CrazySexyCool, Blood Sugar Sex Magik and the long road to Los Baños
There is a phrase that used to appear regularly in used-car advertisements in the Philippines: lady-owned. It was meant to reassure you. The implication was that the vehicle had lived a gentle life, been driven carefully, kept clean and probably spared the indignities inflicted by men who treated every traffic light as a qualifying lap. My younger sister Tin-Tin’s red two-door 1983 Mitsubishi Pajero was lady-owned, although anyone expecting that to mean showroom condition would have been disappointed.
It was not a wreck. It was simply used, properly and without much ceremony, and the years of Philippine sun had got to the interior. The windows had no tint, so some of the upholstery and plastics had acquired that slightly faded, baked quality old cars develop in tropical countries. The air-conditioning worked according to principles known only to itself and tended to become philosophical about its responsibilities on precisely the afternoons when you most needed it. On a reasonably cool day it could perform well enough to make you think perhaps you had been unfair, then the next time you climbed in after the Pajero had spent hours parked under the sun, the vents might offer little more than a weak suggestion that colder air existed somewhere in the world.
The cassette player was factory standard, as were the speakers, and they sounded like it. “Tin-canny” is probably the fairest description. Bass was represented more as an idea than a physical presence, which was unfortunate when one of the albums permanently lodged in the car was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The other was TLC’s CrazySexyCool, and somehow, despite being very different records, those two cassettes became the soundtrack to countless drives with my sister, particularly the long familiar run towards Los Baños. We played them often enough that I stopped thinking of them as belonging to separate genres, separate years or even separate bands. In memory they are simply the two albums that lived in Tin-Tin’s Pajero.
Tin-Tin more or less lived there too
Looking back, I suspect Tin-Tin spent a significant portion of that stage of her life inside the Pajero, and the car had the evidence to prove it. She used the boot partly as storage and partly as what can only be described as a mobile shoe closet. There were shoes in the back, shoes migrating towards the front, and occasionally shoes occupying part of the passenger-side floor, where feet were theoretically supposed to go. Getting into the car sometimes involved a little housekeeping before sitting down.
Tin-Tin had a lot of shoes. I am not going to pretend this was unusual behaviour for a young woman, but she had clearly reached the point where conventional cupboards were no longer sufficient and Mitsubishi had been forced into the footwear-storage business. Pairs accumulated in the boot, odd shoes appeared under seats, and now and then something would slide around under braking and remind you that the car had become an extension of her room, cupboard and daily life.
Alongside the shoes she kept a small Igloo cooler in the boot for drinks and food. That was actually quite sensible, particularly when the air-conditioning had decided to withdraw its services. The cooler became part of the car’s permanent inventory, along with the cassette tapes and whatever else accumulated during university life and the normal business of being young and constantly going somewhere. The Pajero was therefore less like a pristine vehicle than a small moving room. It connected home, school, friends, errands and weekends, gathering bits of all of them as it went. I doubt Tin-Tin ever consciously thought of it that way. Nobody thinks of their everyday car as an archive while they are still throwing shoes into it, but that is what it became.
Riding shotgun
On weekends I would sometimes ride shotgun with her. Sometimes we actually had somewhere to go, and sometimes the purpose of getting into the car was simply to get out of the house. I miss that kind of casual driving now because every journey seems to arrive preloaded with navigation, estimated arrival times, traffic conditions and a blue dot following your movements with unnerving precision. Back then, you could go out without turning the afternoon into a logistics exercise. If there was petrol in the car and nothing especially urgent happening at home, going somewhere was reason enough.
Los Baños was a natural destination because it belonged to both of us in different ways. Tin-Tin studied at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, while I had gone to the Philippine High School for the Arts there. She knew it through university life; I knew it from my own high-school years. That gave the place a shared familiarity. We were not driving there as visitors, and neither of us needed the landmarks explained or the significance of the place sold to us. It was simply part of our geography.
Repeated journeys do strange things to memory. After enough trips, the route stops being a sequence of roads and becomes a collection of sensations: a particular stretch where the traffic usually slowed, a change in light, the feeling that you were getting close, a song that seemed always to arrive at roughly the same point. That is where the cassettes come in, because the music began attaching itself to the journey almost without either of us noticing.
The world’s smallest record collection
There must have been other tapes in Tin-Tin’s car. Statistically, it seems unlikely that she owned exactly two, but memory has apparently deleted the rest. The two that remain are CrazySexyCool and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and over time they became less like albums and more like pieces of the vehicle. One would already be inside the deck while the other sat somewhere within reach, presumably near the gear lever, on a seat or hiding underneath footwear.
