There's an interesting issue brimming between the two Southeast Asian neighbors - Indonesia and Malaysia - one that has caught the news world just today. It's in fact a broiling issue that threatens to overflow --- amounting even to a call for war.

Just lately, Indonesia has accused Malaysia of plagiarizing its culture when the latter used a Balinese dance --- the Balinese Pendet Dance --- to promote a TV Program aimed at imbibing tourism.

Malaysia has since apologized and had canceled the use of the disputed dance. Yet, tempers remain high as Indonesian protesters trooped to the Malaysian embassy in Jakarta and pelted it with unlikely missiles, from rotten eggs to ninja bladed stars --- mind you. And some of them thought war could ensue. Now that’s really a serious consequence just for a mix-up on a cultural dance, getting overboard somehow.

But there’s a positive thing I see in this brewing controversy for it only shows how these two countries feel so much passionately about their culture.

Contrary perhaps to the fact that some of us do not even think about it anymore, not in this ultra-high speed, modern age that we are living right now.

Still, I must say that Indonesia and Malaysia should hold their horses and refrain from going to war (pun intended) based on the misuse of a Balinese Pendet Dance. Historically, speaking the two countries share so much in terms of culture and civilizing influence, a fusion that goes back to so many centuries ago, even as far back as the empiric age of Sri Vijaya and Majapahit (7th to 13th Century). And even with the Philippines, cultural affiances are myriad and overwhelming.

In this age, the Hindu culture from across the ocean had made very deep inroads into the Malay Archipelago and into the vast Indonesian islands. This had happened in a time long before the Arabs and Chinese came, for trade or religious duty.

In this manner, mix-ups or confusion with cultural items or matters would surely ensue, and could not actually be negated completely. To this, there should be understanding and indulgence between the two Southeast Asian countries, two nations that are often at odds with each other, even going to war in the 1960’s in dispute of Borneo(Konfrontasi).

And besides, it’s time that Southeast Asian countries should band together culturally and not be so mindful of minor cultural differences. Culture is best apprehended and appreciated when it is shared especially to the ones that are near and adjacent.

By the way, as an upshot of this controversy, some Indonesians started to point out that the Malaysian national anthem, Negaraku (My Country) , was merely a copycat of an Indonesian song Terang Bulang (Bright Moon). This is true in some point since the two songs, Negaraku and Terang Bulan are adaptations of an old French melody that was so popular in the entire Malay peninsula in the 17th century.

Now this one could actually inflame and flare-up nationalistic and patriotic feelings and sentiments since we are already speaking of a national anthem here, and not merely a cultural dance.

I hope the leaders of Indonesia and Malaysia would be wise enough to calm the fierce debate at the soonest time possible and be able to resolve it in the most reasonable of manner.

When David Cook's new single came on FM radio, I thought "Come Back to Me" was such a catchy rock ditty that I wanted to play it over and over again. I was even thinking of calling the FM radio and talk to the DJ. But nah, that was something we don't do anymore, making song request over the phone --- or do we still do that?

In fact, I liked the song first before I knew it was a David Cook song. Maybe it's true that David's voice is not so unique after all.

So, "Come Back to Me" is a number with a very strong come-on, and to be sure it would further reinforced David Cook’s stranglehold on his new-found fame, making his star shine all the more.

Maybe I won’t talk about this very catchy song anymore, maybe you just have to hear it playing.

Ely Buendia is riding high so once again with Pupil’s “Teacher’s Pet” garnering massive playtime on primetime radio. It’s on KLITE Manila; they’ve been playing it all so often and that makes it tops of the charts, years after it was officially released .

Just when we thought we can count Pupil as just another Eraserhead spin-off, the band lurches back with this ditty that has got not only great sound and melody, but really, really clever lyrics, one that only Ely Buendia could spew out and no one else, at least in the local music scene. It’s so original that way.

Consider how Ely sang in “Teacher’s Pet”: “You are a natural selection, a full-proof rule without exception. Let me indoctrinate you, while you indoctrinate me.”

That’s really awesome lyric making.

And the song itself sound so much like a Billboard charter, only if we don’t easily recognize that it’s Ely singing a catchy ditty all along.

Maybe I’ll just publish the entire lyrics for you to browse. Hope I won’t go copyright violating for this.

Teacher's Pet by Pupil

You could be making the grade

You could be making the grade

Don't let your memory fade

Stop cramming when the meter starts running

I stopped playing online poker for an hour tonight so I can watch “American Idol” on cable television and that’s a sign how I am such a huge American Idol patron. As a matter of fact, I am often glued to the singing competition show every time it’s on, perhaps five years in the running now.

