Billy Ocean topped the US airwaves on 15 February 1986 with his smash hit ‘When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going’. A few days later, the song’s simple thesis found an intriguing validation. Over the Pacific Ocean, in the Philippine archipelago, tumultuous events culminated in the forceful removal of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr from power. His firm grip on Philippine politics, after almost three decades of unchallenged rule, had waned. His body, like his regime, was eroding as well; he suffered from severe kidney complications. On 26 February 1986, he and his family fled the country amid widespread, deafening clamour for his ouster. He wasn’t tough in the end, but he and his family did get going. The people who filled the streets after enduring decades of stern and suffocating Marcos rule turned out to be the ones who embodied the spirit of Ocean’s oeuvre.

Dubbed the People Power Revolution or the first EDSA Revolution (with sequels to come), the events of February 1986 did far more than dispose of a dictator. They tore open the floodgates of cultural and artistic expression, irrevocably altering the sonic topography of Philippine popular music.

For what had seemed like an eternity, music had functioned as a megaphone, blasting the approved mores and messages of the Marcos government’s prevailing political orthodoxy. During that era, the airwaves hummed with grand, often bombastic, pronouncements of national unity and relentless progress. This utopian promise found no louder echo than in one of the regime’s official anthems, ‘Bagong Pagsilang (New Birth)’. Its confident lyrics declared: “Everything will change, towards progress!” Notwithstanding the irony of delivering a message of transformation in a musical format rehashed from old marches, the anthem instilled in many Filipinos the hope of reform and improvement.

• Tags: Issue 42, music, Philippines, Pippo Carmona