It all happened after I watched his movie 881 last month. But it wasn't the glitzy and amazing costumes or the tear-jerking plot about two getai singers that did it. It was the songs.

Sometimes maudlin, sometimes funny and always bittersweet, the tracks in the movie struck a chord with me.

Suddenly, instead of listening to the BBC World Service while driving, I'm humming along to the movie's two soundtracks and a couple of other Hokkien CDs.

Anyone who knows me will know this is very bizarre. One, I never hum. Two, I didn't grow up listening to Hokkien songs and I speak the dialect quite badly.

But suddenly, these songs are all I want to listen to.

Not everybody feels the same way. Some of my friends grew up listening to them but won't do it now, lest they get bad flashbacks of getai past.

Others know the songs from childhood and are rediscovering them with pleasure. That must account for why Hokkien CDs are all the rage in neighbourhood shops, and the fact that the movie's two soundtracks have been flying off the shelves.

In many ways, the songs are like country music, with their descriptions of hard-scrabble lives, love found then lost, spouses who stray, painful deaths and a thousand other regrets.

But the Singaporean-ness of the lyrics make them especially poignant.

For instance, there are so many songs that deal with the buying of lottery tickets and the longing to win the big prize. Who in Singapore cannot relate to that?

One song, called One Million Dollars, talks about what the singer would do if he had that sum of money. Take a plane, he sings, eat sushi, eat spaghetti.

It sounds like the conversations I have with my friends when the Toto jackpot goes above $2 million and we pool our resources and have a bit of a flutter.

One of the first things I learnt from listening to the songs is that we Hokkiens like to sing about sad things.

How else to explain why every other song features the phrase 'koh lian' or 'koh lian tai', these being variations on the theme of pitiful?

Take the song Bad Times, which appears in both the movie soundtracks. In the first, there's a fast, 'techno' version that is quite forgettable.

But the 'emo' (short for emotional) version in the Volume 2 soundtrack, sung by Tan, really takes me back to the hard times everyone went through a few years ago, when Singapore was hit by the Asian Economic Crisis, Sars and the post 9/11 slump one after another.

It is odd listening to the song now, when the economy is booming and everybody is in celebration mode.

But the lament about how difficult it is to make a living in hard times and the warning to not spend foolishly is perhaps the kind of cautionary tale we need to take heed of in these heady times.

I've also learnt that nothing is too prosaic to be woven into song.

In a 'cha-cha' version of Last Breath, (you have to admit, it takes some chutzpah to put cha-cha into death), the singer talks about injections that cause hair fall, and having to lie in bed in pain all day. It all rhymes, too.

Yet another thing I've discovered is that there's no shame in borrowing.

There's a song called Money To Be Earned which features those instantly recognisable opening bars composed by Ennio Morricone for the spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. It made me laugh out loud when I heard it and then I wondered about the copyright issues.

I wondered too, about another song called Singapore Food Street, which is sung to the tune of another famous song, Shanghai Bund.

It has become one of my favourites because it is nothing more than a funny recitation of dishes ranging from satay and prawn noodles to chicken rice and rice dumplings.

I wonder if I can turn it into a ringtone for my mobile phone.

True, I'm such a Johnny Come Lately with these songs. But listening to them has made me stop resenting those noisy getai concerts near my block every time the Hungry Ghost Festival comes around.

I've also learnt that it's cool to be Hokkien. We might be a bit melancholic, but we're ever hopeful, we're resilient, we have a warped sense of humour and we can tolerate pain.

Even better, we can make it all rhyme.

hsueh@sph.com.sg