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Moshing in the Philippines One week with the Pinoy 'red punks' • Andrew 0'Brien My new friend Joy and I reach for the wet steel bars over the window as the jeepney rattles and bounces over the potholes on the decaying city street. It’s my fifth day in Manila and the pounding monsoon rains have hardly let up for a minute.

Suddenly the jeep slows and I notice the arcs of water spraying up from the side of the vehicle. A group of shirtless, bare-footed children run along kicking up water and no sooner do I turn around than I feel the shocking splash of cold, filthy water down my neck. The driver curses at the boys as they run away laughing. The mother on the bench across from us wipes her children down with some tissues from her purse. Joy grumbles and mutters something under her breath about street children being "the product of American capitalist imperialism." She hands me a tissue and smiles bitterly, "I guess you haven’t been in this part of the city before. It floods every time it rains."

As the jeepney speeds up and the water around us slowly begins to dissipate, the passengers prepare themselves for a new hazard of this part of Manila – the smell. Joy has covered her mouth and nose with a red bandana, only allowing exposure for her eyes, which reveal both exhaustion and rage. The stench hits me on the next breath I inhale and I nearly gag. We are near "Smoky Mountain," Manila’s twenty-one hectare rubbish tip named for the smoke emitted by endless piles of burning debris. It is also home to 3500 families, Joy tells me. I remember the T-shirt of the thrash band Co-arse that my friend Darwin gave me earlier that day in his downtown punk rock storefront. The black and white photo depicted two farmers with bundles on their backs hunched over in a vast field. When I was through studying it, Darwin finally said, "That’s not rice those two farmers are harvesting. That’s Smoky Mountain."

It was after I picked up a copy of a punk rock compilation entitled In the Name of Revolution while touring with my Taiwan-based punk band in Singapore that I first became interested in the Philippines music scene. The cover art on the album depicted a brigade of rifle-bearing men and women charging at some unknown enemy. Our tour manager, a Singaporean punk rocker named Shaiful, told me it was a Filipino compilation of "revolutionary punk bands." I had read news stories about the Maoist New People's Army's raids in the Philippines countryside, but I didn't know much about the thirty-eight year civil war, the many grass-roots revolutionary youth movements, or how punk rock tied into it. The music was as diverse as punk rock can be – some of it was heavy and hard, while some of it was speedy and anthemic. However, it was the lyrical subject matter that most intrigued me about the Pinoy punk scene – from songs like Peasant Women, Ka Mayang Guerilla Fighter, and Pain of the Masses, it was clear that the Filipino punk bands were addressing some much heavier issues than most of the Western bands I had grown up listening to.

When I returned to Taipei, I emailed Emman, a DIY show promoter and founder of Delusion of Terror, a distributor of punk merchandise in Manila. I told him I would like to stop by Manila on my way back to the United States for my brother’s wedding. I said I wanted to learn more about a punk music scene that, according to Emman, had been active since the early 1980’s. Emman repiled that he would be happy to show me around and that I was more than welcome to stay at his home. Two days before I flew out of Taiwan, he sent me one more email: "Just so you know, this is a third world country. It’s not like any of the other countries you’ve been to and you have to be careful when you arrive." I had no idea what he was talking about.

As I rode the shuttle bus from the plane to the terminal, I commented on the number of carbine bearing security guards to an older British businessman. He nodded and said, "Well, they’re here for our safety. This place has a problem with terrorism." Then he paused for a moment. "But a couple years ago I saw two security officials get into an argument. One drew a gun and shot the other dead right in the middle of the terminal. Sometimes I wonder who we need protection from," he sighed. After clearing immigration, I walked through the sliding glass doors into stifling heat and humidity. I weaved through mobs of jubilant families behind steel barriers, greeting the parade of overseas migrant workers fresh off the plane from Taiwan like they were soldiers coming home from a far off war. As we hit the highway, the road suddenly became clogged with cars, trucks belching black smoke and jeepneys packed full of people clinging to.

