What exactly did Palin walk into?
For the final leg of Michael Palin in the Philippines, the three-part Channel 5 series that closed out Monday, October 12, director Neil Ferguson pointed the famously genial Monty Python alum at Davao City and the home studio of DJ Love, real name Sherwin Tuna. Budots is Davao's own strain of electronic dance music: loops run hot and fast, built around sampled sirens, barking dogs, tricycle horns and whatever noise the street offers, with a street-dance tradition built right into the choreography. Palin called it "sharp, jarring." Ferguson, blunter, said it makes "punk look like Beethoven." DJ Love is the genre's most credited architect, the producer whose name comes up first in any serious account of how budots moved from Davao sound systems to a genre with its own stars, its own crowds and, now, a slot on British terrestrial TV.
Why does the nicest man on television like the noisiest genre in Davao?
Palin has spent four decades being filmed as the reasonable, polite one. He said as much on camera: "I have to battle against this image of being terribly nice. And that's why I like budots, because it's so utterly different from the church music I was brought up on." That's the whole collision in one line: a presenter built on warmth meeting a genre built on friction, in a studio he described as a "lair," where a self-taught producer samples the sounds of his own neighbourhood and loops them into something people dance to in the street, not the club.
"I like budots, because it's so utterly different from the church music I was brought up on.", Michael Palin
Why should an underground electronic audience care?
Budots will never be mistaken for house or techno, and we're not filing it as either. What matters is the pattern. This is a scrappy, self-made, hyperlocal electronic scene, built with whatever software a producer in Davao City could get his hands on, getting the biggest mainstream platform it has ever had, through a travel documentary nobody in the genre asked for. DJ Love had already been documented by specialist dance media: Resident Advisor covered his mix collaborations with DJ Danz and DJ Ericnem well before Palin landed in the Philippines. Now the exposure runs the other way, from the dancefloor press into mainstream UK living rooms, the same route worth tracking across every underrepresented Global South scene, from Lagos to Luanda to, now, Davao.
