“I’ve always been a strong advocate for not only being represented in stories, but also to be the ones writing and creating the stories,” Ruby Ibarra tells Vogue. Photo courtesy of Mikayla Swiper Delson
Following the release of her single “Bakunawa,” artist Ruby Ibarra reflects on where Filipino American music came from, and where it’s going.
Ruby Ibarra’s latest music video, “Bakunawa,” begins with a shiver and ends with a bang. A white-haired woman, sitting in a rocker, narrates the tale of the bakunawa—bent snake, moon eater, the cause of natural phenomena. The camera focuses on her hands, her mouth, and her feet without showing her entire face, but the woman is soon revealed to be June Millington.
After watching the documentary Fanny: The Right to Rock, I’m immediately struck by the significance of this collaboration. June Millington and her sister Jean formed part of the trailblazing all-female rock group Fanny, a band that broke all the rules in the early 1970s, playing in major venues and opening for acts like Deep Purple, Steely Dan, and Jethro Tull. They were no manufactured pop group; the girls wrote their own music and were masters of their instruments, defying gender expectations of the era. Oh, they were also Filipino immigrants.
Despite Fanny achieving a level of success and acclaim in the five years they were active, the band was seemingly erased from musical history. Even David Bowie told Rolling Stone in 1999, “They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time.” Fanny-revival began when the original members reunited to record a new album in 2018, followed by the Bobbi Jo Hart documentary which was released in 2021.
Near the end of the film, the women rockers, who are now in their sixties and seventies, perform together live for the first time at a small venue in California. Ruby Ibarra, who was in the audience, was interviewed for comment. “Being a young woman of color, a Filipina…when I learned about Fanny’s music and their accomplishments, I was just frustrated that I didn’t know about these women earlier on,” she says. “I think everyone needs to know their name; they need to be a household band name.”
Ruby Ibarra’s journey from the Philippines to California echoes that of the Millington sisters, with 30 years in between. Both found a venue for expression through music, June and Jean in rock, Ibarra in hip hop. “It’s such a challenge for [Filipinos] to break through American media, yet you had these artists in the 1970s living in a completely different political and social climate making the strides that they did,” Ibrarra tells me. “And to think, those barriers still exist. I felt it was so fitting to have a collaboration with a pioneer together with newer artists, not just myself, but Ouida and Han Han, for example. It’s a great juxtaposition to show people this is where Filipino American music came from, and this is where it’s going.”
The music video ends with Ibarra spitting verse in English, Tagalog, and Bisaya, and just as she closes with the line, “rebirth the new moon,” a wide shot shows Ibarra cradling her baby bump. That’s one way to announce a pregnancy.
“Bakunawa” is the first single off her upcoming sophomore album, which will be released through Bolo, the record label she founded focusing on Filipino American artists in the Bay Area. The album represents a shift from her 2017 debut, Circa 91, which largely centered on the immigrant experience. After finding out she was pregnant earlier this year, Ruby feels the album also transforming: “The first album was a love letter to my mother and our immigrant experience. I think this next one is kind of a love letter now to my daughter and the legacy I want to leave behind, the messages that I want to share with her, the themes that I hopefully will be able to discuss with her more thoroughly when she gets older.”
Ibarra’s approach to songwriting has changed as well. “Us,” one of her most popular songs, was seen as a celebration of sisterhood and women empowerment. Now that she’s about to have a daughter of her own, Ibarra feels like she’s unlearning everything she thought she knew. “I’m questioning if the things that I’m saying are substantial enough, if they’re meaningful, if they are things that I would want to share with my own daughter,” she reflects. “I’m having to kind of redefine for myself what it means to feel empowered, and what it means to empower other women, through the lens of my daughter.”
If these means that her lyrics may be less aggressive, they are in no way diminished in their potency or pride. The idea of exploring the bakunawa myth came about during the pandemic when she started delving more into Filipino folklore, in particular watching and reading the Trese series. Visayan in origins, the tale of the snake-dragon that swallows six moons was something she naturally gravitated toward. But Ruby wanted to turn it on its tail by embodying the feminine force of a creature traditionally characterized as dark and malevolent.
Ibarra also emphasizes the importance of having Filipino talent behind the camera, like Desire Lacap, the director of photography who worked alongside the rapper as she directed the video. “When it comes to storytelling, that makes all the difference in the world. I’ve always been a strong advocate for not only being represented in stories, but also to be the ones writing and creating the stories.”
A couple of weeks after we speak, Ruby, who would’ve been 36 weeks pregnant, headlined the Island Woman Rise concert in Los Angeles, her full moon out and loud. It was to be her last show for the year and for a while as she slows down to prepare for a new life. One audience member described the show as “therapy” and “empowerment”: “Incredible Filipinx rappers. No one referencing their men, MCs speaking to the community, lifting up the movement we need and want here and now.”
Filipinos in the diaspora have had to forge their own communities while striving to maintain connections with their heritage and culture. This struggle is part of the reason why Ibarra co-founded Bolo Music Group last year. “I don’t think it’s going to take one artist. I don’t think it’s even going to take just 10 Filipino artists to succeed,” she says. Rather, Ruby sees it as a continuous movement of Filipinos opening doors for one another, “because that all contributes to the global conversation of raising our fists up high and being proud of who we are.”
