In The Background

I have big problems with so-called background music - I mean the sort of stuff that get played in public spaces because some idiot psychologists have said it helps to relax people and make them better consumers of whatever it is you want to sell them. (It now seems to get played in workshops where someone's trying to sell you ideas.) I suppose it boils down to two problems with me. The first is that most of the music that gets played is dreadful, well it is for me. This is odd because I have extremely wide tastes in music, with enthusiasms from punk to Puccini, yet the purveyors of muzak (let's call it what it is) almost unerringly opt for the bits that grate on me. The second problem is that when I very occasionally hear something I actually like I want to focus on it, yet it's the nature of public spaces to make this extremely difficult. Usually the volume level in these cases is just low enough to make me miss the details my ears are primed for.

So it was with some gratified surprise that I found myself beguiled by the music being played at one of the stalls at the hawker centre adjacent to Parkway Parade in the early afternoon. As we were enjoying our cups of tea the unmistakable strains of a P. Ramlee duet with his wife, Saloma, brightened the, in truth, somewhat overcast day, setting my heart dancing and toes tapping. I think I even smiled. The humour and charm of the song would be apparent I think even to listeners who didn't understand a word of the Malay in which they were singing. The song I suppose would have been something of a hit in this part of the world in the late 1950's and I was struck by the fact that the qualities of the music (the humour, the charm, the simple joy in living) are so rarely found in what passes for today's popular music. Now life is easier our music is harder.

I was also set thinking of the one reference to P. Ramlee in Anthony Burgess's The Long Day Wanes, his trilogy about life in 1950's Malaya, at least it's the one reference I remember. It's an unpleasantly negative one regarding a song, quite a delightful number actually, relating to the key precepts of Islam (a song that remains popular in the Malay community to this day.) The insightful western liberal gets it wrong yet again! It would be interesting to do a study on just how wide of the mark Burgess manages to be throughout what we are told is a keynote work on this part of the world.