Luk Thung is sometimes described as Thai country music.
Lyrically, it usually focuses on the plight of rural dwellers coming to the big city, or on tales of lost love and heartbreak. Musically...well, there isn’t really any one way to describe it musically. Typical sounds include big band horns, stinging electric guitar, traditional Thai instruments, synthesizers, and a chugging garagey vibe associated with a regional music style known as morlum. There are even dance remixes. Luk thung, in other words, can be almost anything; it’s one of the most eclectic and omnivorous genres on the planet.
Luk thung is hugely popular in Thailand, but the style hasn’t traveled much internationally. That means, unfortunately, that for a non-Thai speaker it’s difficult to track down CDs, or even to download files.
Which is where videos come in. Karaoke is a passion in Thailand, and many successful performers get their start by participating in singing contests, lending their voice to the backing of a currently popular hit. As a result, Thai pop is often distributed by VCD discs — a sub-DVD visual format. The VCDs are mastered so that the singers voice comes through one channel but not the other, making it easy to listen to the music and singer together, or to drop out the lyrics and sing along yourself.
The original impetus for making this a video format was presumably to allow singers to see the lyrics scroll across the screen. But, and of course, as long as you’ve got the video to begin with, you might as well put on a show. As a result, virtually every Thai song has a video. And the vast majority of those, it seems, have made their way to YouTube.
As you might imagine, when you’re making videos for every single song you record, you don’t necessarily throw money at each one as if you’re Lady Gaga. Instead, you work on the cheap. Thus, all the videos for a given album tend to look like they were shot at the same time using the same settings. Not infrequently, the performers even show up wearing the same clothes — both saving on costumes and emphasizing their countryish, plain-folks bona fides.
As an example, the video below is from the remarkable 2005 garage-meets-vaudeville album Wong Kalimae by performers Aump Nuntiya and Boonta Muangmai.
According to Jod Taywaditep, a Chicago native-Thai speaker who kindly offered to provide translations for this article, Wong Kalimae means Caramel Band, a title sweet enough to give a Jpop act a diabetic shock. The song is “”Worn Pee Mee Ruk Deaw or "Begging You to Have One Love” — also a definitively pop-worthy sentiment.
But, despite the album title, Aump and Boonta aren’t quite doing the slick pop star thing. Instead, they’re dressed as if they just decided to get up on stage to karaoke after a trip to the mall. That’s how they dance too; their choreography looks cheerfully improvised, with traditional Thai hand movements accenting more familiar western-style spontaneous wiggling. The blocking is so resolutely simple in fact, that through all ten videos the two never change places; Aump is always on the left (usually in a skirt) and Boonta is always on the right (in pants.)
That’s the second song on the album variously referred to as “Ruk Song Paen Din” or “Bao Lao Sao Thai.” Either way, it’s a tale of a Thai bordertown girl in love with both a Thai neighbor and a Laotian peddler boy who crosses the Mekong on his motorboat to see her. In Thailand, Laotians are often seen as rural or unsophisticated...and, I think this song suggests, as having a certain animal vitality. Being from the boondocks can mean innocence (the girl group vocals), but it can also mean a raunchy earthiness (the grit of the guitars.) According to Jod, the lyrics include a mention of how the girl “wishes she could keep both [her lovers] as a symbol of the Thai-Laotian cross-cultural and economic goodwill” — and if that sounds like a sly rationalization, well, yeah, that was probably the point.
Even by Thai standards, the Aump and Boonta videos are rather bare bones. Even when there aren’t pyrotechnics, producers do try to give you a bit more to look at. Specifically, luk thung live concerts are known for their gaudily dressed go-go dancing girls. Following in that tradition, women in tight, short, flamboyant outfits are the background filigree of choice for most luk thung video performances. The video below by Yui Yardyer, a veteran who got her start touring as a nine-year old in the 1980s, is a good baseline. The first song of the medley is “Pok Mia,” a popular traditional number that translated loosely means, “Why Did You Bring That Baggage, Your Wife?” and includes a line where she wishes she had a remote control that would make the object of her affection lose his spouse. The last song, “Mia Keb Mai Ao,” means “I Won’t Be Your Kept Woman.”
You can see the appeal, here obviously; hot girls shaking for the audience; low cost for the producers — what’s not to like? And, too, such a simple formula allows for infinite variation. You can go classy, as Pamela Bowden does in "Khor Pen Nang Aek," (“Let Me Be Your Heroine,”) a retro-style number from the early aughts, which, to my Western ears at least, recalls Memphis soul in its horns.
Or if Bowden’s tight dress isn’t enough stimulation, you can head into racier (and significantly slicker) territory. For example, Mayura Fahsithong adds a a bit of co-ed cheesecake, some instrumentalists, a pair of truly spectacular plaid pants, and comes up with a perfect disco-y vibe for the hard funking “Sao Bang Poe.” The song title means “Bang Poe Girl,” and is ostensibly about feeling homesick for Bang Poe (which Jod believes is probably in central Thailand near Bangkok). With Fahsithong’s quasi-rapping and the general party air, though, the song doesn’t seem particularly nostalgic; instead, it sounds like she’s representing. That’s particularly true of the awesome Latin bridge at 2:15, cribbed, as Jod noted, from “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” a tune played in 60s proto-strip clubs . The take-away message, apparently, is that her neighborhood is sexier than yours.
Even more flamboyant is “Arom Sia” by actress and singer Apaporn Nakornsawan. The title means “Sick of It All,” and indeed the performer appears to have become so disgusted at her romantic troubles that she has turned to super-villainy, luring the Justice League into some sort of catastrophic defeat at the hands of a gay pride parade.
Once you get started watching these things, it’s...well, let’s not go into how many hours I’ve spent at this now. But surely this is enough to get you started. In part 2, coming up not too long from now, we’ll look at some videos that take the formula a bit further afield, or abandon it altogether.
