What A Time To be a Cebu Music Fan
Cebu Music from '90s Rock and Reggae to Bisrock and Vispop, plus (inevitably) some language politics.
This was originally published on storiesofcebu.com back in 2016 and is now part of the book The Invisible Philippine War and Other Essays.
It is fascinating how a few seconds of a song can bring you back decades.
I was in the backseat of a cab, one of my regular commutes, when I heard the song. It was background music, one of those well-polished pop songs that sound so normal, you almost don’t notice it.
Then the vocalist started singing. At first it did not make sense. It was so strange that my ears had to float it to the surface of my consciousness.
It was like realizing a stranger is actually a friend you have not seen in years. It was a delicious surprise. The lyrics suddenly made sense. The song was in my mother tongue, Cebuano.
My heart started to beat faster, and I was suddenly back to long-forgotten concerts in ‘90s Cebu.
At the center of my excitement was one question.
Has the time finally arrived?
Cebu Rock, Circa 1997
The earliest concert I remember was for the landmark rock anthology “Showground,” in some hall near Fuente.
I did my first and only stage dive at that concert. In those early years, we had to engineer it a bit. The landing pad of raised hands was only those of my high school buddies. The rest of the crowd were just standing and watching. As we triumphantly walked away from the stage after a set, some girl quipped to “let the animals pass through.” Perhaps we were the only ones who watched videos of Pearl Jam and Nirvana concerts and stupid enough to emulate them.
I also remember that awkwardly laid-out Yano and Eheads concert in Abellana stadium. The stage was in the middle of the football field, and the audience was in the bleachers. That was before the Eheads became icons, so it was possible to fit everyone comfortably in a few sections. No one was allowed in the field, and this produced this strange empty space between the bands and the people.
As several opening acts came and went, a crowd grew right in front of the stage, heaving up and down with the music. People got there with one of two ways you get through barriers in Cebu: you are well-connected enough to get through the gate, or you are ballsy enough to jump the fifteen feet between the ground and the bleachers, straight into the rattan batons of the barangay tanods.
The Razorback and Wolfgang concert in Padi’s Point Ayala was more permissive. We were moshing and headbanging right in front of the small stage, while the people who were there to see and to be seen, were mingling and giggling in the bar, away from the barbarians.
At one point, Paco Larrañaga, who later on became the center of one of Cebu’s most controversial legal battles, walked through the pit, and effortlessly shoved us away. He was a large and powerful man, half-Basque and half-Osmeña, and he was the kingpin of the young Cebuano world at that time. In a primal and wordless language we all understood, he encouraged us to not go too wild with our moshing. We complied. For around five minutes. Clearly, this man also did not watch Pearl Jam concerts.
Cebu Reggae
Something surprising happened in Cebu’s music scene in the latter part of the ‘90s.
Modern Cebu’s music trends have always been distant echoes of the United States. New wave, punk, heavy metal, grunge, hip-hop, electronic dance music — all these sprouted little scenes in Cebu following their popularity in the US. This makes sense, given the pervasiveness of American cultural influence on the Philippines.
The unexpected and sudden rise of reggae bucked this pattern.
Cebu street lore tells us that the appreciation for reggae was incubated for years in the Fine Arts Department of UP Cebu. Later on, it spread throughout Cebu’s universities and high schools, and eventually went mainstream.
At its height, the city was throbbing with annual reggae festivals, reggae hours on local radio, and countless reggae concerts. People wore red, gold and green, grew dreadlocks and dangled ethnic burloloy. Urbandub, Cebu music’s biggest commercial success, came from this Cambrian explosion.
Here’s my pet theory. The foundational rhythm of reggae came from the waves of the seas of Jamaica. The tropical weather allowed them countless nights of music and merrymaking on the shore, singing of friendship and heartbreaks and social justice in the light and the crackling of the bonfire, amidst the rhythm of lapping waves.
The same experience and the same rhythm runs through the collective consciousness of Cebu. We are told that the Sinulog dance is also patterned after waves. Not surprisingly, this dance is strikingly similar to skanking (that dance you do to the sound of reggae). Reggae feels like the soundtrack of our lives here in Cebu, an island practically all seashore, just like Jamaica.
