The Rise and Resistance of Cambodian Hip-Hop

Cambodia. Hip-hop. It’s not an obvious combination… Until you hear it. I remember my first time. It was a sultry Phnom Penh afternoon just after the pandemic. I was looking for shelter from torrential rain and the splash of endless motorbikes. I ended up in a shabby hole-in-the-wall bar off the Mekong, clothes dripping onto the concrete floor with a bottle of tepid beer in front of me on the plastic table. As others arrived out of the rain, the bar began to liven up, and they switched on the YouTube jukebox. The sound grabbed my attention from the start. Strangely discordant, dystopian minor keys tinkered an intro. There was so much reverb that it sounded like they were being played in some vast, echoey underground concrete bunker. Then a multiplex-deep bass began throbbing, visceral and warm as a heartbeat. A man began to sing, in rapid rat-a-tat repetitions, accompanied by what I thought was gamelan. Gamelan? In hip-hop? The voice and gamelan swirled around electronic whoops and scrunches interspersed with what sounded like a trumpet. The music swelled and a woman burst into the soundscape, jousting with the man in a downpour of dipping staccato diphthongs, interwoven fabulously with the digital swooshes and analogue timpani. The voices battled in counterpoint for a while, and then the woman soared into a chorus as angry as a call to arms before the song dropped back into oozing, funky bass and more weird percussion.

“What the hell is this?” I asked the barman, who had no idea what I was talking about. No one did. They just smiled and said, “No English.” So, I hurriedly switched on Shazam, which gave me a picture of a Khmer woman wearing what looked like a cross between a Star Trek costume and a glittering temple apsara gown straight from a fantasy Angkor. The names of the artist and song were in Khmer except for ‘(feat. Galaxy Boy)’, bracketed in English. It was like stumbling across a musical Stargate. What was this strange music, and who recorded it? Finding out took me on a wonderful journey of discovery into the creative, complex world of modern Cambodia.

I began to dig right away. The day after the Phnom Penh rainstorm, I was scheduled to fly to Siem Reap – a tourist centre and access point to Angkor Wat. With its sleek hotels and fake Irish pubs, it seemed a hopeless spot to discover more about the world of Cambodian hip-hop. But after asking numerous tuk-tuk drivers, I found a place and pulled up late at night on a Saturday at a spot on the edge of town. The street was dirty and dimly lit. A few dogs loitered under a distant lamp post which fluttered with moths. I asked the tuk-tuk driver to wait a few minutes, just in case, as I walked up to a building blinking with neon and argon lights and thudding from within with deep bass beats. It looked like an oversized garage with a man in sunglasses standing at the door, admitting entry to groups of 20-something Khmer. When I reached the front of the queue, he looked at me quizzically, smiled politely and pretended he didn’t understand what I wanted. He wouldn’t let me in. “Sorry”, he eventually said, “Khmer only. You go pub street, many bar.”

I didn’t go to ‘pub street’. But I wasn’t put off – quite the opposite. I was still more intrigued. I felt like I had stumbled over a secret corner of a world where everything is available everywhere, all the time. What was Cambodia hiding, I wondered, and why? I consulted Wikipedia.

It wasn’t much help. But I did learn that the gamelan I had heard in Phnom Penh wasn’t gamelan at all; it was roneat, an instrument used in Khmer pinpeat orchestras for almost a thousand years. Pinpeat played the ceremonial music of Cambodia’s royal courts and temples when the country had the greatest South Asian Empire since the Cholas. The central instrument of pinpeat, which I was sure I also heard in the hip-hop track, is the pin – an arched harp which is the Cambodian counterpart to the Indian veena. There have been pin played in Cambodia since at least the seventh century. So Khmer hip-hop, it seemed, is doing a Fairport Convention, consciously celebrating the past while reinventing it.

I was intrigued. Returning to Phnom Penh, I discovered a backstreet record shop hawking vinyl to fashionable young Cambodians. And I learnt about Cambodia’s golden era – a period between the 1950s and the mid-1970s – when arts were actively fostered in Phnom Penh. Artists like Sinn Sisamouth, Pen Ran, Ros Serey Sothea and hard rock band Drakkar were at the forefront of Southeast Asia’s edgiest and most creative cultural scene, taking the old and mixing it with new electronic sounds, Western music and psychedelia. Phnom Penh was Asia’s Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco.

Then, in 1975, came the Khmer Rouge and 90% of Cambodia’s writers, artists and musicians were lost to the Killing Fields. Sinn Sisamouth disappeared. So did Pen Ran, with some reports saying that the Khmer Rouge tricked her into performing one of her songs, after which she was led away and executed. Serey Sothea probably died from overwork in a Khmer Rouge agricultural concentration camp. All of Drakkar were killed except for singer and guitarist Touch Seang Tana, who, after imprisonment, claims that he survived genocide by singing Santana songs to Khmer Rouge soldiers on demand while pretending to be a peasant.

