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About this Song
R&B is a genre that has long served as a dynamic, unifying thread for creative communities based in and connected to the Philippines, and this sound, titled Babalik, emerges from that rich, ongoing lineage of Philippine-rooted R&B practice that stretches across local island scenes and the far-flung global Filipino diaspora. Across decades, R&B has been adapted, reimagined, and embedded into the cultural fabric of the Philippines, growing far beyond any framing of it as an imported genre to become a core mode of creative expression for creators building work that speaks to both the specific experiences of life across the Philippine archipelago’s hundreds of inhabited islands and the shared experiences of Filipino people living and creating outside of their home country’s borders, from North America to Europe, the Middle East, and across Southeast Asia and Oceania.
