In Continuum.

This, is the Canadian flag. It is also known as the Maple Leaf flag, with maple leaf also being the national symbol of the country. The colors red and white are the national colors of the country as well, and they are the same colors used in the Union flag, or the national flag of the United Kingdom. Canada is one of the two countries that dominate the continent of North America, with better half of the country being covered in ice and snow. I remember looking upon the scattered northern lands of Canada on the laminated map that my father gave me when I was little. I pictured Canadians rowing kayaks in between those broken lands within in Arctic Circle, and they didn't have cars in the country at all. That was when I had a much smaller perspective of the world, the same kid that hadn't seen the Pacific Ocean. But I've always been fascinated with the snow-capped country, the country on the other side of the world. But I had little knowledge of that place, knew as much about Canada as an average African living in the forest of Congo. That was until I finally visited the country more than ten years go, when my family decided to pay a visit to our relatives living there.

I don't remember much about Canada, and I still don't know much about it either. I remember Vancouver being an awfully cold city to be living, but that was only because we visited the place in winter, and it was not common for temperatures in the night to plunge below the zero point. I wore four pairs of underwear, five pairs of pants, and countless layers of shirt to keep myself warm, and that wasn't even enough to keep myself from getting frost bites at the bottom of my feet. We were at this skiing resort, and the trip there in the morning was an excruciatingly long one. We passed a bridge made of iron that stretched over a frozen river, and it had metal lions melded into the frame of the bridge on either side. I remember the long stretch of road afterwards covered in dead maple leaves, then taking cable cars up onto the mountain and then rolling down the side of it because I couldn't ski to save my life - I still cannot ski to save my life. I remember the little playground in the neighborhood where I lived that had a swing and black sand, and the rotating tower where the family had dinner that night that made me nauseous and sick. As you can see, I don't remember much about Canada, and what I do remember certainly does not seem very encouraging either. 

I am convinced, however, that there is something magical about the country. It must be something to do with the latitude of the country, the fact that it is higher up and further away from the equator that sets it apart from every other country. For one, it has one of the best sounding national anthem I have ever heard, perhaps even more catchy than an average pop song we hear on the radio. It begins with "Oh, Canada. Our home and native land...", and then I don't recall much about the rest of the song any longer. I heard it over MTV once, not because there is a music video made with the national anthem, but because a teenage-bopping band from Canada was singing it on MTV, for some strange reason. It was the Moffatts, those little teenage boys who thought that they could make music just because they wrote a song or two while they were younger. My sister was a fan of this band, the band with the long silky hair that made it difficult for people like myself to tell their genders. Either way, Canada became the country with a lot of maple leaves, a lot of ice, and a lot of confused teenagers confused about their genders and forming boybands with electric guitars. 

But things have changed quite a bit over the years, Canada has become not just a country with boybands, but also a country with power-house singers. Shania Twain came out from Canada, and so did Celine Dion. Everybody hates Celine Dion for some reason, but you cannot deny that she can sing. Shania Twain has the highest selling female album of all time, as well as one of the top five selling albums of all time. Celine Dion, at the same time, has the honor of claiming the highest overplayed song of all time, and I don't suppose there is a need to elaborate on which song I am referring to. So, at that time, I started to wonder if there is something in the waters that the Canadians drink, if there is some secret in the type of food they eat that make them so much more different from the rest of the world musically. That is not to mention how another one of my favorite singers of time emerged out of nowhere and blew the rest of the world away. She came from a little island - in the context of Canada, it really is quite small - of Nova Scotia. This singer, is Sarah Mclachlan, and let's admit this: Angel is one of the best songs in the history of music, no matter how many times you decide to play it.

I was talking to a friend of mine last night, sharing our iTunes library over a program called Mojo, and discussing each others' playlist. Somehow, we started talking about the Canadian music scene, and that was when I realized that I do love a lot of Canadian music out there, without actually trying to like them at all. I love Broken Social Scene, New Buffalo, Feist, The Most Serene Republic and Do Make Say Think. I just discovered Stars from the same record label (Save for Do Make Say Think), and they are equally amazing as the rest of their Canadian counterparts. Obviously, it must be because of where they are living now, what they are eating, how they are eating, and everything that must have somehow contributed to their incredible talents. This is just a hypothetical assumption, merely an observation from a random fan of music from halfway around the world. But every assumption, every experiment, needs a control. Let's look at a country that is within the same latitude range, probably has the same diet, but a hundred times smaller than Canada - Iceland.

Iceland has a population of just a little over 300,000. Iceland, like the name of the country suggests, is really cold - like Canada. It is the youngest country in the world, growing in size every year due to their constant volcanic activities on the ocean floor. Despite the small population, this country has some of the most unique and distinct type of music I have ever heard. The thing about Icelandic bands I have heard so far is definitely the difficulty in classifying them into any conventional genres out there. There should be a musical genre called "Icelandic", because you can never put them in a box and mark it as "Alternative", or "Rock", or "World". Bands like Sigur Ros, Amiina, Mum, and even Bjork, they have some of the strangest - for the lack of a better word - music I have ever heard. But they are also beautiful music, something from out of this world entirely. If it isn't something that they eat and drink, I don't know what it is.

Now we consider countries closer to the zero point on the latitude, the equator. Singapore has very little musical talents to speak of, and that is a very sad thing indeed, considering the fact that I have been in this country for the better part of my life. It's not that Singapore doesn't have their musical talents, it does. It's just that the genres they tackle tend to be rather restricted, most of them are threading within the same boundaries and within the same cafes and bars. There isn't anything wrong with it surely, but then when was the last time we heard of a local band that actually made it somewhere, even regionally. Of course, some of us might argue that Singapore has done relatively well, regionally, in the Chinese music industry. But then these singers are Singaporeans, everybody else involved in their albums are not. Maybe it is the ridiculous amount of oily and spicy food we seem to love so much, or maybe the heat throughout the year baked the part of our brains with musical talents. The way I see it, music seems to thrive only in snow-capped countries in the Arctic, only in cold places where it can truly blossom and bloom. 

So, I am raising my glasses to the Canadians right now. More than their ridiculous amount of maple leaves and ice, not to mention the Niagara Falls, the Canadians have a thing for good music too. That is not to mention their little neighbors, the Icelandic people. Perhaps they should consider sharing their secret with the rest of the world, maybe a country like Singapore. I think it'd be cool for local music to be known around the world somehow, for someone else from another country to listen to the music and think about this small little country south of the South China Sea. We need to start eating fishes all the time, or grow maple leaves, or something, anything. At least we already have the color combination in the flag right, now we need to replace the crescent and the stars. We'd be alright, we'd be fine.