Paper
read at the Conference on
“Media
Practice and Performance Across Cultures”
University
of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin
March
14-17, 2002
Towards a
political economy of the “real”: music piracy and the Philippine
cultural imaginary
JONAS BAES
Assistant
Professor, College of Music, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon
City 1101, PHILIPPINES
e-mail:
ajpbaes@yahoo.com or jonas.baes@up.edu.ph
Abstract
The
piracy of commercial music on compact discs has been so rampant in the
Philippines as to alarm not only the recording music industry, but also some
agencies of the state. The existence of pirated CDs has
dichotomized recorded music between what is considered “real” (i.e.,
‘original’) and “not real/fake” (i.e.,
‘pirated’), and an ongoing campaign has been launched in an attempt
to combat this rapidly spreading phenomenon. But while certain “moralistic” and
“self-righteous” statements have been made against piracy and
questions of “quality” and “guarantee” have also been
mentioned, I believe that certain aspects of this issue need to be further
problematized. How, for instance, can piracy be examined from the perspective
of a Philippine society struggling to “globalize” by imagining
itself to be part of a larger cultural milieu outside the geographical
boundaries of the nation state? In
making a music culture more accessible and affordable to a greater sector of
the Philippine population, does piracy actually serve the music industry in
reinforcing the musical hegemony/hegemonies? And how would piracy affect the “imagination” of
a local/national culture, knowing that the state seems powerless in controlling
the technology in pirating CDs, and the Philippine population seems to remain a
recipient of a dominant transnational music industry?
In Simulacra and Simulations (1981), French social
theorist Jean Baudrillard shows that as the boundaries between images and
reality crumbles, distinctions between what is ‘real’ and
‘unreal’ in postmodern society have been rendered ambiguous. Images (simulations) and signs (simulacra) no longer represent
reality because that reality has been corroded into the condition of the hyperreal, i.e., that which is
more ‘real than real’ (Baudrillard, in Hawk, http://www.uta.edu/english/hawk/semiotics/baud.htm).
In this paper, I will jump off from those perspectives in an attempt to view
the case of music piracy in the Philippines. The existence of pirated CDs has
dichotomized
recorded music between what consumers in the Philippines considered
‘real’ (i.e., ‘original’/ ‘orig’), and
‘unreal’ or ‘fake’, (i.e., ‘pirated’). But if CD recordings to begin with are
a reification of music, therefore are already ‘hyperreal’ objects, what
then are pirated CDs? Hyperreal simulations of those hyperreal objects? That does not
seem to make much difference in the Philippines, where most consumers are
rather more concerned with the lower prices of pirated CDs. The dichotomy
between original and pirated CDs carries with it the socio-economic dimensions
of consumptive behavior. If, invoking Baudrillard further (1976), simulacrae become objects that
“have economic lives of their own”, what then are the
socio-economic dimensions of
‘original’ or ‘real CDs and what is the impact of
piracy? And more importantly, what does the existence of pirated CDs tell about
the Philippines, a thriving nation-state in Southeast Asia struggling to be part
of a larger ‘global’ cultural milieu?
Within the present global world order, the
Philippines remains a society caught within the rubric of material, cultural
and economic under-development.
The situation may be rooted to three hundred years of Spanish
colonization from about the 16th century, which wanted to create a
docile, Christian cultural majority. A period of revolution and independence in
the late 19th century was followed shortly by American subjugation,
which at the first part of the 20th century created social, cultural
and economic institutions of a modern nation state. In the last half century, a
global political economy has ushered in a “neo feudalism”,
characterized by a highly agriculture-based economy, a centralized material,
infrastructural, and cultural development, a dependence on transnational and/or
multinational-dominated industry, and an open-door import policy. As a
so-called “Third World” country, the Philippines is an important
source of low-cost labor and raw materials. The uneven distribution of wealth
may be represented by a pyramidal stratification consisting of a small
privileged class, a complex middle class and a large underprivileged class. A
center-periphery or ‘trickle-down’ structure of development is seen
not only in the full-scale technological and infrastructural wealth of urban
centers, which is in opposition to what may be found in the numerous far-flung,
“out of the way” places. Metro-Manila or the National Capital
Region is itself a scenario of “discontinuity” and disjuncture. The
modernizing business centers of Makati and Ortigas and the affluent residences
in Dasmarinias village, White Plains or Ayala-Alalabang are in direct
opposition to the slum or squatter areas, for instance in Payatas, or the dirty
and smelly side streets of Quiapo, Cubao or Divisoria.
