1 Capitalism and cultural relativity
The Thai pop industry, capitalism and Western cultural values
In 1997 one of Thailand's more popular soap operas was Saam Num Saam Mum (‘three boys, three points of view’), televised weekly on Sunday night to a large Thai audience. In one particular episode, aired on 7 September 1997, there was a scene where one of the main female characters, Nat, cooked a Thai meal for her husband and her husband's two younger brothers. During this cooking sequence a government announcement flashed across the bottom of the screen: Thai people should help Thai people: eat Thai food, buy Thai goods, holiday in Thailand and be thrifty’.1 The onset of the Asian financial crisis, starting with the fall of the baht on 2 July 1997, leading to the closing of 50 finance companies by the government and a slump in the economic growth rate, forced Thailand's once booming economy into recession. Never before having faced a recession quite on this scale, the government, media and people of Thailand were quite justifiably nervous. The ‘buy Thai’ promotion campaign by the government intending to stimulate the local economy was the first programme in relation to the financial crisis. It was also the first of a wave of crisis-related promotion campaigns which relied heavily on nationalistic pride.2 With this government announcement, Thai food is written and acted simultaneously on screen, the actions of the Thai soap opera demonstrating what the government directive desires — Thais to support their country by eating local food. Irrespective of this caption appearing at this precise moment of the programme, in numerous ways television dramas tend to be closely associated with nationalistic aims.3 Hardly unique to Thailand, soap operas in many countries articulate middle-class, familial values and reproduce nationalist discourses that agree with government policy. However, what distinguishes this section of Saam Num Saam Mum, and one issue I wish to examine here, is the proximity between nationalism as entertainment and nationalism as a governmental discourse.
In the episode Nat is learning how to cook Thai food so she can feed the three brothers. Pee, the youngest brother, is learning how to dance because he wants to take a girl to his high school graduation ball. At the beginning of the show Nat cooks a terrible meal in which certain dishes which should be thick are watery, and other items are overcooked. At the same time Pee loses his dance partner because he stands on her toes too often. In response, Nat gets cooking lessons and also teaches Pee how to dance. She eventually accompanies him to the ball since he has no partner, and all is resolved. The concerns of the episode are quite clearly about pedagogy: what it means to be a good teacher, how to be a good teacher or student, and why learning and respect for knowledge is good for both oneself and others. Indeed, the moral of this episode can be contextualised with the government's promotion of self-education and teaching others as acts that benefit the nation. Listening to people who know, and learning from them, are valuable qualities — as Nat learns to cook or Pee to dance, it is not difficult to transpose these values to the audience reading the government's message.4
This may appear a tangential approach to introducing a discussion of Thai pop, for neither government propaganda nor television drama are overtly associated with pop music in Western countries. Yet, in relation to Thai pop, I consider it is these discourses and media that need to be analysed. I open with Saam Num Saam Mum since I wish to explore the connection between national identity, the government, the media and popular music. Primarily I seek this line of argument because I want to discuss some of the ramifications of the tendency in much Western cultural studies to see popular music as transgressive.5 Repeatedly there is an assumption that pop music, before commercialisation and popularisation, was a revolutionary and dissident form of cultural expression. Thus there is an implication that this form of music is inherently a radical tool which has either been sold out or has been appropriated by corporate forces.
The episode of Saam Num Saam Mum outlines some of the distinct ideas of cultural values which I use to contextualise Thai pop, and the Thai pop industry, in its governmental, cultural and commercial spheres. That is, my interest is in how the capital of culture is administered in Thailand on macro levels (government and media corporations) and reproduced on micro levels (songs, artists and appreciation by fans). My second concern deals with exchange systems in this economy: how should we conceive the exchanges between Western and non-Western pop, music industries and cultural criticism? I do not want to argue that Thailand's music is exclusive and independent; neither do I wish to read it as a version, a copy, or repetition of Western music. Rather, through its interaction with Western culture, its interaction with other Asian music industries, and its unique political and media context, Thai pop produces a quite distinct form of popular music, audiences, industries and authorities. Finally, cultural value in pop music is significantly determined by the commercial context. While Western pop likes to downplay the importance of the industry and the commercial value, Thai music is overtly situated in the configurations of private industry: singers are known by the company they belong to and they rarely, if ever, switch companies.
The show Saam Num Saam Mum is closely connected, indeed is a crucial part of, the Thai pop industry. It is about three brothers, Tosapol (Tos), Ekapol (Ek), and Peerapol (Pee); respectively a banker, an advertising executive and a high school student. Their parents were killed in a car accident and so they live together in their family home, supporting each other in a number of ways. However, the actors playing the three brothers are individually all very successful Thai pop singers: Ek is played by Songsit Roongnophakunsri (Kob), Tos by Saksit Tangtong (Tang), and Pee by Patipan Pattaweekan (Mos). Combined, these singers have sold approximately 30 million records, with Mos probably the most well known, his records selling over five million copies per album. But the show features other personalities: Ek's wife Nat is played by ex- Miss Thailand World, Mathinee Kingpayom (Ked). Further, the show regularly features other well-known comedians and other singers. Most of the feature actors from the show have already gained fame elsewhere or in another entertainment field, and there is a basic reason for this cross-hatching of careers, which I will soon detail.
