Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity Edited by Gerry Bloustien, Margaret Peters and Susan Luckman, London: Ashgate: 2008 Chapter Ten From Folk Devils to Folk Music: Tracing the Malay Heavy Metal Scene in Singapore Kelly Fu Su Yin and Liew Kai Khiun Introduction: Reflections of the Misunderstood Mat Rockers On 25 April 2002, Adi Yadoni’s Reflections of the Misunderstood Mat Rockers became the first documentary on the local metal music scene to premier in the Singapore International Film Festival. The screening of this documentary in a major cultural event was a milestone for the ‘Mat Rock’ (a colloquial term for the Malay heavy metal subculture) scene since the appearance of the phenomenon about four decades ago. Moving away from the negative stereotypes associated with the subculture of rock and heavy metal music associated predominately with the ethnic Malay minority youths in Singapore (ethnic Malays make up approximately 15% of the total population in Singapore with the ethnic Chinese making the majority of 75%), the film highlighted the increasing respectability of Mat Rockers in Singapore and attested to the tremendous resiliency of this subculture. Branded as the music of societal deviants, this subcultural scene has had a colourful but troubled history. Mat Rockers had to overcome the gauntlet of social stigmatization, official disdain and moral panics that constructed participants as hedonistic drug abusers in the 1970s and ‘devil worshippers’ in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, this scene was still subject to monitoring, but had gained grudging acceptance in a climate where a government-led liberalization of the arts was occurring. Globalization, the ease of access to information technology and the space given to youth subcultures have all contributed to the proliferation of metal bands, with the effect that many have diversified musically and ethnically. This chapter traces the cultural origins of the Mat Rock music subculture to the hybridization of western rock music with Malay folk musical traditions, then discusses the evolution of, and the tremendous inroads made by, the metal music scene. In the process, it challenges dominant theoretical understandings of the boundaries, limitations and impermanence of the development of subcultures, as well as the one-dimensional portrayal of the political apparatus in contemporary Singapore as all-encompassing and all-knowing. Youth Subcultures in Singapore: Passive Recipients to Active Subjects Scholarly studies of youth and music-based subcultures as significant socio-cultural phenomena have spanned more than half a century. This includes the establishment