One of the first things
that bombarded our ears when we arrived in Manila was the sound of traffic.
Tricycles, jeepneys, cars, and trucks all make their presence known through honking. When we moved to our neighborhood in Barangka, Marikina City, these
sounds were replaced with the shouts of playing children and roosters crowing, all echoing through the narrow alleyways. Karaoke performers nearby and the church next door add to the mix, as do the bells of the garbage trucks and the shouts of the food vendors on
the street: “Taho! Taho!”
When we first walked into our little nearby shopping center,
Riverbanks, the sounds of music nearly overwhelmed us. There was a man who set up a card
table next to the entrance and was hawking lo-fi dance remixes of various
songs, including a Casio drum track added to Adele’s latest hits (Not quite as
professional as this version).
Inside, all the stores have their own sound systems going. The first time we
walked into the mall it felt like we were being assaulted by sound. We’re able
to tune it out now (kind of like how, in River Town, Peter Hessler describes the process in which the constant honking of cars in
Fuling, China gradually became mute. Hessler writes that he had so completely
tuned them out that he only noticed them again when his dad visited and
complained about all the noise). We’ve traveled to various malls near Marikina
to pick up supplies and the noise level is almost always the same.
Two things jumped out at me from this wash of sound: the
steady stream of Christmas songs that started at the beginning of September,
and the ubiquity of “Call Me Maybe.” The Christmas songs in September, as well as the Christmas displays and long Christmas season, are a subject for another post (we've mentioned some things here and here ), but I just want to pause to note that we have heard some rather strange
holiday songs at our local Save-More grocery store: two notable ones are The
Chipmunks version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with various celebrity
cameos, and a mash-up of Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girl” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” I definitely did not see that one coming...
While these Christmas songs seem to be everywhere already,
we definitely can’t escape “Call Me Maybe.” It doesn’t quite seem to have made
it to the karaoke playlists yet since singers in our neighborhood tend to favor Whitney Houston and Broadway musicals like “West Side Story”, but
any time we walk into a public building we seem to hear, somewhere in the
background, “Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy…”
The ubiquity of this Canadian pop song made me start
thinking about the circulation of popular music from North America to the
Philippines over a hundred yeas ago. Last year I gave a paper about the global movements of “Hiawatha,” a song that was the most popular
tune in the U.S. during the summer of 1904. Like “Call Me Maybe” today, “Hiawatha” saturated the atmosphere of Manila in
1904-1905. In my paper, I was able to trace the movement of this song from the
United States, where it became so well-known that one person who was sick of
hearing it burned down a record factory where the record was being
pressed. “Hiawatha” made it to London, where it was similarly irresistible,
and then followed the shipping channels through the Suez Canal to India, Sri
Lanka, and Singapore (I also found people complaining about hearing it too
often in Liberia). “Hiawatha” probably made it first to the
Philippines via the West Coast of the U.S but the most complete description of
the song’s presence in Manila comes from an English woman who had first heard
the song back in Europe.
While many scholars in
the social sciences posit a distinct break in the 1980s towards a new level and
form of globalization, seen in ethnomusicology in some of the early scholarship
on world music in the 1990s, there have been many critiques of the common claim
that the internet, as well as the implementation of neoliberal economic policies
and new trade agreements, have really brought about a startling new mode of
global circulation of popular culture and consumer goods (See Andrew Jones' chapter on the rise of the gramophone in China for a concise critique of
Appadurai on this topic, esp. pp. 57-8). The meanings and methods by which
popular music circulated is certainly different (while neoliberalism can be
understood as a kind of economic imperialism it differs dramatically from the
actual colonialism of the pre-WWII period in Asia) but hearing “Call Me Maybe”
multiple times a day reminds me that what I’m hearing is nothing new.
The other thing we’ve heard that have brought my research to
life was the sound of a brass band. One Saturday morning, though, we heard the
sounds of “76 Trombones” played by a band coming in over the mechanical hum of
our air conditioner. They were practicing in the cemetery near our apartment (Can anyone help me identify the song I recorded here? [update: thanks to replies, we've identified this as the official song of the U.S. army, the "Cassion song." Mighty interesting that they're playing this...can you imagine a brass band in the U.S. playing the official song of another country's army?)
Brass bands have been a main feature of public events in the
Philippines since well before the Americans arrived in 1898. In Philippine
national hero’s Jose Rizal’s incendiary indictment of the Catholic church and Spain’s
colonial policies in 1887’s Noli Me Tangere, a careful read reveals the sounds of brass bands playing at fiestas and town
gatherings throughout the novel. These bands are a legacy of Spanish colonialism and countless
visitors in the 1800s mention the presence of a brass band in every small town
they visit.
One of the main bands to help spread the sounds of U.S.
popular music in the early 20th century Manila was the Philippine Constabulary Band, a group of Filipino musicians led by the African-American
conductor Walter H. Loving. They gave weekly free concerts in Manila’s main
outdoor park, the Luneta. These events were well attended by all classes of
society and by the 1920s the concerts were also broadcast over the radio.
Normally their programs would consist of selections from operas, marches, and
one or two popular songs. I’ve only been able to locate a very few
examples of their early recordings, including a 1910 version of an old Filipino standard. While it seems as though brass bands are no longer a main-stay in Manila, we've heard from others
that the tradition is still alive and well in smaller towns, especially down in
Bohol.
In short, it’s been
interesting to keep our ears attuned to Metro Manila, version 2012, while keeping
the sounds of previous decades in mind. It certainly helps to put Miss Carly
Rae in perspective.
