ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the transculturation of vaudeville in the Philippines as popular music, focusing on how Filipino musicians responded to the capitalist imperatives of a growing market and audience while maintaining a space for the negotiation of relations between the divergent cultures of the hegemonic empire and the colony. Bodabil’s prioritisation for marketable acts obligated stars to work hard, to constantly try to outdo themselves through introducing new acts, songs, or dances, and to surrender to the tedious itinerary designed by impresarios whose main intention was to generate more profits. Bodabil also exhibits the specific processes that characterise Turino’s (2000) view of cosmopolitanism “as the interaction of local cultural practices with ‘global’ processes”. The popularity of Bodabil in the 1920s coincided with the transformed taste for American products by the colonial population. With their improved economic condition, Filipinos adopted a modern lifestyle marked by their preferences for imported commodities.
