Kapihan sa Kanto

The truth is, I'm no anthropologist and I can't be scientific about my observations on Philippine culture. But I am opinionated. So.

Now about Nyoy Volante and the Mannos: I heard their version of Al Jarreau's Spain earlier today and it wasn't bad at all. Actually, their version of Apo Hiking Society's Panalangin is interestingly original, too.

Like everybody else, I take pleasure in looking down on the lot of artists that have sprung from the womb of Jam 88.3 with guitar in hand and wimpy voice intact. Oh you know, the likes of Paolo Santos and Jimmy Bondoc. Yes, I know you hate them, too... while storing a couple dozen downloaded mp3s of them in your computer, or belting out that heart-wrenching we just have to say our love was true but has now become a lie in the car when the song comes on, or looking up the lyrics of some of the songs you've heard them play because you realized, oh yeah that's the song I've always liked but completely forgot about till now!, only to say to everyone else that you absolutely love the original version better and that theirs is an utter sacrilege. Still, it can be proved that you downloaded both versions.

After a while, being mean to them gets stale. Whether you admit it or not, their brand of music isn't so foreign to us, neither is it a genre we don't like. The acoustic style of Paolo Santos and Nyoy Volante reminds me of the harana: a guy picking up a guitar and strumming it to the tune of some lovelorn song with a foolish grin on his face. Even the trio of MYMP and other such unplugged bands sounds close to home for me: a couple of people hanging out, singing to pass the time -- that sort of thing can be found anywhere from your high school's hallways to your college tambayan to the nearest karaoke place. Let's face it, in our country, the guitar is the most accessible instrument (next to the videoke). The guitar is everywhere, the guitar can be really cheap, and the tabs for it, in the form of the favorite song hits, are everywhere. In high school, practically every guy in class could hold a guitar's body and wring its neck to squeeze out some bleeding Side A song to show off to the girls.

So the antagonism of the Paolo Santos genre is really quite unfounded. We keep hating him for it even though it's actually a genre that does not belong to him: it was already there when he stumbled into it out of, perhaps, necessity. Who knows why Paolo Santos chose the acoustic sound to define and stereotype himself with? Maybe nobody took him into their band, and nobody joined the one he was starting up. Then, nobody probably wanted to do back-up vocals for someone who didn't look like he should be at the front of the stage. So the only one to give him a break was a radio station, which made sense to everyone when he became a hit and the TV stations tried to present him to the audience and sustain his presence on the audio-visual medium... to no avail.

Hence, the one-man acoustic style.

As for us, the discriminating music lovers: why would we boycott such a music that is actually very understandable for us as a society? Probably because these guys with guitars are too ugly to be so popular, maybe it's the voice, maybe it's just not right when one of them practically plagiarizes John Mayer's Your Body is a Wonderland.

Or maybe we just can't admit that the favorite hobby of the tambays of our generation is actually that one stroke of genius we hadn't thought about first -- and now they're a hit? I mean, who would've thought that something so simple and so musical-talent-not-required would be up there in the limelight, downloadable and sing-alongable on the car radio, while we who are such incredibly talented human beings with an opinion for everything including them are still at the bottom of the pile -- downloading and singing along.