Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  A couple of minutes later, the band went into a faster number. “Yee-hah,” cried a man with the frame of a construction worker, standing up at the bar, shaking his fanny and pumping his elbows. He swirled a high school girl in high heels out onto the dance floor, and she flashed a smile back at him, shimmying like a dream. “Shake it,” cried out the singer. “Yee-hah!” The dance floor started to get crowded. The Australian pulled his companion out onto the floor. Two girls in jeans began dancing together. A young girl in a flounced skirt swayed happily opposite an old girl with too much makeup. “Welcome to my world,” sang the girls as they danced, smiling at their partners and clapping. “Welcome to my world.” And as I went out, the singer was just breaking into a perfect replica of Loretta Lynn, while singing, with flawless anguish, “You know, it’s only make-believe.”

  THE PROFESSIONALISM OF music in Manila had impressed me almost as soon as I arrived. But as I stayed longer in town, I was hit more forcibly by a different aspect of the local singing. It struck me first one night in Baguio, in one of the city’s many “Minus One” sing-along pubs, where customers take turns coming onstage and delivering the latest hits, accompanied by a tape to provide backup instrumentation. “I would like to dedicate this song to a special someone,” a girl was whispering huskily into the mike as I walked in. Then she adjusted the stand, put on her tape and proceeded to deliver a note-perfect version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” absolutely identical to the original, down to the last pause and tic. Song complete, she whispered “Thank you” to the mike, sauntered offstage and went home with her special someone.

  As the evening went on, the scene was repeated again and again and again and again. Almost everyone in the pub came up to deliver flawless imitations of some American hit. And almost everyone had every professional move down perfectly. They knew not only how to trill like Joan Baez and rasp like the Boss, but also how to play on the crowd with their eyes, how to twist the microphone wire in their hands, how to simulate every shade of heartbreak. They were wonderfully professional amateurs. But they were also professional impersonators.

  When I walked into another pub down the street I got to witness an even greater display of virtuoso mimicry: the Chinese singer onstage was able to modulate his voice so as to muster a gruff warmth for a Kenny Rogers number, a high earnestness for Graham Nash, a kind of operatic bombast for Neil Diamond and a bland sincerity for Lionel Richie. His Paul Simon was perfect in its boyish sweetness. Yet what his own voice sounded like, and what his own personality might have been, were impossible to tell. And when it came to improvising, adding some of the frills or flourishes that his culture relished, making a song his own, he—like every other singer I had heard—simply did not bother.

  “Sure,” an American correspondent based in Manila told me when I mentioned this. “Music is definitely the single best thing here. But there’s no way you’re going to hear any local tunes, or variations on the recorded versions of the American hits. There’s one singer in Davao they call the Stevie Wonder of the Philippines, because he sounds exactly—exactly—like Stevie Wonder. And there’s another woman locally who’s the Barbra Streisand of the Philippines. That’s how they make it big here. You know one reason why the Filipinos love ‘We Are the World’ so much? Because it gives one member of the group the chance to do Michael Jackson, and another Cyndi Lauper and a third Bruce Springsteen. Some guy even gets to do Ray Charles.”

  Finally, in Baguio one night, I came upon a happy exception to the rule: a pudgy singer who slyly camped up Julio Iglesias’s song “To All the Girls I Know” by delivering it in a perfect simulation of Iglesias’s silky accent, while substituting “boys” for “girls.” But then, a few days later, back in Manila, I heard another singer at the Hobbit House do exactly the same trick, with exactly the same words (and, a few months later, I was told, local minstrels were delivering the same song, in honor of the fallen Imelda, to the words: “To all the shoes I had before / I wore them once, and then no more”). Likewise, at a free public concert one afternoon I was surprised to hear a professionally trained singer transform the revved-up anarchy and energy of the Beatles’ “Help” into a slow, soulful ballad of lovelorn agony. But then I heard the song delivered in exactly the same way, with exactly the same heart-rent inflections, in a small club in Baguio, and then again at another bar: all the singers, I realized, were not in fact creating a new version, but simply copying some cover version quite different from the Beatles’ original. All the feelings were still borrowed.