From Imitation to Originality
Back in the day, we were aping the Jamaicans the way kids now ape today’s most popular music groups — sometimes to a comical extreme. I remember a reggae concert in one of the incarnations of those two or three artsy bars on Gorordo Avenue. There were guys in dreadlocks, posters of King Haile Selassie, some guy preaching the Rastafarian religion in between sets (in a Jamaican accent, of course), and people openly smoking ganja (good thing Duterte wasn’t president back then).
Imitation is probably just a phase that artists and their audience go through. During that time, there was this band called Frank! (with an exclamation point). They sounded to me like a Soundgarden clone, which was one reason I liked their music.
After a decade of near silence, the frontman of Frank! came back with a band called Franco. To me, their first album is a rich and masterfully crafted brew whose ingredients are the sounds of the Cebu music scene of my teenage years. At the same time, you could hear that they have found their own voice.
(By the way, check out the last song of that album, that ode to friendship, and you will hear the rhythm nature gifted to Cebu and Jamaica).
The Cebu music scene appears to collectively follow the same journey from imitation to confident originality. Reggae gave Cebu a taste of going off-script. What happened next is obvious in hindsight. Singing with your own voice quite literally means singing with your own language.
First came Bisrock, the bastard son of the Cebu music scene. Afterward came his popular sister, Vispop.
Before we go there, let’s try to answer this question: why the hell did it take so long?
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme
Today, we take songs in Filipino for granted. However, we did not always have this abundance of popular music in the national language.
My mother spent some of her teenage years in Manila. ‘90s Cebu to me is ‘70s Manila to her (her favorite was a group called the New Minstrels). She says there was a time when mainstream artists in Manila were singing in English rather than in Tagalog.
The Philippines, of course, has a long history of folk songs and church songs in each of the major local languages. It was only in the ‘70s, however, that we had an urban genre of original music written in vernacular. People call it Manila Sound.
I imagine this was the transition from imitation of American music to the thoroughly Filipino music of ’80s OPM. The usual example of Manila Sound is Hotdog’s “Manila,” which is written in a mix of English and Manileño Tagalog. (The underground, as always, was ahead of its time. Asin, for instance, was deep in Tagalog since the 70’s).
The genre’s name encapsulates its aspirations. Original Pinoy Music was a concerted effort by artists and record labels in the ’80s to establish an actual music industry.
They were successful. ’90s bands like the Eraserheads and Yano sound to me like they grew up listening to local music. They riff on established local musical tropes rather than simply translating an American genre to Tagalog.
There were forces greater than the music industry that led to this blossoming of music in Filipino. Like many new nation-states, 20th century Philippines followed the template of “one nation; one language” in its grand project of nation-building. Tagalog was chosen by the Commonwealth government of 1937 as the basis of the national language. By the time of my generation, college graduates underwent an average of fourteen years of training in the national language.
I am grateful that we have this rich body of music in at least one local language. Like many non-Tagalogs, I must also admit that I’m a bit bitter that I received zero formal education in my mother tongue and that there was no state-sponsored project to promote my language, and consequently hardly any music in Cebuano, beyond Yoyoy and Max Surban.
Until Bisrock.
Pakyu
Legislation is just one barrier to Filipino music with more diverse languages. A more insidious challenge is the baggage that people have with their vernacular.
My go-to explanation now for human behavior is the framework of evolutionary psychology. It goes like this when applied to the hierarchy of languages in our heads. There is a survival advantage in the ability to identify the status of people in a society (this allows one to better negotiate structures of power, which in the tribe could mean life or death). There is also a reproductive advantage in the ability to signal status. Evolution gave us a sixth sense, an instinct for status almost impossible to turn off.
In sociolinguistics, there is a concept of “prestige language.” Certain languages signal status. Latin, for instance, was the prestige language of medieval England, signaling access to education and power. I don’t know what the opposite of a prestige language is, but that was the status of Binisaya, at least in my childhood.
