It’s a hectic Saturday in September and DJ Love is feeling frantic.
The Davao City DJ is in Manila for 14 hours to play his eighth gig in the metro since April (not counting shuttling between Cagayan, Zamboanga, and Siargao). He ducks into a quiet beer joint with NME, speaking hurriedly over a few swigs of pilsen. We’re hours away from DJ Love’s set at the Metrotent in Pasig, where he’ll close a stacked hip-hop lineup that includes Shanti Dope and Loonie.
DJ Love is well aware that the hundreds in attendance aren’t his usual crowd, and when he jumps behind the console at midnight, the audience who’d been there since noon begins to thin out. Unfazed, he keeps his spirits high throughout his set, spurring remaining attendees to dance with him onstage.
It’s taken a while, but DJ Love’s career kicked into overdrive this year. For more than two decades, the 46-year-old producer born Sherwin Tuna has been making DIY dance music from the corner of his Camus Street home, which used to double as a pisonet shop crammed with coin-operated PCs. DJ Love tracks are an eclectic mix of frisky Bisayan songs, samples of animals and street sounds, and the occasional slapstick joke set to 140 beats per minute, rounded up with chunky bass, sirens, and syncopated synths. It’s called budots.
“Budots is considered provincial dancing, or dance for the slums. They think it’s tacky” – DJ Love
Over time, these campy sound collages proliferated online, from Friendster to YouTube and TikTok, and in the real world – blaring in the jeepneys and basketball courts in Davao City, where it originated, to political campaigns and national TV. Over Labour Day weekend this year, budots reached an unprecedented global audience in a Boiler Room showcase of the genre, headlined by its widely credited pioneer, DJ Love.
Before its Boiler Room debut, budots had captured national awareness. It crept into popular broadcasts on Philippine TV, including the reality show Pinoy Big Brother in 2008 and the news segment Kapuso Mo Jessica Soho in 2012. In the run-up to the country’s 2016 election, politicians were quick to jump on the budots bandwagon to make themselves seem relatable. Ex-president and then-Davao mayor Rodrigo Duterte was filmed clumsily dancing to budots with locals in the city’s public park in a video that shortly went viral. Others, including Bong Revilla Jr., who was fresh out of prison from a plunder charge, used budots, including a DJ Love track, across his campaigns for senator. (DJ Love says he was never paid, credited, or approached by Revilla’s camp for using his original track.)
“Budots captures the lightheartedness of the Filipinos: how we can take a difficult situation and make light of it or find the silver linings in things” – Jorge Wieneke
Then in 2019, the short film Budots: The Craze traced the cultural phenomenon’s origins in Davao City. “Everyone knows what budots is in Davao, but I realised that even though it’s everywhere, I didn’t understand it as deeply as I did until after we shot our documentary,” Jay Rosas, the Davao native who filmed the short with Mark Limbaga, tells NME. “The mass appeal was there, but [it] wasn’t a topic for cultural analysis before.”
The word budots spun off from the Bisayan slang for slacker (budong for men, budang for women) – and refers to both the music and its style of dance, which involves shimmying elbows and knees and gentle gyrations. Videos of budots dance challenges (often compared to ‘Gangnam Style’ and The Dougie) have racked up millions of plays across YouTube and TikTok.
DJ Love’s own journey with budots began with dance. Tuna’s parents made a living in upholstery while renting out sound systems and dancing on the side. A self-identified “dancer first”, Tuna first spliced music on VHS tapes before graduating to FL Studio. He then produced videos of his crew (formerly the Camusboyz, currently the Camusgirls) dancing to his mixes, which he choreographed, shot, directed, and edited.
It was a creative effort to keep Camus Street residents off illegal substances and away from gang violence, he says. Like the music, budots dances often get remixed – which means sometimes you’ll see dances peppered with gestures like holding up gun fingers to the head, miming sniffing a bag of solvent, or running an index finger under the nose.
Tuna has been adamant about saying “yes to dance, no to drugs” (a slogan of sorts that also appears on his Facebook page), but is aware of people’s pre-conceptions of budots. “When they think of budots, they think of rugby boys” – rugby being a reference to a brand of contact cement that users often sniff for a high – “and lowlives. It’s considered provincial dancing, or dance for the slums. They think it’s tacky,” he says matter-of-factly. Davao event organisers would opt to fly in DJs from Manila to headline cultural events, Tuna says, sidelining local budots producers.
“The reluctance towards budots is two-part,” Rosas observes. “There’s the class aspect, because budots originated in the slum areas of Davao. And there’s the sociopolitical underpinnings of juvenile delinquency and drugs.” These chafe against a “certain homogenous representation of Davao”, he adds. “When you say ‘Davao’ you think durian, the Philippine Eagle, and all this iconography replicated for the visual arts branding. That’s what these cultural entities or authorities see Davao as. Budots is hard to sell.”
In April, music platform Manila Community Radio announced that it would be hosting the country’s second Boiler Room event after winning the club culture proponent’s broadcast lab grant, which aims to fund “innovative projects” spotlighting “underrepresented artists, community and collaboration”.
MCR chose to showcase budots. Its programming lead, Jorge Wieneke – a DJ/producer and electronic music professor – first encountered budots in 2011 as a visiting artist in Davao. He’s been an ardent champion of it since. “For years, I’ve advocated for Budots as a legitimate and original form of electronic music because I feel it captures the Filipino spirit,” he says.
