Jingle was bakya and burgis in equal measure, to use the patois of the era. Or, in today’s speak, a mood. It was born in 1970, a decade that began with students storming the ramparts of the re-elected president’s administration and culminating two years later in a clampdown of freedoms that would last for the next 14 years.
The chordbook-magazine, a necessary hyphenate, was the first publication of its kind in the Philippines. It was also independently published and relied for the better part of its existence on newsstand sales for revenue. The magazine, which was initially published every two months, ran without ads. At the peak of its readership, it printed 100,000 copies – a feat then, as it is now.
Founder Gilbert Guillermo, who died on Tuesday at age 74, got the magazine off the ground by convincing his family to sell a lot they owned and stake their future on something that was yet to exist. The Guillermos were middling middle-classers who believed in trad investments like land. It wasn’t in their market profile to gamble on an inky publication that would teach kids how to play the guitar.
Gilbert may have said that he named the magazine Jingle because it was happy and musical and meant pissing at the same time. Which is exactly how the first issue turned out to be. I always like to point out that it featured both Nora Aunor, for whom the term “bakya” was coined, and Blind Faith, a supergroup made up of rock demigods who were so painfully hip they broke up after two seconds. This culture clash/meld was the magazine right there.
Even when Martial Law forced Gilbert to temporarily rename the magazine Twinkle and manually crop out the long hair from photos of rock stars because long hair symbolized the pasaways of the day, he gleefully considered it the highest honor to have the military peeps say to his face that Jingle was shuttered because it was “a bad influence on the youth.”
While Gilbert kowtowed publicly, the pissing angel, which was the magazine’s icon and mascot, grinned on. Jokes, comics, articles, record reviews, poems, one-page stories, a gossipy column called the Duhat Vine (a botanical invention because the real fruit grew on trees) bristled with fun and subtext obvious to readers but opaque to the military minds that patrolled the media.
Thus, Jingle became a kind of freedom wall, to use another dated term, a place to say what the hell you wanted to say if in metaphor, and explore nascent talent. Thus, Jingle was the medium in which the best and the brightest found their voice, among them ribald poet and later celebrated folk artist Joey Ayala, poet-filmmaker Lav Diaz and cartoonist-filmmaker Rox Lee, advertising man David Guerrero and avant garde artist-writer Cesare Syjuco, to name just a few.
Gilbert was the daddy of ‘em all, and JINGLE, the playground on which their earliest mud pies – imperfect and magical – were first created.
Ces Rodriguez was the longtime managing editor of Jingle who helped preside over the celebrated chordbook-magazine’s most creative period during the Martial Law years.