"Hey Joe!" a group of children shouted as they ran along the side of the cab. I smiled lamely, feeling, for the first time in my life, like an aristocrat sporting a powdered wig and monocle. The cab turned down a narrow tunnel next to the freeway and I covered my nose and mouth with my shirt, overpowered by the stench of shit, piss and burning garbage. More families were sitting around mini bonfires in the dark passage. A baby was lying alone on a dirty torn sofa in the middle of the tunnel. As we weaved to the right I noticed a teenage boy leaning against the wall with a bag over his mouth that was rapidly inflating and deflating. Suddenly he pulled it away and turned toward the cab laughing and screaming as saliva dripped down his chin. The cab picked up speed and we pulled out of the tunnel and into the light.

The next afternoon, when I met Emman in front of the hotel, I asked him about the In the Name of Revolution compilation. He smiled and said, "I distribute that CD." I can take you to meet Rommel. He runs Dirty Shoes Records, the label that releases those albums." A few hours later, as we stood at a Jolibees fast food joint, a clean-cut bookish looking man dressed in a white dress shirt and black pants approached us. After Emman introduced me to Rommel, we walked down the road to the local chapter of Anak ng Bayan ("Nation's Children"), a mass youth party under associated with a long list of left-wing activist "umbrella organizations." Pic: Dirty Shoes

As we walked up the creaky wooden stairs into the sparsely furnished meeting room in the dilapidated apartment, Rommel informed me that the Anak ng Bayan members were in the middle of another "discussion." A college age kid was writing on a worn-looking black board, while five other students sat around a table taking notes and asking questions.

"They are all full-time activists and they live here now," Rommel whispered pointing to two bright, colorful tags painted over the doors on the right wall, which said, "men" and "women." "Most of them have dropped out of school to join the movement." He pointed to a girl sitting at the table wearing a bandana. "Joy over there was student body president of her university, but she was kicked out for her 'subversive activities.'"

As we sat on the benches near the window, Rommel explained to me all about Anak ng Bayan and his Dirty Shoes Collective. Anak ng Bayan was founded in 1998 as a mechanism not just for recruiting students, but also working youths, street children, and farm and factory workers. Highly influenced by the philosophies of the exiled Communist Party of the Philippines chairman Jose Maria Sison, Anak ng Bayan focuses on the major issues affecting Filipino youths such as high tuition costs, jobs, and affordable housing. Ideally the group aims for a mass mobilization of the peasants, proletariat and "petty bourgeoisie," which would oust the current regime, form a "patriotic and democratic council of leaders," then begin delivering all the socialist goodies to the masses. In the late 80’s, After the Aquino administration repealed the anti-subversion laws that were enacted under the Marcos regime, these "non-violent" leftist groups were allowed to flourish; with the caveat that they must remain peaceful.

"I am an accountant actually," explained Rommel. "So that makes me a petty bourgeoisie, but I am still a friend of the revolution. After spending my salary on food and rent, I give 20% of my monthly wages to the movement." Rommel told me that he had a deep understanding of poverty in the Philippines because he himself had grown up very poor. From the age of six, he had helped to support his family by going door-to- door looking for garbage to sell to farmers. He made it through school on academic merit scholarships, but he never forgot his roots. Much to the chagrin of his family, he joined a Christian left-wing organization in high school. As he put it, "It is my duty to support the people who helped me move up."

Rommel told me he had first heard punk rock in high school. "It was one of the most powerful forms of protest music I had ever heard." A few years later he founded Dirty Shoes Records and released two volumes of revolutionary Filipino and Filipino-American punk bands. After a couple hours, the smell of food cooking came wafting in from the kitchen and the room filled up with young people laughing and chatting away. Rommel told me that 50 pesos (US$1) fed the commune of twenty with one meal for a day. A young long-haired man sat cross legged on a table, strumming a guitar and singing the popular Pinoy punk band The Jerks' song RageI Children begging in the streets at night/Knocking on cars until the morning light/People standing in line for a kilo of rice/Welcome to the dark ages, the era of lies/But I go not gently into the night/Rage! Against the dying of the light.

As we sat down to eat and passed the dishes of green beans and chicken in adobo sauce around the table, the Anak ng Bayan members started asking me lots of questions about who I was and what was my purpose in the Philippines. It was the week Hurricane Katrina hit and everyone expressed their sympathy for the people in New Orleans, saying they would send money and supplies if they had any to spare. Rommel explained that they try to keep themselves informed about the struggles of the dispossessed all over the world because they view the oppression of the masses as an international struggle. "We must have solidarity with them," he said.
After we left, Emman asked, "So are you going to meet them tomorrow? How much time did you say you had?"
"Yeah, I said I was free all day,"
Emman laughed. "Uh oh! Well have fun with your indoctrination!"