It was an odd pairing. CrazySexyCool was smooth, measured and confident, a record built from R&B, hip-hop and soul that seemed to understand the value of leaving room around a groove. Blood Sugar Sex Magik was much sweatier: funk, rock, rap, noise, sex, melancholy and the persistent feeling that Flea was attempting to escape through whatever speakers happened to be available. The Pajero’s speakers were not remotely equipped for Flea, but they did what they could.
Perhaps that is part of why the records belong together in my head. They were not being experienced through headphones in ideal conditions. They were being filtered through the same mediocre factory stereo, the same road noise and the same ageing cabin. The car became its own mastering engineer, flattening some things, exaggerating others and giving both albums a shared acoustic space they were never meant to have.
CrazySexyCool in a hot Pajero
Some records naturally belong in cars, and CrazySexyCool has always felt like one of them. “Creep” is the obvious example. The opening is enough to put me back into motion. T-Boz’s voice settles low into the track, the rhythm feels relaxed without becoming sleepy, and the whole song carries itself with a confidence that does not need to shout. It suited driving because it did not fight the journey; it moved with it.
“Diggin’ on You” had the same quality, while “Kick Your Game” pushed harder and “Red Light Special” slowed everything down without losing control. TLC could make sensuality sound effortless, which is harder than people sometimes remember when looking back at mid-1990s R&B. Inside Tin-Tin’s Pajero, however, all of this sophistication had to compete with much less sophisticated circumstances: road noise, heat, the old engine and an air-conditioning system that occasionally seemed to be unionised.
That became my version of the record. I do not hear CrazySexyCool as pristine studio audio so much as the Pajero mix, with TLC accompanied by tyre noise, sun through untinted windows and the occasional unidentified object shifting somewhere behind the seats. Oddly enough, none of that diminished the album. If anything, the imperfections became part of it. The record also gave the cabin a kind of cool the car itself could not manufacture. Even when the air-conditioning was failing and the sun was pouring through the glass, CrazySexyCool somehow made the whole experience feel less shabby, as though the music could temporarily compensate for the Pajero’s refusal to behave like a much newer car.
The album that knew when not to push
What strikes me now about CrazySexyCool is its restraint. It would have been easy for TLC to make everything bigger after their first album, but much of CrazySexyCool works because it does not constantly demand attention. The production has space. T-Boz, Chilli and Left Eye sound distinct without seeming to occupy separate records, and even the bigger singles feel relaxed inside themselves.
That confidence is particularly obvious when you hear the album from beginning to end rather than reducing it to the songs everybody remembers. Cassette listening helped with that because when an album went into the deck, you generally listened to the album. Skipping tracks was possible, obviously, but it involved fast-forwarding, stopping, checking where you were, overshooting and reversing. Eventually laziness defeated selectivity and you simply let the tape play. That meant songs were allowed to become familiar gradually. There was no algorithm watching for the first sign of boredom and offering something else, and the cassette had no interest in whether you were engaged. It simply kept going, which in retrospect may have been one of its best qualities.
“Waterfalls” and the things that slip past you
“Waterfalls” is probably the song from CrazySexyCool that changed most for me over time. When you are young, a song can become familiar long before you understand what it is actually saying. You respond to the chorus, melody and rhythm while the darker material passes underneath almost unnoticed.
With “Waterfalls”, those darker elements eventually become impossible to avoid. The song deals with destructive choices, drugs, violence, HIV and the belief that consequences somehow apply mainly to other people, yet none of it arrives as a lecture. It remains smooth, and that contrast is what gives the song its weight.
I doubt I spent much time analysing any of this while sitting beside Tin-Tin on the road to Los Baños. I was not staring thoughtfully out of the window considering TLC’s approach to social commentary. I was probably hot, mildly hungry and wondering whether the air-con was going to recover. That is usually how important music enters your life. It does not announce itself as culturally significant; it plays while something else is happening.
Then somebody put in the Chili Peppers
The move from TLC to Blood Sugar Sex Magik should have felt abrupt, but after enough journeys it became completely normal. Maybe the connection was rhythm, because for all the differences between the records, both rely heavily on groove. The Chili Peppers simply arrived at it from a much noisier direction.
“The Power of Equality” has little interest in easing the listener in, while “Give It Away” operates like a machine that has somehow learned funk. Flea and Chad Smith provide the engine, John Frusciante cuts away anything unnecessary and Anthony Kiedis rides across the top of it all with that peculiar mixture of seriousness and absurdity that defined the band at the time.
Through Tin-Tin’s speakers, Flea’s bass lost some of its authority. Quite a lot of its authority, actually. What remained was a sort of enthusiastic metallic thump, as if somebody were attacking a biscuit tin in the footwell, but the energy survived. Good records are surprisingly tolerant of bad playback equipment.
