The Philippine Online Chronicles

I think my first encounter with Glee, which meant a mad scramble to download and watch within a day all of the episodes of the first season, is telling. Rachel was singing “On My Own” from Les Miserables, a song sung by Eponine, the girl who’s looking for lost love. I know all that because of Lea Salonga, who sang it as her audition piece for Miss Saigon, as a teenager with a high ponytail and clear skin. Lea is pitch-perfect, and is so seriously about the singing, she doesn’t care about being ugly.

This consciousness of/about Lea, is what allowed for Glee to be interesting, and for a character like Rachel to be real, to me. And that says more than enough about which Pinoy I am: the middle-class one, yes?

The one who likes Lea, and didn’t think it strange that she could speak in English in the midst of her That’s Entertainment co-stars. The one who is familiar with the American high school – blame it on growing up with Archie Comics and Sweet Valley High and the lives they introduced. The one who, because precisely of her social class, has the stereotypes in English down pat.

In English. Because the kikay, the mataray, the crush ng bayan, don’t exist in Glee, but the jock, the cheerleader, the geek, the rocker chick do. This is a totally different world, and yet it is a world that a bunch of us are familiar with. So much so that we actually have a sense of how these stereotypes are dealt with differently by the show. The perfect girl gets pregnant, the talented girl doesn’t have social skills, the nerd is also in a wheelchair, the gay guy isn’t out of the closet, the black girl’s middle class and rocks her heavy weight, the Chinese girl is a rocker chick, the protagonist jock is stupid but nice, and the antagonist jock is smart and has ambition.

And this does appeal to me as a Pinoy just because I am reminded of imperfection, as well as overdetermination – we are not stereotypes after all, and there are no simple stories. There is no Betty (as opposed to Veronica) here, or Elizabeth Wakefield (as different from Jessica Wakefield), no Archie and that basic struggle between two girls, no Moose who’s just a dumb jock, no Reggie who’s just full of himself. But also, there is no Troy and Gabrielle love story, that’s only struggling really with the evils of Sharpay.

Because of course it is High School Musical that is the context of Glee, and maybe its antithesis: high school, after all, ain’t about the pretty picture that the former paints regardless of where you had it, and when. To a certain extent, Glee hits on a universality about school and the kind of difficulties kids go through extraneous to their studies.

Glee reminds us that teenagers can be the meanest people on earth, and that high school can be the most judgmental of spaces. We are shown the struggle between the arts and sports, and how one is deemed as cooler, if not worthier of funding. We are given a sense of how teachers have their own lives, how teaching can be just a job for some, a passion for others, a dictatorship for one; and how the idea that teaching doesn’t pay well, and thus is a lowly job, cuts across borders.

Between these real issues, and the individual stories of its three-dimensional characters, this seems like stuff for serious drama ala Boston Public. Instead, Glee responds with humor. And music.

The humor is in vernacular American English, the kind that’s being recreated everyday, with changing idioms and various other Englishes, plenty of brand names, and most importantly, the kind that’s premised on a whole lot of popular American culture subjects/objects/products.

Rachel rattles off titles of musicals. Mr. Shuester chooses songs that are from both Broadway and the Billboard charts. Kurt is defined by the Marc Jacobs he wears. Quinn frowns at Rachel’s preppy outfits. Puck cleans pools for cougars. Quinn finds out that Puck is sexting. The football team wins a game by dancing to Beyonce’s “All The Single Ladies” – that same episode began with Kurt dancing like Beyonce did in the song’s music video. A whole episode is devoted to mashups. Mercedes calls Quinn’s and Finn’s pregnancy babygate.

It doesn’t take much to realize why we can laugh at this show. Because that is also the reason why we can sing with Glee.

A song wouldn’t be revival, it wouldn’t be a reconfiguration if we didn’t know the original. The thing is, this Pinoy audience is familiar with the originals of those songs, who sang it, how it was performed, and even what the video looked like. Case in point, Quinn’s version of Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” and even the Acafellas’ version of Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up.” That these songs are well-chosen for very particular situations and instances in Glee, allows for another layer to the use of music, that isn’t just for the background.

Instead, much of the music in Glee is about articulating through music what cannot be said in real conversation. And yet, instead of representing certain emotions, the songs become a counterpoint to what it is that’s actually going on with the characters, the singing self the private version of the public self. This is where the overly dramatic moments are saved by song, i.e., where the anger and sadness of a broken heart is transformed into Rihanna’s “It’s Over Now” by Rachel, the regret in impossible love into “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady and sung by Ms. Pillsbury, the frustration of handicap into Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” by Artie. All light and happy and powerful, all really quite sad.

Of course looking at this essay now, it becomes obvious what it is that allows for this kind of appreciation for Glee. Our love for Glee is borne of our capacity at intertextuality. We know of the original songs that have been recreated into the show’s soundtrack, we come from a space where the violence(s) of an American high school are believable, we come from a neo-coloniality that let’s us know of, and allows us to appreciate, American culture more than we might our own. We look at Glee as text and we find that what we take into it as Pinoy spectators is our knowledge of American life and culture.

And then some. Listening to “Don’t Stop Believing” it is difficult not to think of Arnel Pineda’s version of the song; watching the melodrama of lying and betrayal that goes on in Mr. Schuester’s marriage, scenes from our own soap operas come to mind. And I don’t know about you, but it’s just creepy that the actress who plays Rachel? Her name’s actually Lea, too.