The next morning Joy and I walked to a vendor across the street from Anak ng Bayan headquarters and bought a pile of cigarette singles. "We're going to need a lot since this is going to be a long three-part discussion," she said. For the rest of the day, from 1pm until almost midnight, Joy gave the first two parts of the lecture - "The History" and "The Problems."
For the first six hours, Joy gave her revolutionary history of "the people’s struggle." From the first mass popular uprisings against the Spanish, to the Philippines American War, the Huk Rebellion, then finally the rise of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA), Joy’s delivery was dripping with irony, especially when she described America’s role in the Philippines.

"America has a habit of ‘liberating’ us coincidentally when popular revolts have already done the dirty work for them," she concluded, rolling her eyes and exhaling a puff of smoke. "The Filipino people were overjoyed the first time the Americans came. They thought they would finally have their ancestral lands returned. That is until they realized the US had no plans to abolish the feudal system that had existed for centuries. Besides, by the time the US purchased the Philippines from Spain at the Treaty of Paris in December of 1898, the Filipinos had already declared independence from Spain seven months earlier!"

The last half of the lecture, The Problems, was a historical blur of US-supported puppet governments, American corporations allied with local landlords exploiting the peasants for cheap labor, a mass exodus of job seekers heading overseas for non-skilled work, the rise of the sex trade, the recent boom of out-sourced call-centers serving the American market, the government’s refusal to develop an autonomous, industrial sector, and government debts piling up and collecting high interest rates. One of the government’s solutions to the high interest rates was to privatize public institutions like the education system, which subsequently hiked tuition rates making education unaffordable to many Filipinos. I remembered an American tourist explaining to me that the best time to tour the Philippines was during the spring.
"That’s when tuition payments are due," he explained. "Just put a handkerchief on your car aerial and park outside the gates of the university, The girls will come running out."
Shortly after Joy left, a thin young woman emerged from the women’s quarters and introduced herself as June. She told me she had just gotten off work at the call-center where she works selling timeshares to people in America. My head was spinning with all of the revolutionary history packed into my cranium and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to absorb the next lecture: The Solution.

For the next several hours, June explained the goals of Anak ng Bayan and the NDF, but by the time she was finished my mind felt like a congealed mass of terms such as: Big bourgeoisie-big comprador land lord class, semi-colonial/semi-feudal, Bureaucrat Capitalism, reactionary ruling clique, politico-military strategic line of protracted people’s war, absolute consensus, PROLETARIOT DICTATORSHIP, TWO-STAGE REVOLUTION!!! Finally, June took a breath and said, "Well, you’ve been sitting there for over ten hours. Let’s take a break!"

As June wandered over to a group of students chatting at a table against a wall covered with anti-Arroyo placards, I leaned back in my chair with my mouth slack, trying not to drool. Knowing the Q&A session was next I attempted to write down all the challenging questions that I had formed in the back of mind throughout the lecture.
"How would the Philippines not become another killing fields when the revolutionary government began seizing land from the big compradors and big bourgeoisie?"
"How would the government boost the economy when all of the corporations were booted out?"
"What countries would support the Philippines after the Western world severed ties?"
"How can the NPA justify the brutal murders, kidnappings and extortions they’ve committed in the past?"
But by the time June returned, I looked down at my paper and realized it was blank and I blurted the first thing that came to mind.
"What about porn?"
"Excuse me?" she asked.
"Will porn be declared illegal by the utopian revolutionary socialist dictator run government?" I continued, deciding to see this one through to the end.
"Definitely," she said. "It's a capitalist tool of exploitation."
"Wait a minute. Art, music, everything will be controlled by the masses and you believe in ABSOLUTE CONSENSUS?"
"Of course," she said calmly. "But remember if there is dissent, we...what?"
"Persuade not coerce," I answered, the ten hour indoctrination having already worked its magic.
"Exactly, now moving on...going back to the Two-Stage Revolution..."
"But what about drugs, alcohol...marijuana?" I interrupted.
"Drugs will be illegal, alcohol - of course not! Marijuana will be illegal."
"But what about cigarettes?" June looked a little worried. "No! Never!" she exclaimed, snubbing out another Marlboro Red. "But we will nationalize the cigarette companies."
"Well, anyway. Getting back to porn, how about nationalizing the porn industry and making 'People's Porn' where everyone, and everything, is exploited equally for the benefit and entertainment of the masses?"
She looked irked. "Ok, you see, you're not getting it. We have another discussion on this exact subject but it will take at least a two to three days and that depends on whether you can be persuaded."
"But not coerced, right?"
"Exactly. You're coming back for another lecture, right?"