“Funky Monks”, “Suck My Kiss” and the title track all retained their physical force even when reproduced through a stereo that would have struggled to satisfy anybody selling hi-fi equipment. The Pajero was hardly an audiophile listening room, but then neither were most of the places where we discovered music.
When the loud record becomes quiet
What gave Blood Sugar Sex Magik staying power was that it did not remain in one mode. “I Could Have Lied” slows everything down and exposes a vulnerability that the louder material tends to conceal, while “Breaking the Girl” feels strange and slightly unsettled, acoustic without sounding comfortable.
Then there is “Under the Bridge”. Years of radio play have made it easy to hear the song as simply one of the accepted monuments of 1990s rock, but put it back inside the album and it still feels like a disruption. The swagger disappears, the emotional distance collapses, and the record suddenly becomes about loneliness rather than bravado. That may be the point where Blood Sugar Sex Magik unexpectedly reaches towards CrazySexyCool. Not musically, obviously, but emotionally. Both albums are far more complicated than the surfaces they initially present, and both are interested in the darker things sitting underneath confidence, sex and movement.
“Waterfalls” and “Under the Bridge”
The connection did not occur to me then, but “Waterfalls” and “Under the Bridge” are both songs about people approaching edges. One looks outward at destructive choices and their consequences, while the other looks inward at isolation, addiction and disconnection. Neither sounds like a lecture, and neither sacrifices melody to make the point.
They also sit inside albums full of confidence, sexuality and forward motion, then quietly reveal that the adult world is far messier than the surface suggests. We were younger when those songs were playing in the Pajero. Tin-Tin was studying, I had my own history in Los Baños, and weekends still had that loose quality where several hours could be spent driving somewhere without feeling that the time needed to justify itself.
Meanwhile, two cassette tapes kept feeding us songs about loneliness, danger, desire, bad decisions and consequences. We probably absorbed more than we knew, even if at the time the more immediate concern was whether the car was getting too hot.
Los Baños as shared territory
The older I get, the more I realise that places can belong to different stages of your life at once. For Tin-Tin, Los Baños was university. For me, it was also the Philippine High School for the Arts and everything that came with that period. So when we drove there together, we were travelling towards the same physical place but not necessarily the same version of it.
I like that now because it means we each carried our own map. Perhaps that is why I do not associate these albums with one particular journey. There is no single afternoon that represents all the others. What survives is repetition: Tin-Tin driving, me beside her, the familiar road ahead, heat coming through the windows and those two tapes circulating through the dashboard. Memory has compressed many weekends into one continuous drive. That is probably inaccurate, but it is also how memory tends to work, keeping the textures and discarding the calendar.
A car becomes a room before you notice
Cars are strange domestic spaces. You eat in them, argue in them and sit silently beside people in them. You have conversations while staring ahead rather than at each other, which sometimes makes difficult things easier to say. You leave receipts in compartments, lose coins beneath seats and accumulate bags, clothes, rubbish, food and, in Tin-Tin’s case, enough shoes to supply a modest retail outlet.
Without anybody deciding it should happen, the vehicle gradually becomes an extension of the person who drives it. Tin-Tin’s Pajero was hers in that deeper sense, not because she maintained it obsessively, but because she inhabited it. The sun damage, temperamental air-conditioning, little Igloo cooler and migrating shoe collection told me far more about her actual life than a spotless restoration ever could. A pristine Pajero would be easier to photograph, but it would not be the one I remember. The one I remember had been lived in, which is probably why the memories attached themselves to it so thoroughly.
The cassette made you stay
It is fashionable now to treat cassettes as objects of uncomplicated analogue romance, and this requires forgetting quite a lot about cassettes. They hissed, stretched and occasionally attempted to commit suicide inside the tape deck. They could be rewound with a pencil if you were patient enough, and finding a particular song could become a minor administrative project involving fast-forwarding, stopping, pressing play, realising you had gone too far and reversing again.
Streaming is objectively better at many things, but cassettes had one accidental virtue that I increasingly miss: they made you stay with the record. If CrazySexyCool went into the deck, we usually listened to CrazySexyCool. When Blood Sugar Sex Magik replaced it, we travelled through that album as well. Songs did not need to impress us immediately because they were likely to come around again anyway. Repetition gave them time, and eventually even the tracks you cared less about became landmarks between the ones you loved. That is how albums turned into places.
Albums had sides, and journeys did too
There was also the physical pause when a cassette reached the end of a side. The music stopped, the mechanism clicked and somebody had to intervene. Maybe Tin-Tin handled it at a traffic light, maybe I flipped the cassette from the passenger seat, or maybe we switched albums entirely.
