Solitude Standing – Suzanne Vega (1987)

One of my earliest memories of the musician and songwriter Suzanne Vega – apart from the hauntingly flippant “Luka” and the overt eroticism of the “Tom’s Diner” remix – is from the early nineties when, alone in my parents’ bedroom one weekend night, I found myself idly pressing the “Channel” buttons up and down in search of something interesting to watch. I was probably six or seven, and our television didn’t have a remote control back then. Cable channels haven’t found their way into Philippine television yet, so options only ranged from channels 2 to 13.

A music video – from some show called Video Hot Tracks – piqued my interest. It was shown on the now-defunct ABC 5 or RPN 9 – I couldn’t quite remember well, but I was certain that it wasn’t in the two then-emerging giants ABS-CBN 2 or GMA 7. Note that music videos back then belonged to the culture of the young, early adopters and setters of pop culture trends, as MTV hasn’t reached our shores yet and Internet access was limited to the most affluent corporations.

Much has changed in almost twenty years. MTV and other similarly-formatted channels are currently in stasis after peaking during the mid-nineties and declining during the inception of Youtube. Internet access has become a ubiquity in the Filipino middle-class household, neighborhood coffee shop, and mobile phones. But such is the life cycle of trends. At that moment in 1992 (or was it 1993), watching Suzanne Vega’s music video of “Solitude Standing” was a novelty. The existing image of an artist usually was, for the most part, limited to an album cover, but music videos allowed the image of one in motion to reconcile with the already-familiar auditory experience . It was going to be my first time to see Suzanne, as my experience of her music was limited to the occasional “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner” airplay over the radio.

Suzanne Vega – Solitude Standing

Suzanne wasn’t the most beautiful woman I’ve seen on screen, but she had an air of aloof intelligence that set her apart from the searing guitars and falsettos of pre-grunge glam rock and giddy, bubbly synthesizer-driven pop. Her voice was a soft, tepid tone thinly-veiled by a veneer of nonchalance. However, it balanced out the prominence of her songs’ heavily syncopated beats, the jangly folk guitars, pronounced bass line – with a sprinkle of keyboard notes every now and then. Tempered, yet far from lackluster.

There are no heavily stylized melodies, no vocal acrobatics. She did not have a powerful voice nor a commanding presence. Neither was she a performer, in the kinesthetic sense of the word. In the video you will see her do an androgynous, tensely mechanical pirouette, with her head cut off from the frame. Beneath Suzanne’s phlegmatic expression lay a simmering intensity riveting enough to trigger flashbacks of her music, years before the Internet came to serve as a collective repository of pop culture memory.

Whether her apostrophé on solitude was something arbitrarily abstract or just too sophisticated for the average audience, one thing was certain to me that early on – she knew how to string a sequence of notes that will tug at your soul like a blunted sliver of something glaringly, painfully real.