When I first heard about this project a month ago, I thought to myself, either David Byrne and Fatboy Slim don’t know or don’t care that Imelda Marcos was essentially a co-dictator of a third world country who suffered greatly under her and her husband Ferdinand Marcos’ regime. That her tens of thousands of shoes, a symbol of audacious glamour and wealth to hipsters like them, is for us Filipinos (and most normal human beings) a symbol of the poverty and repression their wealth was built upon. I didn’t want to lash out against a project I knew little about, so I waited to hear and see more.
Then this slideshow video promoting the album dropped, with quotes from David Byrne himself as he narrates an even more sugarcoated story than I could’ve imagined. It opens with a shot of young beauty-queen Imelda, followed with some revisionist history claiming that she was “forced to flee the Philippines” as if she were the victim. Then something about being fascinated with “the needs that drive powerful people” and how her story resonates and how she loved going to dance clubs in New York. All while her people starved and got jailed, tortured or killed for trying to do something about it. The slideshow doesn’t include that last part, of course.
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