Were the Eraserheads the end of cultural history?

“I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or the gumption to stand up and lift the stylus,” claims novelist and critic Kurt Anderson in a recent Vanity Fair article,  which decries the so-called “end of cultural history.”   Apart from massive technological innovations, Anderson claims, American culture has petrified into a perpetual 1992, where pop icons like Lady Gaga have become mere reincarnations of divas from the recent past (i.e. Madonna). Media theorist Marshall McLuhan was wrong: the medium is not the message. Massive changes in transmission systems - from Walkman to iPod, from record store to iTunes, from bookstore to Kindle Store - have not changed content.   As with most cultural trend pieces, Anderson’s suffers from easily debunked generalizations that editors forgive in their zest for zeitgeist. Acting as a cultural policeman from the baby-boomer generation, Anderson judges “us” too harshly. Boomers may have had Haight-Ashbury and Dylan, but Gen Y has Occupy and Radiohead. Of course culture evolves.   But Anderson has a point, particularly with music. Major shifts in sonic culture occur when musicians from the margins explode into the mainstream, as when four white kids from Liverpool made black American music palatable to white America (The Beatles remain the most important musical act of all time), or when shoe-gazing punk fans in Manchester experimented with midi files to produce the rave music that glowstick-touting konyos would eventually enjoy (of course, punk itself was a similar game-changing movement). To my knowledge, the last similar watershed in American music was when Nirvana – long established in the Seattle grunge scene – topped Billboard with “Smells like Teen Spirit” in 1991. Musical innovations continue in independent scenes, but these rarely dent the mainstream. The gulf between the indie blogosphere and the Billboard charts increases as musical subcultures divide and bifurcate into digital ghettos, which intentionally isolate themselves from the unhip. At no point has popularity dovetailed so seamlessly with selling out. Just ask indie “maistreamers” Foster the People. Animal Collective, possibly the most critically acclaimed indie darlings of recent memory, cannot begin to compete with Taylor Swift or the Bieb.  No one will idolize Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) the way people did Kurt Cobain. In the age of web 4.0, balkanized digital spaces hinder collective cultural progression. Maybe cultural history has not ended, but has merely moved in infinite directions. But this was not the case in the 90s.      As Cobain lamented the aimlessness of Reaganite, hyperconsumerist American youth, a similar phenomenon was occurring in the Philippines with emergence of the Eraserheads. The late 1980s and early 1990 saw the retreat of the nationalist OPM that dominated the Marcos period – a time when everyone from Imelda to Jose Maria Sison to Pepe Smith was looking for an elusive Filipino soul.   In 1990s, as the threat of authoritarianism and armed insurgency ebbed relative to the threat of 10-hour brownouts, big national questions became less important. Groups like Asin would no longer pen mainstream hits that condemned massacres in Cotabato, nor would a pop trio like APO release another anti-imperialist ditty like “American Junk” (they were already on noontime TV).   In 1993, Marcos had been gone for seven years and the US imperialists were kicked out of their bases the year before. It was thus more difficult to complain. And with the Left in shambles (1993 was the year of the massive split in the Communist Party of the Philippines), nobody could tell you what to complain about.     It was in 1993 that that the Eraserheads released their first album: Ultraelectromegneticpop!   I was nine or ten when I first heard “Pare Ko,” and what struck me at the time was not its quotidian poetry, but the “Diba? T_ngina!” that punctuated its chorus. I loved the E-Heads then and I love them now, albeit for different reasons. I remember begging my parents to take me to see them in Club Dredd. I was the youngest person in the audience, and until now, I’m not sure how I got in. I think Ely played one of my requests, but got my name wrong.   With historical hindsight, it is easy to view the E-Heads as representing the changing Pinoy youth culture of the 1990s. Buendia’s lyrics seek normality after the politically charged years of dictatorship and resistance. His University of the Philippines, for instance, was not the UP of communes, rallies, and political discussion groups. In his UP, you made fleeting but deep friendships in the Kalayaan dormitory (“Minsan”) or teased your classmate Shirley as she walked holding hands with her nth boyfriend on the way to the Casaa canteen.   “Field trip sa may pagawaan ng lapis ay katulad ng buhay natin, isang mahabang pila, mabagal at walang katuturan,” Buendia sang in  “Huwag mo nang Itanong.” The factory, in this case the pencil factory, was not a site of worker alienation but of student boredom and a Rorschach test for an existential crisis.     The metaphorical turn in Buendia’s writing after the Cutterpillow, though changing the topics of his songs, conveyed the same uncertainty: the beauty of the rainbow (bahaghari) is delicate (maselan); problems can be avoided through simple dissimulation (“Kung may problema ka, magsuot ng maskara.”).   But despite the opacity of the latter work, the ‘Heads insisted that it was “para sa masa” (for the masses) – to all the fans of Sharon Cuneta and to all those buried by the system. Thus, while converting the gatekeepers of high culture (although I’m shocked that Buendia has yet to receive a Palanca), the Eraserheads knew whom to speak to, though not necessarily knowing what to speak about.   And this, to conclude on an admittedly clichéd note, was what made them special. Musical breakthroughs are inherently democratic. The Eraserheads played and we all listened.   If a band breaks out of our highly-segmented musical enclaves, we may get a new Eraserheads. If not, I will just continue to scoff at Hale and pogi rockers, while cherishing smaller acts and clinging to my nostalgia. ______________ Leloy Claudio teaches political science at Ateneo de Manila.