Thursday, November 02, 2006
hi, here's an essay i wrote for my non-fiction class last semester. it's still unpublished. hack away
My Rock and Roll LifestyleI normally like the smell of adobo. A whiff of it gets me smacking my lips and ready to eat. The problem was, the smell wasn’t coming from a hot boiling pot of the dish. I smelled it when I stepped into a windowless bathroom.
It’s a hard enough task to go to the bathroom half-drunk trying not to step on anything nasty on the floor. But I was also trying to hold my breath and cover my nose and mouth with my shirt to block out that adobo smell and shoot my pee into the toilet using my hearing so that I wouldn’t have to look down into the toilet and see someone’s adobo rice dinner swimming at me.
None of this worked, of course. Urine trajectory is a tricky thing after a few beers even when you’re looking. Hence the common Filipino male’s preference of walls over toilets in these situations. Using my ears wasn’t effective, and I had the creeping feeling that I might have been peeing on my shoes, so I took a peek. This peek had me looking at the adobo chunks and grains of rice that looked like they hadn’t even been chewed; it was as if someone just decided to dump some food into the toilet (isn’t it mind-boggling that some foods look almost the same regurgitated as they do going in?). Seeing that made me gag. Because I gagged, I lost hold of my shirt, which I had to grab quickly, lest it drop into the urine stream. That meant that there was nothing covering my nose and mouth, so I got a good whiff of the adobo, making me gag again.
I held my breath again, and soon as I could finish off peeing I lunged out of the bathroom; I’d rather let everyone in the bar see me zipping up than spend an extra second in the bathroom.
Just as I got a hold of my bearings and my breath, I saw my bandmates getting ready to get onstage. They were lugging their guitars and cords, and our drummer was already up there fixing the drum kit. I rushed to our table and got my bass, then proceeded to the stage. When we started playing, I could still smell that nasty adobo as if it were lurking somewhere in the back of my throat.
Funky bathrooms are never mentioned when you read about how cool rock and roll is.
It seems, like many dreams borne of Western thought, that the dream of becoming a rock star in the Philippines is a far cry from what one in the West could expect. Reading about great rock and roll bands one gets to know of the adventures of hallucinogenic drugs, life on the road, playing to tens of thousands of people, massive orgies, crazy barroom brawls, drunken escapades, and all other kinds of crazy things.
I learned to play the guitar when I was fifteen. I only took playing seriously a few years after. Those first years of guitar playing were done under that impression that it was cool, and that it would get me chicks. These days I have learned that though it may give you a few cool points, it rarely gets the chicks, unless you look really good in the first place. And I have also learned that referring to women as chicks further lessens the probability of getting chicks.
When I was in grade school, I found that I had little proficiency for musical instruments. I did learn to play the recorder. It’s a wind instrument that has an irritatingly high pitch; most people will know the sound of the recorder because it’s that goofy flute-like thing that they sell in mall stalls, most of the time the people selling it are playing it as muzak to the tunes of boy-band songs or current bubble-gum pop hits.
After the recorder, I was put in the bell choir. By that time it was also clear that I had no singing ability so while the other kids were in the vocal choir, us rejects were taught to play the bells. For each song you would be assigned different bells, the size of each determining the bell’s register. Playing was a matter of reading the sheet music and ringing the right bell at the right time. There wasn’t much skill involved but it did help to develop a sense of rhythm. However, like the recorder, bells were never going to instruments that would be considered cool. You can’t exactly rock out to bells.
This passing interest was replaced by an interest in hip-hop music. Living in LA during the time of the rise of gangsta rap, I got caught up in the fad, as even my white classmates did, even though we were living in the suburbs. Gangsta rap relied mostly on beat-boxing (done with your mouth), turntables, and sampling. At the time I had no idea what a sampler was, so I decided that maybe I could try to play the turntables. They looked easy enough.
When I saw a rap video or performance, there would be the rappers up front, and the turntable guy at the back. He’d be wearing big headphones and scratching on the records. I decided I could do that. I pulled out my big headphones and attached them to our record player at home. Then, since I didn’t have any records of my own, I took out my dad’s 70s rock records and started trying to scratch them. Nothing happened at first, so I kept scratching. Soon enough, I got the wrist action down to get that “Wiki-Wiki” sound like you’re cleaning a windshield with a squeegee, but then my dad came home. With a, “Putang ina, anong ginagawa mo sa mga plaka ko!” he ended my dismal attempt at becoming a turntablist.
My attention shifted from music to sports then. For the next few years I would forgo MTV for ESPN, spending afternoons collecting basketball cards, memorizing stats, and playing football and street hockey.
