Ris Low and our pop culture

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When Ris Low starts appearing on the Halloween Costumes of your friends, you can be pretty sure that she has crept steadily into Singapore’s pop culture.

Just last week at a private Halloween party, I caught the glimpse of a walking iMac with the YouTube video of Ris Low on its screen. NewUrbanMale recently released its line of NUMTees incorporating the world ‘Boomz’ with a number of catchy phrases and slogans (‘When People say I’m Fabulous I Say BOOMZ’, ‘BOOMZ coz it shouts me’) – I admitted I bought one. An in-house store promotion gave you a discount if you could form a sentence with it. (But who decides if it’s used in the correct manner or not?)

Like it or not, Ris Low is admittedly now a part of our popular culture. The 19-year old pageant winner’s initial gaffes and choice of words in the by-now infamous interview has introduced a series of expressions and words that are commonly used and understood. But what does it mean for her to enter our ‘popular culture’?

Contrary to the negative connotations of the word when it was used in English during the fifteenth century in law and politics to represent the ‘low’, ‘vulgar’ culture and values of the common people, popular culture has gained greater positive nuances and widespread acceptance since the 1950s — even if it still remains contrasted against high, elitist culture.

Pop Culture in Singapore
For a long time, Singapore’s pop-culture has been heavily influenced from abroad. In the late 90’s, Japanese popular culture from Dance Dance Revolution machines in the arcades, to the omnipresent Neoprint machines in shopping malls, and pop figures such as Ayumi Hamasaki entered our shores. Less than a decade on, Singapore is hit by the K-Wave. Now, it is not uncommon to see hours of local televison dedicated to broadcasting popular Korean dramas, and  Korean movies are a sure sell at the local box offices. Arguably, Korean culture has displaced her Japanese counterpart in the recent years.

So why do we not celebrate something that we can call our own, even if its in the form of a 19-year old beauty queen making grammatical and diction mistakes in an interview? Some of us took it the hard way, calling for her pageant title to be stripped and suggesting that she was unworthy of representing Singapore on the international stage.

But, as some this Halloween saw it, there’s really something to be thankful to Ris Low for. And it’s more than just giving us weeks long of newspaper headlines and gossip over workplace lunches. Ris Low has entered our popular culture, and now it’s time to show that we have that important sense of humor, enough humor to laugh at our occassional gaffes and things that make us truly Singaporeans. And in a neo-Confucianist society such as ours, where a lot of attention is being paid to getting things done the right way, to adhering to societal norms and rituals, humor may to play a very important role for us in learning how to admit of our own mistakes and to laugh at them. It is okay to be wrong. In fact, it is not okay to never be wrong.

So who’s getting inventive with dressing up as Ris Low next Halloween again?