To understand something of, first, the links between nationalism and pop culture, I wish briefly to describe some historical precedents. After this I detail the Thai entertainment industry, the industry's structure and the audience it is marketed to. The cultural and institutional dissimilarity from the Western entertainment industry will explain something of the impossibility of using aspects of Western cultural studies to read Thai pop. However, by noting some of Lawrence Grossberg's arguments (1992), I want to detail the universalising strategies of some aspects of cultural studies, and the desire to mask the commercial underpinning of popular music.
Thai nationalism
In the wave of nationalist changes in Thailand during the 1930s after the fall of the absolute monarchy, the government initiated the National Cultural Maintenance Act, a government act which defined certain cultural practices which the Thai people should do, and others which were prohibited. Among these changes was the legislation that Western clothes were proper for Thai people, including hats and gloves for women. The changes were seen as excessive by some; for example, a minor recommendation was the decree that men should kiss their wives goodbye before they went to work (Reynolds 1991: 7). These cultural acts, called Ratthaniyom — for which the standard translation is ‘state conventions’, but which Thai social critic Sulak Sivaraksa playfully translates as ‘following the car (blindly)’ (1991: 50)6 — are historical artefacts of Thailand's incorporation, formalisation and categorisation of the West's culture in Thailand. The Ratthaniyom are examples of the level at which the Thai government has historically intervened and controlled cultural formations. While the first Ratthaniyom dealt with issues of national security (Stowe 1991: 123–4), and changed the nation's name from Siam to Thailand, later conventions focused on cultural issues. This is not to argue that Thailand is any more or less nationalistic than, say, Australia or the USA, but that when considering cultural values we must see a tendency in the West to favour implicit and seemingly autonomous practices of nationalism independent of government initiatives, as if patriotism wells up suddenly in romantic concepts such as the imagination (Anderson 1993). For there is a caution in the West about displaying the explicit ordering of cultural values by government institutions, even though these occur regularly (and we only need to think of flag-raising ceremonies or the Australian ‘Year of Federation’ promotion). Not that the explicitness is any better or worse; however, the explicit level of nationalism in some Thai pop is not a register of state control but an acknowledgement of the source of cultural values that the West would rather erase — the governmental manipulation of nationalist myths. Another important point is that cultural mandates, in Thailand and elsewhere, are largely a thing of the past and we are now dealing with their residue in terms of legislation, practices and dominant myths on cultural activities.
The Ratthaniyom are categorisations which both promote and limit the influx of Western culture into Thailand. There is a willingness, I feel, by Western academics to read state intervention negatively for a couple of reasons. First, the valorisation of the rise of a civil society more willing to resist government powers, and a legacy of viewing non-Western and particularly South East Asian countries as authoritarian regimes, means that non-Western state power is more frequently articulated as dangerous power. Second, there is often a curious reproduction of colonialism specifically through the West's criticism of its own intervention. The Ratthaniyom are usually read as a signal that Thailand wanted to become Western, and that the West will prevail, both proof of the ‘inevitable march of colonialism’. These ideas emerge mainly in modernisation development theory which Michael R. Rhum described as the ‘great enthusiasm of the Third World elite’ to import the ‘technical’ and ‘cultural’ modernity of the West (Rhum 1996: 329). There is an implicit assumption that Western clothes, language and work practices are ‘modern’ and the related Thai practices are traditional — a very loaded cultural assumption. As a view which valorises the West as strong and unstoppable, this reading can similarly be made of Thai pop's relation to Western pop — that Thai pop is merely a copy and reflection of the significant Western entertainment industry and is a signal of Thailand's cultural mimicry of the West (and by Western pop I mean almost exclusively American and British music). However, there are numerous problems with this view of Western dependency: it reduces Thai nationalism to actions opposing the West, thus reducing Thai nationalism to a position of opposition to, and hence dependency on, Western nationalism. It would be simple to read Thai pop in this manner. There is an overt acknowledgement, even within the Thai music industry, of the use made of Western music — such as copying melodies or concept groups such as the Spice Girls and boy bands.7 I disagree that this signals the domineering power of Western culture, for cultural appropriation works all through Western and non-Western cultures (we only need to think of the Monkees as the American Beatles’ — this hardly means the United States was acknowledging their cultural defeat by the British). Rather, the relationship between Western pop and Thai pop fits into a much larger relationship with Thai traditional and folk music, other Asian pop music such as Canto- and J-pop, and the international pop music industry. For it seems there is a growing trend, not just in Thailand but in the region, that positions J-pop with an increasing, and perhaps greater, influence on the pop music industry than the West. A flick through any pop music or teenage magazine in Thailand will show that poster pin-ups now tend to be Thai or Japanese performers, whereas previously they were Westerners.
