There's something about Meiday

Some people are famous for starting something. Mei Bastes is one of them, and Meiday is one of those events that “people are talking about" in certain social circles. An indie music promoter from UP Diliman's Underground Music Circle, Mei staged the first Meiday gig in February 2008 at Purple Haze along Tomas Morato in Quezon City. The name? It was a pun on a line from Urbandub's “Alert the Armory," a popular song at the time. In the beginning, the music event was simply a “community effort," Bastes says. “Friends helped out [with] the posters and with promoting the gig on Friendster and Multiply, and there weren't any big bands [then]," she told GMA News Online via email. In the summer of the same year, Bastes celebrated her birthday by staging a series of gigs at BigSkyMind, a place which was, at the turn of the century, the heart of the contemporary arts scene. Bastes notes that the next few Meiday gigs at BigSkyMind “were intimate—everyone knew each other." Sometime this year, I had a flavor of the “classic" Meiday when I joined some 200 or so people on a rainy night for a gig staged in part as a party for two of Mei's friends who were about to get married. If I did not know anyone, at least it was easier to get introduced. It was that sort of night.

It wasn’t long before the Meiday gigs attracted a lot of buzz. When a band called Pedicab began drawing much attention, the crowds forced Mei to move the periodic series to Cubao X, where it remained until September this year. The whole point of Meiday was, and still is, to get people to hear the kind of music made by people Bastes knows. It all started back in college when she realized it was hard to find a place, or a chance, to share with others what she considered good music. She wanted Meiday to be that space. Francis Cabal of the band The Strangeness, which recently launched its first EP, tells a typical Meiday discovery story: “Mei invited us. We were playing at Sazi's (the former Mayric's) and [she] was there." His band, like other relatively unknown ones, got exposure through Meiday, not to mention the kind of energy a crowd can draw. To her credit, Mei has featured bands like The Strangeness that cover the likes of Burt Bacharach alongside more conventional rock acts like Pedicab. However, there are limits to her taste: she has not, to my knowledge, invited a progressive band to come on board. But I cannot fault her for choices that ensure Meiday draws the crowds. As Cabal says, “We get the biggest crowds at Meiday among all the gigs in which we perform." And some of the crowd can sometimes be difficult. This is why visitors to Cubao X were greeted by an unprecedented security cordon to mark Meiday's second anniversary. Even with the tight measures, however, the gig that night was marred by an incident involving a young music lover, an overzealous bouncer, and the music lover's online retelling of the incident. This was also the time when questions were being raised about the kind of people who were at Mei's days. Understandably, Mei has some discomfort at being lumped with the kind of people who, as the joke goes, burn their tongue while eating a pizza. (They ate it before it was cool.) Being a maven in the independent music scene opens the door to such accusations. Yet, her prominence has gotten her a career as a professional events host. “Being Mei of Meiday has its perks," she says. And for every email attacking her, she notes, “I [can] just ignore [these] because, at the same time, I get a lot [more] fan mail." Indeed, it is her carefully-cultivated musical connections that made last Friday's special Meiday event the biggest one ever. The fundraiser last October 7 was meant to raise money for the expenses related to Mei's illness, which she described as an “internal hemorrhage." The line-up that night was stellar—the Itchyworms played alongside Ang Bandang Shirley, a Meiday favorite, and no such gig would be complete without Pedicab showing up. But what surprised me was that Meiday's following has extended far and wide. Just ask Louie Nucup, a student from Pampanga. “We don't get to see the bands who play here back in Pampanga," he says, “[And] they cater to bands here that we want to see but are not yet big." He brought his sister and another female friend to the gig, and, very much like those early days, they found out about Meiday through social media. The man responsible for Meiday's social media look, Rob Cham, designed the T-shirts on sale that night. He was initially invited to do a one-off comic strip/poster reminding Cubao X visitors to Meiday not to trash the place. This project led to others, most notably the Tumblr blog header which has become a trademark. And the prominence of Meiday has rubbed off on him too. “Some people have seen a [Meiday] poster and visited my site... and I have been getting jobs because of it," says Cham. If Cham has anything to say about Meiday, he would describe it as an event about “free love. Love for music. Love for what you don't know. When I first went to Meiday, I didn't know most of the bands… I started to appreciate the indie scene here." And if there is anything Mei has managed to do for Cham, for me, and for hundreds of others, it is to have made indie music in Manila something accessible and worthy of celebration. – YA, GMA News The next Meiday event is the annual Meiday Halloween Costume party on October 28 at the Fort Strip.