Here is a link to a video of an earlier version of the song entitled "Mas Mahal Na Kita Ngayon", with its lyrics, as performed by Michael V, its composer and original artist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn06XpqAIVY
Perhaps, what forcibly inserts this song in my subconscious is the curious contradictions that characterize my encounters with it. I usually hear it being played during times when I am trying to cushion up my external masculinity, vigorously lifting weights to pump up my muscles, even as its lyrics talk about a deeply victimized male who apparently suffered an enormous amount of physical and emotional torture from presumably his female partner.
The lyrics are funny, at first. After all, it is composed and was first performed by Michael V, one of the most popular and multi-awarded comedian in the country who is now also well known as Yaya, the other half of the comic duo, with the other half being the precocious Angelina played by the equally talented Ogie Alcasid. But as one absorbs the reality of the lyrics, one realizes that it is a macabre narrative of an inhuman treatment of a man being subjected to unspeakable forms of domestic violence. Think about this: being ridiculed for having a bad haircut, being fed with cat food or food laced with poison, being hit by an iron pipe, being suffocated with a pillow while asleep, being bodily assaulted with razor blades and subjected to mauling including hitting his boils, and being forced to take a bath with boiling water, among others. But what even adds to the blackness of its comedy is the apparent suggestion at the end of the song when the male singer has now felt a deeper love for his lover-tormentor only since the latter is very dead, as he sings: "Ang hapdi at kirot ng sinapit ko noon, di ko na ramdam pagkat mas mahal na kita ngayon. Kahit nasan ka man mas mahal na kita ngayon. Ang cute mo naman bagay ka sa iyong ataul," followed by a hearty "Hay, Salamat!"
A closer analysis of the textual politics of this song leads to a very disturbing message. And this leads to the other inherent contradiction in this song, even made more dangerous by the manner by which it is delivered for public consumption--as a funny, ordinary, popularized form of cultural artifact played on the radio, heard by ordinary citizens, which may seem innocent. It is this innocence that may render this vicarious, simulated experience of a battered male to be perceived as a usual, real happening by a desensitized, if not uncritical listening public. Lost in the comedy and the popularization is the reality that if one only checks actual statistics on domestic violence, that if there would be a credbile and logical gender who should be singing this song, it should be one with a female voice. While nobody is demeaning the isolated cases in which men are victimized by domestic abuse from women, this song violently inverts reality, one in which for every one male subjected to such abuse that thousands more women are suffering from it all over the world.
I can only surmise Michael V's intention in composing this song. Perhaps, he was just trying to be funny. Maybe, this is a satirical portrait of an emasculated male, a parody that in fact deconstructs the dominant image of male superiority and the patriarchy that sustains it.
But I also have another way of resisting the politics of this song, if only to complete my deconstruction of it. I have finally settled in my mind that indeed, the singer talks about his experience of being the object of domestic violence. But left unsaid in the lyrics, and which I now forcefully appropriate to provide logic to the missing piece, is my own imagination of the character perpetrator of that violence. Indeed, there is no doubt that the male voice in the song was physically and emotionally abused...
...by his male lover.
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