The second problem is that even in the Ratthaniyom, Field Marshal Phibun Songkhran, the co-author of many of the Ratthaniyom, did not see Western culture as a threat that could overpower Thai culture — which perhaps is the all too common view held by the West. He surely would not need to inaugurate the compulsory wearing of Western clothes if the West threatened to take over. Indeed, one aspect of the changes in clothes to an ‘international’ style was to help Thai people to differentiate themselves from the occupying Japanese forces.8 Phibun wished tactically to include aspects of the West into Thai culture, both to ‘impress on the world that they were civilised people’ (Stowe 1991: 187), and I suspect to make cultural interaction easier by ‘Westernising’ aspects of it. The edicts also functioned to normalise Bangkok culture as Thai national culture; minority groups in areas outside Bangkok, such as the Isaan in the north-east or Muslim groups in the south, were now legally required to participate in Bangkok culture. Also the edicts were a play for power with the mercantile Chinese middle class. It was Chinese clothes, mainly, that were banned and replaced by Western clothes (Reynolds 1991). Thai nationalism formally incorporated its Chinese mercantile section of society. While this vilification of the Chinese has mostly disappeared,9 the cultural edicts are examples of policies of assimilation which homogenise the society by situating the administrative centre and national culture both in the capital city. With the Ratthaniyom, Phibun and his supporters could construct a homogeneous Thai identity that closely supported the three foundations of culture: the monarchy, religion and the nation. I now want to turn to the operation of the Thai pop industry to demonstrate that the centralisation of culture continues to be reproduced in the production of pop music.
Grammy Records
There is little published work on Thai pop outside of the industry magazines, and almost nothing published in English. Virtually all of the research for this section was conducted by interviews with people in the industry: record company executives, music critics, fans and musicians.10 Thailand does not have official music charts, and the details and figures I provide are arbitrary. In order to understand how Thai pop operates at this stage I want to detail the operations of Grammy Records, the largest Thai pop label. Grammy was the first, and remains the biggest, Thai music company. It has diversified into many other areas of entertainment, which I will outline shortly. Started in 1983, one of the founders was Rewat Bhutthinun (‘Der’) from the band The Impossibles (whom I will return to soon). Grammy was fortunate by picking as one of its first promoted acts the actor Thongchai ‘Bird’ McIntyre, who subsequently turned into Thailand's most famous contemporary musician. ‘Bird’ was well known in Thailand because of his role in a 1980s' weekly television show Khu Kam (Fated Couple), which was set during World War II, in which he played a Japanese soldier who falls in love with a Thai woman.11 I want to describe how Grammy works by using a case study, the career of Tata Young, a recent very successful singer.
Tata's career started in 1994 when Grammy realised they were losing the ‘preteen’ market, aged around 12–16, to rival company RS Promotions, and they wanted to recruit a young star who would appeal to this age group.12 Tata won a contest on one of Grammy's ‘star search’ programmes at the age of 14. She was employed by Grammy as a singer and consequently went on to become their most prominent pop singer.13 Grammy actively recruit through ‘star search’ programmes on television and young talent competitions in shopping centres; they also employ spotters to recruit young people. Because the career of a Thai pop singer is often short (one or two years and perhaps two albums), Grammy need to constantly find performers to fill this turnover.14
Once recruited, Tata's first job is to go through the Grammy training school where she is taught all aspects of becoming a Thai pop star. During Tata's Grammy training she is taught to act and sing by Grammy staff. Grammy writers and public relations people decide on a musical style for her and develop her show-time personality. Her wardrobe, hairstyle, make-up and so on are also selected by Grammy consultants. Grammy writers write her music, which is then performed and recorded in Grammy studios with Grammy musicians. The records or CDs are pressed and distributed (again by Grammy) to Grammy shops, while being played on one of Grammy's five radio stations which have access to approximately 65 per cent of the Thai population.15 Advertising is managed by Grammy advertising, starting with radio promotions or her own radio show. If her music is popular she will make various appearances on one of Grammy's 25 television shows. At first she will appear as a guest on variety, talk or quiz shows. If this is considered successful she will make a cameo appearance on a comedy show. Increasing popularity means she will become a character on a particular show. The penultimate stage is having a role in a drama series such as Saam Num Saam Mum where she can prove herself as a ‘serious’ actor. Grammy do not own the television stations (like radio, a media which, by law, they cannot own), but lease this time from the television companies, and this is the only part of the industry which Grammy do not own.16 Grammy do gain revenue from subleasing commercial time and this also provides opportunities for the cross-promotion of other Grammy products.
All this is done alongside concert performances (organised by Grammy concert promotions and in Grammy concert halls), and these are often broadcast as a Grammy television show. The ultimate level, at this point, is starring in a Grammy movie, which Tata recently did in Red Bike Story (1997). The movie was written, directed and produced by Grammy employees, distributed by Grammy, and features a Grammy soundtrack. Tata appeared alongside the other big Grammy teen pop singer, Mos, from Saam Num Saam Mum, who has appeared in a number of movies. After the movie has been released, the soundtrack (by Grammy stars) is released, and finally the video is released and sold or rented in Grammy videos stores. Furthermore, any critical work on or analysis of the movie could be published with Grammy's publishers, Ton-or Grammy. The publishing wing has two core interests: magazines devoted to Thai pop stars and television personalities, and educational textbooks and scholarly works on areas such as Thai history, geography, literature and society. As far as I know, at no point does Grammy contract out, or rely upon, another company for any aspect of its production. While pop music may not be the single largest earner for Grammy, most of the entertainment is driven by the music industry, and the stars must succeed in music before they are seriously considered in other media roles such as television and radio.