Just then Rommel walked in wearing his office clothes. On the way back to Emman’s house, he told me I had just sat through a very brief (eleven-hour) lecture. "Sometimes our discussions last thirty days - wake up, discuss, eat, sleep, wake up and discuss." I had one more question about dissent under a socialist dictatorship.
"Will punk rock be illegal?"
"Of course not," Rommel replied. "We love punk rock, but it will be different. We monitor dissent and if someone is very critical of our system we will try to persuade them, but not..."
"Coerce. Right."

Two days later I woke up with a message on my cell phone from Joy inviting me to join Anak ng Bayan in solidarity with the transport worker's union to protest the government's decision to hike the price on fuel - eleven times in the past year. On the bus, she told me they had staged a protest earlier that morning, but it had been broken up by the police. "The mayor is pro-Arroyo and has made it extremely difficult to have rallies in Metro Manila that are critical of her regime," she said. As the bus crept up to the square in the gridlocked traffic, I had to cover my ears with the sound of screaming, horns blaring, loud drumming and beating of pots and tin cans. Joy smiled, "Noise barrage. A Filipino protest tradition!"
Welcome Rotunda was filled with activists holding banners, chanting, and wandering throughout traffic with coffers asking for donations to the movement. A clever anti-President Arroyo song set to the tune of YMCA blared over speakers mounted on a jeepney - OUST GMA! Unite the people and OUST GMA-AY!" I sat down on the grass in the square while Joy and a group of girls rolled cigarettes and made placards. One thin, shy girl, who had been eyeing me for a long time, finally spoke up,
"So where are you from? Why are you really here?"
A little jarred by her blunt question, I replied, "Um..I'm from America. I just want to learn more about your political situation."
"Well, we hate Americans."
Joy quickly interjected, "We don't hate Americans! We hate their capitalist system and what their corporations and military have done to our country. It's the government, not the people."
The girl finally smiled weakly and said, "She's right. That is true."

A couple Anak ng Bayan members tried to persuade me to hold an anti-GMA sign, but Joy stopped them, gesturing toward the line of police officers who were eyeing me. She turned my attention to a short, slight, quiet boy standing to my right. She told me his name was Israel, the head Anak ng Bayan organizer in his high school and the vocalist for the local oi street punk band Tolonguez Death Squad. I asked him how his parents felt about his involvement in the movement and he said they were fully supportive since his mother was a member of a left-wing teacher's union. He said that although he occasionally had trouble from the administration, he could always find teachers who were sympathetic to the cause. When asked what made him get involved in the movement he said, "It is my duty to let people know about suffering in this country and how we can change it." Joy then introduced me to a group of young men who were helping to organize the squatters living on the train tracks, which the government will soon develop into a modern commuter rail to the tune of 500 million dollars (US). The modernization of the Spanish colonial era tracks has already received funding through loans from South Korea and China. These loans will be added to the enormous debt the country already shoulders. Reportedly, the interest on these loans will not even be paid off for another 25 years, which means the project will generate zero revenue for the government and the people of the Philippines.
"It's just another extravagant modernization project that will be of no benefit to the Filipino people, but will make Manila somehow appear richer and more developed than it actually is," Joy said.

