UP Publications Online
Philippine Collegian
Diliman UPDate
UP Bagumbayan
UP Madayaw

Index of issues

UP System Homepage | UP Webmail | Diskusyon sa UP

Revenge of the 'jologs'
by ALP

Psst…Yes you, wearing that cool Armani shirt and Girbaud jeans (for sure, alam ko, orig yan). We can tell simply by looking at you so admit it. You’re a true blue, jologs, no doubt about it. And don’t insist on finding out how we knew. Simply rest on the fact that it really takes one to know one.
So we are jologs, you and I. And for the moment, it is all that has to be said to tip us off from our low waist, super baggy hip-hop (note: pronounced hif haf) pants, or to make anyone who wears a bonnet a la Robin Padilla, red with embarrassment. Interestingly, people are quick to assign the monicker to everyone but themselves, attesting to the power to embarrass that the word carries.

The great ‘jologs’ brotherhood of the early 90s used to have the upper hand with the popularization of “coño” as a potent colloquialism to describe their cologned counterparts in Loyola and Alabang. But suddenly, coño has become a badge of social and educational refinement. It has now become vogue to be coño. It seems that an offensive has been launched and local pop culture is being used as a take-off.

The word “jologs” was coined a few years ago supposedly by coño kids from private schools. It is a pejorative term used to describe the vast majority of low-income public school fashion victims who hang around SM Mall’s skating rinks, among other places, without actually putting skates on. The exact etymology of the word is still unknown though the word Jol is usually attributed to a teenybopper actress who herself is popular for her unique fashion sense. Jologs, thus, has been used to refer to the fans of the young actress, so much so that it has been equated with those studying in the campus the actress allegedly attends.

A LegManila article even went academic, defining jologs as something that can be used either as a noun or an adjective, being a complex word with various nuances. The word, it says, is often used to refer to people in the lower class, but not necessarily limited to them. It refers to someone without breeding, equated with being crass, tactless, potty-mouthed, uneducated and low-life. It also pertains to someone who has poor taste in fashion, music, movies, etc; or to cheap poseurs and those who make cheap imitation of the current trends.

So yes, seen this way, jologs may refer to the downtrodden, the former bakya, the lumpen, the hoi polloi, all these and more. It collectively describes the unkempt-looking juveniles frequenting the malls wearing bell-bottom pants, bandanas on their heads, chains hanging from their belts, and trademark alpombra slippers, hailing from Manila’s slum areas.

Before, there were only its blatant equivalents: baduy, dugyot, skwaking, skwating, iskwakwa and squatter. Not since coño has there been a label so infused with class, not since then has a street slang reeked of vindictive elitism. Commonly, street jargon or kanto words, originate from the mouths of the economically disadvantaged. The convent schools and the Jesuits apparently did a fine job in imparting the word’s originators with such linguistic cunning.

We could have settled for baduy, a word which is more about style and class and therefore less insulting. Another is bakya, which conjures rural connotations, and generally means being poor and disadvantaged in the way a peasant or a farmer is. But jologs is a different thing altogether. It is clearly of urban origin and it does not refer to poor per se. It does not describe someone as having a meager net worth. As a synonym for squatter, having nothing as a socio-economic fact is thrown straight to our face. Jologs are squatters with nothing to call their own. It’s like saying that since they have no property, they have no meaning.

Its etymology digs deep into the very debate of urban squatting and reveals how the youth think of such issues these days. No wonder very few give a damn about demolitions anymore. Squatters, anyway, have no right to land, to set up their filthy shabu-infested shanties alongside posh clean subdivisions. Besides, golf courses are more pleasing to the eye.

Of course, people who use the word jologs would freely say that the term does not have such far-reaching conno-tations. It only means that someone doesn’t have any manners, hums the tunes of April Boy and Aegis, listens to 101.9 WRR (for life!), knows all the soap opera airing in primetime, wears low-waisted baggy pants, and goes around shouting “punk is not dead” (pronounced pank es nat ded). No harm done, yeah right.

But looking at it closely, it seems objectionable and politically incorrect to use the term when referring to the taste and preferences of the masses. And if you get to the bottom of it, you’ll realize that being jologs is actually being attuned to the beat of the popular culture of the time. So one can actually be a jolog for his or her knowledge of trends pertaining to a particular period of time, not necessarily the present, as well as with the icons representing a certain generation.

What does it mean to be a jologs? It is to laugh and cry with Esperanza whose life story very much sounds like our own. It is to settle with Hi-ro cookies because Oreo costs too much. It is to be fulfilled by mimicking every inch of our favorite MTV artists’ looks because it boosts our self-esteem. It is to give in to the itch to decorate every spare millimeter on our jeepneys and houses with pictures of our idols. It is to be swallowed up in the throes of unrequited love, especially those expressed in the music of April Boy and Aegis (Okay, okay, over na).

Why should we be proud of being jologs? Because it means we are the most resilient and innovative people in this country. We can be contented with fake armanis and straight from the widescreen pirated versions of the latest movies mainly because that’s all we can afford.

To be jologs is to be native cheap, to be contented with self-created substitutes for needs and things that our economic conditions would otherwise not allow us to enjoy. For as Pierre Bourdieu argues, “it is not only in music or sport that ordinary people are reduced to the role of the fan, the militant, the supporter locked in a passionate, even chauvinistic, but passive and spurious participation which is merely an illusory compensation for disposession by experts.” A short-skirted SM salesclerk may smile and stand for 10 hours but what she’ll get at the end of the day won’t buy her the expensive perfume she’s selling so she has to settle for Johnson’s Baby Cologne. A garment worker can grow calluses all over her hands sewing Levi’s jeans but she still has to settle with Lives, its bangketa version. Dispossession, anyway, is a tacit social relation whereby labor and the product of labor are presented to the worker as “alienated” labor. They’re so near yet so far.

Looking at it closely, our culture is one overwhelming “jologs.” The course of colonization made us borrow from our colonizers everything from their belief system to their very ethno-linguistic flaws.
I admit I once had this penchant for blurting out coño as often I cursed. I had no qualms about it then even if I knew it did a great deal of injustice to the well-off. But the label jologs connotes the base social existence of three quarters of our people. It is a slap on a hungry child’s face.

Let’s not forget that the components of the putative EDSA 3 were the slipped urban poor, the sqwaking, the jologs, trucked in as they may have been, paid even, along with political groups, and allegedly, bottles of gin and shabu. It was rage and rage against existing class inequality that fueled such a wake-up call. I wouldn’t want something like that repeating.

The thought alone scares me.

Tampok
Safeguarding our patrimony
Protect the Sulu-Sulawesi Sea

The ultimate freshman guide
by Alicor Panao

FORUM Online Homepage | isyu | balita | opinyon | tampok |
letter from the president

Copyright © 2001 The UP System Information Office
All Rights Reserved.
Updated June 21, 2002
Comments and Feedback

Search the web with

Search worldwide web Search google.com Search up.edu.ph