Grammy does not hold a monopoly on Thai pop, but controls a significant proportion of the market. Furthermore, the competitors are styled like Grammy — as much of the market competition with Grammy is from companies started by Grammy-trained professionals. Hence a majority of the pop music industry operates along the lines of Grammy. The market share (which is very anecdotal as Thailand does not have music charts and record sale numbers can be manipulated by the companies) suggests that Thai pop constitutes about 80 per cent of the market, and Grammy has around half of this share; thus around 40 per cent of all music sales originate from Grammy. RS promotions, with around 20 per cent of all music sales, produces music predominantly for the teenage and student market, but also has a film studio rivalling Grammy.
The work of a performer in Thai pop is different in subtle ways from that of Western pop musicians. In Western pop music there is a lot of debate about the ‘manufactured’ bands like the Spice Girls, and Bardot in Australia.17 This debate is not a central concern in the Thai pop music industry. Some music critics claim this is because pop identities are referred to by companies such as Grammy as ‘performers’ or ‘presenters’ and not ‘singers’ or ‘artists’ (nak sadaeng rather than nak rang), meaning that these people are presenting work done by Grammy to the public and not performing their own work. However, there have been changes to the concept of performer with the emergence of ‘independent’ musicians and labels in the 1990s. As yet, these labels have only around 10 per cent of market share and are quite a new market force. Independent bands are considered to be those who write and perform their own songs, and are not representative of a particular label. The beginning of independent pop music in Thailand is most often attributed to the band Modern Dog from Bakery Records. Bakery was founded in 1993 by the four producers of the first Modern Dog album. Reluctant to pass the record to one of the major companies because it could be changed significantly, the producers decided instead to start their own company — Bakery music and Taxi distribution. The first record sold 600,000 copies by word of mouth, a phenomenal success. Bakery have grown to have around 20 acts signed to the label. As an independent label Bakery did attract notoriety when Thai rap singer Joey Boy had songs banned by the Department of Culture. One was a song based on a true incident of a father raping his daughter, and another involved the colloquial phrase ‘go fly a kite’ (pai chak wao), which means to masturbate. The banning, according to Bakery, had little effect on the record sales for better or worse. Like most independents, Bakery records are played on Time Media stations, owned by Grammy, but Bakery claim these companies are fair in their selection of music. Obviously, however, the independents must maintain good relations with the larger labels or risk losing their only avenues of exposure to the public.18
Central to Thai pop music is the extensive industry network which joins the fields of music, performance, television and print media advertising. In outlining the overt commercialism of Thai pop I do not want to suggest that Western music escapes this - rather this relationship is disguised to a great extent in the West. And this avoidance of commercialism is evident in cultural critiques of music. I now want to look at how some quite fundamental work in cultural studies avoids this very issue.
Rock criticism
I must locate my discussion of Thai pop in the sources of knowledge from which this chapter emerges. It is the concepts, discourses and politics from cultural studies (which importantly must be considered as a form of cultural capital) that determine a value and an understanding of Thai music. My critical engagement, or that of any Western academic, with Thai pop will be marked by the way we see and speak about rock/pop in the West. Furthermore, if there are careers and concepts at stake in the formulation of rock criticism, then necessarily this academic economy must in a variety of ways inform the reading and reproduction of knowledge about music. There is an industry of talking about music which pays for this chapter which perhaps is closer to the structure of Grammy than we think; this is an industry that informs the cultural values I bring to reading Thai music, and provides the production, reception and audience for this chapter. I write predominantly here of cultural studies criticism and the associated fields of popular music and pop culture within the discipline of cultural studies. As a foreigner writing on Thai pop, I realise my view will be limited, because I do not recognise many of the subtleties of cultural practice and cultural history in the music. While quite clearly this questions the chapter's accuracy, I consider there is value in the task of positioning Western writing on popular music in its specific and limited history.
I want this chapter to operate against what I see as an emerging orthodoxy in writing on popular music in contemporary cultural studies. As most disciplines within the social sciences and humanities are confronting their sometimes problematic association with colonialism, or gender and ethnicity inequalities, there is frequently an erasure of these points in some parts of rock music criticism. Of particular concern is a universalising tendency to read the ‘culture’ of cultural studies as universal — as if the Western university practice can provide the tools to read all culture. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have stated that American-dominated representation of “cultural studies” … [which presents] itself so self-confidently as cultural studies per se is just one illustration of how hegemony derives its effectivity from a self-presentation as universal, one that does not acknowledge its own particularity’ (1996: 364). In a couple of ways the cultural and national specificities of music is sometimes ignored: either by proposing that music is a revolutionary force (Ramet 1994; Whitely 1992), or that its authentic form is devoid of its commercial context. I am not saying that this work is never done. Rather, there appears to be a nostalgic desire to make pop and rock music a gesture of liberation. I want to take the position that perhaps rock is, and always has been, a conservative practice (but one that can have radical subjects within it), and has always been associated with capitalism.
