing on doing things that promote social well-being instead of promoting mindless “Rebellion without cause because we are rockstars who’re different and badass”, we do something positive. Not just for lcoal music but for our society, our friends, our families.

You don’t want your little sister or your girlfriend turning into a chain smoking alcoholic because she decided to join a band right? And you don’t wanna have that sort of impression of what being in a band is. You don’t wanna think “oh no she’s in a band she’s gonna turn into a drunk, chain-smoking whore.”

Perhaps trying to change that idea of what being in a band is really like, will make it a better scene.

Ronin rebelled without a cause on the first school tour and fucked up its reputation, along with the whole scene’s reputation. Now I LOVE Ronin, they inspired me and got me into the scene. They got publicity, but schools hated them. Parents hated them. Sponsors hated them. I remember being really sad when they screwed around at VS, their alma mater, and had so many teachers and students upset at what they’d done.

That does everybody a huge disservice. It really screws everyone else and drags the whole scene down, that great people in the scene have worked so long and hard for- literally, they have worked for decades to get this scene to where it is now.

When Syed wanted to do the next school tour he had a hard time convincing people that we’re not out to swear at teachers and tell 13 year old girls that we’re ‘****ing animals”.

It’s only now that local bands are being taken as legitimate commercial identities. But when shit like that happens, it undoes so much of all that hard work. We stand on the shoulders of giants, that’s the only reason why we are able to get as far as we are now.

What do we do now, where do we go from here?

We break our backs to make the best music we can make, to be the best people we can be, to inspire the best in others as best we can, and to prove that we’re more than just the foolish school dropouts everyone thinks we’ll end up as, with no ambition and no brains. but come on, all of us are so much more than that.

So why not live it?