I wonder how the disillusionment over the recent presidential elections will affect the millions of young people who gave their all to an ideal? Will the pain turn into anger? Will the anger prod them to seek quick answers? Will they get impatient over the slow burn of an NGO program? Will the poll loss eventually radicalize them?
They sang to heart “Liwanag sa Dilim.” Kaya ba nilang hawiin ang maitim ng ulap? May mangyayari ba kapag sumigaw sila sa hangin? Do they have the power to part the dark clouds? Will they get results by hollering at the wind?
People my age had “Ang Bayan Ko” in the 70s and then, again, in the 80s. It is a song of lamentation that has an undertone of seething emotions. Somehow, singing them assuaged our frustrations simply because we were able to express ourselves.
But during the recent campaign, not only was there just the particular song of the Rivermaya, as interpreted so soulfully by Yeng Constantino, but a dozen or so other compositions that expressed the youth’s inner hopes and dreams. Most of them were joyful. Will those songs of innocence, some wavering at the edge of naivete, be supplanted by anthems of awakening?
How will they fit into this frenzy over BTS or the other Korean singers or songs, or Taylor Swift or the Stray Cats? How will entertainment phase in to enlightenment? If such is the logical order.
The necks of our generation, as the Filipino generation preceding and even the generations succeeding, were tied to the American dream. We mourned the death of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King as if they were our own because, wrongly or rightly, we identified with our white brothers. We considered America as our home, and carrying a blue passport was (still is?) the ultimate honor.
America had a hand in Marcos Senior’s prolonged reign as in his dramatic fall. US President Ronald Reagan, a former actor, was chummy with the dictator until he was forced to let him go.
My own pubescence was best expressed also through the American dream of surfs, powerful cars, and girls in bikinis as sang by The Beach Boys. I took refuge in “In My Room” and basked in “The Warmth of the Sun,” the latter song, I later found out, was not a paean to summer but about despair because Brian Wilson (b. June 20) and Mike Love, the songwriters were reportedly deeply affected by the assassination in Dallas, Texas.
Republican Reagan declared that The Beach Boys was “The American Band” as would Democrat Bill Clinton agree years later. The group hugged the music charts in the mid-60s until Great Britain’s The Beatles came to burst their balloon. It was a friendly world war, although the demand on creativity frayed the protagonists’ nerves. When The Beatles came out with the trailblazing The Rubber Soul, The Beach Boys responded with the album Pet Sounds, which in turn got a fatal one-two punch in Revolver and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band from the Beatles. Smile, the Beach Boys retort, got knocked off. Paul McCartney (b. June 18) acknowledges that this would have been a great Beach Boys album.
The innocent, so-called bubblegum songs were giving way to more sophisticated compositions, with more complex musical arrangements where whole studios, with their mixers and armory of talents, were wielded as the instruments. Pop songs became more layered, with a little push from psychedelia.
They delved deeply in individual psyches and festering social issues. For instance, despite their bandmates’ resistance, John Lennon insisted on his piece “Revolution” and Brian Wilson with his “Cabinessence.” They were indicators of our own growth. Or struggles, if you may.
“Cabinessence” was meant to prick the American conscience over their nation’s ghastly period of slavery and racial discrimination, while “Revolution” talks about effecting change the peaceful way, a prelude to Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance” and “Imagine.”
The world was convulsing in the ‘60s and on to the 70s. The youth were taking to the streets. The young all over the world were fed up with politicians and the Establishment, plus the overstretched Vietnam war. Some were espousing free love and experimenting with drugs.
The Filipino youth were being emboldened to affect their own coda of change. “Times were a changing,” intoned the folk singer Bob Dylan, one of the influencers of The Beatles - in style and in substance. Cough.
Will we be seeing a cycle in the Philippines, now that our own pop music has found a more vivid identity, with more songs commenting on social ills? Is there bitterness arising among today’s Filipino youth over the farce and the lies prevailing in our society?
Let us pick up lessons from our teenagers, and the elders must be watchful of how songs evolve. Not because these “kids” have stopped crying can we say that everything is all right. All the more we should be wary when the surface of the water has become calm and placid.