  This development of musical mannequins struck me as strange, especially in a country that understandably regarded its musical gifts as a major source of national pride. I could certainly see how the Filipinos’ brilliance at reproducing their masters’ voices, down to the very last burr, had made them the musical stars of Asia—the next-best thing, in fact, to having a real American. But as a form of self-expression, this eerie kind of ventriloquism made me sad.

  It was the same kind of sadness I felt when I read that the national hero José Rizal had described his home as “a country without a soul” or when I opened What’s On in Manila to find the first ad in the personals section begin: “I would like to meet an American. Looks are not important but he must be kind and cheerful.” It was the same kind of sadness I felt when I went to Pistang Pilipino, the capital’s main tourist center, and found that the highlight of its show of local culture was a splashy Hollywood-style spectacular in which chorus lines of handsome young men whipped through some brassy choreography and six-year-old girls in bikinis performed acrobatics while a fat man with greasy hair in an open shirt crooned “House of the Rising Sun.” Mostly, it was the sadness I felt, when an intelligent Filipino friend in New York told me, with a happy smile, “Every Filipino dreams that he will grow up to be an American.”

  While I was in Manila, there was plenty of token opposition to the U.S. presence. Nationalists railed against the country’s still justified image as the world’s great center of mail-order brides and chambermaids. The Marcos-run paper, in a show of ill-considered braggadocio, printed Manuel Quezon’s famous cry: “I prefer to see a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.” And when foreign newsmen flooded into town for the election a few months later, an opposition paper greeted them as “two-bit, white-skinned, hirsute, AIDS-predisposed visitors.” But the “two-bit,” I thought, said it all. In the Philippines, anti-American guerrillas drew up their strategies in Michael Jackson notebooks. And a respected newspaper greeted the suggested removal of the American bases with the headline “Bye, Bye, American Pie.”

  IV

  As the headline suggested, it was not just melodies that struck a responsive chord in Filipino hearts; it was, even more, the sentiments that pop songs expressed, the sensibility they revealed. One day, I managed at last to track down some examples of local music. To my surprise, nearly all the albums had titles like Romantic Filipino, Romance and Hopeless Romantic. And nearly all their liner notes were florid rhapsodies about hearts burning and eyes on fire, lovesick maidens and heartbroken men. All of Manila was saturated with this sense of overwrought passion and sweetness—emotions borrowed from love songs, convictions taken from a jukebox. The local coaches were called Love Buses, and there were Sweet Love Taxis too. Sweet Love Boat-Lines ran a Love-Boat to Zamboanga. The Sirens of Lost Eden were playing at Love City, and at Shakey’s, Euphoria shared the stage with a group called Sweet Love.

  Just one month before arriving in the Philippines, I had gone to California to cover a convention of high school cheerleaders, and there had found both walls and hearts decorated with Smiley faces and valentine symbols. After a while, I realized that the teen-queen gathering had, in fact, been an ideal preparation for the Philippines. For the entire country seemed to resonate to the high-spirited flightiness of a high school world, where tomorrow is another lifetime and hearts are made for breaking. The walls of Manila were plastered with red hearts, and the bumper stickers on
jeepneys wailed: “It Hurts to Say Goodbye.” Chatty sexism filled the media (“Sex in Space?” was the headline above an article on the possible return of martial law) and a kind of leopardskin looseness informed the TV listings (one typical show was called “Chicks to Chicks”). Local menus were tyrannized by cute tags (My Father’s Mustache offered “Butch Cassidy and the Sandwitch Kid” and “Wild Beef Hickcock,” while the Hard Rock Café had dishes called “GI Blues,” “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Army-Navy,” to go along with “Loving Spoonfuls” and “Johnny’s B. Goode”). And the costume jewels of wisdom printed on T-shirts sounded like nothing so much as the catchy titles of pop songs—“Don’t Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You.”

