The high-tech, hyper-globalized island nation of Singapore (population size: 5.5 million people) may be known as the "Switzerland of South-East Asia", but many aspiring Singaporean musicians have chosen to pursue their artistic careers abroad, citing the lack of support for local music acts as the main reason for migrating. Its perhaps not hard to see why - musicians singing in English immediately face comparison to globally-dominant and well-established artists, while those singing in Mandarin or Cantonese face intense competition from mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong singers.
Singapore Idol contestant Daphne Khoo has certainly followed this trend, first moving to Melbourne to complete a degree in communications after releasing her first album Desperate (2007) and then to Boston to study songwriting at Berklee College of Music. She currently resides in Manhattan, New York. Her 2014 song "Weak" was recently used as the soundtrack for a romantic Wong Fu Productions short film.
'Doll' was one of Khoo's first singles (and still my favourite track of hers); it foregrounds the thematic preoccupation with vulnerability that can be found throughout her oeuvre. The lyrical setting is one you might expect in a case study from a developmental psychology textbook: a young girl sees a doll in a shop display and sings: 'Look at the pretty doll in that window mama/ Oh how happy she looks today/ I want that pretty doll in that window mama/ Then they'd turn and walk away'.
The atmosphere of childhood joy is disrupted in the second verse, when the young girls returns (10 years later) to observe that children's toys have been unmistakably sexualized: 'Look at the toy guns in those windows mama/ Look at the bare-bellied dolls', while the desired doll from a decade ago is dismissed as 'a ragged thing'. The song then switches into a more angsty rock register, with Khoo's lyrical persona questioning how these changes have occurred without her having noticed or understood them: 'Why didn't I ask why/ Ask why ...'
Social commentary can be off-putting when the listener gets the impression that the message takes precedence over the music, but in this case its the lyrical persona's emotional reaction to the societal trends she observes that is foregrounded, rather than an analysis or argument.
