Miget's Chamoru Vinyl Collection

After my third child Lulai was born in 2021, I had a month of paternity leave from working at the Guam Museum. 

During this time, I would usually take Lulai at night for around four or five hours, to give her mother Desiree a chance to sleep or relax or do anything undisturbed for a while. 

I would sing to her, rock her, hold her while she slept.

It gave me time to think, to reflect, to watch things, to read.

One of the things that I thought alot about at the time was Chamoru music and its future. 

I never really made the jump to digital music platforms like Spotify, but I do listen to music on YouTube. 

While I would be watching Lulai I would want to sing to her different Chamoru songs and I would look for them on YouTube and not be able to find the songs.

I was frustrated because I had the songs on tapes or on CDs or on vinyl records, but my hands were full with a child, or the physical copies were packed away in boxes in storage somewhere and it would take forever to find. 

I would complain to people in my Zoom classes that I couldn't find certain songs by certain artists and I would always hear the same thing, of there's plenty of Chamoru music on Spotify. Everything is on Spotify. 

I took everyone's advice and checked out Spotify and found that while there was Chamoru music there, there was actually barely any Chamoru music on Spotify. 

As someone who first started learning the Chamoru language through Chamoru music, and starting trying to translate songs, and collect as much Chamoru music as I could, and know as much as I can about it, it horrified me to be honest, to see that the sliver that is available on platforms like Amazon or Spotify seemed like alot to them. 

As I spent more nights holding my child thinking about the issue, it made more sense to me. 

Even if we look at the first generation of Chamoru musicians in the modern era. Very few of them actually went on to record a physical album, a vinyl record, since the costs and barriers involved were prohibitive at the time. 

Most of them sang in more informal ways, for parties, for gatherings, for their families, but never made the leap to anything official. 

When tapes and then CDs became common, this led to a transformation, where someone could record an album, especially with the assistance of a helpful producer locally such as Tommy Bejado or Dante Trinidad in a week or a weekend. 

For a few thousand dollars, a few hundred tapes or CDs could be yours to sell or give away. 

A passionate project, a fundraiser, your dream of becoming a musician, it was all much more achievable, and so by the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, there are simply as many musicians as mangoes in mango season. 

But not all of those who record tapes, make the transition to CDs, not all of those who make CDs make the transition to digital. 

Not all are professional musicians, who perform regularly, who see this as a full-time part of their lives. 

And so hundreds of musicians stay in physical form, in tape collections or on radio playlists in the Marianas. 

Most haven't been brought into the digital domain yet.

For some of the more famous artists, what we have seen is their children taking up the task of digitizing and preserving their parents' or grandparents' music. 

But for others we see their music just floating around, sometimes forgotten by the newer generations, perhaps the tune or voice familiar, but the names of the songs or the artists lost since Tun Google with his supposedly infinite wisdom has no answers. 

As I was one year into teaching my Zoom Chamoru classes at the time, the mantra that I often remind them "Anggen ti hita pues håyi?" was very much in my mind. "If not us, then who?" 

If we aren't trying to preserve our own music, language and culture, what does it say if we are waiting for Spotify or Google to do it for us?

What can we expect if we rely on them? Would they really care if only one out of 100 Chamoru artists was preserved? If we do it, would it increase the chances that 10 out of 100 or more are preserved? 

This is why, during my paternity leave in 2021, with the help of my second oldest child Akli'e', we began to digitize my Chamoru vinyl record collection. Many of the songs in it are already available on YouTube and Spotify, but some aren't. 

Now, three years later we've digitized more than 400 Chamoru songs, and have at least 100 more to do. 

Once we finish the records, we'll be moving on to tapes, for which we literally have a collection of hundreds waiting for us. 

If you want to check out the songs that we've digitized so far, you can head to the Fanachu YouTube page where they are all collected. The Fanachu Podcast pays for the purchase of the records and any supplies that are needed for the work.