Late last week Jigs told me that NU107 is closing down. Apparently that news has been on the rumor mill for weeks now and I’m one of the unfortunate few to have known last, having reduced myself to an intermittent listener to the station for some time now. I initially didn’t buy it; afterall I just heard a commercial plug of NU vying for best broadcast station in KBP’s Golden Dove Awards last week.
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But come November 5th, in the midst of a cold afternoon rain, I get to listen to a very nasal Joey and an equally poignant Zach rendering their lasts on air: last credits, last thank you’s, last goodbyes, a last affirmation of the station coming to a close after more than 20 years of feeding our hungry souls.
It was a sad, sad moment.
I grew up from junior high onwards listening to NU107. I can not exactly recall how my transition from dancing the Macarena and doing one-man Cypress Hill rap-athons to loving Rivermaya and Incubus took place. No one in our house followed rock music. I was raised with Debbie Gibson and Fra Lippo Lippi playing in the background. The closest anybody in our family ever gets to rock is when a relative sings the super gasgas Zombie in videoke. But boy, am I glad to have made that risky plunge.
While most kids in school talked about DMX and Monica, I bunny hopped around in my room, swinging my arms like mad as The Cure, Limp Bizkit and Blink 182 ran on NU107. NU became a staple in my daily life along with coffee and cigarettes. I tuned in day in and day out while reviewing for an exam, while eating, sometimes even while I’m taking a bath (I used to plug in that extension cord then place the radio right outside the bathroom door). I listened to it when I’m in love (especially when I’m madly in love) or when I’m watching the rain, trying to remember or trying to forget. It became a sort of sustenance, a part of the intricate structure of me.
NU107 was my source of all things rock. The sweaty gigs from where me and my friends would come out drenched in sweat, walking with our swollen feet on the curb home from the moshpits. NU-initiated gigs like the Independence Day Sessions will always be positively memorable for me. Who could ever forget Billy, that stranger in the turquoise Pokemon shirt who tried to shelter us away from all the mad men in the crowd, yelling “Pare, may mga babae dito!”; Holding a cup of San Mig in the air as we belt out Wakasan; Grabbing tapsi and pares afterwards at 2AM and talking to friends till our jaws grew a lock, meeting rockstars, coming over to their pot-smelling hideouts and having real-time conversations with them about a braless Joyce Tolentino wearing a loose shirt (Mga manyak! Haha!); That big ball of energy as each person in the crowd regardless of age, social status and skin color sang in chorus to a favorite song. Sitting sleepless at 4am, writing on my journal while listening to news about the constant Gallagher brothers bickerings, the fallout of popular bands, INXs’ Michael’s suicide, the birth of rap and rock as twins, hell, even something as trivial as Mondo’s (and mine as well) fancy of that A Perfect Circle’s bassist doing a quick pony in the Judith video just before she resumes her riff after the chorus.
I would never get tired of saying this too: NU107 has been the medium for the coming together of the now married Butchie and Jigs. It was in the NU107 chatroom on MIRC that we met each other, being regular listeners of NU107. I would always remember us driving along the outskirts of Malate one Sunday night, both a bit tipsy, singing our hearts out to Thursday’s Standing on the Edge of Summer; Having make-or-break fights and crying over Chris Cornell’s Sunshower; Listening to Damnbuilders’ Driveby Kiss on our way to Subic for Jigs’ weekend birthday. There are many more songs that are reminiscent of many things. NU tirelessly played those songs over and over for me and Jigs. It was once, part of our youth-fueled days.
In the regular pop-loving world, it would be a bit puzzling how rock music could be genuinely, massively likeable. It is definitely not cute as a button most of the time; the riffs could come across as too edgy and even morbid. But rock, with its sincerity and boldness at expressing forbidden addictions, pain and sorrow, made it easier for us to understand the world and ourselves at our most vivid, rawest nature. A true and honest radio station is not afraid of exposing the beauty in that weakness in us; It doesn’t exist to simply please the mainstream population. It doesn’t just play relevant music because that’s what sells at the moment. That, I think, is the one achievement NU107 had that some radio stations don’t. It wasn’t there to please but for people to be grounded, to offer a world that for the most part of the century, was considered taboo. I don’t think any other radio station has given that spectrum the opportunity to introduce itself better than NU107.
Today, after midnight, NU is going down in history. I could go on and on about how we brought this great station to its demise. Like for instance, how we support talentless commercial eyecandies so that they rake in truckloads of money instead of supporting true artists who write their own music, go to their gigs assistant-less, carrying around their own instruments. Or downloading copyrighted music (I know I’m guilty of that) instead of buying CDs, making it financially harder for artists to produce original work. Or simply the fact that the advent of technology has outlasted the era of radio stations like it did cassette tapes. If anything, I would say technology has made us more impatient and unappreciative of all the small things. I mean, who really has the time to tune in to the right frequency, request for a song, and wait for hours for the jock to play it when you could simply push a button on your cellphone or iPod for a fix? With the fast paced world we now live in, radio stations can barely catch up. Radio is but a memory of simpler times, an era that flourished before MP3s, iPods and bit torrents.
But I digress.
It’s unimaginable that NU107 is up on its final hour and tomorrow there won’t be any Zach and Joey in the morning, or a Remote Control weekend and Not Radio to look forward to next weekend. Because truth is, it’s not just a radio station. It’s a community that spurted out of a revolution: a gathering of Filipino kids who are bold enough to question what yet is out there in terms of music and of passionate seniors who made it their life’s vision to continue on the legacy of a music that has lived on for decades, from the time of fitted leather and mohawks to the horror of Miley Cyrus reaching her maximal puberty rate. It is a part of my history, who I am (and I think I am speaking for a wide population here), and where me and Jigs stand right now. Saying goodbye to NU is like saying goodbye to your childhood, to one part of you that you don’t want to let go of, to that important picture of how times were before your daughters and grandkids. It is, simply put, a passing on of a renaissance period in music, of a generation of simple pleasures, when we would anxiously anticipate for a favorite song on the radio and giddily prance around (or bump our heads) when the DJ finally has it on cue.
Thank you NU107 for standing your ground amidst all of the influential cliche’d entities and the rampant music raiding. Thank you for playing the soundtrack of my life. For those of us who luckily, were born early enough to witness this great era of true, passionate music, NU107 will always be a memory of great times. NU, along with rock music, indeed “will never fucking die!“
Long live NU107!
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