U.S. pop singer Demi Lovato passed through Singapore for a one-night engagement at the Hard Rock Hotel in Resorts World Sentosa on Monday.
After starring in the Disney film Camp Rock and now serving as a judge on the American version of the televised music competition program X Factor (alongside the “gleefully snarky” Simon Cowell) the 20-year-old Lovato reinvented herself as a diva and role model to young women around the world. Some of her hits include ‘Skyscraper’, ‘Give Your Heart a Break’ and ‘Heart Attack’, which was released ahead of schedule in February.
Speaking about her career to date, the starlet mixed with Singaporean media on Monday afternoon and received a crash-course in Singlish (a Creole version of English spoken in Singapore) from MediaCorp Radio 987FM DJ Divian Nair. Lovato quickly put her newfound Singlish vocabulary to use.
"It ('Heart Attack’) was leaked early, so we weren't actually going to release it until a week later,” she told Channel News Asia. “We decided, since it's already out there, we might as well release it…. None of us were expecting the success that it got so quickly because it had no promotion and it did so well, so I was really 'shiok' about it."
According to an article published in South China Morning Post, ‘shiok’ is slang for “delicious,” as was picked up by the father-son authorial team Terry Tan and Christopher Tan, alongside David Thompson and Edmond Ho, who together penned a Singaporean recipe book titled Shiok!: Exciting Tropical Asian Flavors. The authors wrote that the term can also be used more broadly to describe something that is “sublime, unutterably wonderful, greatly more than satisfactory in all ways, unsurpassingly good.”
But the road hasn’t been easy for Lovato, who has struggled with bulimia, bipolar disorder, self injury and addiction – her recovery is chronicled in the MTV documentary Stay Strong. What has brought her to the point where she can confidently say that she feels ‘shiok’ about things?
“In this industry, a lot of people tell you yes, yes, yes and nobody will stand up to you and tell you you're doing something wrong because they don't want to get fired," Lovato told Yahoo Singapore. "I don't have people like that around me. I have friends who have my best interests at heart and I spend a lot of time with my family."
She added, "When I speak up about my issues I want to make sure I set a place where girls know they can talk about it, and don't have to struggle about it anymore."