Now the only karaoke machine that can fire up “Bakit Pa?” is in my aunts’ living room, and I’m never there. Whatever poured out of a passing jeepney once leaked, tinnily, from my officemate’s headphones. Gone are the days when I could hear a Filipino love song out in the wild. How close is the product to that which produced it though? I believe that nowhere are feelings more pure than when they’re in a Filipino love song. “What the lover needs,” writes Carson, “is to be able to face the beloved and not be destroyed.” This is why we create things like music we need something to exist in our stead, to contain the feelings that would rip us in half if we housed them for too long.
“I talked for hours to your wallet photograph,” sang Rivers Cuomo, “You laughed, enchanted by my intellect, or maybe you didn’t.” Hugot is hardly self-conscious, though, and while “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” remains a love song, Cuomo is too self-conscious to have achieved hugot he’s escaped the damage by disavowing it right away.Īnd yet the Filipino love songs counsels, “Huwag mong ikatakot ang bulong ng damdamin mo.” And yet the Filipino love song asks, “Ilang awit pa ba ang aawitin, o giliw ko?” The Filipino love song doesn’t suppress, and the Filipino love song doesn’t tire. Western love songs in the ‘90s adopted sardonicism, or awkwardness, as armor against the violence inherent in hugot. The most admirable quality of hugot is that it is essentially avowal upon avowal, and the most admirable quality of a Filipino love song is its core of hugot: guileless in the confessional, sans irony, sans armor. While not all hugot becomes a Filipino love song, all Filipino love songs are hugot. It’s essentially a violent act to drag something out from within, to dredge up something that was meant to remain concealed. Hugot, as a process and not yet the product, is violent. The beloved object is far from you, and so you pull the feeling from within yourself with even greater force. Lack is its animating, fundamental constituent.” Hugot, the quality of confession, is produced in that lack. So in defense of hugot - how painful it must be to be so constantly pained - it’s been around for a long, long time, and it’s here to stay.Īnne Carson in 1986, inadvertently describing hugot: “Simultaneous pleasure and pain are its symptom. Before the word was appropriated to mean watery slam poetry and Twitter tautology, hugot was the core of the Filipino love song. Hugot: to yank out, to pull from deep within.
Manila (CNN Philippines Life) - What makes a Filipino love song remarkable? Plenty - omnipresence, singability, quotability - but what makes a Filipino love song remarkable amongst all other love songs is hugot.īear with me.
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