I turn to Lawrence Grossberg's We Gotta Get out of this Place (1992) to discuss these erasures. We Gotta Get out of this Place is an examination of popular culture and rock music. Situated in US society with the advent of the new conservatism sweeping America, Grossberg's text details ‘the rock formation’ (1992: 131–5) through mobilising cultural studies as the ‘tool of intervention’ (1992: 20). Music is critically engaged, as Grossberg himself announces, via a ‘postmodern sensibility’ (1992: 209). And, as perhaps is becoming typical in postmodern analysis, the interrogation of the formation of rock is itself rather sweeping and all-encompassing; it is defined by the ‘different organisations … other planes of effects … complex phenomenon … and a number of different relations … [fluid] boundaries … boundaries already defined … an abstract site’ (1992: 74–7). Even though Grossberg announces that cultural analysis is ‘the specificity of an articulated context’ (1992: 61), as the previous quote exemplifies, there is a determined avoidance of grounding the analysis in social relations of power. And this produces a dangerous precedent around the practice of studying culture. For cultural studies' accounts of music is both allowed to ‘easily embrace generalisations’ (1992: 1), as Grossberg himself admits, and to be ‘tools of intervention’. As the limits of Grossberg's study is never mentioned, the tools are global and appear applicable to all texts; other cultures are made comprehensible by the specific discourse of American cultural studies.
‘Cultural practices’, states Grossberg, ‘are the sites of many different activities and effects [and are] practised in many different ways’ (1992: 63). It is far easier to articulate rock as a practice of difference and as the product of different things, particularly as everybody will have different approaches, different ideas, and amass different amounts of money from their activity in rock. However, stating that a critical study of rock is based on a mapping of differences wishes away many crucial issues of politics and daily life which should be of fundamental importance to a cultural critic. Mapping differences only shows the territory of possession for rock, not what it excludes, bans, marginalises or dismisses. There is a level of generalisation which marks these ideas, and simultaneously an optimistic view of cultural practice as allowing the freedom of proliferation. This is a reading of difference as variety, not difference as that which also might include the coercive and censoring powers of the hegemony. Curiously, this desire for difference does not permeate the text which is homogeneously American (with a modest half page on Australia and Canada; there is no substantial reference to non-Anglo countries). In operation is a certain version of ‘difference’ that is wholly limited to specific Anglo-centric discourses, but articulated almost as a global overview. Popular music writing in this scenario either becomes the hopeless cause of cataloguing the many differences or a constant attempt to disguise those forces or operations within rock which seek to limit its use and power to particular groups. Far from asserting that ‘difference’ is an unsustainable critical concept, I suggest that difference does not occur without relationships of power, discourses of authority and so on. Some differences are permitted, even made commodifiable, as an act of transgression which simultaneously maintains homogeneity. Joseph Pugliese makes this point in his critical rejoinder to the concept of transgression: ‘[there is a] potentially conservative nature of transgression … [It] is that which simultaneously conserves and maintains the parameters of that which it exceeds’ (1996: 22). But exhibiting ‘difference’ does not mean that popular music is transgressive, for difference can be policed to a much greater degree if it is regulated. Similarly, difference in the rock formation is discussed as a product of a global, multiracial, postmodern formation, yet the textuality of the rock and pop music Grossberg discusses is far more specific, far less different, and far more regulated than this.
Perhaps we see in Grossberg's reading an optimistic take on Foucault's re-analysis of power as not repressive but productive. However, this does ignore discipline as a crucial adjunct to productive modes of power, a point made clear in works such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Grossberg's text is saturated by the reading of proliferation: the willingness to approach a problem with the maxim of ‘seek differences’ or ‘open the text up to differences’ situates the rock formation as little more than an object which can possibly speak for everyone, do everything, and mean anything. And in this emphasis we see the by far weaker political engagement with rock because it does not associate differences with relationships of power, and refuses to admit that with the tendency to categorise, classify or conceptualise differences the work of the cultural analyst simultaneously co-opts difference into a formal conceptual system. The analyst always masters and makes the difference comprehensible. To praise differences while placing the ‘different’ in specific orderly categories is contradictory to the proliferation of differences themselves.