In the
last two decades, overseas contract employment has provided more opportunities
for social mobilization. While these opportunities have provided some material
benefits and expanded the worldview of a number of underprivileged Filipinos,
those opportunities have also highlighted an even greater dependence on
developed countries.
So then, after various colonial regimes and with its
peripheral place in the global world order, Philippine society cultivates a
western-dominated and western-dictated cultural imaginary. And this kind of society along with its
disjunctured landscapes becomes the setting for my study of music piracy, which
was done from May 2001 to January 2002.
Towards a Political Economy of the
“Real”
In this section, I will describe the moves against
piracy by the Philippine state, some sectors of civil society, and the
“global watchdogs” of international trade. Sanctioning CD piracy in the third
world appears to be comparable to what John and Jean Comaroff (1992) observes
in Homemade Hegemony as the “sanitation of society”.
Since the late 1990’s, the International
Intellectual Property Association (IIPA) has put the Philippines in its watch
list of intellectual property violators. In 1997, piracy in the Philippines
accounts for estimated losses of about 3 million US dollars in music, 22
million in motion pictures, 56.7 million in business application computer
programs, 26 million in entertainment software, and 70 million in books (IIPA,
1997). These statistics have grown as Manila ranks presently as the 7th
worst Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) violator (Arceo-Dumlao, 2001), and is
seen as the next piracy capital in Asia (International Trade, 2001a). Hugh
Stephens, regional vice president of AOL-Time Warner laments that Manila and
the Philippine Congress is now perceived as among those…”offering
least resistance”…to piracy (Guttierez, 2001), and he further
stresses that the Philippines is…”on the brink of being included in
Washington’s watch list of violators” (Guttierez, 2001).
In response to this growing clamor from the
international trade sector, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo issued stern
warnings against illegal video and music compact discs (Guttierrez, 2001),
while Senator Edgardo Angara proposed severe measures against those caught in
this illegal business (Inquirer News Service, 2001). To further step up its
efforts to assist the IIPA, the government has enlisted the services of more
agencies like the Philippine Center for International Crime (PIAC-IPR, 2001)
and the Department of Transportation and Communication (PDI, 2002) aside from
those agencies already in charge against piracy.
Some sectors of civil society, particularly those
from the entertainment industry have joined the bandwagon against piracy.
Singers and movie stars are the ones most victimized with the onset of piracy.
Magazine TV programs and talk shows have been campaigning against music and
motion picture piracy while singers and movie personalities have made
initiatives to explain to the public the ill effects of piracy.
One of the main causes for the rampancy of pirated
CDs, singers and movie stars lament, is inefficiency in the implementation of
appropriate laws. “The police raids on those selling pirated CDs have
not done much to prevent it… said one guest in ABS-CBN’s noontime show
“Talk TV” (June 20, 2001); those selling pirated CDs would come
back as soon as the police leave the place”. In another magazine program, movie
stars and singers have complained that large amounts of pirated CDs are sold
even within the vicinity of some police stations in Metro Manila. “But they have no right to
confiscate what we are selling…one pirated CD vendor in Quezon City
exclaimed to me… the police are just like the Abu Sayyaff (a kidnap terrorist
group in Southern Philippines), they come and confiscate everything we
sell…while some of them and choose the (pornographic) films and some of
the good music CDs and just take (those) away!”
“The main problem…another would say
on “Talk TV”…is that even if the state have all
these laws against piracy, it does not have any control over the technology
that enables piracy”. This fact supports what
Jane Kirtley stated in a lecture delivered at the University of the Philippines
(June 28, 2001) that… “governments are afraid of new technology
because of their inability to control it”.
Sometime in 2001, there was a call from the
entertainment sector that producers should lower the prices of
“real” CDs so as to meet the buying power of the average Filipino.
A number of not so new movie titles were priced from the usual 450 to 600
Philippine pesos (about 9 to 12 US dollars) to 150 pesos (about 3 US dollars).
Music CDs maintained the same prices, but since many years ago, the CD label Limelight, for instance, has been
selling classical music CDs for only 100 pesos (about 2 US dollars). But the
lowering of prices did not amount to as much as expected. First of all, there
is the need for CD producers to maintain its market sector so as to preserve
its status. Secondly, even the lowered prices could still not compare to the
much lower prices of pirated CDs: new titles could be acquired for as low as 50
pesos each in the flea markets, while in the sidewalks of Quiapo in Manila,
some stalls sell three CDs for 100 pesos, sometimes even at 25 pesos each
(about 50 cents).
