I’m sorry for the delay in this blog, but that’s what happens after a profoundly moving experience. I usually reserve such superlatives for Great Moments in Thought, Religion, or Love, but there are exceptions. That’s why I got into the music business after all, or why it got into me. I always knew it had the capability for profound effects on the region of the upper chest area, and Dengue Fever did not disappoint. I first saw this group on TV somewhere, either in Thailand, US, or UK, sometime either 2004 or 2005, long before they started climbing world music charts. The blurb was about a Cambodian group making waves in LA. They didn’t look all that Cambodian to me, but they were certainly memorable, a petite Asian with a monster voice singing in Khmer while a band of renegade Angelenos backed her up, playing a type of music I’d never heard before, 60’s Cambodian pop/rock. I planned to see them at SXSW in 2006, but that was before I’d ever been to SXSW and knew what a traffic jam it was. They got lost in the shuffle. So I started following their web site looking for a place to catch them in the flesh, all the while catching snatches of their songs. It wasn’t just that I liked them, but with our mutual connection to Asia, it was something I needed to be on top of. That opportunity came in September of the same year at Bumbershoot in Seattle on my way back from Alaska. If SXSW was a traffic jam, Bumbershoot was a certifiable cluster-fuck. Fortunately Dengue Fever came on early, and they were great, but nothing like last Tuesday’s show in Flagstaff. That was transcendent. Or maybe it was just because it was MY show. I guess I’ll have to catch them again soon, just to know for sure.
The music business is pretty flakey, and ‘World Music’ is even flakier, probably because no one really even knows what it is, or what it should be. For an English-speaker, it tends to be “none of the above” in the ‘multiple choice’ of listings, and considering the English-speaking world’s dominance of the music and entertainment industries, that’s probably the way it should be. Tell that to the people who book world music festivals. Whether because of their legendary quirkiness or more likely to provide backfill logic to the fact that world music is going nowhere fast, there’s always someone who’s going to book a bluegrass group or a blues band or something, explaining dryly, “America’s still part of the world, isn’t it?” This does not help promote the genre, though it might help promote an otherwise struggling bluegrass band, of which there are many in the US. Ditto for Mexico where groups who are nowhere near the top of the charts in their own country find themselves written up in encyclopedias as representatives of their respective genres, all because at least one member of the group fearlessly promotes them in the English language, while an all-Spanish group like Mana’, who hit number 4 in the US charts overall with millions of sales, gets no mention whatsoever. So world music execs toss out big words like ‘indigenous’ while simultaneously falling right into the hands of those with the best marketing department. Dengue Fever certainly is second to no one in the category of ‘mixed origins’- they hired her after all- but then they mix metaphors in time as well as space and offer no apologies, nor should they. This is psychedelic surfer sixties Asian pop, remember. If some critics sniffed “wayward eccentricity” after their GlobalFest showcase in New York in 2007, tell that to the hundreds of Cambodians who flock to their shows when ever and where ever they play. I wish we’d had them in Flagstaff, for while the show was a huge critical and sensory success, the Tuesday night crowd was not enough to turn a profit. But that’s my problem.
Ch’hom Nimol is a wonder to behold. While not the group’s founder, she is its pretty face, and the direct link to the group’s spiritual origins in Kampuchea. Nimol is a cross between Cinderella and an Asian Janis Joplin, the fragile soul in the glass slippers boozily belting out Asian pop hooks in a voice much larger than her own small frame should logically accommodate. It’s not an act. For a girl from Battambang raised in refugee camps (she speaks good Thai btw) to now be touring the world at the head of a LA rock group is truly the stuff of fantasy and legend. Maybe they’ll let me write the book some day. If the Khmer lyrics leave you wondering what she’s really singing about, then have another drink. Isn’t that Asia’s biggest attraction anyway, tradition and family and folk wisdom packaged in a shroud of mystery for sale to the highest bidder? If it all seems chaotic and frenetic and frenzied under the harsh glare of sunlight busily cracking through urban skies, it’ll get better when the sun goes down and the little multicolored twinkling lights come on and you listen to sweet melodies reminiscent of Chinese brush paintings in misty country sides. Or maybe you’d rather pretend that the lyrics are about Zen enlightenment or Triad treachery. The Khmer lyrics let them be whatever you want. So what if they’re mostly silly love songs adapted and modified to many different beats, similar but different? That only proves what I’ve known for a long time: it’s about the music, not the lyrics. Only a very few artists depend on lyrical content, if you can even understand all the words anyway. Dengue Fever can do well on that count, too, what with lines like, “you called me up because I’m sober and you wanted me to drive.” But however much Nimol may want to ‘connect with her audience,’ the bottom line is, mysteries sell well. Most Asian girls have Teddy bears back home on the bed, not whips nor opium pipes, but you don’t need to know that. Mysteries sell. These guys play infectious entertaining, and downright addictive indie pop with an Asian flavor, and that’s the bottom line. Think tom yam rock and roll.
I don’t usually include pictures in this blog, simply because there are too many of them out there and their content is too easy to slosh around the mouth and then ultimately spit out, while the US populace becomes increasingly illiterate by the day. But this time is an exception. For one thing I want it to be clear the headlines refer to the music, not the disease. For another thing I want to show the band backstage, rather than their usual publicity photos, which you can find anywhere. These are a bunch of really nice people after all, driving their own van cross-country and then playing their hearts out like it all has meaning. It’ll be a sad day when I book them or see them and it’s ‘just business,’ playing the set lifelessly and then going on or going home. It’s probably inevitable, though. I don’t see how they can maintain such an energy level forever. Actually I’d probably include some concert pics here also, but my wife Tang cut off Nimol’s head in the photo, so that’s that. I’m sure that was no Freudian slip, though I confess to enjoying my quick hug. They enjoyed Tang’s massages, too. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Jack Free and Thai girl in America.
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