Journal Filipino DJs 4/11 by Fangshu Wu

In Antonio T. Tiongson Jr’s article on Filipino DJs, he talks about Filipino’s involvement with hip-pop and DJing, which was related to the race, culture and popular culture that we have read and discussed earlier. I noticed that in his interview with several respondents, all of them considered hip-pop is part of Filipino culture. Even though they acknowledge the African American culture and where it (hip-pop) came from, but no one can deny that hip-pop or Djing is part of Filipino’s culture. This reminds me the definition of popular-culture. Popular-culture is also a folk culture, which must involve with a lot of people. In this case, most of them grew up with this hip-pop culture and it has huge influence on the population. One interesting idea that has been pointed out in the article is that Filipinos claim their cultural legitimacy through a particular experience. They are not only adopting black cultural forms, but practice and change it based on their own experiences. I think they form a unique Filipino hip-pop culture instead of just shared the African Americans’ hip-pop culture. I think culture is not unchangeable, but can be changed or influenced under different circumstances and situations. DJing and hip-pop become a necessary source for people to identify the Filipinos. Therefore, we definitely can say that DJing and hip-pop is a Filipino culture. For example, each time when I listen a k-pop music (Korean hip-pop music), I automatically related to Korean culture even though k-pop is a adaptation of the original hip-pop from other cultures.