I just loved how talented these amateur participants are that I often have doubts if ever they are really real contestants and not just been hand-picked by the show’s producer. And especially the early parts of the season, the one’s they held on stadiums, where lots of goofy things happened, and lots of crazies wanting to have their 15 seconds of fame. I had guffaws most especially when these so out-of-sync contestants really thought they were shoo-ins and even spew bitter and stinging words for the judges, most especially at Mr. Cowell. The episodes are so much funnier than any spoof one could ever snatch on TV, really.

But this year, I haven’t got to watched lots of American Idol episodes due perhaps to my busy work schedule as a University teacher. Or perhaps, I just got tired of it. So I watched AI sparingly now. I don’t even know the names of the current season's finalists, unlike in previous years.

But hey, this year’s version of American Idol really has stupendous talents, like now it’s so true, as what Randy Jackson have always been saying every time, that this year (like every year he says), the show has the most talented group of contestants than any other year, and the most tight of competition at that. Like he always says that, and it sounds so patronizing doesn’t it?

So now it’s down to the top 3 and next week would be final night. That’s great excitement for AI lovers. The cute girl with the rocking voice was booted out and it was a misjudgment. But hey, I ain’t got no vote privilege to ever complain, being far from the American coast.

And Chris Daughtry appeared with a new single. To date, he had sold 5 million copies of his debut album and had won a Grammy or two to boot. Probably Chris is the most successful Idol graduate to date. Except perhaps that Carrie Underwood could challenge this status, being so huge now in country music world.

Now I wonder, if this would be such a patent irony. We all know that Chris Daughtry did not win the AI the year he was a participant and was a far fourth actually, losing to Taylor Hicks and Ms. Katherine McPhee.

This must be what we can call the Chris Daughtry Irony. He is the reason why perhaps I could surmise why some contestants probably want to go home early and do a daughtry, having some kind of a sweet revenge, or a stunning comeback, proving all of em wrong.

But a tribute CD had caught my attention one day and after listening or watching it, I had a thought about to where have I been to all these years. If you throw me a Bob Dylan record, some days I would surely prefer to play Leonard Cohen on my cellphone-cum-mp3 player-cum alarm clock. 

One thing is for sure, he is Canadian. Now that I know.

And he'd been playing music since Dylan did in his 60's heydays. I wonder now why he'd been so widely-unknown, really amazes me, what with the silvery folksy music that he croons to, its unimaginable to a great extent.

Mr. Cohen in fact had to change his music style a bit just to garner interest in popular music, and one of them song is "Closing Time", featuring vibrant and dancy beat, complete with a polished and ultra-sleek music video released along with it. And the result, same gem music he often produces, telling and poetic, for he is also a published poet, and novelist as well as essayist.

So listen to this, "Closing Time"; Although I assure you, his best work does not make you dance at all.

When I was just new to being a music lover, like really being into music, sometime just after my high school days, I had a thought then that I didn’t have much interest in dance music. Not that I were just being typical of most rock music lovers, who shows no restraint at all in showing (off) their contempt for “dance” music, like it was only for sissies and phonies. In fact I could like them so well in the past. When I was a very young kid, like somewhere between 8 or 10 years old, I had often jibed and feel the beat of songs like “Brother Louie” or “Tarzan Boy” being played in game arcades that I had frequented then.

Perhaps, it was my great leaning to New Wave that had somehow made Petshop Boys reasonably chic and modish.

Or perhaps, Depeche Mode was really a dance band when they started making music in the mid-80’s that we countless millions of soul who had loved them in their early days really and actually had loved dance music, without us knowing it.

One day, about several months ago, I passed by my favorite video rental store and got hold of the tribute concert video to Leonard Cohen titled “I’m Your Man” , and I just got blown by it. It was a very good concert video/musical, and could be just second to U2’s “Rattle and Hum”. There was this fat guy in that show who just appeared on stage and sang Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” and I thought it was a fabulous number, the way the fat guy sang it was so terrifyingly haunting that I kept on watching that part of the concert over and over again.

The thing is - I never knew the name of the fat guy even if I had gotten so interested with his so enchanting voice. But I tried searching in the net and I later found out that his name was in fact Antony Hegarty. I thought that I liked to hear most of his song and wondered if ever he had some works before and truth to be told, indeed he was in a band, two of them in fact, Antony Johnson and the Aeons and Hercules and Love Affair.

This was how I discovered the sumptuous and wonderfully-crafted album Hercules and Love Affair, the self-titled debut album from the band with the same name.

The album is a dance album that’s why I was having some soliloquy about dance music in the beginning part of this post.
Now I wonder if finally, dance music is just as pleasurable as rock music. I wonder even if dance music is finally making a huge comeback, back to its heydays in the 80’s.

And for a dance band, Hercules and Love Affair’s album is so seriously wonderful and lyrically emotional that it was not like any other dance album that I’ve got ever known of.

In the beginning song “Time Will”, Antony Hegarty sang “Don’t Lie to me. Don’t Make it Up… I cannot hold half a life.” Now that’s just an emotional outbreak that just got me so wedged with this album.

