Between the later part of 2006 and middle of 2007, I received three offers from three record labels to reproduce and distribute Missing Filemon’s two albums – the debut ‘Mising Filemon (Suroysuroy)’ and ‘Sinesine’. “And if things are good, we have money for your third album,” they told me. The condition, and this had to be on contract and non-negotiable: “Write a few songs in Tagalog, and record some Tagalog versions of your old hits.”

I told them something like “Fuck you and your Tagalog market.” I never heard from them again. I was reminded of this after reading Bordowitz on Nirvana and the Seattle ‘grunge’ scene. Read, too, what made Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ work. If there’s a song that gave me courage to finally quit my seminary studies, this would be it.

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Last Christmas, a colleague bought me the book ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick – The 52 creepiest love songs you’ve ever heard’ by Tom Reynolds. The book pillories artists for writing songs that “for some reasons have gone off the rails into the realm of the tawdry, the overwhelming, the obsessive, the self-absorbed, and the completely weird.”

It’s so entertaining (and downright hilarious) that I can’t help sharing with you excerpts from some of the articles. To Mr. Reynolds (assuming that somebody other than my girlfriend reads my blog), I’m a huge, huge fan of yours, so I hope you don’t mind.

To you guys, If I leave you hanging after every post, it’s because nothing beats buying the book. So go check it out.

Let’s start off with Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive’…

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