It's 1990, and you're 13/14. A casual music listener, stuck with what's mostly aired on WKC or WTM, no earning capacity yet to buy your own tapes at Odyssey. The FM airwaves are populated mostly with Top 40 hits from the U.S. or the U.K. What you are familiar with as Pinoy music -- Apo, Yoyoy Villame, Florante, Freddie Aguilar, Asin -- you can appreciate to varying degrees, but you feel no allegiance to that music, no sense it belongs to your generation. Even at that age, you feel them too jokey, too preachy, too slow, too folksy. And you are too young and too suburban to have yet waded through the great Pinoy rock of the 70s.
Francis Magalona steps in. You had known him as a juvenile matinee idol, one of many. Did some rapping on Loveli-Ness, sounding too slavish an imitation of the American product, with an accent too affected, so you hadn't bothered. Then his string of hits stream out. Gotta Let 'Cha Know - catchy. Cold Summer Nights - slick and suave. Mga Kababayan Ko! - colloquial, effusive, perhaps the last great burst of post-EDSA 1 Pinoy pride. The older folk hate it all -- rapping is not music, it's incomprehensible talking. You wedded in the mainstream you are just giddy. No Pinoy artist you have heard like him before, who sounded as young as you feel.
Years pass, you enter college, ride on the hipster bandwagon, develop a mild antipathy towards earnestness and the mainstream music scene. Mga Kababayan Ko! now sounds to you like Soviet-sponsored rap music -- just a hint of rebellion to let loose some steam, but not authentic enough to earn some serious street cred. But you never develop any disdain for Francis M. His music remains interesting throughout the years, even if painfully earnest at times. Occasionally, you argue with friends who have dismissively written him off as a pale white knock-off that he was a way more intriguing artist than meets the eye, than what his osmosis into the Eat Bulaga universe might seem to betray.
He died way too young, with kids way too young to lose a father. The internets will erupt with outpouring of grief from Filipinos around the world with a keener sense, a different sense of loss than I feel. I'm quite sad that we won't be hearing more of his art, and that a distinct voice from my youth had passed on.
- Francis M dead at 44 -- ABS-CBN News
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