Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Look what the cat dragged in...

Or to be precise, look what I found in Quiapo last weekend.


The band logos are stickers, so is the Billboard logo, while the Skid Row and Guns N Roses pictures are just that, pictures. I bought them in a store along Quezon Boulevard that used to be a record bar, and I think these are authentic relics from the 80s because the store still has lots of them, bundled in plastic bags, yellowing and covered in dust. Wow. I remember growing up in the province and seeing these stickers in tricycles and in my classmates' notebooks. And I remember that (badly printed) photos of bands (and also song lyrics with illustrations in them) were big with high school students in the late 80s and early 90s, buying them at the palengke and giving them away to friends and crushes with dedications at the back, or they (we) just inserted them under the plastic covers of their (our) books and notebooks.


I started high school in '89, and back then, my classmates were huge fans of hair metal bands, especially Guns N Roses (G'N'R), Skid Row, Poison, and Bon Jovi. At that time it briefly occurred to me that there must be something wrong with me because I wasn't into rock (I was heavily into...Technotronic and Roxette). But how come when Metallica released "Enter Sandman" and Nirvana came out with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" mere months apart in 1991, I immediately liked them? It was only recently that it occurred to me that maybe at that age I already had taste in music, hindi kaya? (pump up the jam, pump it up, while your feet are stompin', and the jam is pumpin', look at here the crowd is jumpin'...)


But now I appreciate those hair metal bands, in an ironic sort of way. I realized they're campy as hell. Now that they're fat and bald (serves you right for destroying the ozone with your Aqua Net!), they're now even more hilarious because some of them still seriously think that they have made a great contribution to humanity and that they were/are the bomb. Well, for a short period of time now relegated to our subconscious, they were.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good for people to know.