Worms in the brain

The Last Legion is the last pseudo-Roman film I’ll watch in a while. The actors looked like a bunch of white guys dressed up as Romans for Halloween.

There was a Gandalf masquerader, complete with white beard, robes, staff, magic and a horribly curved fake nose.

The film seemed to be too heavily influenced by the Lord of the Rings trilogy — the producers ripped off the map from the intro and even the musical score was but a blatant imitation. It failed to keep up with the historical movie standards that Gladiator set more than 10 years ago.

British accents and Roman films do not go hand-in-hand. It just doesn’t fit right. At least Russell Crowe made his character believable.

Colin Firth should have stuck to chasing after fat-bottomed girls who keep diaries. Worst quote from the movie: “Caesar’s ghost shall haunt you ever after”! — Gandalf the Fake. I wish I could give a full review of the movie, but I stopped watching after that.

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Basketball is a disease which has spread across the country in the form of hoops and balls. There are basketball courts wherever you go, from the streets of Manila where greasy-haired people in tsinelas will dodge jeepneys to play ball with a rubber one that’s so worn down it’s smooth and a passion unlike any other, to the posh residences of Ayala Alabang where people play with practiced form. Is basketball our national sport? If it isn’t, it should be. Bows and arrows shouldn’t be the only things we’re winning at the Olympics.

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We are conscious and we are subconscious, but we are never unconscious. For us, things happen for a reason. Human beings have the capacity to learn something from anything, if we choose to. The choosing part’s the kicker.

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Idea: how we subconsciously associate the music we’re hearing with our feelings. The songs we like might be the songs we were listening to during positive moments of our life. After a series of songs become associated with positive moments, one might develop a taste for a particular music genre in a subconscious attempt to listen to more songs that we feel are a reflection of our life. This may explain why simpler people prefer simpler things and people of greater intelligence prefer a more meaningful form of music; thus more developed human beings appreciate life more. (End of propaganda.)

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They told me that the classics never go out of style but, they do. They do. Somehow baby, I never thought that we would, too.

— Intro to Worms of the Brain/Faculties of the Soul by Refused.

I guess it makes sense. Classics do go out of style. So do we, eventually. But f**kit! F**k style! You only live once. Might as well live life on your own terms. Just make sure you choose those terms well.

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Recommended reading: Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

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Pop music has been researched by scientists. What they discovered is this: scientists are employed by the music industry to generate melodies that stimulate a certain part of the brain in such a way that it gets stuck in your head. They deliberately do this to make you want to buy the music that they surround your life with.

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One of the things I enjoy most about spending quality time with my father is laughing together with him at the sheer stupidity of the world. Sad how many kids these days rarely share good moments with their parents.

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“Is this all life is going to be? A never-ending search for the next meal?” The person quoted ate shortly after that.

Okay, enough messing around. On to the real article.

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Beginnings

Tony told me about a question he had. Did big rappers like Jay-Z start off good right away, or did they suck at first? They probably did, I remember replying, but here’s what I think now. Let’s take Eminem as an example. I heard that when Eminem released his first album (“Infinite”), he was still just a white boy. And when I checked it out, I discovered that, indeed, he was. The song 313 reminded me of the rapping style of someone I knew when I was trying to study in Vancouver. I noticed that while Eminem had great potential, he still had a long way to go before he got to where he is in the world today: enjoying the status of being the world’s most popular white rapper. “Infinite” isn’t the sort of album Average Joe will rush to stores to buy. A person with musical insight like Dr. Dre, however, would have been able to see the latent talent in young Marshall Mathers III and would have done his best to jumpstart his career (in fact, he did). But changes like that don’t happen overnight. With that being said, let’s move on to Young JV.

I first met Young JV at a summer camp called Teen Explore Adventure in 2006, and I could tell he already had big plans for his future back then, after he proudly performed a song that I recall to have been on the soundtrack for a Filipino movie (of course, JV pointed this out to us all, too). But I think he was truly excited. I saw him perform songs from his recently-released mix tape at the mix tape launch party in Temple, Greenbelt 3 last March 14 and while I was impressed by how much he had improved since the last time I heard him, I was disappointed that sometimes he rapped more to the video cameras than the crowd. What could this mean, I asked myself. Could he perhaps be more drawn to the fame and the fortune than pure love for the music? Is he really holding true to the initial boyish dreams he had in the beginning? Enough stupid rhetorical questions, I told myself. Quit tripping and enjoy the damn music for what it is: real Pinoy hip-hop. And I did. I had a wonderfully uncrowded spot to the side of the stage behind the photographers where I could really appreciate the performance without having to worry about some smelly guy with greasy hair and a bad moustache pushing up against me and jacking my wallet while I was stuck in the crowd (not that the bouncers at Temple would allow anything of the sort to happen).