In “Blind”, the band showed exceptional liveliness with a very jibing bass intro that makes the body move effortlessly and being so caught up by the ever so melodic vocals of Antony, making it one of the most original pieces of music that I have heard so recently.

And as if this wasn’t enough, the album moves on to higher ground in the extremely vigorous “Raise Me Up” with meandering lyrics that sang “They put you down. They pushed your face down. You kissed the ground.”

Naomi Ruiz also maintain vocal duties in this band and she is sometimes called “Fabulous Naomi” and the first time you hear her sing, it would be no surprise why she is called that way. Her voice is smooth and flowing like a crystal afloat an ice field, that in “Iris” and “Athene” she just turned the songs into full bloom naturally. She immediately reminds the listener of EBTG’s Tracy Thorn, so confident in voice and one who needs no vocal acrobatics whatsoever.

Almost every song in the album is as catchy as a fresh rainbow, almost all. It’s a being rare that way. Every song in it could actually be played on FM radio and that’s ultimate radio-friendliness that doesn’t happen every day.

Rating : 9/10

Keane is back with a reverberating album in “Perfect Symmetry” now topping the Billboards Album Chart at No. 7 and I expect it to remain somewhere within that sphere for many weeks to come.

In 2004, this English band gained worldwide accolade for the catchy and ultra-melodic “Everybody’s Changing” and from that moment on, the band never looked back and gained more and more success.

Honestly, I thought so little at first about this band from East Sussex, relegating them merely and probably as one of those one-hit wonders that had just got lucky with one very inspired composition. I even thought then that Tom Chaplin’s voice was just one of those Bono wanna-be’s that tries to imitate the inimitable voice of the U2 frontman.

But lately, things have changed. I am greatly engrossed by Keane and the music they permeate, sounding so proficient and deep like they’ve been out there for decades among the great rock bands of all time. And Tom Chaplin’s exudes that forceful confidence that’s definitive throughout “Perfect Symmetry”, a kind of feel-good exuberance that becomes imbibing to the listeners, especially when most of the songs in the album embark upon the subject of love and emotion, piano-driven love songs as they are called, and probably Keane could be forgiven for being silly almost all the time, as they could be just among a few modern rock bands that is able to extrapolate on those silly topics so extraneously and then be excused afterwards.

In “The Lovers Are Losing”, Keane sings a winning melody that could rack up admiration all over again, just like it did in “Everybody’s Changing”, serenading the listeners with a wicked keyboards intro that’s leaves a very good mark. Another promising song is “Better Than This’, very catchy and inspiring.

And listening to the whole album is like being in one very enjoyable ride, through desert highways and immaculate interstate avenues, as the wind kisses the sunlit horizon so silently.

I just thought Keane’s new album is just perfect for the car stereo, when I never really thought before that there is some kind of music that is just perfect while one is driving or riding in a car.

In the latest single “Spiralling”, Keane introduces itself so loudly and so eloquently and the song itself has just that, a very enticing intro that make the heart stomp and the feet move in lively rhythm.

Listen to Keane’s “Spiralling”:

Keane's Album : "Perfect Symmetry" -
Rating: 8 out of 1o.

There’s a good song and then there’s a good song. What I mean is that, some song is just so good that I just feel triumphant about it. Like Nick Cave’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow” which he sang with Australian pop diva Kylie Minogue, a song I’ve heard on TV, in a music video some years ago and never heard about till now. The thing is Nick Cave is so popular worldwide but he ain’t as such in our territory that not even a shadow of any of his albums was seen in any local music store. That way, I forgot about Mr. Cave, even if I liked him the first time I’ve heard his voice, singing “There Is A Light” in the soundtrack of Batman Forever movie.

Maybe Nick Cave sounded so much like Jim Morrison of The Doors that I could not help but feel so enamored by his voice as Jim remains the most iconic of all musicians for me, just like Bono and Bob Dylan, and since he is now gone, Nick Cave and his songs just felt so fulfilling to me, so in time, truly wondrous and celebratory.

I don’t know specifically, but I thought this song “Where the Wild Roses Grow” is just a very good song, while Nick Cave is just a very clever musician. And mind you, the music video that goes with the song is classic to the sight, like a critically-acclaimed movie from Akira Kurosawa, such as “Dreams” and reminds me so much of a dream I had some years back, one that was so vivid and most memorable of all, to which I have written about as “The Pond” and truly, if I could picture that very memorable dream in a movie, it would most probably have this kind of look and feel, so meaningful and yet so silent, like words have no meaning at all, for no words is necessary, and everything is animated and heavy with meaningful thoughts.

