I'd like to preface this by saying, I'm neither a hater nor a fan, also not an expert. I kept reading posts about Dionela so I tried listening to a few of his songs. Also, it's the wee hours, and I got no one to talk to about it.

When you don't pay much attention and just listen to his songs in the background, you'll definitely wonder why people are hating on his music, but after you actually pay attention, you begin to understand.

Dionela's music gives off that highschool vibe during late 2000s to early 2010s. Although I'm not talking about pop music during those years, it's more of the feeling or emotions attached to it.

It's the invincibility we feel when we get that puppy love during our teenage years. It's bold and fearless, it's the desire to shout into the world about how much we love our significant other without caring about what other people might say. Although this is surely already a given since his songs (most?) are an ode to the love of his life, which he makes pretty obvious.

There's really no issue with how he creates the melody of his songs, in fact it's done so well to the point that it's kind of like those upbeat Japanese or Korean songs that people don't really understand but they dance to it on TikTok anyway.

The hate is really coming from how he writes the lyrics of his songs, like what a redditor commented in a post I read, it's a "word salad".

There are really no "rules" in creating poetry, however it feels like the freedom in writing was kinda misused in his songs. Like some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't.

I find that this is mostly defended by saying that, what matters is that he understands the meaning and that it's his message to the love of his life.

While it's up to the writer how to play around with words to deliver an artistic piece, the lyrics of his songs still gave that feeling of someone using the thesaurus to pick some unique word without understanding what it really means. This made his lyrics lose structure, resulting in an ambitious attempt to deliver creative lyrics by usage of figurative language.

Bottomline though, there's room for improvement and I'm honestly hoping that he'll develop his song writing since he does have a talent.

PS I don't think rap (?) suits him. First part of Marilag felt off and out of place. But I'd still add it to my playlist coz the beat is a bop. 😭

TLDR May talent siya, technique is there. Maganda melody ng songs niya, may problem lang talaga sa song writing. Parang high school kid na inlove yung vibes ng lyrics niya. Worth it naman bigyan ng chance.