Rocking Tradition
Protests aren’t the only thing shaking up Cambodia. Meet Southeast Asia’s newest punk rockers.
Courtesy of Yab Moung Records
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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia—Tin, the lead singer of Cambodia’s gnarliest rock band,
slaps his friend on the shoulder and says, “Let’s get fookin pissed ya
nobhead,” before downing the rest of his beer. The 21-year-old rocker,
who has rarely left his native Phnom Penh, taught himself English by
watching gangster films until he talked like a Manchester scallywag. His
accent is wildly incongruous with his delicate Khmer-Chinese looks.
His band is called Sliten6ix, and it’s part of a handful of groups that form the nascent rock scene in Cambodia’s largest city. (According to Tin, the band’s name is a portmanteau that combines slit and sewn in order to describe the curative power of music; there are five members, with music forming a metaphysical sixth member.) They have no local music influences, as there is no history of rock music in Cambodia. The Southeast Asian country enjoyed a short-lived surf-rock scene in the 1960s, but the Khmer Rouge quickly crushed it.
The scene, small as it is, resonates with the larger upheavals in
Cambodian society—the unprecedented success of the leading opposition
party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, in last summer’s elections
and the recent wave of mass protests
show how increased education and Internet access have led people to
begin to question the current authoritarian government. After decades of
war and its aftermath, Cambodians are finding their voice.
Thanks in part to that upheaval, there is, for the first time, a
Cambodian hardcore, metal, and punk scene. Myley Rattle, a Kenyan-born
poet and promoter who co-founded Yab Moung Records, Cambodia’s only rock
label, tells me that the scene is similar to what New York was in the
1960s—really small and very original.
Rattle also runs Show Box, a bar that is home to the freaks and punks
of Phnom Penh. Aptly located between an open sewer and the genocide
museum, the bar has walls webbed with graffiti; Khmers and expats chat
at the bar, and the stereo hums with hardcore ragga and rock. Khmer
spoken-word artist Kosal Khiev turns up with his new purebred puppy and
greets Conrad Keely, the frontman of And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.
Keely made his name in Austin, Texas, but is spending a lot of time in
Phnom Penh these days. Show Box is cool but chaotic. Rattle’s newest
venture at the bar—hosting Cambodian cooking classes—nearly failed when
his chef passed out drunk. Luckily the lead guitarist from No Forever, a
local band, stepped in to teach the team of foreign NGO volunteers how
to cook Khmer mango curry.
Cambodian rock groups like the ANTI-Fate
and Sliten6ix have found their efforts met with confusion. Cambodian
society is conservative and hierarchical. The majority of the country is
still living essentially a peasant lifestyle, where religion, family,
and farming trump all. Rebellion and rock music is not so much scorned
as disregarded. Most Cambodian kids listen to K-Pop or Cambodian singers
whose videos always seem to end with a spurned boyfriend blasting the
sky with a gun, his face twisted by heartbreak.
Back at the bar, Tin is blasting his vocal chords onstage with
Sliten6ix. He ricochets between shrieks and growls while the band
ignites a blast furnace of guitars with experimental tempos and
punishing breakdowns. “I used to be in a screamo band,” Tins tells me
after the performance. “Y’know with screamin’ and singin’ at the same
time? But then I decided fook that—I want even more hardcore.” Sliten6ix
are followed by post-punk band No Forever, who include traditional Cambodian melodies in their heavy sound, somewhat reminiscent of System of a Down’s use of the Armenian scale. Both bands are signed to Yab Moung Records.
The Cambodian rock bands have not yet put out any official releases. The Yab Moung crew
are working on a mix CD they plan to send out to industry contacts in
England, Germany, and Australia. But apart from a small collection of
Phnom Penh reprobates, no one else has heard their tracks.
Tom Reichelt, an expat from Leipzig, Germany, is the other half of Yab Moung Records.
He tells me that most Cambodians have not heard about punk or hardcore
music, and even if they have, they probably still don’t get the point.
To put it more starkly, he estimates the rock scene is about 400 people
in a country of 14 million.
Courtesy of Yab Moung Records
Still, Cambodia has a young population—26 percent are between the
ages of 16 and 30. Social media has become a powerful rallying point for
youth movements, and the hardcore scene is no different. Fans interact
online at the Cambo Headbanger Facebook group.
It was started by scene linchpin Veasna, who runs a music school and
lets bands record in his studio. He has long, straight hair; a Lamb of
God T-shirt; and a reserved manner. He tells me that the Facebook group
has grown from four to 272 members in the past two years—a large
extended family of Phnom Penh rockers.
Sam, No Forever’s boyish female vocalist, tells me that her family
doesn’t even know she’s in a band. Offstage, she’s quiet, almost elfin.
But in Cambodia, women are expected to look feminine and marry boys, not
dress like them. So when No Forever played on Bayon TV (a national TV
appearance that her family didn’t see), critics on Facebook lashed out,
saying that is wrong for a boyish girl like Sam to sing on TV. But Sam
is undaunted. “Being in a band helps me to be myself, because when I’m
up there singing, I don’t care what people think of me anymore,” she
says.
The public reaction wasn’t surprising: Cambodian society has little
tolerance for misfits. The country’s mores are still more geared to the
collective than the individual. While Western influence is eroding such
buttresses of Asian life, these differences remain. Western artists
typically refer to the desire to “express themselves” when describing
what they do. In Cambodia, their counterparts are still more likely to
explain their art as furthering the common good.
Sam tells me that the songs she writes are meant to inspire positive
social change. She had a troubled past and spent much of her teenage
years at odds with her parents and her school, even dropping out for a
short time. “When I was young, I did many bad things,” she admits. “Now I
write songs for people who were like me, and I want them to know that
it is possible to stop destroying yourself and take your life in a more
positive direction.”
Like any capital city, Phnom Penh offers plenty of opportunities for
vice. The problems are exacerbated by easy access to guns and
methamphetamine—a drug frequently found in the bloodstreams of cops,
taxi drivers, and revelers alike. Sam, who through music found an outlet
for her youthful angst, is now teaching English and studying
international relations.
Like Sam, Tin also stopped edging toward the cliff of
self-destruction. “The music ’elps me to be myself,” he says. “I
couldn’t go on fightin’ people and cursin’ people, so the music ’elps me
to release that.” Rattle agrees: “If you go around screaming and
roaring, people will lock you up. But if you take the rage onstage they
will relate to it in a more positive way.”
In October, Sliten6ix played in Phnom Penh’s battle of the bands.
Their three guitarists lined up like a firing squad while Tin detonated
the mosh pit with horror-show vocals. Their darkly Dionysian performance
won them the $200 grand prize. After the show, they and No Forever took
full advantage of the free bar. Things got blurry. They tumbled out of
the bar into the Phnom Penh neon, just like kids anywhere else.
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