The songs that kept me sane

Unable to travel, this writer found ways to go international through music.

WELCOME to 2022. This is my first column for the new year and if you are expecting me to rage against the nasty and horribly depressing issues and controversies that continue to plague us – the latest involving the MACC chief commissioner – I will disappoint you.

Plenty of other columnists and opinion makers are telling us what is wrong with our country and leadership, but with no solutions in sight.

Neither do I want to vent on the pandemic and the endless mutations of SARS-CoV-2 with also no solutions in sight, unless you consider the push for vaccine booster shots as one.

Instead, I want to shine a light on something a little more positive, and that is the music that kept me sane, softened me with nostalgia and made me dance and sing along, allowing me to forget for a while the sad reality of today’s world.

My go-to places for music are YouTube and Spotify. Thanks to its effective tracking algorithms, Spotify is able to analyse the listening habits and preferences of its subscribers with what it calls “Spotify Wrapped”.

No surprise when Spotify told me that out of the 1,466 artistes I listened to last year, South Korean super pop group BTS was my number one choice.

Indeed, I enjoyed their recent slew of English songs, but I still prefer the ones that are sung mainly in Korean for their unique melodies, arrangements and themes. These include Spring Day, Fake Love, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Magic Shop and We are Bulletproof: The Eternal.

I also listened a lot to virtuoso Kazakh singer Dimash Kudaibergen whom I wrote about in my April 19, 2017, column “Dear boy from Kazakhstan”.

Dimash has many new songs, including three in English: Be With Me, Fly Away and Stranger.

Less than a decade ago, my music was almost all white and Western. Last year, I listened to 37 genres on Spotify, my top choices being K-pop, Chinese pop and Japanese pop. I no longer keep up with new Western artistes whose names on my adult children’s playlists leave me cold.

My kids actually shake their heads at how I am so into music sung in languages I barely understand. I can’t explain it either.

All I can say is I am able to appreciate music and film in other languages and from different cultures because I learned to put aside my prejudices.

As I wrote in my Feb 12, 2020, column “When Korean isn’t all Greek”, celebrating Parasite’s win for Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars, quoting the director Bong Joon-ho: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

Where music is concerned, I don’t even need subtitles, although I do look up the translations for some songs that I particularly like so as to have a deeper appreciation and understanding of the sentiments conveyed.

Mind you, I still have a great fondness for songs from my youth. Feeling nostalgic, I looked for them and found a series on the “Most Popular Song Each Month” from different decades on YouTube.

There I rediscovered many songs from four or five decades ago whose lyrics I can still recall. Many are back on my Spotify playlist.

BTS amazed the Western world as the first Korean group to hit number one on the Billboard 100 in 2020 with Dynamite. But there was another Asian artiste who beat them to it way back in 1963. And he was the first to do so in a non-European language.

This was Japanese crooner Kyu Sakamoto and his song Ue o Muite Aruk. If it doesn’t strike a chord, even among older Malaysians, it’s understandable. In English-speaking countries, the song was renamed Sukiyaki to make it short and catchy, even though there is no mention of the word in the Japanese lyrics. We now know sukiyaki is actually the name of a beef hot pot dish. It was a severe case of cultural insensitivity in a time when Western soft power ruled us all.

Indeed, Wikipedia cites how a Newsweek columnist compared this rather dreadful re-titling to releasing Moon River in Japan as “Beef Stew”.

When I listen to Sakamoto today, I can only shake my head at my youthful ignorance.

I can still recall the first two lines of the English version: “The charms of Sukiyaki, the arms of Sukiyaki”, but now at least they conjure up an image of a yummy beef dish and not a pretty Japanese maiden.

Other rediscovered songs include many beloved Beatles’ hits that are truly timeless. Another is Frances Yip’s Shanghai Beach, the theme song of that hugely popular 1980 Hong Kong drama, The Bund, that just quickens the pulse from the very first note.

A noteworthy event last year was the return of legendary Swedish group Abba after a 40-year break.

Mamma mia, how can I resist you? Of course, I downloaded their Voyage album, which contains 10 songs written by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson.

The sound and arrangements of the songs are pure Abba vintage. The voices of Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad are as vibrant and dulcet as ever. All four may be in their 70s, but they haven’t lost their touch and talent.

A Malay song on my list that almost became an ear worm is Faizal Tahir’s X Missing U, sung by Faizal, Dayang Nurfaizah, Yonnyboi and Tuju. This is one catchy and brilliantly performed number.

It’s so good that I’m not surprised Chinese superstar G.E.M. has recorded a Mandarin version of it, renamed I’ll Be Missing You. It’s been doing well since its Dec 21 release on YouTube, with more than 1.1 million views.

Lastly, I want to mention a 33-year-old song that is on repeat play: Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire.

Joel was jolted into writing it after meeting a 21-year-old man, who, dismayed by the state of the world in 1989, wished he had grown up in the 1950s when “nothing happened”. In the song, Joel listed 118 historical people and events taking place in the 40 years since his birth in 1949.

In a way, the song is outdated, but in it is a line, “Children of thalidomide”, which refers to the “biggest manmade medical disaster ever” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a German pharmaceutical company aggressively pushed the use of thalidomide in pregnant women, resulting in more than 10,000 children born with severe deformities, as well as thousands of miscarriages.

But America avoided the tragedy because one US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviewer, Frances Kelsey, who was in charge of approving the drug, refused to do so.

Despite pressure from thalidomide’s manufacturer, Kelsey was not convinced it was safe and wanted more data to show the drug was not harmful to the foetus.

She did this even though the drug had been approved in Canada, as well as more than 20 European and African countries.

Her concerns were tragically proven correct. Her firm stance and the ensuing public outcry led to the US Congress passing legislation in October 1962 to strengthen drug safety regulations. This included stricter testing and the requirement that the effectiveness of drugs should be established prior to marketing.

I wonder what the late Kelsey would have thought of the way the US FDA gave emergency approval to the present crop of Covid-19 vaccines and how they are being administered to pregnant women and children.

Sorry, I did say I wasn’t going to talk about vaccines. Blame it on Covid-19-induced cabin fever.

The views expressed here are the writer's own.