That the music of the golden era survived at all is thanks to luck and determination. The chance discovery of golden-era Khmer records in a San Francisco music store led to the formation of Dengue Fever, who played golden-era songs. As did the Cambodia Space Project, a band founded by rural villager Kak Channthy (‘the diva of the rice fields’) and her Australian husband. Channthy had heard her father singing golden-era music and her own band rose to popularity in new-millennium Phnom Penh before her tragic death in 2018. Touch Seang Tana started gigging again. These performers and a handful of others introduced golden-era Khmer music to post-Pol Pot millennials.

Which brings us back to hip-hop. Through the record shop and an old friend, I finally tracked down a hip-hop artist I could speak to: Sang Sok Serey. After a show, I approached her and persuaded her to give me an interview.

Serey, a millennial, explained the depth of feeling that her generation has about being Cambodian and about defining their own identity after identity had been denied to them for so long: by the Khmer Rouge and by the French before them. She spoke of her love for Cambodia and golden-era music. She was passionate, and her English was flawless. And I pressed her about Khmer hip-hop.

“To be honest,” she said, “when I was 17 or 18, I didn’t know anything about hip-hop. But I became involved with this organisation called Tiny Toones. They’re a charity who provide proper education to street kids – alongside learning how to dance, to make art and so on. I was interested in the dancing, but then I discovered the Tiny Toones recording studio, and I tried writing some songs, helped by the producer.”

It came naturally to Serey. “I found that it’s so easy to rap in Khmer. We have such a rhythmic language, and our instruments – the skor drum, the roneat gamelan-marimba and the tre trumpet – work so well with the style. So, from the start, it was natural to put Khmer instruments into hip-hop, combining them together. It’s what most hip-hop artists do here. We want to make what is truly Cambodian music, not a copy.”

Serey was talented and lucky. “My first song, ‘The Light’, got released and became really huge in Cambodia. This motivated me to keep going, and not just musically, personally.” Serey told me that it was like a mission for her. She’d found a way of being a genuinely Cambodian artist and an avenue for sharing her passions. Khmer hip-hop, she told me, always comes with a social conscience.

“For me, hip-hop gives me and other Khmer people [the opportunity] to express their feelings and the stories of the real things, life experience. It allows us to speak up and tell people’s real-life stories through music. ‘The Light’ was about a friend of mine, who was thinking of killing herself after her parents abandoned her. I told her story, but I changed its sadness to [a] plea for empowerment – to encourage her. That’s why the song is called ‘The Light’. Many young Khmer identified with the message. I felt that my music could help people.”

Life can be tough in Cambodia. It remains the poorest country in Southeast Asia. 17.8% of the population live below the national poverty line (as of 2019) and roughly 24 in 1,000 children die before their fifth birthday (2022). Things can be particularly hard for women. Khmer hip-hop exposes their lives and champions social justice. Cambodian hip-hop, Serey stressed, isn’t about ‘gangsta’ poses. It’s a force for change.

Serey put me in contact with other Cambodian hip-hop artists: all-woman The Messenger Band, a group of former garment workers which grew from the Womyns Agenda for Change NGO and who sing of the difficulties workers face in the massive factories that ring Phnom Penh, and which churn out clothes and shoes for our high streets; and Kea Sokun, whose music is made in alliance with groups like the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights.

The lyrics to one of Sokun’s songs includes the line, ‘In 2014, there was suffering on Veng Sreng Street, anger broke out at a protest for a living wage… Workers struggle to have rights, freedom, but the search for justice is filled with obstacles.’

Both he and The Messenger Band turned down interviews. Cambodia’s president, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who has been de facto ruler since the 1980s, sees hip-hop as trouble. In 2023, his government formally warned Kea Sokun about his song ‘Workers’ Blood’. They accused him of contravening Article 495 of the country’s criminal code, of “inciting content that may cause insecurity and social disorder.” I began to understand why I had been refused entry to that club in Siem Reap.

But it’s going to be hard to keep Khmer hip-hop under wraps. Last year, rapper VannDa sang at the opening of the Paris Olympics. His most famous song (which blends Khmer instrumentation with beats) is called ‘Time to Rise’. It has reached more than 100 million views on YouTube. VannDa describes it as a call to arms for Cambodian youth. Its popularity is perhaps made even more impressive by the fact that the song features the voice and playing of chapei dang veng (lute) player Master Kong Nay (who sadly passed away last year), representing the passing on of traditions to a new generation.

This brings me back to the music I heard during that Phnom Penh rainstorm. I eventually tracked down the artist. She’s called Ton Chanseyma. She grew up in rural poverty in the paddy fields of Takeo. The song I’d heard is apparently a sarcastic, caustic lament about how Cambodians only get to eat rice soup… I wish I understood the lyrics.

Additional research by Horm Sreynich