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Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Obenieta: Puff music
By Myke U. Obenieta
SOUND OF MOSAIC
In the end, the Bisdaks who jam-packed the grand ballroom of Waterfront Hotel last Friday night for the 22nd Cebu Popular Music Festival got their voices heard. So clear, the audience’s decision. Sharp enough to prick into bursts of air all the bubbles of great expectation.
Nay! Or so they resounded in response to a consensus call whether or not there would be any competition next year. Instead, the 2005 event will showcase the Best of Pop, featuring the past winners in the annual celebration of Cebuano music-making.
There’s no dearth, no doubt, of listeners to lyrics and tunes naturally inato. Proof-positive, the chock-a-block crowd at the Waterfront. But if they were hot about discovering the next immortal Cebuano song, how come they were lukewarm at the chance of yet another competition?
All that jazz to jack up popular support for the “music of our blood” deserves a choir of commendation, all right. Even the festival organizers, bless them, have coughed up cash prizes by the bushel. And a local recording company, Soundtraxx Production, has not only come up with a CD album of the this year’s entries but has been seizing the lapels of radio stations to give these songs ample playtime. Well and good.
So why is it that either Bayani Agabayani or Viva Hot Babes has been getting us all ears? If the festival’s products are pop, how come these don’t prevail against the fluff of “Otso-otso” and “Bulaklak?”
Though there’s nothing new under the sun, freshness still matters in the marketplace of sound. And though “Otso-otso” and “Bulaklak” may not be whiffs of fresh musical air, they’re no blast of tranquilizers either. If simplicity were a virtue, “Otso-otso” takes the cake with the modesty of its lyrics, “One plus one equals two…” And wouldn’t you deem it devilishly clever that a children’s limerick like “Bulaklak” is loaded with double entendres that will make Freud whistle?
Ah, to whistle. To have a jolly good time, yes. That, pardon me If I’m wrong, is what pop means. That’s something I don’t sense when I listen to the festival’s recent crop of compositions.
Among these year’s entries are odes to ordinary people like “Mamasurahay,” “Retokero”, and “Balut.” But I have this sneaking suspicion that these crowd-pleasers, as breezy to the ears as they get, sort of served merely as intermissions to the deluge of sentimentality and sloganeering. With due respect to the judges, a festival is synonymous to fun. We’re not holding a Cebu Popular Music Sermon, right?
A celebration of clichés, that’s what the festival of late seemed to me. Sorry, but none of the recent winners have the puzzling play of images and the lush melodies of, say, Allan Jayme Rabaya’s “Kausa Nabasa ang Tubig.”
Talk about message, and most of the recent entries take their lyrics with the heavy-handed earnestness of graffiti artists and editorialists. Come on, please, send in the clowns.
No wonder, prior to the announcement of winners, it was a couple of comedian’s stand-up antics that brought the house down at the Waterfront ballroom last Friday night. Might that be message enough, easy does it, to the festival organizers and jurors?
(January 20, 2004 issue)
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