Most philosophies and religions have tools to allow people to overcome these tendencies. Models of enlightenment like St. Francis of Assisi or the Buddha show us how transcendent love or transcendent detachment allows one to treat everyone with dignity, from your maid to your mayor.
However, when faced with the sentiment that “Bisaya so eewww,” there is perhaps a more appropriate response. One can simply evoke the magic word: “Pakyu.”
Bisrock is the musical equivalent of Pakyu.
In my elementary days, we were punished for “speaking in dialect.” I imagine Bisrockers grew up in a similar environment.
So when an FM radio disk jockey by the name of DJ Ram (God rest his soul) started exclusively playing rock music in Cebuano, it was as if a dam holding back pent-up Bisaya voices broke and ushered in a wonderful flood of Pakyu.
I remember people complaining about the quality of Bisrock music. I think we have been a bit spoiled. The music that normally reaches us has been filtered by several gatekeepers — from producers to DJs.
For every Eraserheads, there are thousands of Pinoy rock bands who get filtered out by the music industry. For every Missing Filemon, there also had to be a horde of misbegotten Bisrock bands. The difference was that we got to hear them.
DJ Ram discovered a hunger for music in Binisaya. The volume of songs at that time was simply too thin for him to be picky, given the format of FM Radio. It also fit the ethos of punk rock to just let the floodgates open.
Bisrock was like those punks who jumped from the bleachers in that weird Eheads concert in Abellana. There was a lot of rawness and vulgarity, but perhaps that was needed to break the unspoken taboo on singing with the Cebuano language.
A decade later, the main entrance was already open for Vispop. As if to atone for the barbarity of its predecessor, Vispop came in impeccably curated, polished, and professional. It also came at a time of rapid economic growth in Cebu.
Millionaire in Shorts
All of us will probably be happier if we try out youthful rebellion and saintly transcendence. For the purpose of overcoming biases against Binisaya, however, this might be a bit overkill. I think there is a third and easier way for Cebu.
I have a friend from Tacloban who is now a top sales guy for BMW Cebu. He told me that he was surprised that his clients are not English-speaking guys in tailored suits. They are guys in shorts who call him “bai.”
If he had grown up in Cebu, he would have been familiar with the archetype of the Millionaire in Shorts. While nuns, NPA rebels, and starving artists free themselves from capitalistic status-seeking by opting out of it, these guys feel that they have already won the game, or at least play it on a different level. They are the local version of the Silicon Valley mogul in a hoodie.
Cebu has had immense material progress in the past decades. Will this prosperity merely bring us taller buildings, swankier restaurants, and faster cars (that crawl in the worsening traffic), just like any other third-world city?
I hope Cebu could collectively be a Millionaire in Shorts instead, to play the game at a higher level, and finally let go of those silly insecurities with its native tongue.
To Grow Up with Vispop
What a great time to be a fan in Cebu. If we look back — or listen back — to Cebu’s urban music history — from Mango Jam, to Showground, to Cebu reggae, to Bisrock, to Vispop — we could hear an accelerating progression toward craftsmanship that could compete globally, and toward rootedness free of pretension and insecurity.
The local music scene’s leading voice of today — Vispop — is Cebu’s OPM moment. It is an industry coming together and educating its audience in the appreciation of its heritage.
There are kids in Cebu now who will grow up listening to songs in their native tongue. It will be as normal to them as songs in English and Tagalog. They will not have any of the baggage of earlier generations. As Cebu becomes more cosmopolitan, perhaps their musical vocabulary would even include songs in Ilonggo, Waray-waray, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, etc.
Music itself will be the education in our mother tongue that the state failed or refused to give.
Some of these kids will be gifted with suffering, joy, obsession, or whatever it takes to create music. They will riff on local tropes rather than just translating American genres to Cebuano.
Their audience will likewise be educated enough to catch their allusions to songs from Cebu’s music history.
The same audience will be mature enough to support their artists and allow them to pursue their craft without having to hustle all the damn time.
They will sing with their own voice, in their own language.
I can’t wait to listen to their music.