I was driving along Quezon Avenue when a song on the radio caught my ear.
Until recently, whenever I’d hear something good, I would try to remember the tune and then ask around about the title. Now, what I do is ask one of the kids in the car to turn on SoundHound, an app on smartphones. When you activate it, it listens to a song on radio or TV or even someone singing or humming it out, and in a few seconds, it’s usually able to tell you what song it is, even who the singer is. It even works on classical pieces; I was bowled over once when it identified Rossini’s “Petite Messe Solennelle,” and the chorale group that was performing it!
But let’s get back to that song I heard while I was driving along Quezon Avenue, which SoundHound identified as “No me ames” sung by Jennifer Lopez. Look at that, I thought, after centuries of love songs, here’s one that’s titled “Don’t love me”!
I was intrigued but forgot about the song until a weekend when I had some free time. I remembered the song and went back into SoundHound, which keeps a record of the songs it searched.
After I retrieved the title, I went on to a YouTube search which produced several versions of “Don’t love me,” including a good duet by Lopez with another Latino singer, Marc Anthony (her ex-husband, it turns out).
I googled for a translation into English, since it would take too long with my limited Spanish, and was led into a site called lyricstranslate, where people contribute their translations of a song and other people rate the quality of their work.
A few days after that, I again heard a catchy Latino song on radio. With SoundHound and YouTube and lyricstranslate, I found out it was Cristian Castro, a popular Mexican pop singer.
So, what’s happening here? Are we seeing a revival of Filipino interest in Spanish songs?
Pilita
Although Spanish (more precisely, Castilian Spanish) was never widely spoken in the Philippines even during the Spanish colonial period, Spanish songs were popular among Filipinos well into the 20th century. The American occupation meant English songs displacing the Spanish ones, but I still grew up hearing Pilita Corrales and her renditions of Spanish songs.
Pilita was in a way the original “crossover” artist, crossing different genres, and languages, which meant she appealed to the masses with Cebuano and Tagalog songs and, for the upper classes, English and Spanish songs. I think she was the last major Filipino singer who used Spanish songs.
From the 1970s onward, Filipinos continued to appreciate Spanish songs by the likes of Julio Iglesias (who was married to a Filipino, Isabel Preysler). But it seems Iglesias was the only Spaniard whose songs took off in the Philippines because, still from our American colonial hangover, we began to take to Hispanic-American singers like Linda Ronstadt, who sang in both English and Spanish.
Over the last few years I lost track of popular songs because I rarely listened to local pop stations. It’s only recently, now that my kids are acquiring their own tastes in music, that they have overruled my choice of radio stations (classical dzFE) in favor of their own, thankfully a mix of rock, jazz and fusion.
Latino songs are even more emotional and romantic than Filipino songs. Spanish-language teachers might want to get their students to listen hard to the lyrics and translate them into English and Filipino. Here’s a small sampling of the lyrics you’ll get:
Look at how “No me ames” (again, “Don’t love me”) starts out: Dime porque lloras de felicidad/y porque te ahogas por la soledad (Tell me why you’re crying for happiness/and why you drown in loneliness).
Latin temperament
You’ll find a lot of lloras (tears) and lloran (rain) in these Spanish songs … and solitude. “Crying in the rain” in English is dramatic, but imagine this passage from a song from Cristian Castro: “Mi vida sin tu amor no es mas que el crudo invierno de mi soledad en el silencio de la immensidad/un alma que no encuentra su lugar (My life without your love is no more than the raw winter of my loneliness/A soul that cannot find its place in the silence of the immenseness).”
The song’s title is “Mi vida sin tu amor” and is replete with despair. Another line compares life to “barco en alta mar sin puerto ni illusion (a boat on the high seas without a port, or illusion).”
If there’s loneliness and solitude, there’s silence, too, and Castro’s “Por amarte asi” again compares love to being in the open sea, where, seeing a distant horizon, the poor lover finds himself in this situation: “gritando en el silencio tu nombre en mis labios.” I had to laugh out loud with several translations of gritando: shouting, yelling. Try it on the whole phrase: “shouting in the silence, your name on my lips.”
Goodness. Do you want to try the Filipino “sigaw” instead? Tahimik na sigaw, pangalan mo sa labi ko.
“Don’t love me” fits the Filipino again, with our ambivalence, wanting and yet fearing love, with Jennifer Lopez (JLo to fans) warning, chiding, tempting people toward dangerous love. In one take, she describes one’s heart being filled with a thousand winters (“este corazon que se lleno de mil inviernos”), and in the same breath proclaims how love is like the sun after a storm (“como el sol que sale tras de la tormenta”). I ham it up with the kids, translating the passage then explaining that the sun and rain together mean there’s a tikbalang wedding going on.
Now, if Filipinos don’t understand the lyrics, why would Spanish songs click? That’s for brain researchers. If classical music, or more specifically, Mozart’s compositions, might have an effect on the ability to think (or, stretched more wildly, on intelligence), could Spanish love songs (actually, songs in the Romance languages like Catalan, French, Portuguese, Italian) cross-cultural borders with the way they’re sung? Does our brain respond, in a way described best in Filipino as “kinukurot ang puso (the heart being pinched)”? Might we have a kind of shared Latin temperament that glorifies love’s pleasures and agonies?
I don’t have answers but there’s much more to Latino songs, from Spain or Latin America, than mushy love songs. Look up alt.latino on National Public Radio, a weekly program scanning the Latin American scene for all kinds of new Latin music, from Mexico down to Argentina.
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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph