The barangay grooves to Davao’s budots

Budots is something that Filipinos have heard in their daily routine. Whether they despise hearing it in the jeepneys or groove to it for their “taga saan ka” memes, the sound has been ingrained in our culture. And we have Barangay Camus of Davao to thank for that.

Tambay, or someone who’s jobless—that’s the true budots. These are the same people who invented the sound and dance to it. And it may surprise you how elaborately they developed this genre.

Starting back in 2012 with the CamusBoyz, budots is sounds, occasional scratching, horns of varying pitches and tempo, DJ spiels throughout, sometimes distorted vocals, looped all over.” Tracks in this genre are often made with outdated music software.

How people dance to it has the same traditional roots. Community blog DavaoEagle describes it as “patterned

budots as random and formless. But this sound is rooted in staking an identity in a modern Western society.

molding it to how they hear it. Budots how a province interpreted a Western genre and shaped it to their own liking.