Popular music and the guitar have always had a relationship that somehow necessitated each other for either to exist. The guitar’s history goes back to the lute, which was the instrument of choice of bards and traveling musicians whose livelihoods were largely provided by commoners who had some change to put in the now-idiomatic hat that got passed around. One could argue that the arrival of the six-stringed instrument also marked the beginning of popular music, as art music was clearly differentiated from the former by its audience (which was the royal court and, eventually, the living rooms of patrons), its manner of recording (which carries with it a certain sense of one needing to be learned enough to decipher and conscribe music with), and the instruments for which such music was written (classical music for guitar was a relatively recent phenomenon, and had only acquired similar stature with the advent of Andres Segovia and his peers). The new instrument afforded the vagabond musician both the convenience of being able to carry it around, as well as the accessibility and affordability of oft-replaced parts (as strings were made of sheep gut) while providing enough tools to express relatively complex musical ideas, particularly those involving harmony, which was quite a new invention during the time.

Its amplification and the birth of rock-and-roll shortly after only affirm this symbiotic coexistence. Stories such as those involving Link Wray driving a knife into his speaker cones to produce the first documented example of a distorted electric guitar and the branding of Dylan as a heretic and a traitor (this was a time when the folk music audience was still closely identified with the idea of a “community” and not as part of the panoply of popular music) when he and his band wielded electric instruments at Newport in 1965 only reinforces the notion that had the electric guitar not been invented, popular music as we know it would have developed quite differently.

A few days ago, I was waxing nostalgic about how much time I had when I was younger to play guitar and learn new things from songs I found myself intently listening to on the radio. Recollection soon turned to meandering and led me to think about those songs that made me want to pick up my instrument and cop them, if only to learn just the riff. Looking back, I believe it was primarily because they were being driven by—no, they were standing on the bedrock of a great guitar riff that a young lad learning the guitar found them to be interesting and inspirational. Thus, here is a quick survey of what in my opinion are some of the most interesting guitar riffs in OPM.

The Dawn: “Iisang Bangka Tayo” (1992)

Once the theme for a beer TVC, “Iisang Bangka Tayo” stands out as one of those songs that remind me why the moniker “the U2 of the Malayan race” with which the band was tagged is both fatuous and insulting (to The Dawn) at the same time. Clearly, the riff is an attempt to complement the song’s lyrical themes of flying and soaring through, well, notes in the high register, which it does successfully without sounding camp. When placed against guitar riffs from the same period, Francis Reyes’ genius stands out as a prime example of that which separates the timeless from the dated.

Rivermaya: “Kisapmata” (1996)

“Kisapmata” marked Rico Blanco’s first attempts to be a full-time guitarist for the band after Perf de Castro left the group. By this time, the snobbery towards flashy guitar playing brought upon by grunge had already arrived in Philippine shores and the audacity to open a song with an arpeggiated phrase and play a guitar solo in it was admirable. Never mind the fact that the song ran its verses and choruses on pretty much a strummy affair; the la-re-la that opens the song is an indelible mark it could not do without.

Juan de la Cruz: “Mamasyal sa Pilipinas” (1973)

Rizal Underground: “Sabado Nights” (1994)

Interestingly, my first encounter with this riff did not involve the JDLC number above. Rather, it coincided with my discovery that “hot,” alongside “cute” and “beautiful,” was a valid and equally useful adjective for a woman. The “Sabado Nights” advert—which featured Ina Raymundo, my first example of the newly-learned adjective—had Rizal Underground’s song of the same name as a theme. The said song carried the riff from JDLC’s “Mamasyal  sa Pilipinas,” a fact I would only learn about six years after, when I bought my first JDLC record on CD. I am not certain whether there have been any legal gesticulations surrounding these two numbers, but I decided to include them in this list as the temptation to say that the riff had enough potency to carry not one but two equally memorable songs in the OPM oeuvre was hard to resist. (Marco Harder)