  All these, however, were contexts in which a kind of bubble-gum bumptiousness might be expected; what amazed me more as I looked more closely at the country was to see this poppy lingo applied to everything. Nothing was sacred. When first I saw the bumper sticker that said “I God,” I took it to be a joke. But though it certainly reflected the happy-go-lucky exuberance of the nation, it was not, I gathered, meant to be funny. Nor was the jeepney sign that said “God is my co-driver.” Nor was the huge billboard above the Aristocrat Restaurant (“the King of Fried Chicken”) that announced: “Greetings to No. 1 Mother of the World on the 2000th Anniversary of Her Birth.” The entire city was indeed planning to throw a super party on September 4, 1985, to wish the Virgin Mary a merry 2000th.

  After a while, I was ready for anything. When I saw a sticker saying “Mother Dearest” on the fender of a jeepney, I assumed that it had a religious rather than a domestic significance. But who could tell whether Madonna Lingerie was named in honor of the Virgin or the Whore—especially in a country where both types were so ubiquitous? And as I rode the bus to Baguio, a lovely seven-year-old girl behind me sang along quietly with every determined word of “We Are the World,” and a middle-aged lady next to me filled out one-word answers to a Bible Study quiz (“Can you describe the Holy Spirit?”) while, in front of us all, a soft-core British spy movie flickered on a video screen.

  Some of this was doubtless more glaring in the Philippines than elsewhere in Asia because the medium of mass culture here was American, its excesses neither dignified nor disguised by the exoticism of a foreign tongue. And some of it might have been a kind of Spanish trait—I had found an equally lush sentimentality in Cuba. But even in other English-language areas of the world, and even in other Spanish-American provinces like Honduras or Puerto Rico, I had never felt myself so relentlessly bombarded by what seemed to be broad satires, in somewhat shaky taste, of a nickel-and-dime culture—the products, one might have guessed, of a Harvard Lampoon parody of Seventeen. Every nugget of kitsch, moreover, was delivered quite without irony. “Come and see Jenina, a play on Child Prostitution,” ran the breezy invitation in the anti-Marcos paper Mr. and Ms. The Family Club Theater in Dagupa City offered uncensored pornography. And one day, Manila’s most respectable paper, the Marcos-run Bulletin Today, blandly reported: “Some films submitted for showing at the Manila Film Center were disapproved because they weren’t bold enough. The producers had no alternative but to add more sexy footage.” One of these movies, I read, “directed by a multi-awardee,” showed its lead actress “making love to a lesbian, to the son of a semi-retired character actor and to a still very active character actor, probably the Kissing King in Show Biz.” Another had a “lead actor sodomizing a bit player and ejaculating on the face of another bit player.” Yet both, it seemed, were still too mild to satisfy the stern strictures of the Film Center (which charged four times the regular rate for its officially sponsored porn and denied admission to women in housedresses and men in sleeveless shirts). The Center’s overseers, Mr. and Mrs. Marcos, were notoriously difficult to please.

  Indeed, the jazzed-up jukebox sensibility that was so incongruous throughout much of the country was loudest of all where it was most incongruous: in government. Every political party so insistently used show biz that politics itself had come to seem nothing more than a party. And after a while in Manila, I could no longer distinguish between local show-biz characters, with names like Coy, Pepsi, Zsa Zsa and Bimbo, and local political figures, who were known as Joker, Teddy-Boy and Ting-Ting (the Chief Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court was called Ding Dong). Often, in any case, the two performed together on a single stage. The opposition to Marcos famously commemorated the assassination of its beloved leader by singing out the cheery pop tune “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.” The guerrillas of the Communist National People’s Army had taken over a Manila studio to record an album of stirring guitar-and-flute folk ballads (to be played, no doubt, at 45 revolutions per minute). And the Marcoses’ Foreign Minister was famous for his boogie-woogie piano.

  The queen of them all, though, and the country’s leading vocalist, was Imelda Marcos. Just before I arrived, she had organized a rendition of the national anthem sung “We Are the World” style, with pop stars imitating the country’s favorite video right down to the hands they clapped on their ears as they took their turns at the mike. A little later, tapes emerged showing the First Family itself belting out the song for Ethiopia’s starving in the midst of one of its abandoned bacchanals aboard a private yacht. And one day while I was in town, the Bulletin Today devoted much of its second page to printing, in its entirety, a song that Imelda, the former “Muse of Manila,” had written, apparently to her husband, on her way to the funeral of Yuri Andropov in Moscow:

  I love you, I need you, I miss you, my love,

  I deeply love you.