The issues on piracy in the Philippines have brought
forward an explicit case of a global political economy. This is where
“watchdogs” of the international trade community through the local
political structures and some sectors of civil society put its control over
consumptive behavior of an entire population. “Real” CDs are made “legitimate”, in
the sense that they have been processed and produced to be consumed, and therefore
to earn, through established and standard modes of trade that come in the form
of standards in exchange values. And because of this, “real” CDs
have standards of quality; and such standards pertain also to a standard of
life. In ABS-CBN’s radio program Radyo Patrol broadcast last February
9, 2002, an editorial read stated that the rampancy of pirated CDs is rooted to
poverty. It also stated and that the Philippine government is at a dilemma as
to which sector to “help”: the artists or the pirated CD vendors? I
listened to the radio and raised a question to myself: If people are in
poverty, why then is there a need to buy CDs?
Piracy and the Philippine Cultural Imaginary
The question I have raised regarding the
“need” to acquire CDs despite poverty seems to allude to the
contemporary Philippine cultural imaginary. Shaped by a dependence on developed
countries in the west, the Philippine cultural imaginary is largely a culture
of “aspiration” hinged on the acquisition of technologies that
manifest a quality of life. Material acquisition is therefore a simulacra and a
simulation of that quality of life. As the unequal distribution of wealth
creates the great cultural divide, it is piracy that tends to bridge the gap
with its various impacts to various sectors of Philippine society.
There is no evidence as to the rumor that local,
giant record companies and movie distributors themselves produce those pirated
CDs. But if this rumor were true, isn’t piracy in the final analysis
serving to reinforce the cultural hegemony? Pirated CDs are among the vestiges of a kind of material
development that in the minds of people stand for a ‘quality of
life’. It extends this kind
of development to the most disjuncted places in the disconnected socio-cultural
landscape of modern Metro Manila and other parts of the Philippines.
The places were these pirated CDs are sold tell of
that disjuncture of the physical environment: flea markets, overpasses,
underpasses, dirty side-streets in Quiapo, Cubao, Divisoria, Recto, Morayta,
and many other places. Those places are very opposite of the
‘hyperreal’ world of material development projected in the very
impressive super-malls like Glorietta in Makati, the many Shoemart and Robison’s mall branches, or the Shangri-La
Plaza (after
A. Baes, 1998). Those are the “worlds” of pirated and of
‘real’ CDs, respectively. Sometimes they exist side-by-side; for
instance, in the sidewalks
just outside the SM City super-mall in north EDSA a number of vendors have
put up temporary stalls for pirated CDs.
The somewhat faded color prints of the cover labels
of pirated CDs tell further that they are indeed vestiges of that so-called
material development. “You actually miss out on a lot of things when
you buy that garbage” remarked popular singer Martin Nievera during on of his
late-night TV shows (MAD, January 2002).
But during an on-the-spot interview I made with bystanders in the
pirated CD stalls in a flea market in Cubao, Quezon City, many people remarked
that pirated CDs were all they could afford. One woman said to me: “I
could buy my favorite (recordings) for a much lower price. Another teenager said: I
would never be able to buy a beautifully packaged CD of my favorite bands from
Tower Records in Makati, but I was able to buy that album I wanted from the
stacks of (pirated) CDs in Quiapo. Another said: “The quality
of the sound of the music CDs do not differ from the “orig”
(original CDs), but the movies are (film transfers) taped from movie houses;
while watching, we hear people laughing (during the funny scenes), and we
sometimes see shadows of people getting up or getting out (of the movie house).
It’s like watching (other) people watch (laughs), but we don’t
mind; we could watch movies that have not even been shown in theaters”.
