"Walk This Way": More musings about pop music

23 October 2012

World's Biggest Shoes

This post begins with a shoe sale. Marikina City, our newly adopted hometown, is known as the Shoe Capital of the Philippines since it produces a large number of shoes. The famous Shoe Museum that displays part of Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection is here. The world’s largest shoes are housed in the Marikina Shoe Gallery in nearby Riverbank mall (size 753). So we were not too surprised to discover this past weekend that there was a shoe festival going on at various locations throughout Marikina. Most of the festival, it seemed, revolved around the “Walk This Way” shoe sale. We saw banners for this all over the place, including the relatively quiet street near our apartment that borders a large cemetery.

Ad for shoe sale

Statues of carabao along Marikina River

            In part to investigate this shoe sale (both of us were in the market for a new pair since we packed lightly) and in part to finally explore the nearest big mall in our neighborhood, we walked along the Marikina River to SM City Marikina. We were greeted at the entrance with a giant green high-heeled shoe-cycle.

Walking to SM City Marikina across Marikina River

In front of SM City Marikina entrance

Just past the entrance, a band of six Filipinos were performing with at a deafening volume. Quite appropriately, when we entered they were playing Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,”  (it would have been more fun had they done Run-DMC’s version but no such luck). After this song, the leader began his patter for the seated audience and new arrivals, hawking the shoe sale and the SM brand. He and his band had clearly studied late 1960s James Brown quite closely; even his bassist was in on the act to add “yeah!” when appropriate. They transitioned into JB’s “I Feel Good” before continuing on with tunes recorded by African-American male singers in the late 1960s (The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, etc.). The singer kept his JB rasp, albeit toned down, for the rest of the set, even when performing one of Al Green’s biggest hits. The band was good and they were working hard, even in this cavernous room amidst a bunch of shoppers, wandering shoe mascots, and giant trampolines. This encounter made me think about the widespread and much-discussed idea of Filipino “mimicry.”

Care to buy some shoes?

entertainment next to the band

Much of the discourse about popular music in the Philippines centers on the trope of Filipinos as premier imitators, as dead ringers for American singers. A common move is to call somebody “the so-and-so of the Philippines.” The singer in the video above, for example, might be known as “the James Brown of the Philippines.” Nicknames like these have been around for quite some time, and are often embraced by the performers themselves. For example, Katy de la Cruz was often described as the “Sophie Tucker of the Philippines” during the 1920s. During the 1930s, Filipino radio stars with these sorts of nicknames would fool American tourists tuning in that a whole host of American singers had relocated to Manila.

The simple and obvious problem with this trope of imitation, though, is that it denies any sort of creative agency or thinking. This issue has been around for a long time. For example, in El Filibusterismo (1891), Rizal gives one of his Spanish characters the following opinion about Filipinos:

Since he [Don Custodio] professed to be a liberal he would, when he was asked what he thought of the natives, answer condescendingly that they were fit for mechanical work and the ‘imitative arts’ (by which he meant music, painting and sculpture)…(169).

A few pages later, Don Custodio expands upon this idea to his colleague:

“Nothing can be original, nothing should be allowed to be original, as far as the natives are concerned. Do you follow me? I have a great liking for them, but one must not praise them for anything; that only encourages and spoils them (170).”

This kind of colonial mentality of racial others mechanically imitating forms of music or art has been used all over the world (for example, read any descriptions of slave music in the U.S.).

Whiteman

Of course, when a musician embraces such a title like “The James Brown of the Philippines,” it could also be seen as a marketing strategy, a way to assure audiences of a certain quality and content of their performance. In the 1920s, for example, many musicians hoped to draw on the celebrity of Paul Whiteman to find more work. Whiteman lent his own name to satellite bands that traveled around the U.S. and worked on Atlantic cruise ships. Other musicians took his name, too. Among them were the Paul Whiteman of the West (Jean Goldkette), the Paul Whiteman of New England (the Starita Brothers), the Paul Whiteman of the East (Jack Carter), and the Paul Whiteman of the Orient (Whitey Smith). Instead of merely imitating Whiteman, these musicians were probably just using his name as a point of reference to listeners.

Still, there is a difference between calling someone “the so-and-so of the Philippines” and having a musician adopt that nickname for their own gain. I’m on the lookout here for this sort of language and have already found many cases where people embrace the idea that Filipinos have some innate talent for singing American songs.