When I moved back to the Philippines the great burning question of identity, which my cousin addressed to me to assess my character was, “Hip hop ka ba, o metál?” Take note of the emphasis on the second syllable. You cannot be metal, you are metál.
I didn’t really know how to answer this. In my last school, a public high school, I had made the mistake of wearing a San Francisco 49ers jersey (it was red) and as a result had been mistaken for a member of a rival gang and chased home. Now I was confronted with rather unusual lines for taking sides, but I did not want to make any mistakes, alienating the only person my age who had spoken to me thus far. “Um, how come our neighborhood doesn’t have sidewalks? Where are people supposed to walk?”
This stumped my cousin appropriately, leaving the musical question in the air. We decided not to answer each other’s questions; the conversation ended with, “Where’s the nearest basketball court?” and my cousin answering, “Tara.”
The next time music would pop up would be when I had started school again, first time in a Filipino school. I was a sophomore and our class had been divided into groups, each group supposed to prepare a creative presentation for something or other.
I had no talents fit for creative presentations. My knowledge of sports statistics or the X-Men’s Phoenix saga was not going to be entertaining when the other groups had homosexuals ready to burst into elaborate Spice Girls-inspired dance numbers. To this day I can’t dance or act. So the other people in my group decided they would be playing as a band, and I could probably stand in the background or something. It was up to me. Or, they said, they could give me a crash course in guitar.
Normally, I would have said, Ok, whatever. But there is one thing that never fails to motivate me. In fact, it’s the reason behind most of the ill-planned, ill-considered things I do: women.
The chance at women worked on two levels in this situation: a) first was the great rock and roll promise that if you rock then you’ll become a chick magnet; and b) there was a girl that I had a crush on who was in the group. This meant that if I was there for the practices, then I could spend time with her.
As with most situations where I fall for the female motivator, I did not wind up with the girl. She didn’t wind up with anyone from our group; I can’t even remember if she finished the school year. I did, however, gain enough motivation to start learning the guitar.
My guitar-playing started on a faulty premise: If I learned to play guitar I could get girls. There were times when playing the right songs did get the girls to gather round, but it never resulted in more than that. In time though, playing the guitar, and finally finding that I was some good at playing the bass, became good enough reason to replace that false start.
Once I’d given up on the idea that I was playing for girls and fame and was in fact playing because I liked to play, I began to progress as a musician. I joined a succession of bands, playing anything from grunge to punk to metal to hardcore and rap-metal. Music was a way to express myself; self-expression in high school was mostly about getting your angst out, and what better way to get your angst out than thrashing around wildly with a guitar and screaming?
As the years passed I found myself exploring different kinds of music. As a college undergrad I worked as a music journalist. This gave me access to new music, as well as access to local musicians. When I’d do interviews, I would ask questions for the articles I would write and also get tips on how to improve my playing, or what I could study to broaden my musical imagination.
I played in classic rock cover bands to improve my playing skills. For a few weeks, I even fell in with a showband bound for Japan. I’m not sure if it was a conscious or subconscious thing, but things didn’t pull through when I failed to learn “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”
For some reason, I’ve stuck it out, nurturing that rock and roll dream. At present I seem to have hit the groove with the right band. We’ve gained some notoriety which always surprises me. I’ve been told that some of our songs have been turned into cell phone ringtones. This is surprising since we’ve yet to release our album. We’re only halfway through the recording process, but I’ve been told that bootleg copies of our performances are available online in both audio and video formats.
I still get surprised when we’re playing and people start singing along. I’d understand our friends, people who we force to watch our performances, knowing our songs. But strangers knowing our songs and singing them, that’s something.
Of course this hopeful spark of fame does not mean that we’re getting famous anytime soon. Nor does it mean that I am getting women from rocking out. The band’s stance is to offend as many people as possible, and we’re pretty good at it. This means that most of our groupies are male. There are various reasons, I suppose. But the easiest explanation for me is because you probably won’t be able to get girls to sing along to lines like, “”Wag kang sasama, kakantutin ka lang nila” or “wala ka nang inisip kundi sarili mo/ at ang vibrator na saging,” or to even just chant along to our hypnotic pop hit “Satan Rules.”
These days, even with this little crest of notoriety to ride, we are still subject to those things that they never tell you about when you start having rock and roll dreams. We’ll still be playing the same crummy bars with the same people who think it’s cool to look bored. And the bathrooms will always be detestable little portals to remind you that the rock and roll dreams are just that, dreams.
merchant of menace â¥
6:56 PM
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