On keeping up, growing old, and the Once Monthly entering the Terrible Twos

Writing about pop culture means keeping your ears on the ground and staying young, somehow. Alas, I am on the wrong side of 30 to do just that.

It’s January, which means the Once Monthly turns two.

Wait, this thing is two years old now?

Well, I shouldn’t be surprised, considering I was hoping to be able to keep up with this for as long as I did with this project’s spiritual predecessor—that one ran for seven years. I suppose it’s a testament to that, and how much I used this as a coping mechanism for whatever it is that keeps on happening to me.

And it looks like it’s working, for it’s been a pretty interesting 2024 for the Once Monthly. I mentioned this time last year plans to launch a series reviewing new Filipino albums. Now Plaka Notes is firmly settled in the editorial calendar, and while listening to so many albums to write about just one a month can be tedious, it’s also been fun. (The other plan—a series of essays using a song to tell a personal story—languished in the drafts. But you probably don’t remember me saying that.)

The ongoing refinement of this publication’s voice and perspective has also been an interesting journey. 2024 was the year I really embraced cultural commentary, acknowledging a need (or is it?) to better tell the Filipino story, or at least a particular version of it, on a still Western-centric platform like Substack. (That mindset also drove the founding of Stack Natin a couple of months back.) The essay ostensibly about Taylor Swift but really about the common Filipino’s idea of progress performed really well, and led to the new Dispatches from the 63 umbrella, which allowed me to not have to look for a pop culture hook to write about something… although I’m certain my communications student days helped in writing, say, this piece that I’ll say is about political storytelling.

All of this brought back some of the anxieties I had back in the day. The old music blog was, after all, very much immersed in the news cycle, and the Once Monthly very much shouldn’t be—it’s in the name! (Although, of course, I now write at least twice monthly.) Suddenly, I recall the rush to be one of the first to hit publish, or to have a take so unique that people will click on it and share it, or both. Of course, the social media ecosystem has changed but, you know, I guess this counts as past traumas. The urge remains to get on the laptop and write something, but I have to remind myself that the point of this whole enterprise is to take things slower—to take the time to connect the dots, to aim to present as big a picture as possible.

Easy, considering one of the thrusts of the Once Monthly is to explain the Filipino perspective, or at least my Filipino perspective. Not easy because, again, this is the Internet. Those hellbent to earn from whatever they’re writing here have to be first, or be outrageous, or both to have a shot at earning pennies. (And then there are those writing in Substack from countries outside of the global north, who can’t even take advantage of this platform’s monetization schemes, to cite just one example.) So, if I really wanted to be popular, the odds are already stacked against me.

And then there’s the fact that I chose to write about pop culture here, and culture in general. That means keeping your ear on the ground, constantly—and I’m on the wrong side of 30 to be able to do that. Sure, again, the point of this whole enterprise is to take things slower—but sometimes you just want more people to read you (and tell you that you write well), so you consider writing something even if you don’t know much about it. Those mind games—especially when you realize you’re juggling a lot of things you had long planned for on the editorial calendar—can be difficult.

Yeah, I’ll admit, sometimes I write because I like being told that I write well. I told a friend that I lost a source of affirmation when I closed down the old music blog, and it took some getting used to. I do playlists and write about albums and do these essays because it’s something within my ballpark and it’s something people may find useful. I know the Once Monthly was designed to have a lot more of my personal voice in it, to the point that it’s more personal journal than anything else sometimes, but damn it, I still want what I write to be useful. Nothing against personal journal writers—I still write on my own blog, twenty years in—but I still remember being told to close that down because it’s not as useful as the old music blog. Imagine how uncomfortable I get when all that bleeds into this space.

And then you do write something, and the other anxiety comes in—that somehow what you’ve written is “wrong” and that you should somehow pay for it. Now, I’m not here to bemoan the “wokerati” like some are inclined to do. I’d like to think that my perspectives tend to align with them more, although I’m not militant about it, because it’s just not what I do, and I have other things to worry about. But it’s funny, isn’t it, writing about these things in a time when we’re both being fragmented into thousands of microcultures, determined by algorithms and identified by an incredibly specific criteria—and, also, that we have this mostly Western, mostly American monoculture that demands we bow down to it?

I am on the wrong side of 30 for this! (And I’ll be deeper on that wrong side from next week, since it’ll be my birthday!) And I can’t even imagine being the guy that’s chasing feelings of youth just so he can be relevant again. (Trust me, I know someone who made a virtue out of still being able to “understand the kids”, in their words.) If I am to grow older with dignity, I should own the fact that my time has passed, that I am making the most of what I have and what comes my way, and I should transform what I know into something that might be a source of new perspectives for others.

So, I end up writing about lost friends. Great, the personal journal side still creeps in more than it should.

This is supposedly a (now annual) status report for the Once Monthly, now that it’s turning two years old and will probably want to break things. But then, I’m not really a young kid, but rather, an adult reincarnated in a child (publication)’s body, to borrow an anime reference. Maybe the frustration. There will be a lot of frustration. But I have to remind myself to keep at it, to continue writing about what interests me, to find the angles that can take my experiences into something universal. (So, this month, you’ll get a Hyperfocus essay on GFriend and another essay on the Metro Manila Film Festival, alongside everything else.)

Apart from that, I don’t really have any big plans for this year—although I do hope I can interview people, and also, I hope I can juggle this with Stack Natin! (If you’re a Filipino writer and aren’t on the directory yet, why not sign up?) I hope you could cheer me on, as they say in K-pop.

Oh, right, this is still, ostensibly, a music publication… so let me talk about my plans to decorate the flat I share with my cat. I ordered prints from Nikki Nava, a Filipino artist who also released a couple of songs a few years ago—I actually interviewed her some years back. I’ve had this in mind for months, but only getting around to it now. So, while I look for frames, let me leave you with one of her songs from a couple of years ago.

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The Once Monthly’s ten most popular of 2024

…at least according to Substack’s vague algorithm. I must note that most of these entries came from the second half of the year for some reason.

• We knew we were never, ever, ever having Taylor Swift over
  The one time when writing like I do for the day job—using pop culture to talk about “boring” stuff like infrastructure and urban planning—really paid off.

• Would you even try to see us eye to eye?
  The defeat of Kamala Harris brought back a collective trauma for roughly 15 million Filipinos… who then proceeded to further dig their heels in.

• The Philippines had its best Olympics ever
  I was honestly surprised Carlos Yulo winning two golds also captured my non-Filipino readers. I felt sorry to have to focus on the so-called controversy.

• Plaka Notes #10: Olaholah by SunKissed Lola / Make Believe by Over October
  Editor’s note: you will get a lot of views if the musicians you write about share your reviews on social media.

• Playlist #22: Never easier, never better
  The one time I really let go and went all-out personal journal on my playlists.

• Alice Guo = Anna Delvey
  The essay that formally launched the Dispatches from the 63 umbrella is something I’m still proud of, although I felt mocked by Alice Guo’s face on the home page for months.

• Playlist #23: Nostalgia, am I right?
  I feel this is up on the list because of the playlist that preceded it.

• Plaka Notes #9: Sad Girl Hours by Jayda
  Not a big artist in the Philippines by all means, but an interesting angle (and some really good songs) made this review easy to write.

• Kipp’s Chicken is (not) exactly no more
  An essay on the Filipino’s love affair with shopping malls, wrapped around a childhood memory.

• Plaka Notes #11: Method Adaptor by Ely Buendia
  In which I make sense of one of the most impactful musicians in the Philippines by only talking about his (only two!) solo albums, which I listened to while riding the trains of Hong Kong.