That little interruption kept the object visible. You never completely forgot that music was coming from a piece of magnetic tape moving between two reels inside a plastic shell. The journey had a similar structure of leaving, road, arrival and return, and there was no instant jump between any of them. Both the cassette and the trip required duration. You had to go through the middle. Perhaps that is why driving and physical music worked so naturally together. Neither was especially efficient, but both made you occupy the time rather than skip across it.
The little red greenhouse
What I remember now is texture rather than chronology: sunlight through clear glass, faded interior surfaces, the slightly thin sound of the factory stereo, the little Igloo cooler in the boot, Tin-Tin’s shoes occupying whichever section of the Pajero they had claimed that week and the air-conditioning beginning optimistically before apparently losing interest.
None of these things seemed particularly important at the time. In fact, some of them were annoying, which is one of the dangers of nostalgia. It can polish the past until you no longer recognise the thing you are supposedly remembering. Old cars become classics, old technology becomes pure and every inconvenient afternoon acquires a golden haze it never actually had. I do not want to do that to Tin-Tin’s Pajero. The car was imperfect, the air-con was unreliable, the speakers were mediocre and there were too many shoes. That is why it feels real.
The ordinary things become the important things
Tin-Tin died in February 2020 from complications following the birth of her second child, and her death inevitably changed the meaning of these memories even though I have never wanted it to swallow them. When somebody dies young, there is a tendency for the ending to move backwards and occupy everything that came before it, as if every story about that person must eventually become a story about losing them.
I would rather remember my sister while she was still busy living, and that is partly why the Pajero matters. There is nothing ceremonial about these memories. They are not birthdays, graduations or carefully posed family photographs. They are ordinary weekends in a badly air-conditioned car, with Tin-Tin driving, me beside her, shoes in the wrong place, something cold in the cooler and two cassette tapes within reach. Sometimes there was not even a particularly good reason for the journey. That ordinariness became precious only later, which is perhaps why I distrust the idea that the important moments of our lives are always the ones we recognise at the time.
The albums survived better than the car
I can now listen to both albums in conditions far better than the Pajero ever provided. I can play CrazySexyCool through proper speakers and hear details Tin-Tin’s factory system probably never reproduced, and I can listen to Blood Sugar Sex Magik with enough low end for Flea to sound like Flea rather than somebody trapped inside a metal cupboard.
Technically, everything has improved, but the clean versions have never replaced the ones inside my head. My CrazySexyCool still has road noise mixed into it, while my Blood Sugar Sex Magik still comes through ageing car speakers. When “Creep” starts, I can see sunlight entering through windows without tint. “Give It Away” still seems connected to the movement of the Pajero itself. Somewhere behind “Waterfalls” is an Igloo cooler sitting in the boot, and somewhere underneath “Under the Bridge” there is probably one of Tin-Tin’s shoes shifting across the passenger-side floor. That is not nostalgia for perfect things, because nothing was perfect. The flaws are part of why I can still see it so clearly.
One more ordinary weekend
If somebody placed those two cassettes in front of me today, I would probably spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at them, although I am not convinced I actually want to return to using tapes. Memory should occasionally be kept away from online shopping.
What I would like is something much less obtainable: another ordinary weekend with Tin-Tin before any of us knew that ordinary weekends were finite. I would want the Pajero exactly as it was rather than restored into something it never was, with the lousy speakers, factory cassette player, faded interior, untinted windows and air-conditioning that might or might not fulfil its contractual obligations. The little cooler would still be in the boot, and the shoes would still be everywhere they should not be.
Tin-Tin would be driving and I would be beside her. Maybe we would have an actual reason for going to Los Baños, or maybe we would simply be getting out of the house. Either would be fine. The place ahead of us would mean different things to each of us, as it always had: for her, university; for me, memories of the Philippine High School for the Arts. Between us would be all the ordinary sibling history we never thought needed documenting.
One cassette would already be playing and the other would be somewhere within reach. I do not imagine we would discuss the albums in any meaningful way, and we probably would not talk about memory, mortality or the strange ability of music to preserve places that no longer exist in quite the same form. I hope we wouldn’t. I would rather hear whatever ordinary conversation we actually used to have, half-covered by road noise and those tin-canny speakers.
Eventually the cassette would reach the end of Side A and the deck would click into silence. One of us would turn the tape over, Tin-Tin would keep driving towards Los Baños, and for another forty minutes or so neither of us would know that there was anything about the moment worth remembering. Looking back now, I think that is the part I miss most.
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