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Lowering the Boom on Pop Culture

Not unlike millions of hipsters, lifers, hippies and intellectual elitists in the world, I find pop culture to be quite the tiresome affair. The fact that one cannot live in this day and age without dealing with pop in any form makes today's standards of living very poor indeed. But like everybody else, I muddle along somehow.

One of the current manifestations of the nebulous tumor of pop culture, at least in the Philippines, is the horrific #Aldub phenomenon. For the uninitiated, Aldub is apparently this new soap opera format employed by long-running noontime variety show Eat Bulaga. Beyond that, I know very little else about it as I choose to avoid Eat Bulaga, despite being a fan of TVJ movies as a child.





Now this #AlDab I can handle. Taken from Kim Montalvo


I can't stand Aldub, and hearing people wax intellectual in defense of it irritates me to no end. Not because I find it stupid, which I do, nor because I find the people who watch it stupid, which I don't all the time, but because pop culture - or culture in general - is a man-made construct that won't even matter in a decade. Nobody will care about 2015's Aldub or 2010's Kim Kardashian or even 2001's Zagu when ocean waters start rising, or when technology breaks doen, and civilization has to resort to hunter-gatherer survival once more. How the hell can Alden help you survive being mauled by a tiger?

And then there's the whole problem with sustainability. The reason why Aldub is a thing is because Vic Sotto and Joey de Leon sign off on it. Gone are the days of Kabayo Kids, the original Iskul Bukol, or even Istarsan, where these comedians worked on the bar previously set by Dolphy. Now they're just mere shadows of themselves, funny still every once in a while but fated ultimately to wither and fie. What's gonna happen to EB after that?
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