The next time you’re on a cruise ship — or in a small nightclub in Las Vegas, a hotel lounge in Singapore, an amusement park in Cologne — that band doing the Norah Jones and Led Zeppelin covers will very likely be from the Philippines. (Almost 60,000 Filipinos are employed worldwide in nightclubs, cruise ships, and hotel lounges as Overseas Performing Artists.)
A Filipino guitarist told me a nugget of unbelievable truth one time, trying to explain to me why Filipinos were apparently such great performers. “Filipinos are the only people,” he said with all seriousness, “with tongues like parrots.” But his answer wasn’t prompted by the fact that it was his fourth shot of gin before it was even noontime.
He was one of the many artists I’ve interviewed extensively over the past two years who looked at me as if I had asked a stupid question — “Why do you think Filipinos are hired as singers and musicians all over the world?” — and gave me variations on the exact same answer: Filipinos can imitate any sound.
Not the reality of labor networks, mind you, or the history of English as the medium of colonial instruction in the Philippines, but an apparently inherent, even quintessentially Filipino ability to mimic, premised on replicating exactly what is heard.* Indeed, the Tagalog term for this (obviously dating from the seventies) is “plakado,” a compliment given to bands that can unerringly reproduce what is heard on the plaka, or vinyl record.
As Danny, a keyboardist, told me, “If you cannot copy it exactly, then you’re not a good musician.” (This, Danny said, was the main difference between Vietnamese and Filipino musicians. Speaking from his experience playing in Saigon in the early ’70s, Danny explained that the Vietnamese were “good instrumentalists, pag pumikit ka parang [Carlos] Santana, pero pag kumanta… [when you close your eyes it’s like Carlos Santana, but when they sing…].”)
Let me quote here from an online review of the Filipino band Freestyle to put the idea of “plakado” in better context:
“They did covers of Incognito, Mike Francis… Monday Michiru… Will Smith, Michael Jackson, George Michael… And no matter whose songs they did – you could actually close your eyes and not know the difference. It was, in local parlance: plakadong-plakado.”
This act of closing one’s eyes is important. It signals a kind of erasure of cultural difference: that these Filipino musicians are, in a sense, aurally alienated from the products of their musical labor, so that they act as substitutes or copies of “the real thing.” And part of the pleasure in consumption of this technical mastery is that the audience would open its eyes, as it were, and discover, to its surprise, its music uncannily reproduced by the Third World.
*It’s worth noting that many of the singers I interviewed initially received little formal training other than long sessions of karaoke. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology (and for shame — get yourself to a karaoke bar!), many newer videoke machines give scores to the performers at the end of their songs; at a public gathering, this can result in either enthusiastic applause or outright humiliation. It is clear that the computer algorithm that rates the performance evaluates this on the basis of how closely the singer follows the tempo and phrasing of the tune; improvisation, or at least, any verbal deviation or unique expression of the singer’s personal singing style is therefore discouraged. Which is maybe just as well — it’s hard to indulge in Mariah-style melisma when you’re being graded — but the standard is, nonetheless, being plakado.
[To be continued, but to give you a hint about where this is all going: small town girl, lonely world.]
