'Bands like Oh, Flamingo!, Rivermaya and Up Dharma Down challenge what it means to be Filipino through the moving layers of music and lyrics unapologetically written in Tagalog.'
The first time I heard Pinoy rock, my heart ached. On a whim, I had looked up “Filipino Indie Rock” on Spotify late one night. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of my office, I crouched over my phone and scrolled through a list of Pinoy bands until I stopped at Up Dharma Down and its song “Oo,” from its 2006 album, “Fragmented.”
As a Filipino Canadian who spent half my childhood in California’s Central Valley, I never fully understood Tagalog’s vocal potency until that moment. Millare’s voice felt new, familiar and sobering, like I’d finally come home just to wonder why it took so long for me to get there. Mainstream rock’s primary target has always been white, American youth. For a sound rooted in African American rhythm and blues, it is a narrative of cultural appropriation as old as time. Yet the soul of rock has always belonged to the marginalized, the othered and the forgotten. And although the genre reached the Philippines in the 1950s, it would be two more decades before it became the rallying cry of the people fighting against the Marcos dictatorship, which lasted from 1972 to 1986.
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