An alternative to "alternative"

Alternative music just isn't subversive anymore. It certainly isn't subversive in the Philippines, where many an alternative fanatic is an Ateneo, La Salle, or UP student living in Ayala Heights or Tahanan Village. It's hard to see just what these kids are supposed to be rebelling against; it can't be the status quo, since they are among its greatest beneficiaries. Those faux-vintage T-shirts, artfully beat-up jeans, and sturdy flip-flops don't come cheap.

It's obscene, really. It's one thing to slouch in your parents' garage in Seattle, play grunge music, and imagine yourself artistically and morally superior to prep-school kids steeped in Mozart. It's quite another thing to sit in your air-conditioned bedroom in Tierra Pura and scoff at the people who like Cueshé.

There isn't even any inherent value in liking music that isn't popular, that isn't merely entertaining. Clive James describes a period in the development of jazz when musicians began to work at "sounding like art, with entertainment a secondary consideration at best, and at worst a cowardly concession to be avoided." The result: "Where there had been ease and joy, now there was difficulty and desperation."

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, "A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity." Joy is a necessity; expressing yourself the best way you know how is a need. There's nothing wrong, in itself, with the popular or the entertaining. But there is something wrong in labeling what you don't like as inferior or worthless.

In his highly amusing thriller Floodgate, Alistair MacLean defines a snob as a person who pretends to be something he's not. By that definition, a person who can't relate to pop music is not necessarily a snob; maybe his parents are classical cellists and he has never listened to pop in his life. (Of course, it's equally likely that such a person, hearing Britney Spears for the first time, would quickly become a fan.) Now, when a Pinoy who grew up watching Eat Bulaga and hearing Marco Sison on the radio starts denying the validity of certain forms of musical expression, he is being a snob.

Such snobs often claim to be more "real" than people who like pop music, as if pop were some sort of hallucination, as if happiness and enjoyment were any less real than disaffectation and ennui. A few weeks ago, a friend accused me of disliking sad music because I was happy. Well, it's not only happy people who have no use for sad songs; sad people can't stand sad songs, either. It's usually just bored people who feel a need to hear the musical stylings of the dispirited.

There's nothing wrong with being dispirited; everyone gets sad or bored sometime. That's why it's so important not to knock happiness, especially the hard-won happiness of people whose lives we don't understand, people who find solace in the melodies of the Backstreet Boys or, yes, April Boy Regino.