F4 FEVER

I stop reading Conrado de Quiros already. Yes, he is such one brillian writer, but I have to much of his GMA bashing. Not that I am a fan of Gloria, but I am just tired of it.

However, his article yesterday caught my attention. It did not talked about Gloria but about the F4. Yes, that disbanded Taiwanese band. And I totally agree by what he said. Here's de Quiros" article from the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

Meteors falling
Posted:10:56 PM (Manila Time) | Sept. 16, 2003
By Conrado de Quiros

I'VE been asking people in the past days why the Taiwanese teen singers F4, the stars of "Meteor Garden," are so popular.

The reason for it was the news I saw last week. The Ninoy Aquino International Airport turned into a circus as soon as the group planed in. There was more security than greeted a visiting dignitary and a lot more enthusiasm. A group of kids had skipped elementary school to be on hand to welcome the guests. One girl would say later that she was a little disappointed not to have been able to shake the hands of her favorite stars -- she had been swept aside when the crowd surged forward -- but it was enough that she had shared the same ground with them, or within their proximity.

A fairly senior and impoverished citizen who was at the airport too said she made it a point to save whatever she could to buy F4 or Meteor Garden paraphernalia -- posters, pictures, bric-a-brac. It gladdened her in her old age. Several airport officials themselves, men and women, lost their composure, and like the other fans, faces flushed, gushed breathlessly at the recollection the stars actually passed by them just a couple of feet away. And somebody told me kids from the more affluent schools not just skipped classes but rented rooms in the hotel adjoining the guests'. You can't get more cross-section, and idolatrous, than this.

These are levels of adulation I have not seen for some time. I did see it in my own time in the hysteria that greeted the Beatles wherever they went. I remember that there was a commotion too at the airport when they arrived, and an even bigger one when they left. Though the latter was far less amusing: The group was chased out by a mob, apparently upon orders of Malaca?ang, presumably for snubbing a presidential invitation. A harrowing experience that prompted John Lennon to vow he would never return to this savage land, a vow he never had the chance to break. And an opinion he never had the chance to revise. But that is another story.

But that I should recall the Beatles in reference to F4 must suggest I am impressed by the latter's success in these parts. Certainly, none of the local "megastars" -- Sharon Cuneta, Gary Valenciano, Martin Nievera -- has met with the same levels of worship. They too must be wondering what happened, what they did wrong and what the Taiwanese group are doing right. I just read in the papers that fans caused a stampede at the Philsports Arena, forcing the visitors to cancel an appearance in a local TV network next day lest they be crushed by fanatical embrace.

I confess I have not seen a "Meteor Garden" episode -- my TV consists of news, some sports and DVD -- but my 14-year-old tells me it's funny. He himself got rave reviews of it from his bus mates, which prodded him to watch it. He never got hooked on it, however. He left it after a couple of weeks to go back to his favorite Japanese anime, the ones with even weirder titles than "Meteor Garden" -- "Initial D.," "Grander Musashi," "Amon Saga." And to his favorite online game, the locally made, and equally phenomenal, Ragnarok: I'll have to write about that, too, someday. But he says "Meteor Garden" is funny.

The reactions are divided. Some of my musician friends are furious at the impertinent poaching on territory. Particularly, as one told me last weekend, since F4 was apparently already on the wane ("palaos na") in Taiwan. It doesn't help, he said, that they cannot hold a candle, music-wise, to any decent local group. But another musician friend was more philosophical. They must obviously be striking the right chord -- pun fully intended, he said -- with local audiences. And at least the group comes from another Asian country. We're too sucked into American Top 40 it was good to be invaded music-wise by an F4.

I myself think the phenomenon should wake us up to a not particularly pleasant prospect, about which I had warned in several previous columns. That is, that we could be losing our competitive edge in the export of musicians to Asia, which is one of our biggest and better-quality exports. The days when hotels in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok would put up signs that say, "Filipino band playing tonight" may be numbered.

The karaoke sounded the first tones of its death knell. The karaoke's invasion has been far and wide, penetrating the heartland of popular music itself, which is America. Certainly, its march into the local scene has been 2 fast 2 furious, if the ubiquity of the machine is anything to go by. Even NGOs have not been spared, their staff -- like those of government offices -- repairing to the nearest video-karaoke bar after meetings to take out their frustrations on the microphone. That alone may explain the decline in the quality of NGO thinking over the past years, as shown specifically in their inability to distinguish War Bonds from PEACe Bonds. But that is also another story.

The digital revolution turned the faint tones into a sonic boom. We probably still have the edge in ear but other Asian countries have the edge in technology. While we worry about piracy and use taxpayers' money to protect Hollywood (that's what Bong Revilla is doing with the Videogram Board), other Asian countries have been resolutely exploring the possibilities of MP3s and even higher levels of sound compression and finding new ways to market music. I did warn about that too before; we're looking at life through a rear-view mirror, trying to impose old structures on new realities.

Of course we can always say that meteors are fleeting things; they burn bright and die in the blink of an eye. But they can always say the same thing about us too, or our musicians.

I am (desperately) hoping we can find a way to reinvent ourselves. We've always had a good "oido" [ability to learn by ear], maybe we can still play this one by ear. But it helps to read notes, too, or signs on the wall.
©2003 www.inq7.net all rights reserved