Ignoring the crucial commercial aspect of music wishes away the very frail notion of difference in this cultural production. The choice of what music is produced, and how it is marketed, is significantly influenced by a market economy linked to both private and government institutions. For Thai pop, like music in the USA, is dominated by a handful of large companies, and is related to the military. The Thai military controls a number of television and radio media sources, and influences the pop music market to some degree because of this.19 In a text which deals fundamentally with the rock industry, it is a significant aporia for Grossberg to avoid addressing the industry as an industry, to elucidate the ‘corporate economy’ which for him is the death knell of music. For this reason my investigation of Thai pop focuses primarily on the industry and not the musicians. Grossberg states that the liberal approval of rock in the 1950s ‘constrained the political possibilities of the rock formation’ (1992: 144), as if rock was opposed to the politics and economy of 1950s USA, only to be hijacked by these opinions and hence reluctantly brought back to the fold. For true rock, in the words of many critics, is not commercial, and is best that moment just before the ‘unknown’ is commercialised. In this way Grossberg places rock on the fringe— ‘rock's challenges’, he states, ‘are always by those on the outside’ (1992: 147). Capitalism is the disciplinary order of rock, as if commercialisation means the end of rock as a dissonant genre. Yet when can rock function without an economic value? Attempting to provide such a time or space leads to an assumed ideal and a nostalgia for a period of a time before the ‘sell-out’: that time when rock was ‘real’ and not commercialised. The ‘true’ radicalism of rock is before it sells too many records. Again, this particular reading cannot be transported to Thailand, for the social structure, the politics of ‘youth culture’ and the function of the entertainment industry are quite different from the USA or Australia. Perhaps some rock is never a critique of capitalism but of mass culture, a distinction not made in Grossberg's reading. For a criticism of mass culture can still be both highly commercial and in agreement with the capitalist system.
However, it is important to ask what this great desire for the authentic before the ‘sell-out’ is wishing away. There is a nostalgic yearning for an authenticity, a concept invoked by Grossberg, and found in music's ‘ability to articulate private but common desires’ (1992: 207). For in its repeated articulation there is an implication that only through nostalgia can we repossess or reproduce the ‘truth’ of rock. Grossberg is intent on consolidating rock's position as the authentic voice of opposition; for in music the
voices and the places they marked became the signs of authenticity within the everyday life of rock culture, but they were the voices of the people who had no everyday life, who existed outside the privileged spaces of the repetitious and mundane world of the rock formation.
(1992: 150)
Grossberg says that because
rock emerged as a way of mapping the specific structures of youth's affective alienation on the geographies of everyday life … Rock was a response to a certain kind of loneliness and uncertainty: it was about the ways in which youth itself offers new possibilities of identification and belonging.
(1992: 150)
I must cynically add that it is only the white, baby-boomer generation (who are the audience of the rock Grossberg studies) who could conceive of themselves as ‘lonely and uncertain’ while they were positioned as the privileged section in one of the world's most wealthy societies. Here is a rather fraudulent marginalisation of society's most dominant group in an effort to erase both the problematic history of rock, and the conservatism of much criticism about it, through contending an innate, original politics of resistance.
The emergence of Thai pop
Readings such as Grossberg's highlight the numerous points of incongruity between Western and non-Western cultural studies. The connections between youth culture, opposition politics, commercialisation and music is the product of quite different forces in Thailand. I wish now briefly to signal some of these distinctions primarily to display the limits and the cultural specificity of Western cultural studies. Music has been associated with revolutionary movements in both the West and Thailand. The well-known student rebellions in Thailand in the 1970s against the military dictatorship were generally connected with versions of folk, called ‘songs for life’ or pleng chewit which may be comparable to the music of Bob Dylan in the context of the protests against the Vietnam War.20 This music has quite strong links to luk thung, Thai folk music and its contemporary urban version, luk krung.21 A critical distinction in these categories of music is that they are not clearly targeted by the establishment. Pop music is not seen as a dangerous influence to children, for in Thailand there is a distinct lack of parental, religious or other official opposition to or censoring of pop music. There have been few songs banned (Joey Boy and Ad Carobao during the Suchinda era); the association between delinquency and music, central to American popular culture, is rarely made in Thailand.22 As in the West, there are terms for ‘delinquents’ in Thailand,23 but where the terms ‘punk’ or ‘hippie’ are associated with music, the terms in Thailand primarily mean ‘bad’ or ‘disrespectful’. The government does sometimes express concern at the behaviour of teenagers, with the use of drugs, gang violence, sex before marriage, and traffic fatalities as the main issues. So what happens to Grossberg's scheme if music has no ‘other side’ to escape to, if it is not part of the counter-culture which is the ‘only effective radical opposition within … societies’ (Whitely 1992: 2)?
In this final section I wish to briefly outline the emergence of Thai pop and its relationship to politics to suggest Thai pop's proximity to capitalism, and also hint at the numerous similarities with Western music. Most Western writing on Asian music is oriented towards covering marginal rock and punk music, and strangely this bias does not appear in the Western media's coverage of Western nations. That major Western publications are far more likely to write on radical music in, say, China than in their own country says something about the general Western cultural belief that music resists oppression; to suppose that youth pop culture, derived from the West, is naturally rebellious also implies that these Asian nations despotically attempt to censor any ‘free expression’ from the rebellious young who are given their voice of freedom through Western (musical) forms.
