Tom Waits/Alamy
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
The opening track of what is unquestionably Waits’s best album, Rain Dogs, in its vibrant might resembles a scene from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where the main character Ishmael spends the night in the same hotel room as a savage harpooner. Just like Moby Dick, ‘Singapore’ is also a great Manhattan dream. This phantom song was written in 1985 and had little to do with the real Singapore, where, by that time, one would be fined for spitting in the street. Here, the echoes of New Orleans funerals are joined with the seedy whispers of Chinese hangouts and what Waits himself called a midget’s bar mitzvah. ‘Singapore’ is essentially an example of a classic phyco-geographical hallucination in music. This method was later used by many artists. For example, Grebenshchikov’s ‘Afanasy Nikitin Boogie’ definitely echoes Waits’s song, but Grebenshchikov is known for his adaptability.
Apart from its other merits, the vinyl record of Rain Dogs is remarkable because of its great guest guitarists such as Keith Richards, Marc Ribot, and Chris Spedding, with the latter two actually playing on ‘Singapore’.