1 post tagged “the cemetery”

I've been carpooling with Rayms for the past few weeks, so I haven't had lots of opportunity to get quality music listening time inside my car. As of late, in the limited time I've had driving myself to and from work - two songs come to mind as road favorites: Architecture in Helsinki's The Cemetery and Sugarcube's Motor Crash.

I'm not sure if a sub-conscious death wish is making me like these songs or if my mind is preparing me to crash to my death while head bobbing to Bjork and Friends. The songs, however morbid the titles sound like -  are far from gloom and doom. Aside from being upbeat and fun, which is a contrast of what the songs are all about - I find them quite entertaining in the way they pronounce two words : cemetery and bicycle.

If you've been with a lot of Filipinos - you might notice that a big chunk will speak English without any accents even if they weren't born here. As a Filipino myself, who's been born and raised in the Philippines, some people ask why I've apparently lost my accent or have none at all (I actually have one and I also have a weird way of wording things too - stick with me for a while and you'll notice it). A big reason for this is that having an accent - pronouncing words in the not so normal way -  is a great source of humor for us Filipinos. This is why in local Philippine TV comedy, you'll often see some guy (usually someone from the South of the Philippines - Mindanao or Visayas) , our version of the typical country hick, is seen speaking with a thick accent and mispronouncing a lot of words along the way. So, conscious as we are, not to be the laughing stock of the crowd, we learn to speak it the way them English speakers speak 'em ;) Then again, I could always tell them the real truth why I don't have an accent - I watched waayy too much Beverly Hills 90210 as teenager.

In any case, I find it truly entertaining how Bjork's heavy accented bandmate pronounces bicycle as bye-see-kul and how the Aussies pronounce cemetery as symmetry - which is, to be quite honest, is how my good friends from Visayas and Mindanao would pronounce it. In a weird and disjointed kind of way, all of this reminds me of home :)