By Chin Wong
A FRIEND with an ear for good music once challenged me with this hypothetical dilemma.
“You’re in a room with Barry Manilow and Jose Mari Chan but you have only one bullet in your gun,” he said. “Who do you shoot?”
That was many years ago, when Chan was crooning about a Beautiful Girl and asking Can We Just Stop and Talk Awhile? Manilow was starring in a CBS film based on his hit song Copacabana, after inflicting upon us saccharine songs such as Mandy, I Write the Songs, Even Now, Looks Like We Made It, and Somewhere in the Night.
You’d think that people would have had enough of Silly Love Songs, but Manilow and Chan, each in their own inimitable way, showed me that it just wasn’t so.
Now my friend is not a violent person, and his hypothetical question was obviously meant in jest. I’m sure if he were really locked in a room with Manilow and Chan—and they both started singing— he’d be more likely to shoot himself than any of the two crooners.
The point he was making, of course, was this: which of the two sappy singer-songwriters was more cloyingly annoying?
The years have given me some perspective on this question.
Manilow, now 73, isn’t played very much these days, except perhaps on Throwback Thursdays and on Oldies but Goldies stations. He was last in the news in April 2015, when he married his longtime manager and partner, Garry Kief, ending decades of speculation that he was gay.
In February 1994, Manilow sued a Los Angeles radio station, KBIG, seeking $13 million in damages and $15 million in punitive damages, claiming that one of their advertisements was causing irreparable damage to his professional reputation. The ad, a 30-second spot, suggested that people listen to KBIG because it does not play Manilow’s music. Two days after the lawsuit was filed, KBIG agreed to drop the commercial poking fun at the singer.
So Somewhere Down the Road, Manilow isn’t doing too much damage to our sap-sensitive ears, and we’ve learned that we can smile without him, after all.
But Jose Mari Chan, now 71, is a different matter altogether.
Although we know him mostly for his music, Chan has also been involved in running the family’s sugar business— perhaps the reason his songs of love are so syrupy.
Starting his career as the host and singer of a TV show called 9 Teeners in 1966, Chan released his first single, Afterglow, in 1967.
His first long playing album Deep in My Heart was issued in 1969 and in 1973, he represented the Philippines in the World Popular Song Festival in Tokyo where his song Can We Just Stop And Talk Awhile went into the final entries.
In 1986, he released A Golden Collection of his hits, then released Constant Change three years later that went on to win Album of the Year in the Awit Awards.
It was in 1990, however, that Chan did the most damage to those of us with sucrose-intolerant musical diets, with the release of his album Christmas in Our Hearts, which continues to haunt us every year.
That’s because every October, without fail, the department stores and malls dust off their Jose Mari Chan CDs and blast his carols to remind shoppers they have only three months more before Christmas, so they better get their act together.
Chan probably didn’t quite have this in mind when he sang “may the spirit of Christmas be always in our heart”—but given how early Christmas comes to the Philippines, the words seem oddly prophetic—but no less annoying.
Wong is associate editor of Manila Standard.