Pop goes the pinoy

Like it or not, you and I live pop everyday. We may think we’re above pop culture, or beyond it, but we can’t escape or ignore it.

Pinoy Pop Culture is a book to help us grasp the idea, be more aware of it, maybe understand it a bit better. Everybody should read it–Pinoys so that we may better appreciate what we are and not constantly beat ourselves on the head for not being good enough, and foreigners so that they won’t be so befuddled by a people who smile, sing and dance come hell or high water, although the book claims to be "not a guidebook for foreigners but the Filipino’s guide to himself".

Author Gilda Cordero Fernando says of the book, "Pop is popular culture. Pinoy Pop Culture is really a book on the Filipino—not a scholarly work, just a lighthearted study that will hopefuly clarify further what’s Pinoy."

The look and sound of the book are very Pinoy pop: bright acid colors, off-beat wild images. The language is "whatever is convenient–Pilipino, straight English, carabao English, Filipino English, Engalog, slang and badaf". It’s everything you’ve always wanted to know about the Pinoy but were afraid to ask: from Ma Mon Luk to People Power, barbecue to Liwayway gawgaw, Pinoy technology to halo halo.

To launch the book on October 27 is an equally wild and off-beat event entitled Pinoy Pop Showtime, an hour-long program that will feature a dance/fight scene between comics characters Darna and Valentina, songs by Anna Fegi, Sylvia La Torre and the Aegis band, and an anti-fashion fashion show featuring "real people who eat full meals, yung totoong tao". Gilda continues, "I thought they’d better be personalities on their own (so that) even if they’re overweight or other things they’ll still get applauded. I just hope nobody falls off the ramp!"

Paying for the whole shebang–book and show–is Ben Chan of Bench, whose past endeavors, aside from t-shirts, include the Bench underwear show. "I’d like to give something back to the country," says the shy but shrewd businessman. "Specially the young people who have made my business thrive. We sell a lot of global stuff, from China, from India, from Hong Kong, Europe and the US, so to balance it off, I thought it might be good to be Pinoy this time."

The book should convince one and all that it is indeed good to be Pinoy–all the time and in all the permutations and variations of being Pinoy. As the book admonishes, "Be Pinoy. Enjoy!"