The more theatrical aspects of Imelda Marcos’s life, perfect for a telenovela, have become familiar material not just to Filipinos but to all those who have followed the ongoing drama of the woman whose penchant for unrepentant excess has given rise to the adjective “Imeldific.” Such a life has proven to be a rich source of fascination to writers and musician/composers, including David Byrne. Three years ago at Carnegie Hall, on a cold February night, he, along with a band and vocalists, performed a song cycle based on the life of La Imelda (or as she is known in more irreverent circles, La Maldita, a/k/a Bad Girl). That song cycle has now been expanded into a two-CD, 22-song set, titled Here Lies Love––words that presumably the eighty-year-old former beauty queen, first lady, and billionaire widow of the late unlamented Ferdinand Marcos, wishes to have inscribed on her tombstone. The set features a number of well-known vocalists, from Cyndi Lauper, Natalie Merchant, Santigold, Tori Amos, to Byrne himself.

I reviewed the Carnegie Hall gig for a Manila daily and, begging the reader’s indulgence, let me quote a bit from that review:

“But why would a well-known Scot-American rocker be drawn to Imelda? Byrne writes in the program that he was drawn by her ‘timeless story of power, politics, and psychological needs.’ He also notes that ‘this song cycle wants to evolve into something somewhat undefined, but surely more theatrical.’ The telling phrase here, to me, is ‘somewhat undefined,’ accurately encapsulating not so much the night’s musical performance but its content.”

That something is now a bit more clearly defined, but not by much. Leaving aside for the moment, any lack of examination of Imelda’s culpability in wrecking a country’s economy, her calloused behavior towards the brutalities regularly inflicted on the body politic, as well as in the creation of a multitude of bodies never to rise again, and her narcissism brought to new highs (or lows)—wouldn’t such scrutiny come under the rubric of psychological needs?—this is psychology lite, and much less filling than the music.

Indeed, you can’t go wrong if all you seek is the music, the intricate layers of beats that Fatboy Slim laid down to re-create the clubby, disco feel of the 1970s. Imelda watchers know that she loved disco, particularly as an arena where she could spin with the social and political elites in the U.S. The 1970s were also a time when the Marcoses were at the height of their power. “Dancing Together” (Sharon Jones on vocals) displays the arriviste’s ambivalent joy at the company she keeps on the dance floor, Warhol, Oleg Cassini, the Rockefellers, Margot Fonteyn and the Queen of Spain, among others. There are references to rocking with George—clearly, George Hamilton, a favorite Imelda celeb who returned the favor by testifying at Imelda’s federal trial in 1990, about how like a mother she was.

Byrne understandably steers clear of certain clichéd images that have come to mark the public persona of Imelda: the shoes, the bulletproof bras, the mania for shopping. He’s savvy enough to know that that leads down the well-worn path of cheap tricks and little insight.  He also steers clear of a conventional narrative, instead zeroing in on the emotional moods. For Byrne, in his written introduction to the set, history can be “a series of collective moods and emotions as well” and that those “emotions are sometimes lost to us.”