Abstract
This paper examines how specific historical narratives of the Philippines are remembered in the domain of popular music. Using popular songs written by Filipino folk pop singer Yoyoy Villame about the discovery of the Philippines by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, it analyses the lyrics of ‘Magellan’ (1972) and ‘Diklamasyon’ (1999) as cultural text and interprets them in the light of concepts from literature, language and history. Using Benedict Anderson's (1983) ‘imagined communities’, the study puts forward two ways of remembering the nation's history – the textbook and folk tradition. It shows that satire, facilitated through parody, burlesque, irony and code-switching as rhetorical devices, is a mode for remembering the nation.
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