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About this Song
Hip-hop’s spread across the Philippines has fostered a sprawling, interconnected community of creators whose work reimagines the genre’s core possibilities while anchoring each new output to the specific cultural, social, and creative currents that define creative life across the archipelago, and What U Want joins this vast, evolving catalog of work that extends the form’s reach in ways that feel both tied to hip-hop’s global roots and deeply rooted in the local contexts that shaped its making. To frame any hip-hop sound emerging from the Philippines is to situate it within a decades-long legacy of creative engagement with the genre, a legacy that has seen creators across every major island and regional hub of the country build their own iterations of the form, weaving in the cultural touchstones that shape their daily lives to create work that feels both recognizable as part of hip-hop’s global lineage and entirely unique to the place it comes from.
