WHAT HAPPENS IF MY PARENTS ARE PERFORMING PUNK ARTISTS INSTEAD OF BEING STAID TEACHERS?
By:  Iris P. Concepcion

In the household of four where I grew up, the instruments were never off key.  Stereos sound off blasting tunes of properly melodied symphony and pop songs readily fastened for ears that liven my musical experiences in catchier progressions.

I would stare at the album covers like I would the humungous goat's eyes, clearly in constant wonderment when I could land my pixel self in an album, vinyl cover with outlandish costumes and shiny legs creamed in cocoa powder for special effects.

In my forays to musical listening, I had sometimes wished that my parents with their words of protocol, plantilla, memorandum, voucher and education may be replaced by an avant garde word like "rock lobster".  I had also wished that my brother, him with his tales of W gold mines, become the musician in Queen singing the Galileo song (Bohemian Rhapsody).

This is where I had derived my idea of stupendous wish calculation. What happens if my parents are really the creators of "Rock Lobster" and my brother, really the pianist in Bohemian Rhapsody? Shall I scream out of my wits upon realizing the fact that they had singlehandedly created a movement where shrimps could truly dance and where bass guitars can be improved to a more classical string trombone (refer to Rock Lobster's opening riffs).  The idea is to foster a group of discarded and often maligned in the society to make their message clear: Young. Poor. Angry. But Productive.

The era was, perhaps, started as a protest to the loud music without meaning; a march against music with repetitive lyrics without any semblance of rhyme; a disgust over melodies that are best used as tranquilizers for putting one to sleep.  Punk became an antidote to the senseless awning of lazy creativity. Consider the titles as a slap against that period's decadence. My Sharona, Whip It Good.  The punk movement was created by people, in fact, envisioned by a couple who were early on exposed to perfect rhymes and musical incantations but had suddenly found themselves faced with substandard audio equipment (either the guitars crash or the bass is out of tune).  To add salt to the wound, they made their sound senseless and repetitive as the mediums they were raucusing about.  They had wonderful costumes though, especially the dyed hair that had suddenly stood vertically erect instead of being pulled down.

Thanks to a bizarre neighborhood, I had rekindled all my memories of notes that had made me more musically mature.