Time is another aspect of development bridged by
piracy. As a country located in
Southeast Asia, the Philippines is relatively late to acquire the most recent
trends in music and movie productions that come out of the western world. And time is an entity that adds
up to the market value of music and movie productions. This fact seems to hint
on Paul Virilio’s ‘political economy of speed’ in his
‘dromocratic’ conception of power (Armitage, http://www.ctheory.com/article/a90.html). The so-called “legitimate”
record and video shops like Tower Records or Blockbuster always put up a shelf
for “New Arrivals”—which on its virtue of being the
‘latest’—has a higher market value than many of the
‘older’ CD productions. And as a policy, VCDs and DVDs of recent
films come out months later to assure an audience for the movie houses. But
piracy appears to transcend the “plotting” of time by the record
and music industry. In a remote town somewhere in Central Luzon late in
December 2001, I was able to rent a pirated VCD copy of the movie Lord of
the Rings
weeks before it opened in Philippine cinemas in Metro Manila. In music, one
gets to buy recent album titles at the same time originals are in the
‘legitimate’ markets—just as I have bought a recent Beatles
collection The Beatles 1 in a flea market by the Kamuning church in Quezon City, at
about the same time I saw it in the record shop ‘Music One’ in SM
Megamall.
In doing research for this paper, I often hung-out in
a number of pirated CD stalls in many places in Metro Manila and in the other
provinces of Luzon, to take note of the dynamics between the vendors and their
clientele. Bargaining (tawad) is most common most
especially in the sidewalks and side streets. One could bargain a price of 40 pesos for a CD with a price
tag of 50 pesos. In Quiapo, Manila, some CD titles were sold for 3 to a hundred
pesos, or even lower if one knew how to bargain. A asked a man once how he got his Mariah Carey CD for only
30 pesos, and he said: “ At first, bargain for a very low price, like
let’s say 20 pesos, then you meet his price at 30. Most of the time,
these people would not show any willingness to sell at a lower price. But you
can test them if they would be willing to sell (at a lower price) by pretending
that you are not interested in buying at a regular price. Pretend that you are
about to leave, and most of the time, they would give in. Such is the kind of bargaining practice
common in Philippine “wet” markets, where prices are more flexible.
The vendors are aware that one could never be sure of the quality of pirated
CDs; hence, most pirated CD stalls have made it a policy that one may return
any CD that proves to be defective, so long as they bear the mark or sticker of
that particular stall and that they are returned within a few days. Those trade
practices and vendor-clientele dynamics mentioned above are seldom, if ever,
seen in the so-called “legitimate” CD shops in Metro-Manila like Tower
Records
or Music One.
A friend of mine who is a frequent buyer of pirated
CDs told me once that it is the Moslems who mostly sell pirated CDs in Manila.
Quite a number of Moslem families have long settled in Metro Manila for trade
reasons and they have been known for what many Manilans consider as
“backdoor” trade practices for generations. But this comment is
largely based on the schema of Manilans over Moslem settlers, which is largely
based on a socio-cultural bias.
I have also heard many comments that traced the
origin of these pirated CDs to Malaysia, and/or China, and that the CDs are
illegally brought into the country either directly to Manila or through the
backdoor, like in Sulu for instance. What is clear however is that the
alternative trade routes present challenges to “established” trade
routes of the transnational record and movie companies in the west, giving
impact to what I have mentioned earlier regarding the element of time.
The discussions I have presented induce me to reflect
that pirated CDs represent the “reality” more than original CDs.
Pirated CDs highlight a number of observations regarding the nature of
globalization and the impact of a global political economy on the so-called
“third world”. It
signifies a disjuncture between what Appadurai observes as…”the
globalization of knowledge and the knowledge of globalization”. The trade routes, the places were they
are sold, the cultural imaginary it represents and the socio-economic base of
its consumers are even more “real” than the “hyperreal”
world represented by the malls and the myths of capitalism which the original
CDs represent. CD piracy does not pass-off authorship of the original. It does
not plagiarize. It merely reproduces what has already been reproduced. But its
impact on Philippine consumptive behavior is a great challenge to status quo of
the global capitalist political economy.
Perhaps like the challenge a terrorist group like the Abu Sayyaf poses
on the Philippine state. Why the
strong move against piracy? Because such unseen force has been backfiring on
the capitalist movie and music CD industry, which to begin with is itself
exploitative. So at the end of the
day I ask the same question asked by Conrado de Quiros in a recent newspaper
column: Who are the real—or bigger—pirates, the people who copy
the albums and sell them in Quiapo, Divisoria and Virra Mall for less than a
hundred bucks, or the recording companies who produce the albums and sell them
to the public for more than a hundred bucks? (de Quiros, 2002)
References
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“Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination” Public
Culture
12 (1)
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and Crossbones” in The Philippine Daily Inquirer. V16N76 (February 22,
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Jonas Baes
University of the
Philippines—Diliman Quezon City,
February 23, 2002