Names like Jaime Salazar, Roman ‘Yoyoy’ Villame, and Max Surban are widely known among Visayans as singers of ‘novelty songs.’ Strictly speaking, the tunes they popularized do not fit the definition of ‘novelty,’ which is ‘the quality of being new, original, or unusual.’
The catalog of songs attributed to the trio contains only a trickle of original melodies. Most of the tunes they transformed into massive hits were mostly caricatures of life, musical lampoons, and comical renditions of everyday events that affect ordinary folks.
Salazar ruled the airwaves in the late 1960s, using rhyming in his lyrics and adapting them to the Western song hits of the day. In particular, his Visayan rendition of ‘Honey,’ a song promoted by Bobby Goldsboro, became a jukebox hit; it tells of the parody of a friend who was fond of badmouthing his sweetheart’s mother.
Villame showed up in the music scene in the early 1970s just as Salazar was on the wane.
He composed melodies using rhymes and, like his predecessor, arranged them using the rendition of the day’s chart-busting songs that were taped in vinyl records.
His best rhyming track that is familiar to us is ‘Butsekik,’ which, according to UP professor Jose S. Buenconsejo, is a contrafactum, defined in vocal music as "the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music."
‘Butsekik,’ originally titled by Villame as ‘Vietcong Palagdas,’ is inspired by the 1962 song
‘Baby Cakes’ sung by American R&B singer Dee Dee Sharp. Except for the gibberish,
nonsensical lyrics that are now familiar to us, the original melody was retained in Villame’s
version.
Sugbo.ph, in an online article, wrote that the “novelty song… became one of the staples for radio music in the Philippines. [It] is actually composed of gibberish nonsense lyrics, meaning that they do not form literal words or form coherent sentences or thoughts. The… lyrics were thought of by Villame when he was still a jeepney driver. While… waiting for the car mechanic to fix his jeepney, he listed down all of the names of the Chinese stores in Manila’s Chinatown.”
Hunches also abound that ‘butsekik’ is Chinese sounding, making it the butt of jokes. The Chinese community, as a result, was offended by the track so much so that, according to urban legend, they filed a suit in court and demanded the song removed from all jukeboxes around the islands. The move, though, did not prosper, so the story goes, because the song is not Chinese, does not have one Chinese word, and has nothing to do with the Chinese.
The term ‘butsikik,’ Dr. Buenconsejo argues, comes from the colloquial word ‘butsokoy,’ which he defines as “a diminutive, chubby, and lovable person.” He wrote: “‘Baby Cakes’ is an Afro-American slang for ‘darling,’ and the yeah yeah yeah is the non-semantic linguistic particle that expresses the embodied pleasure of that locution. In Visayan Cebuano, the ek ek ek is more fitting because of the vocal persona Butsokoy is indicating a quizzical expression, ‘Oh, I see.’”
Villame’s musical parody, one of his best-selling songs, even caught the interest of online netizens such that it would become a hit abroad in population centers where the Chinese reside.
The singer’s journey to national fame started in the 1970s while serving as a driver of the Meneses-Butalid (MB) Bus Company, owned by Leo F. Meneses. In between breaks, he treated friends with his parodies by substituting English hitmakers with Visayan lyrics. He later toured the neighborhood with the accompaniment of the MB Rondalla, which his employer organized.
Surprised at the approval Villame got, Meneses founded Kinampay Records with the sole aim of producing music intended for the consumption of the local market. With help from broadcast stations that aired his parodies, Villame and his ensemble started to gain adherents in the Visayas and Mindanao, and later Metro Manila. He later earned the title of ‘jukebox king.’