At the beginning of the song, there’s the entrance of violins, and then came the piano, and I thought if Mozart were alive today, this was his own masterpiece. And the lyrics is pure poetry, such as Shakespeare or Dickinson, and Nick Cave should have won a Nobel Prize for this. Sadly, they don’t give that damn award to rock musicians.

Without further adieu, this is Nick Cave’s “Where The Wild Roses Grow”:

There’s something very edgy about King of Leon’s new album.
To be sure, there’s a deep melancholy about the songs consisting this 4th major outing for the up-and-about rock band from Tennessee, one that is so reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen while in his peak during the 80’s; so terse and forceful, like a radiant harmony from an ancient kingdom, one that’s been lost and had gotten away from the wayward hands of man.

In “Use Somebody”, Caleb Followill (King of Leon’s main man), belches out and self-promotes with an insistent voice so steep that even if I could not use a man right now, I feel like wanting to be in Tennessee any minute now and see if I could actually “use somebody like him”.

He sings “I've been roaming around, I was looking down at all I see, painting faces, building places I can't reach” and that is just like in Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia”, evoking melancholy in narrow streets, across a cacophony of nuances, of desertion and yearning and along sad highways.

Who’s using who? It is as real a question as could possibly be, because more often than not, a man is either being used by somebody or is using somebody --- depending on what end each of us would find ourselves in. Such and such things.

In the end, Followill keeps on belching “somebody like me”, over and over again, seeking attention and affirmation, like a crying child; and that’s where the music becomes glorious in its melancholy, to the point of being salvific.

Overall, the album is such a fresh release, imbibing a rock renewal that brings forth the spirit that had carried rock music to the extremes in the 1980’s, along the path of New Wave and Glam Rock, and mostly to the he no-frills southern tinged work from such legends as Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. You could say, it’s very eclectic this way; but that is just so fine with me.

RATING: 7 out of 10.

I am looking through several videos on the current nowadays. Of course, I would be at You Tube for that. Thanks mostly to the newly installed DSL broadband service that we have just gotten. It’s just a paradigm shift that I wonder where I’ve been before broadband came to us---perhaps in the dark ages.

Now, I hear Katy Perry lamenting how a “Mannequin” is not a man, but “just a mannequin”, and I could almost hear her voice quiver and get exasperated about this fact. And her voice is just superb, just like in her archetypal and brilliant first single “I Kissed A Girl” that took her to worldwide fame in virtually seconds time. Now that’s success in the most instantaneous way.

Katy Perry has such great musicality that in her debut album “One of the Boys”, she belts out a great collection of ear-candy ditties, ones that are also so heavy in emotion and sentiment, and passion of course. I never heard a girl sang with this kind of passion since Ann Wilson of Heart did her thing in the late 80’s, singing “Alone” and “These Dreams”. Ms. Perry sang so well like that. She could similarly be as awesomely haunting as Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette and Sinead O’ Connor, and also like Fiona Apple in the way she writes and sang her songs. Wonder why I mentioned all these great female artists in reference to Katy Perry? Perhaps it’s because I have enjoyed her music so much that it’s one of the most original works that I have digged in lately. “One of the Boys” could be just the best release for this year except if something better comes up from now till December. And do not be surprised if she would garner all the music awards that’s gonna be out there come awards season early next year.

In “Mannequin”, I could almost feel the desperation of her longings, seeking an artificial person, wanting it to be a person, when we are so full of real persons all around. Or is it? Isn’t it somehow beguiling how Katy Perry could be so true in how “real persons” could be so unreal and plastic, that she’d rather have a mannequin on her side. Mannequins don’t complain. Don’t cheat. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. But like Ms. Perry said, “…he’s just a mannequin…and not a man”. Consider this line:

"How do I get
Closer to you
When you keep
It all on mute
How will I know
The right way
To love you"

Isn’t that tragic and romantic, both at the same time?

Katy Perry is just not excellent in “Mannequin” alone. “One of the Boys” is magically lively. “Ur So Gay” soothing yet controversial and in “Lost”, real emotions take the high-note like never before asking “have you ever been so lost…is there a light at the end of the road?” And in “I’m Still Breathing”, the song is just so exceptionally haunting and carries a very catchy slow melody that it should be the best song I’ve ever heard this year, toe to toe with “Mannequin”.

Now you might ask: “I am in consonance with her messages?” Some say she is very radical and controversial for “kissing a girl” or saying something like “ur so gay”, they say she’s homophobic (fear and cautiousness or homosexuals) and some say she’s misandric (irrational hate of boys). But I guess, Ms. Katy Perry is just being brave to tackle the issues that confront the new form of society today, the confusion of gender that hugs the headline news ever so often, the religious and moral issues that heatedly goes with it.

I may not agree with all her dispositions and that’s for sure. But she opens up these questions for us so that we may tackle it ourselves; and observes how these new things are occurring within and without us.

Above all, Katy Perry has really awesome music.

RATINGS: 7.5 out of 10.