Joy then introduced me to a tired, weathered-looking older woman selling cigarettes. She said her name was Nana and lived on Smoky Mountain. Nana is from a southern province and after a big landlord seized her family’s small of plot land because they couldn’t pay their debts, she came to Manila to look for work. However, she could find no other place to live, so she took up residence on Smoky Mountain. Joy then introduced me to a group of Anak ng Bayan punks who live on the rubbish tip organizing the residents. A punk wearing a T-shirt of the American punk band The Casualties said that they lived in the same iron shacks and ate the same garbage as the people. "We pick up something like a piece of rotten chicken and shake it, then cook it again. We call this bag-bag," a guy named Nestor told me. "We must gain their trust and show them we are at their same level," he added.

Another punk said he lived in a cemetery with another group of squatters who were fighting the government's policy of forced removal. "They push us from the train tracks, from the garbage heaps, and from the front of the Presidential Palace for President Bushes' eight-hour visit," he spat. "Where else are we supposed to go? He said the US ‘liberated the Philippines.’ From what? Arroyo spent millions of the Filipino’s money for his visit to tell us that?"
Later, as I sat with Rommell back at headquarters, I remembered the long line of police in riot gear and the stares I received as an outsider at an anti-government demonstration. I asked Rommel if he ever felt in danger as a member of Anak ng Bayan. He told me to look at the liner notes of the "In the Name of Revolution" compilation. I pulled out the paper insert. At the bottom was a little box with the words: In loving memory of August Glen "Enteng" Astronomo (Born April 18, 1980 - June 24, 2003) "A tree is born, a tree dies, but the forest lives forever."

Rommel told me Enteng was a very close friend and his next-door neighbor. He began to choke up as he told me the story:
"Enteng was also a member of Anak ng Bayan. He was an artist and designed many of our logos, as well as painting many murals," he began. "One spring he decided he wanted to go to the countryside to paint murals in the villages. One day he was picked up by some government agents. They held him for several days and accused him of being a member of the New People's Army. When he denied his involvement with the militias, they began cutting off his fingers one by one. Then his toes, his hands, his feet, his arms, his legs, his torso and his head. He arrived in Manila several days later in a box. They threw him down on the table like a pile of garbage. His body was covered in flies and worms - his mother hugged his body and she cried and screamed. We all did. We all know the risks involved. Many Anak Bayan members have turned up dead in the countryside, but we have to continue the struggle."

Just then Joy walked up with a big smile on her face. "Are you going to the First Quarter Ambush tomorrow?" she asked.
"Is it a protest?"
"No, it’s a punk show. The name refers to the First Quarter of the Storm, the protest movements of the 1960's and 70's, which exploded into violent rebellion in the streets until the Marcos government cracked down on dissent and the Philippines entered the martial law era."
"There’s a boy she likes who is going to be there," June said slyly, walking by the table as Joy smiled and turned red.

The next evening Emman and I walked through a residential district, following the sounds of raucous punk rock. The courtyard was filled with skinheads and punks chatting and drinking beer. We made our way into the packed smoky space. An oi punk band was on the little stage belting out anthemic, march-style choruses while the crowd moshed in a scrum, raising their fists and chanting along. The room was mostly barren, except for the shelves of empty liquor bottles and some revolutionary posters, the amps and an enormous red Dirty Shoes Records banner behind the stage, The crowd began swarming inside and as soon as a new band launched into their set, the whole space erupted, immediately becoming a fray of fists and boots. Suddenly I felt two hands grabbing my arms and I looked back to see Israel and Nestor on each side of me, yanking me forward as we plowed into the pit. One of the audience members grabbed the mic from the vocalist and barked:
Who will stop this fascist regime?/Who will build the nation again?/Can you sacrifice for other’s rights?/Are you ready to start to fight?

Later as I sat in the courtyard with Emman, sharing a bottle of whiskey and sopping up the sweat from my face, I thought of the small rural Maine coastal town where I was to embark for the next day. I’d be heading away from the slums, the street children, and Smoky Mountain, where a quiet getaway for many of my new friends was a walk along the polluted banks of Manila Bay. I couldn’t shake my conflicting thoughts about the Communists. Their doctrine was a little frightening and the NPA was categorized as a terrorist organization by my own government. On the other hand, they had an unwavering dedication to changing the horrific injustices in their homeland and they sure knew how to rock out.
© Andy O'Brien gotmahmojo@gmail.com

Andrew O'Brien is a music writer for POTS Magazine, an alternative weekly newspaper in Taiwan.

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