I’ve been living in your cassette
Singing in My Sleep, Semisonic
It’s the modern equivalent
Singing up to a Capulet
On a balcony in your mind
On weekends or when I’m in a particularly good mood, I’d connect my phone to a white Yamaha micro stereo system via Bluetooth and blast music from its speakers. These days, I usually listen to electronic music or ’60s jazz to keep me focused while I’m writing—I find anything with lyrics usually distracting.
Okay, that’s just partly true. At the end of every year, Spotify emails me stats about my musical taste over the past 365 days. And while electronic music and jazz do count among my favorite genres, I still mostly listen to a lot of the music I listened to as a teenager.
I formally became a teenager in March 1996. It was also when I graduated from elementary and readied my bags to study at the Seminario de Jesus Nazareno (SJN) in the next school year.
My parents have always been great gift-givers either as themselves or as Santa Claus. For my graduation, they gave me a Walkman.
Unlike my current phone which can play virtually any song ever written and has a billion other features that would’ve wowed my 13-year-old self, my Walkman was a pretty Spartan device. Sure, there were a few buttons and switches whose function I never figured out, but it was as straightforward as playing music got. Open the tape compartment, slide in the cassette, press play, and listen to your music in glorious stereo on a cheap pair of earphones. At least until the tape gets “eaten” and jams the cassette player, probably ruining your tape forever like it did my Van Halen Best of Volume 1, but that’s a story for another day.
It was the same Walkman I was listening to Bread to one night when I was in my second year. It was bedtime and I was lying on my bed at the Old Dormitory—or Old Dorm as we usually called it—which stretched out from the Prefect of Discipline’s Room on one end to the statues of Mary and Jesus on the other. On either side of this long hallway were beds and cabinets of about 70 seminarians.
I was finding it difficult to sleep. So, I got up and walked across to Phil’s bed, a senior with whom I became good friends because of our shared love of music. He taught me how to play a few songs on the guitar and every once in a while, he’d let me borrow his tapes.
We chatted for a bit, during which I declared Bread as the greatest band I’ve ever listened to. He reasoned with me that there are other great artists too, but I wasn’t having any of it. At the time, I couldn’t imagine how any other artist could top the band that wrote “If”, “Aubrey”, “Guitar Man”, and “Diary.”
I wasn’t aware that my taste was still evolving then. But somehow, a part of me still couldn’t see beyond the greatness of the likes of soft rock titans like Bread and Michael Learns to Rock.
At the end of our chat, Phil recommended that I listen to Gin Blossoms’ Congratulations, I’m Sorry as I rummaged through his cassette collection.
I returned to my bed, replaced Bread’s tape with Gin Blossoms’, rewound it, and pressed play. “Day Job” fades in and I was transported into a world of great pop hooks, crisp-sounding drums, and jangly Fender Stratocasters. Along the way, I picked up a few favorite songs: “Follow You Down”, “Not Only Numb”, “Perfectly Still”, “Virginia”, and “I Can’t Figure You Out”. Hell, I liked the entire album. In fact, I liked it so much I subsequently bought my own copy.
Isn’t It Weird, Isn’t It Strange?
Everyone was into all sorts of music during my time at SJN. What I call “The Rock vs. Hip Hop vs. Punk Wars” of the early to mid-’90s was already over by then so everyone was free to listen to music that they loved no matter the genre. But in broad terms, we can divide these genres into two. There was, of course, Church music, which we sang every day during Mass, and then there was the Devil’s music. We enjoyed both in equal measure, taking as much pleasure in singing “Ave Maria” as growling Sepultura’s “Roots Bloody Roots”.
In my class, no one probably had a more eclectic musical taste than Henrik. He grew up in Borongan, so when we were allowed to go out of the seminary on Saturday afternoons, he’d go home where he’d be able to watch MTV when it was still the primary source of everything cool and mainstream. In the next few days, he’d fill us in on the most popular songs of the previous week. He thus brought to our class the gift of Hanson’s “Mmmbop”, K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life”, and tons of other songs, a gift he continues to give whenever we meet. I don’t look out for new music now as much as I used to, but he still occasionally shares with me fresh ones to listen to.
The community’s broad taste in music might have also been because of the strange time we found ourselves in musically. Grunge was dying, alternative music was still very much alive, Nu Metal was still a few years away from blowing up, and—probably the most important—boy and girl bands became a thing. Okay, boy and girl groups weren’t entirely new, but the likes of Backstreet Boys (BSB), Spice Girls, and NYSNC became the soundtrack of our generation whether we liked it or not. Of course, I ate up boy band music completely, especially because it was a great way to connect with girls.
And while I was heavily into Britpop at the time, I also knew BSB’s hits by heart. It was largely because of Nick—my classmate, not Carter—who was probably the biggest BSB fan in our class. When Millennium came out, we’d share earphones and listen to it during class breaks and I’d air-guitar the solo in “Larger Than Life”. We loved the album so much that we sang and played “I Want It That Way” with Kirk, D’Arcy, and Joey Boy after Mass on a Saturday morning instead of going directly to the refectory for breakfast. A priest caught us mid-concert and then stripped us of our privilege of going out of the seminary that afternoon. We got over it quickly though. We had fun and we told ourselves that it ain’t nothing but a heartache and a mistake. I also guess the priest wanted it that way.