Chinese talentimes and “Kopi-O”: Singapore’s Xinyao’s 80s tele-rhythms

This paper examines the role of Singapore’s “national television” in engendering and contemporarizing a more autonomously hyphenated “Singaporean-Chinese” cultural identity through the local Chinese language popular music of Xinyao (新謠) from the early 1980s. As the genre is increasingly considered officially to be part of the republic’s intangible cultural heritage, the authors seek to revisit Xinyao’s evolution as part of the de-centering of Sinophone popular literature for a music that germinated autonomously from Mainland China. Leveraging from the Chinese language national media networks alongside with the official privileging of the Mandarin over “Chinese dialects,” Xinyao became a contemporary Sinophone enterprise in Singapore’s mediascape. Aside from the televised singing contests or “Chinese Talentimes” that engendered a new generation of performers and audiences among Singaporean youths, the theme songs of the popular locally produced Chinese language television dramas composed and sung by Xinyao artists have popularized the genre. Collectively, Xinyao served in Mandarinizing the sonic-linguistic cultural imaginations along the narratives of the nation-state in molding the National-Sinophone of the hyphenated “Singaporean-Chinese” cultural identity.