01.13.2010
THAT JOKE ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE: 2009 IN MEMORIAM
ALDUS SANTOS CHEWS THE FAT WITH FELLOW MUSIC CRITIC ERWIN ROMULO AND DJ MIKEY ABOLA, AND, YEAH, WRITES ABOUT IT HERE.
I walked into the offices-cum-studios of Underground Radio 105.9 with both trepidation and excitement: I really didn’t know what I was going to babble on about. I, along with the notoriously difficult-to-please music critic Erwin Romulo and the painstakingly cute DJ-host Mikey Abola (also “Billy B.,” also the bass player for The Purplechickens and Arigato Hato), was slated to discuss 2009 in local music. But when I look back, I see typhoons that are too close to home. I see fucking murders. I see Francis Magalona slowly fading and eventually passing away, a picture of noontime-show vibrance and hiphop strut, leaving behind children both genetic and musical. His most obvious heir apparent is, of course, Aries Pollisco a.k.a. Gloc 9, whose Matrikula furthers his forever-vacillating placement between masa and craft-centric rap. But I digress. I’m not the first one to point this out, but perhaps no other year in the 2000s (so far) has local pop culture seen so many deaths: Anabel Bosch, who had a promising run with Analog that got prematurely aborted; Dondi Ledesma, bassist extraordinaire whose last publicly available work, Pepe Smith’s Idiosyncracies, only hinted at the greatness of his newer, lesser known prog rock stuff; Je Bautista, underground luminary best known for his work with Betrayed; Susan Fernandez-Magno, whom folk and protest will certainly miss in no small measure; Tara Santelices, independent musician, whose young body succumbed to a robber’s bullet; the entire Eguid family, who ran a resto musicians frequented after a maddeningly hunger-inducing saGuijo set, also murdered; film critic Alexis Tioseco (along with partner Nika Bohinc), whose writings on cinema and support for independent music were taken away forever by, once more, thieves; victims of Ondoy and Pepeng, who, if they were actual people, would be torturers worse than the Bond villains; the massacre at Ampatuan, Maguindanao, which tragically included in its ranks innocent (not to mention poorly paid) journalists; the displacement of citizens of Albay nearing Christmastime, fearing molten lava and ashfall; and many others that may not have passed my radar but happened nevertheless.
I do realize I spent an entire uninterrupted paragraph on deaths, and may have turned off those who want to start the new year with a bang, so to speak. I’m not sorry, and these “downers” defined the year for me and woke me up. Which is not to say I flat-out refused to appreciate what needed to be appreciated. I was, after all, one of the people who incessantly blew the horn about the Eraserheads’ The Final Set way before it happened on March 7, 2009; I was a Final Set cheerleader, there you go. You can see evidence of it—a whole campaign—in the archives of this very site. Erwin said something to the effect that, and I may be paraphrasing, it was the event that “made everything else less.” I concurred, saying, “Basically, if you were booked to play a bar gig somewhere else that night, you’re screwed.” The Eraserheads were not geniuses in technical terms, but they stood for something: they made bands “happening” again, after the efforts of the 80s—The Dawn, Ethnic Faces, et cetera—were quashed by soloists in the early 90s. Bidding their fans a proper farewell almost a decade after their dissolution was fun but, more importantly, symbolic: the Eraserheads gave themselves (and the 90s) a more-than-decent (albeit belated) burial. Luis Katigbak, who was supposed to join us for the year-end review show but got sick, weighed in (no pun intended) via e-mail: “The heyday of the Eraserheads was long gone before The Final Set, but it was a great reunion, not just for the band, but for everyone who attended the University of Pinoy Rock. It didn’t mark the end of an era so much as acknowledge, with both sadness and a smile, that we were that young and impassioned and united once.”
More than anything, however, I told the guys that the fact that original Filipino music is still being created, good or bad, was a good thing. Not waking up to a world that exclusively played Top 40 covers courtesy of Christian Bautista-or-whoever-else was something to be thankful for. Some of the album titles that got thrown around were: Outerhope’s lovely A Day for the Absent, Pasta Groove’s genre-bending The Distinktive Sounds of Pasta Groove, Zach Lucero’s infinitely singable Fall Crash Infect, Juan Pablo Dream’s soulful Juan Pablo Dream, Archipelago’s rock-solid Travel Advisory, and Musical O’s spacey Debutante, among others. Interesting releases by Us-2, Evil-0 (Dirty Debutantes) and Corporate Lo-Fi (The First Album) also deserve a couple of spins. The collaboration between Ely Buendia and the late Francis Magalona (once nicknamed as “The Sickos” project, but is smartly not called that anymore) was also unveiled via the iconic single “Higante.” The album, which is reportedly going to be called In Love and War, didn’t make the intended October 2009 release, but will hopefully see the light of day soon. One observation made about last year’s releases was that no single genre lorded it over—not emo, not dance punk, not senti rock—and that the Filipino listening public is starting to think more “in shuffle mode” (my expression) and less in longer forms (i.e., albums). Is this a bad thing? Let’s wait and see.
On the “disappointments” front come Francis Reyes’ departure from The Dawn and Rivermaya’s controversial name-wrangling, both propelled by fine argumentation by Mr. Romulo. Of the former, it has been suggested that, while Kenneth Ilagan may be a viable axeman, perhaps someone of the shredding variety may have worked better. Of the latter, meanwhile, it’s a little sad that matters not related to music-making have given the well-loved band a blow that’s going to be a bitch to recover from. In more practical terms, these matters also prevented the general public from at least trying to judge them on purely creative merits: Closest Thing to Heaven, which features exciting playing from Mike Elgar, among other things, got shelved for a long time during the debacle. Lizza Nakpil, who was booked to join us but failed to show up, would have cleared up some matters from her end (or not). Time will tell, I guess. However it plays out in the end, I’m happy new music nonetheless got made (name notwithstanding).
So, thank you for the music, 2009 (and thank you for bringing in Nine Inch Nails the first time and +/- a second time, not to mention making airfares cheap enough to fly out to neighboring countries like Singapore to catch seminal punk figures who now do bluegrass for fun), and fuck you for making us suffer deaths and such. And pardon my French, please.