While Thai pop has been around for 20 to 30 years, there are two key transitional periods worth noting because of the way they situate the music in a political and economic context. First, in the early 1970s, the interest in pop music increased dramatically with the popularity of a Thai band called the Impossibles. Considered by some as the ‘Beatles’ of Thailand, The Impossibles were one of the first successful bands to integrate Thai and American music. Previously music was dominated by local folk and country-style music (luk Aung and luk khrung), though there was some interest in Western music such as Elvis Presley, who famously visited the country and met the King of Thailand. In the early 1970s the Impossibles were playing at a time of massive turmoil in Thai society: the Vietnam War and military dictatorship made this a volatile period. There were numerous bloody student protests and a growing interest in communism. Thai society was divided with groups protesting against the army dictatorship, as well as anti-American, anti-Japanese and anti-Communist protestors. Among the groups, which Benedict Anderson notes took ‘diametrically opposite forms’ (Anderson 1977: 115), were the strong student movement and the conservative, military-backed groups such as the Red Gaurs, the Village Scouts, and Nawaphon (Anderson 1977; Bartak 1994: 26–9). This period also saw a massive increase in the middle class (which Anderson considers increased around 1000 per cent in the early 1970s), giving Thai pop an audience-as-consumers. However, there were increasing power struggles between this new powerful urban class, the military, and the conservative rural groups. And these struggles can be mapped, very generally, against the emerging music categories: the Impossibles playing to a broad middle-class audience, and the ‘songs for life’ playing to the student opposition. It must be noted that the growth of pop music in the West similarly mirrors economic expansion.
As previously noted, one of the musicians of the Impossibles, Rewat Bhutthinun (Der), has an important position in Thai pop history for he is also the founder of Grammy Records. He graduated in economics from Thammasat University, the home of student radicalism, in the early 1970s and would have been brought up on a diet of protests and violence. The Impossibles were popular among American GIs on recreation leave in Bangkok. Der, the singer, would cover English and American music hits, singing in English for the American audience. The Impossibles also translated these songs and sang them in Thai for a Thai audience. The popularity of Thai pop thus emerged as a point of translation, where American music which was popular among the American soldiers was translated into Thai, and in which a Thai band performed Western pop music.
While the Impossibles and the music of the 1970s were an important precursor, Thai pop boomed in 1983 when the Grammy company was established. The changes were truly dramatic. From having an almost negligible impact on the market, within a couple of years about 80 per cent of all music sales were Thai pop. The market expanded also, with best-selling albums selling five million and upwards. An audience which had never before bought Thai pop were now buying it in huge proportions. A small indigenous music industry quite quickly became a multi-billion dollar industry. The question I wish to conclude on is, how could an audience adapt so quickly and take up this form so readily? How was such a large audience educated to appreciate the music in such a short period of time?
Of the people interviewed in the Thai pop industry, most respond to this question by saying that society was ‘ready’ for pop music. But the specific preparations needed are not obvious: preparations such as how to listen, understand and talk about music; how to organise the associated media and the regimes of taste. Furthermore, because Thai pop has concentrated on a teen market, how could this consumer group be formed easily and exploited so successfully as a consumer group for the first time?
The most common answer is one that situates the explosion of pop in the phenomenal changes occurring in Thai society in the 1970s and 1980s with huge economic and infrastructure growth. This period saw Bangkok’s population triple, levels of industrial activity increase enormously, and wealth quickly develop in the country. The boom of a capitalist economy is conducive to the emergence of popular music, as this music can praise materialism and or reassert basic patriarchal and social divisions which may get blurred in the turmoil of economic development. Now the process of Westernisation started by Phibun was no longer sourced in things like clothes but found in entertainment. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker note that values supporting and explaining the economic transformation are found in music and television: ‘As change became fast and bewildering, so the songs came to reflect the excitement and the tension … It said: we are the new city generation. We are a new sort of individual. The old rules do not apply’ (1996: 118). The new consumer group of middle-class children is vital to the entertainment industry, as one record company executive stated: the main consumers of Thai pop are people who have to ask their parents for the money to buy the record. The significant increase in the middle classes, increased urbanisation and industrialisation quite suddenly changed the structure of Thai society.
Yet another response to the question of why Thai pop came about, and this was repeated by a couple of people, was the analogy that young people once waved their fists against the military or police in protest, but with pop the young were now waving their fists peacefully at pop concerts. Here is a belief that the emergence of pop was a social phenomenon which worked to redirect youth activities from politics to entertainment. Pop became a discipline in opposition to political agitation by providing another avenue of expression for teenagers. Thus music, far from a ‘voice of resistance’, was a hegemonic force which served to stabilise the status quo. Thus attempts to suggest that popular music is transgressive because it avoids politics ignores the possibility that perhaps this avoidance is a form of discipline or disempowerment. What is praised in Western cultural studies as an escape is rather a disenfranchisement. Regardless of the cultural value placed upon pop music, its fundamental allegiance to corporate structures — and this is true both in the West and in Thailand — must lead to a reconsideration of the transgressive ability of this form.
Notes
This chapter would not have been possible without the extensive research and translation assistance from the following people: Paweena Klinpaka, Rangsita Traimontri, Nalin Nilwong and Somboon Chaiwood. The chapter has also benefited from advice and input from Peter Jackson. I would also like to thank my colleagues and students in Thailand for their generous advice and discussion on pop music.