  While I’m away from you an unbearable

  Loneliness overwhelms me.

  Because you are all I want.

  When I’m alone, I’m so hopeless and lost, oh my love.

  I need you beyond reason, my darling.

  I love you beyond life and my love will be yours forever.

  Above and beyond such show-biz gimmicks, however, Philippine politicians conducted all their affairs, both public and private, with a noisy gossip-column brazenness, as if their only wish was to satisfy the cheering public. When B-movie actress Dovie Beams had released her kiss-and-tell story of life in bed with President Marcos, her beloved “Freddie” had retaliated, not by denying the rumors or protesting his innocence, or even by proffering excuses, but simply by splashing his own intimate photos of Lovie Dovie in the raw across the national newspapers. Here was Filipino openness and swagger, its fondness for the extravagant flourish, raised to the pitch of low art and high farce.

  At the time I was in Manila, indeed, the Marcos Era was still rolling along with a boldness and broadness that could make a scriptwriter blush. The First Family itself featured a cast of characters stranger, or juicier at least, than any that fiction could conceive. There was the President, the Machiavellian macho villain who had put his monogram on every government institution and treated the national treasury as a personal checking account, and there was his First Lady, a former beauty queen with a scandalous past who proclaimed, “In the Philippines, we live in a Paradise. There are no poor people like there are in other countries,” even as seven in every ten of her people, according to government statistics, were living under the poverty level. There was First Daughter Imee, whose boxer-playboy husband had been abducted by her parents because of his unfortunate first marriage to a former Miss International (now herself a leading opposition beauty—oops, politician), and there was the First Son, Ferdinand, Jr., now governor of Ilocos Norte, who was generally known as Bongbong.

  The saddest aspect of the whole fiasco, however, was that these knockabout characters from Dynasty were stumbling their way through a tragedy by Sophocles. For swirling around the soap opera bouffe were all the darker ironies and justice-dispensing fates, the blood feuds and heaven-sent portents, of a larger-than-life morality play. By the time he was seventeen, Marcos had been charged with murder; while he was in jail, he had gained the highest bar exam scores in the country’s history. After becoming the
country’s first reelected President, he had been challenged by an equally tough and resourceful Wunderkind, Ninoy Aquino—his fraternity brother, his close friend and, in a sense, his shadow self. After Aquino had been killed, Marcos had found himself hounded by the Electra-like figure of Aquino’s widow, Corazón, a soft-spoken grandmother whom the people wished to cast as an avenging angel. True to the parable form, her name meant “Heart,” her party was called Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN), or “People Power (FIGHT),” and her main supporter among the media was a Catholic magazine and broadcasting network entitled Veritas, or “Truth.” Meanwhile, stargazing Imelda had been told by a soothsayer that as soon as an earthquake rocked a church and a crowd crossed Mendiola Bridge, the House of Marcos would fall (it did, it did and, finally, it did). And in the midst of all the murders and the mistresses, the profligate spending and the lavish conniving, stood a lonely one-man chorus with the Wycherley-perfect name of Cardinal Sin.

  The melodrama was kept constantly on the boil, moreover, and the audience constantly absorbed in the political song-and-dance routine, by the restless rumormongers of the Manila coffeehouses, who generated enough wild stories every few hours to ensure that the papers could run 40-point-bold headlines every day of the week. I was not in the Philippines long, but it was long enough to hear the thunderbolt that there was a move to impeach Marcos, and then the sudden bulletin that the President was going to call snap elections, and then the banner headline that there would be no elections after all, and then the wild claim that Imelda was going to be made Veep, and then the shock news that Marcos had decided to settle the election issue with a referendum in the National Assembly and then the screaming announcement that the National Assembly had decided to leave the decision in Marcos’s hands. Every day, in fact, there came a new twist, a bizarre turn, a cliff-hanging invitation to the sequel. It was almost enough to make one forget that the plot was about a tyranny that had brought the country to its knees.