“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite…
I don’t want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell…
I don’t ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart”
- The Police, Invisible Sun
My return had been derailed. The mental outline of this one was nearly complete, when, out of the blue, my father can’t raise himself from his bed early in the month of January—a distressing sign that something very wrong was afoot. No amount of prodding from my younger brother, who’s on vacation from Saudi Arabia, could convince him to go to the hospital. Just when I thought my situation has settled down, things took a turn for the worse anew. Aside from his hardship in walking, my father also lost his appetite and was coughing severely. But this time, I had no younger brother to help me.
My personal circumstance has somehow gone back to “normal” as my older sister nurses our father back to health so that he could reunite with our mother who’s always been under my care. This situation has given the opportunity to retrieve that outline and try to establish a new momentum to get back to my writing.
To regain that momentum which I initially established a few days after 2012 commenced, I had decided to digress from the usual topics I write about. I decided to intersperse my writing with something that’s very personal. This is also my approach to handle my inability to move around to gather information on the topics I wanted to dwell on. The temptation though to set this aside and write something on burning issues, like the certified best soap blockbuster in Philippine TV—the impeachment of the Supreme Court chief—is too hard to ignore. Or, on the stubborn decision of the Pampanga provincial government to return most of the operations of Ricardo P. Rodriguez Memorial Hospital from Bulaon Resettlement Center in the City of San Fernando—where its original catchment still stays—to its original site in Bacolor, where a Php26-million hospital building—but with no clear catchment—had been built even before pre-construction government regulatory requirements and permits had been secured. But I’ll snub these in the meantime especially now that I’m practically back on square one.
Like quite a number of youth activists—national democratic, to be specific—of my time, I grew up and spent hours listening to rock music. Unlike most, may be, the pleasure I derived from listening to this music genre hasn’t waned to this day. In fact, while starting on this one, Big Brother and the Holding Company were playing simultaneously in my desktop.
I discovered this shared predilection during unguarded casual conversation with some comrades of middle class background. At that time, we usually would not let out that we still indulged such passion for fear of being ridiculed by our other “hardliner” comrades. The expectation was we’re supposed to shed our bourgeois trappings and mold ourselves into ideal socialist men and women through our incessant and unwavering struggles and sacrifices to create a world devoid of exploitation, of man over other men, of one class over other classes, of one country over other countries.
The richer post-Flower Generation among us prided their complete collection of premier rock artists’ record albums. These vinyl LPs are now a prized catch avid collectors and rock enthusiasts would give an arm and leg to possess. Sadly, I lost the few that I had when our house was completely inundated by about 10 meters of lahars in 1994, an aftermath of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991.
Personally, I believed, it was rock music that led me to the national liberation movement. After drowning in all those mainstream rock music that dealt mainly with the angst of the youth since my high school days in Don Bosco Pampanga and capped by my hedonist existence during my stay in UP Los Baños, I was introduced and drawn to the underground—the term now is alternative—rock scene, especially to Pinoy Rock. Before long, though, this music was mainstreamed with the pioneering efforts and steadfast supports of the legendary AM station, DZRJ, the Rock of Manila. As Pepe Smith and the Juan dela Cruz Band, Resty Fabunan and the Maria Cafra, Edmund Fortuno and the Anakbayan and Sampaguita found acceptance and were played in “more easy listening” radio stations, I was lured to and captivated by folk-rock protest songs of Heber Bartolome and Banyuhay and Asin. It then dawned on me how potent folk and rock music, and pop music in general, in supporting the development of the creeping nationalism, especially among the young people, which at that time was more anti-Marcos dictatorship than anything else.
I became more convinced of this when I took my Humanities course that was handled by Ms. Jane Po, a non-conventional, UP College of Music-graduate instructor, whom I believed, also taught later in UC Berkeley and is now teaching in an American college. Instead of dealing solely with the “high arts” as other college professors would do, she expounded the importance of the “low arts”—including the lowly komiks that sell briskly in every street corner newsstand—in the development of Filipino culture. I never knew where to get and read that reference book on culture by Mao Tse-tung, which she cited at the start of our classes, to really understand what she was expounding and espousing. Moreover, mere possession of any Mao’s red books at that time was a sure ticket to the dictator’s dreaded stockade.
It was in one of her classes that I had my first taste of the real underground, not figuratively but literally, music—she played what she titled “Neps 1” and “Neps 2”—after we played samples of our musical preferences. (I played Jeff Beck’s “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers”, which she said had disjunct melody but only appeared to have one that’s conjunct because of Beck’s guitar playing style.) One of these, I found out later when I was with the national democratic movement, was “Tano”, one of the all-time favorites of youth activists of my time that bewailed the privation and injustice that hounded a typical Filipino peasant, which inevitably forced him to take up arms to correct the age-old political and socio-economic inequities that relegated him and his class to perpetual poverty and depravity. The songs were allegedly recorded in a NPA camp as evidenced by the chirring of crickets and other nocturnal insects in the background.
The turning point in this belief was when I heard the MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) concert album. Suddenly, there were these rock musicians who hardly directly sang anything about nuclear energy but were able to help hasten the building of consciousness of people, especially the young, worldwide about the dangers engendered by nuclear power. This despite the fact that, if my memory is not failing me, it was only John Hall, of the rock band Kansas, now a prominent leader of US Democratic representatives, that came out with a specific song on the “power of the sun” for the concert. It did not take long before a similar open concert in UP Los Baños as part of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant protest actions was staged. While trying to understand the issue, my readings led and made me understand the various issues plaguing our country which, in turn, eventually led me to the national democratic liberation movement. As my involvement in the liberation movement deepened, so was the number of rock stars espousing issues on social and political inequities grew, too.
As a regular fixture of anti-status quo mass actions from the Marcos to the Estrada administrations, I always looked forward to the performances of the “people’s artists” to break the monotony of the fiery speeches in all those rallies and demonstrations. The songs performed by these alternative musicians never failed to make me forget the fear and weariness these acts of protests have on me, particularly if the threat of violent dispersal stares you in the eye, so to speak. Where Chikoy Pura and the Jerks hit it big singing “Romantic Kill” during my hedonist existence in Los Baños, they were equally, if not a bigger, hit among wearied young and old activists belting out “Reklamo nang Reklamo” atop big 16-wheel cargo trucks during these mobilizations. It was indeed a nostalgic sight to behold old peasant leader Ka Memong Patayan in his 80s dancing in the streets to the infective loud beat of these protest songs after marching without rest the streets leading to Mendiola.
I had a hypothesis why my seemingly natural propensity to rock music, first as restless youth, later as a not-so-young activist and now as a young retiree. More than the pulsating hard beat, rock music provided me a vehicle to escape from the drudgery of growing up under the stifling grip of a very conservative upbringing and an expression of my teen rebelliousness. As I outgrown this self-centered rebelliousness, rock music had become the “official” music genre of the protest movement, at least, that’s how I saw and still see it. No other kind of music is more apt for protest movements more than folk and rock music as they appear natural medium to convey the sentiments of the enraged wronged crowd. And now, in my more sedate and sedentary existence, I may have listened more and more to classical, especially baroque, music but this is always unyieldingly accompanied by the need to cap this with a dose of that old classic rock-and-roll ditties of my youth to remind me that there are issues and injustices that have yet to be settled despite the passing of time. (30)