1 The campaign is titled ‘Kin khorng Thai, chai khorng Thai, thieo meuong Thai, ruam jai prayat’.
2 For work on the rise of nationalism in the media see Pasuk and Baker’s Thailand’s Crisis (2000), and in particular the chapter ‘Selling the Nation, Saving the Elephant’, in which they map the rise of nationalism as a response to the crisis.
3 A popular subject of Thai soap operas in 2000 and 2001 was the rise of the Chinese mercantile class in the early twentieth century, which can perhaps be related to the rise of the current Prime Minister, Thaksin Shintawatra, a wealthy businessman of Chinese origin. Comments on the connections between popular media and political change frequently occur in The Nation’s ‘Chang Noi’ column. See http://www.changnoi.8k.com
4 While I do not address gender, it is important to note the relationship between gender, motherhood, home and nation prominent in this conjunction between the government and entertainment industry, as it is the woman who must cook and manage the home. For connections between nationalism and gender, in particular women, see Penny van Esterik (2000: 96–108).
5 I do not enter the debate on differences between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’. While the generic conventions cannot be ignored, these conventions do not transpose easily onto Thai music. The principal regularity of this genre of music, I consider, is the market audience of approximately 15–25 year olds, and this music I call pop.
6 Here Sulak is changing Rat (state) to Rot (car).
7 The Polygram label set up a group called the Angies who were obviously based on the Spice Girls, with five female singers, each with a nickname and appropriate personality. The group, however, was not successful and quickly disappeared (Craig 1997). Similarly there was a Kathoey (transgender) group who lip-synched Spice Girls songs called Thai Spice.
8 I would like to acknowledge Peter Jackson for providing this information.
9 Borrowing from Nazi propaganda, the Chinese were named as the Jews of the east’ by Vichit Vadhakarn, a prominent Thai writer in the 1930s and co-author of the Ratthaniyom. For a current account of Chinese-Thai relations see Burustratanaphand (1995).
10 The interviews are listed at the end of this chapter. However, a number of people wished not to be cited.
11 This was a story already made famous as a novel, and has more recently be made into a film with the English title Sunset on the Chao Phraya.
12 Interview, Ian McClean.
13 Some cynics state that Tata was recruited before the contest and was subsequently allowed to win, a possible scenario which cannot be verified. Winning a star search would lead the audience to believe Tata had ‘natural’ talent.
14 Some of this recruiting includes auditioning at international schools — private high schools with instruction in English. The recruiters want what has been termed an ‘international look’, or Luk Kreung which means someone of both Thai and Western heritage (Pasuk and Baker 1996: 117).
15 The stations include Radio Green Wave, Radio No Problem, Radio Vote Satellite, and Hot Wave. Grammy are about to introduce two new stations and increase their radio coverage to 90 per cent of the population (around 55 million people).
16 Thai television and radio are owned mainly by three state-run organisations: the Army, the PRD (Public Relations Department) and the MCOT (Mass Communication Organisation of Thailand). The stations are then leased to private companies. The army owns two out of five television stations and 211 radio stations, which is around 44 per cent of the radio stations (Siriyuvasak 1994; Thitinan 1997).
17 A reality television show in Australia called Popstars followed the creation of a pop group, later called Bardot, from the auditions through to their first concert.
18 The major labels have also responded to the popularity of the ‘independent’ movement by producing their own ‘independent’ acts. The band Loso (the name meaning Low Society, which is a play on Thai interest in Hiso or High Society) is a Grammy band produced on a semi-independent label (but still owned by Grammy), and publicised by word of mouth only. The first pressing of 100,000 sold only 60,000 in the first three months, so Grammy decided on some low-level advertising through their other media channels. Over the next three months, with limited advertising, the band sold 1.2 million records. Though maintaining an ‘independent’ image, commercialism was an obvious ingredient to its success.
19 Not only does the military own radio and television stations which play pop music, the army stadium is often used to stage Thai pop concerts.
20 Though accounts of the revolutionary student movements between 1973 and 1976 mention radical films and plays in their discussions, less importance is placed on music (Bartak 1994; Morrel and Samudavanija 1981; Flood 1975). However, this does not mean music was not a central part of the cultural activities associated with these movements.
21 Luk Thung is a rural folk style of music played on traditional instruments. Luk Krung is the Westernised version of this folk music, often using both Western and traditional instruments. For a discussion on the connections between folk and pop music see Ubonrat Siriyuvasak (1998).
22 Recently this has begun to change. However, it is not the influences of music which are blamed, but the massive influx of amphetamines into Thailand, primarily from the Burmese border. The government estimated that about 600 million amphetamines pills (ya ba) would enter Thailand in 2001. There is no link between music and drugs, unlike in many Western countries.
23 The terms are dek leo, dek chua or dek hat, meaning hard case.
Filmography
Euthana Mukdasanit and Nipon Piewnen (1997) Red Bike Story, Thailand, Grammy Records.
Interviews
Sukie Clatt, Managing Director, Bakery Records, 8 September 1997.
Andrew Hiransomboon, Music Critic, Bangkok Post, 7 September 1997.
Ian McClean, Director, Investor Relations Department, Grammy Records, 5 September 1997.