Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

When master rapper Francis Magalona died last Thursday, just as his show Eat Bulaga was to go on air, there was a passing of an old order. He was 44. By all measure, 44 is young, and he was really young. He still had so much to do, so many songs to sing, so much energy to electrify Pinoy popular culture. He could have even done many other performances, as he wished, that he wanted to join his Eat Bulaga family in their shows in the United States. But leukemia had overpowered him and had taken him away from us. We have lost a king, a royalty, a master who sang our songs. Or rapped them, because after all, he was the King of Rap, our country’s answer to MC Hammer who ruled the airwaves during the 1990s.

Watching the tributes that have been given to him, here and elsewhere, one important theme emerged, a theme that basically sums up his life and times—the nation. When his contemporaries—or to be more precise, the others that followed him—were singing the mundane, he was writing the verse of a nation in transformation, a nation that has just risen from the ashes of anarchy and dictatorship. People who have lived through the 1990s would never forget how he broke through the scene singing, nonetheless, a call to remember who we are. Still in the nationalistic tradition of the ‘80s and the ‘70s, Francis M, as he was fondly called, wrote and uttered the pride of his race—our race.

I remember my own brother playing the cassette tape of his album, which contained Mga Kababayan Ko, endlessly, in the old blue Mitsubishi Lancer, where my father cramped all of us, perhaps thinking that we would never grow. My brothers were big fans of Francis M, and they even learned the "running man," the dance move popularized by the song. I remember quite vividly the mode—colorful chalekos, white katsa pants, and native headgears that are usually associated with Mindanao.

Remember Doctrina Christiana, Urbana at Felisa, the conduct booklets and even the confessional lists of the frailes, even the Pasyon? But since he was coming from a subversive art form, rap, Francis M made sure he not only transgressed, in the strictest sense of the word. He turned rap, not only into our own subculture. He made it into a culture. When the intelligentsia look down on Pinoy rap music, the high art-low art cycle simply repeats and emphasizes the widening cultural gap. Francis M, though he may never know it, was the cultural compromise. As a son of popular culture—and popular icons, Pancho Magalona and Tita Duran, he was the icon who could stand side by side with Tondo Boy rappers and belt with high-end clubbers. He is a quintessential creature of popular culture, being able to traverse both the kaleidoscope worlds of the masa and the sosyal.