It was a good show that I thoroughly enjoyed. He’s definitely come a long way since the first time I met him. You should go out and get your hands on a copy of his mix tape, it’s called “Rip Beats” and it showcases the skills of the Tuesday Troop; other artists on the tape include SlicknSly Kane, BiggDaddy (the two of them worked to produce the CD), Mista Blaze, Bebe Riz, Laze the Kid, Alex AKA Madbull of the group Lyrically Deranged Poets, and JV’s own girlfriend Bea de Jesus, who sings the chorus on the love-ballad One Wish. JV tells me that without her, he would be nothing. If she’s one of his sources of inspiration, she should keep up whatever she’s doing because she’s doing a good job. The track Monday2Sunday uses a Dr. Dre beat, but Young JV, SlicknSly Kane, and Biggdaddy really made the track their own. As an added bonus, the dirty version of Monday2Sunday is included right after the outro, but is not listed on the back of the CD.

I started to write a list of the notable tracks on the CD but I found that I couldn’t: I liked listening to all of them. There’s one that really stands out for me, though. It’s the last track before the outro. Young JV may tell Mista Blaze that he’s all grown, but I don’t believe him. I think this is just the beginning. My prediction: if JV keeps up his passion, this is the start of a good career. I wish I could write a full review of the mix tape right now, but that’ll have to wait for the time being.

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For all of you who missed Shadows Fall performing live in Manila last March 15 at A Venue (what an original name, “a venue”), I feel your pain. Circumstances caused me to miss all but the final four songs that they played. Bummer. From the looks of it, though, there weren’t many people who did: when I walked in, the first thing I noticed was how full the venue was and how awesome lead singer Brian Fair looked windmilling his dreadlocks in front of the huge moving monster backdrop (Pulp publisher Vernon Go told me in January that it was going to be 20 feet tall, but I suspect it was larger than that).

I had a chance to chat with some of the members of the band. Shadows Fall’s drummer, Jason Bittner, has been behind the drums since he was 14. That must take a lot of dedication, I told him. He cracked up and bent over laughing for a second, then looked at me with a straight face and a spark in his eye and told me that it did. You know how hard it is to do nothing but play an instrument for the rest of your life? I could somewhat relate to him, knowing how hard it is to practice sometimes (especially when you want to give up) from my childhood experience with the violin, and back then I still had school to worry about. It takes hard work and a lot of effort. Not many people realize that, and think that artists are gods descended from the heavens. They’re not. They’re just people like you and me, except they have a love for their music that enables them to shrug the sh*t aside and keep on playing.

Shadows Fall plays their own breed of music. They’ve been nominated for the Grammys, but they don’t let it get to their head. I observed die-hard fans begging to get their guitars signed, and Shadows Fall would sign with a smile on their face despite the fact that they already expended most of their energy on a kick-ass concert. Right next to the mosh pit right before the show ended, everyone around me was having a great time just enjoying the music. Compare this to an All That Remains show I went to when I was in Vancouver: people were crowd surfing without any care for the well-being of others and a girl got pitched over the front railing and fell right on her head. This was after a big, beefy white guy shoved me out of my spot at the very front simply because I was a short little Asian dude. Vancouver can get pretty crazy sometimes.

I had a quick chat with Brian Fair right before he left to get back to his hotel room at the Dusit, and I wish I could remember everything we talked about. I vaguely remember that it was related to metal and how one of the reasons I enjoy metal so much is because metal bands have no real reason to play their music except for the deep passion they have for it. Not many people listen to metal. It doesn’t come in the same way that hip-hop does with its concepts of fame, fortune, and b****es for everyone. The only real reason people form metal bands is because they just love the genre to death, whereas the music industry today is flooded with “artists” who have little desire for anything but materialistic gains. Shadows Fall is a group of artists, all working to pool their talents together for the love of metal. I believe them to be true artists.

To recap: my Shadows Fall experience was brief but meaningful. I hope they come back here in the future. If this is the beginning of quality metal bands traveling across the world simply to perform for us Pinoy metalheads, then this is a good start indeed. Thanks to Pulp magazine, Red Horse Beer (Ito Ang Tama), Tribal Gear, Warner Music Philippines, PLDT MyDSL (broadband internet), Audiophile, Ibanez Guitars, Tama Drums Hardware and Accessories, Friendster.com, Pioneer-Sparx (to the X!) and The Philippine STAR for sponsoring this event and making it possible. Also mucho gracias to the Go tandem of Gracie and Vernon: without them, I doubt Shadows Fall would ever have made it to the Philippines.

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I should be writing more regularly now. I’ll try to write every Friday instead of just once in a blue moon. E-mail your reactions to the.real.belmonte@hotmail.com.