Mga Kwento ng Makata is Gloc-9 unleashed. Like a kid in his own playground, MKNM reveals an artist who is trying every ride, doing acrobatics, spinning and sliding with no sense of danger or consequence.
As always. The sentiment behind Gloc-9’s songwriting has not changed, the eyes with which he views the world has remained unclouded by whatever success has come his way. This album is about an artist freed from expectations and need, and who has become even more uncompromising in telling the truth according to nation.
According to nation. It’s certainly a daring proposition, but in a landscape of popular original Pilipino music, a majority of which remains decidedly about the bourgeois notions of love and becoming, there can only be value in Gloc-9’s insistence on speaking always and literally about this space we share. The grit and grime of it, the dirt we would rather deny exists, the unjust in our everyday. That these narratives as songs succeed is not so much because they are familiar, as it is because they are rationalized in the process of Gloc-9’s retelling. At the end of which you are pushed against a wall by the truths you do not know to speak. At the end of which you are in a fight you cannot help but engage in, because you must.
And it happens in the space of a rap song, across all of Mga Kwento ng Makata, where the voice is the songwriter’s as it is his collaborators’, where words will make you complicit in the possibility of change, and original Pilipino music is as powerful as it comes.
The poet is in. Join him in this playground of sadness and struggle that is nation.