Wieneke believes what makes budots stick out is its levity. “A lot of electronic music from the west is very serious and budots is about love, fun and kulit [mischief]. I feel that it captures the lightheartedness of the Filipinos: how we can take a difficult situation and make light of it or find the silver linings in things.”
MCR hoped to stage the event in an outdoor basketball court in Manila or Davao, but was foiled by logistical hurdles. So it ended up hosting the showcase in an abandoned warehouse in Manila, designed to look like the gaudy interior of a jeepney. Besides the main set by DJ Love, the one-night-only event featured vibrant and varied individual performances by Cebu-based Libya Montes, trans artist-activist Teya Logos, Showtime Official Club’s MharkTzyOnTheBeatTV, plus shared sets by Wieneke as obese.dogma777 with Pikunin, and T33G33 with Hideki Ito.
Tuna recalls coming into Boiler Room scared but leaving triumphant. “I was so nervous coming into it that I didn’t realise I was jumping and headbanging,” he says. “Only in its aftermath did it sink in that budots could be a Boiler Room thing.”
Following the large-scale budots event, discussions emerged on social media debating whether this streetwise art form that emerged from the margins was being appropriated or gentrified.
“We did receive a lot of criticisms about cultural appropriation, of having this sort of imperial Manila gaze and packaging our culture for a mostly western audience and institution like Boiler Room,” acknowledges Sai Versailles, MCR’s co-managing partner who handled the project’s proposal. But she’s quick to point out the frustrating context in which MCR strives to do its best: an environment where there’s little “infrastructure in place” for Pinoy artists to have “agency” and truly thrive.
“There are huge inequities in the Philippines with regard to how you can make it in music,” Versailles says. “What we’ve always tried to do in MCR is to engage in conversation and give agency and platform to people that couldn’t otherwise get the platform they need where they’re from.”
Remixed endlessly on TikTok and hardly considered underground music, does budots really need to be platformed or championed? Wieneke argues that ubiquity isn’t synonymous with acceptance.
“Mainstream, popular, and accepted are all different concepts to me. Budots being popular is different from it being accepted, and it hasn’t been accepted so much in Manila for a while,” he says. “I remember I used to play it in bars unironically before Boiler Room and people would call me out for it,” he adds, clubgoers thinking he was taking the piss. “That’s changed since Boiler Room. Sherwin is getting a lot more gigs and getting more recognition to play what he wants.”
Tuna has indeed booked more jobs since Boiler Room. He’s played hole-in-the-wall pubs, beachside bars, festivals, even a clothing brand’s anniversary – settings where you don’t normally hear budots. He’s been saying yes to every ‘opportunity’ even if the payout means he’s just breaking even. Tuna’s YouTube channel, which he started in 2009, began to earn money in 2020, only to be flagged for “reused content violations”. So that same year, during the lockdowns, Tuna broadcasted budots livestreams on Facebook, asking for pay-what-you-want donations via GCash. He was initially reluctant to do so, because he believes “budots should be free.”
Is the genre better off thriving in more democratised spaces like TikTok or does it help creators like Tuna when it’s recognised and canonised by institutions like Boiler Room? “Canonisation of art can’t be helped because it’s pop culture,” opines Rosas. “But in the end, if DJ Love didn’t upload it on YouTube, he wouldn’t be noticed and it wouldn’t be replicated. So I think canonisation and democratisation can co-exist.”
Unlike the trendy dance crazes that budots is often compared to, the genre is now at least 20 years old – and unlikely to run out of steam, its creators and proponents say.
“I think it’s here to stay. I consider budots a contribution to OPM as a whole,” says Rosas. Budots has made small appearances in recent films including Filipino-Irish thriller Nocebo and award-winning Indonesian film Autobiography – a trend that he foresees will continue across pop culture.
“When you say ‘Davao’ you think durian, the Philippine Eagle, and all this iconography… That’s what these cultural entities or authorities see Davao as. Budots is hard to sell” – Jay Rosas
Wieneke believes that “budots persisted because it’s part of an ecosystem that involves producers, dancers, parties, and sound systems. Whereas dance crazes like ‘Harlem Shake’ and ‘Gangnam Style’ are just one song, and no one really made ‘Harlem Shake music’.”
Tuna, who constantly hypes and name-drops fellow budots producers like DJ EricNem, has also released ‘DJ Love Presents Budots World’, an extensive project with MCR that compiles budots and budots-adjacent music from 53 artists across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Versailles believes it’s a good snapshot of what’s new and what’s next for budots, which she predicts “will only take up more space”. DJ Love’s growing platform, she believes, should benefit new producers in his orbit, who “will make new interpretations of [budots], in the Philippines or globally.”
But what does DJ Love think? “The budots trend will look like this,” he begins, using his hand to trace the curve of a wave graph that starts at eye-level, rises over his head, and descends back to eye-level again. “Up and steady, but it won’t go away. Even if I stop making budots, it’s here to stay.”
Tuna has lost nearly 500 songs to broken hard drives over the years, but he’s still making budots music and can’t see himself stopping anytime soon. It’s partly because he considers himself too old for the alternative – construction work or food delivery – but mostly because he loves what he does, no matter how people perceive it. “If they dance, then that’s great. If they don’t because it’s tacky, then I don’t really care. I love what I do.”