Recitation of Kaek Baul (​ក្អែក​បូល, 1999) | Cassette, FLAC re-rip

Note: Re-ripped to Audacity on iMac from a TASCAM 202MKVII; project rate 44100 Hz; exported as FLAC, 44.1 kHz, bit depth 24. New link below.

I posted an earlier MP3 rip of this cassette on New Year's Eve 2017, and it has since become the most popular recording I've ever shared. 
Its popularity had everything to do with its uniqueness - it's the only Khmer solo vocal recording without accompaniment I know of. 

(Ironically, one of the first comments I received after posting it to Soundcloud was from a beatmaker asking permission to use it in his work.)

Sayonara Sound Productions was established in West Warwick, RI, in 1987 by Chang Leanghak Song. I have found maybe a dozen Sayonara cassettes and CDs in Cambodian immigrant-run grocery stores in the Bronx, Portland (OR), and Seattle. 

Sayonara is one of a handful of late 20th Century Cambodian diaspora-run production companies that trafficked in bootlegged compilations of sixties and seventies tracks and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodian-language popular and traditional music recordings. I'm convinced that the most ubiquitous of these, the late Thoeung Son's Chlangden Production, provided the source recordings for Paul Wheeler / Parallel World's 1995 Cambodian Rocks, one of the most important - if ethically questionable - so-called "world music" compilations ever released.

Say what you want about bootlegging, but people like Thoeung Son changed our perception of the world in ways that they may never have realized. It makes this 2009 report about the Cambodian Ministry of Culture streamrolling 80,000 pirated domestic CDs and DVDs an occasion for mourning, rather than celebration.

The 1999 Sayonara Sound Productions cassette featured in today's post probably isn't a pirated version; in all likelihood, the singer was a Cambodian refugee living in Rhode Island, or nearby Massachusetts. This woman is most likely still alive, maybe 200 miles from where I write this, unaware of how many listeners she still has (nearly 8,000 via the Soundcloud post alone).

If you had downloaded the previous rip of this cassette, it's worth tossing it in favor of this one, which was played at the correct speed and duplicated at a much higher resolution.

Get it here.

Original post text
It was cold today. Not New York cold. Minneapolis cold. It's 11 degrees as I type this, warmed by a hissing radiator and the voice - the virtually naked, unmanipulated voice - of what we must assume to be the woman pictured on the cover of this cassette  found several hours earlier at Battambang Market II in the Bronx.

It's a remarkable recording. Six of its eight tracks consist of nothing but this woman singing, sans accompaniment of any kind. The other two tracks - each side's last - are traditional Khmer instrumentals. 
There aren't any albums I can think of that feature just a solo voice, unmediated (save, in this instance, for bit of reverb or room echo). I can think of a couple that feature one person's voice multitracked a number of times over itself (e.g., Japanese beatboxer Dokaka's Human Interface).

I love overlay, generally; but this cassette is something entirely different. There's a bit of reverb. Otherwise, it's just this voice. Singing, lamenting, pleading. Breathing. You can hear her breathe in between every. Single. Phrase.

 

It's otherworldly. I picked up a number of other things at Battambang today, but this was just so uniquely beautiful, I had to share it with you before anything else.

Happy New Year.

Link to recording in comments.

Phimpha Phonsiri | It's Red!

Listen to the third track


Give track 11 some attention

Reupped  on May 24, 2015, by reader request here.

Have I really never shared this fabulous example of, uh, well ... what is it, exactly? I was going to use Peter Doolan's term, "work station luk thung," but it's not that, exactly. (And, thanks Peter, for the singer and title.) I'm no longer sure where I picked it up, but the most likely place is Thai-Cam Video (5230 Southeast Foster Road, Portland, Ore.), where I got most of my Cambodian and Lao music, and a bit of my Thai stuff as well.

Exhausted and wanting to catch a few quick Zs before heading over to friends' house to watch Project Runway--I baked a nice loaf of rosemary sourdough for them--or I'd stick around and talk longer. Maybe tomorrow; I've got the day off.

Various Artists | Cambodian Rock

Listen to the first track (a bit muddy for the first minute)


Listen to the second track

Reposted yet again by special request on 2/17/2015, here

[The first reposting of this CD, for which the following text was written, was on April 8, 2012.] This is a reposting of one of the first posts I made to this blog, two years ago, here, and the last of the "housecleaning" reposts from that first month or two, before I was uploading whole CDs in a single zip (or now, rar) file.

A lot has happened in the two years since I started this blog on April 5, 2010. Three people I've either known or who were people who were close to people I know, have since passed away--all of them living in, and/or connected to people who are living in, Portland, Oregon, where I found this CD in a Cambodian grocery store on Foster Road. In late August, my soon-to-be ex-wife and I separated, and I moved from Brooklyn, where I'd spent most of the 15 years I've lived in New York, to Astoria, Queens, where I am now. (If you look at this blog's history, you'll see that there's an abrupt end to posting in August and that I didn't pick it back up until April of 2011.)

Any listener familiar with Cambodian rock of the 60s and 70s will notice, listening to the CD I've posted tonight, that these are not exactly original recordings. They retain the original vocals--from Sinn Sisamouth, Pan Ron, Ros Sereysothea and others--as well as some of the original instrumentation. But other instrumentation has been added, as though to contemporize the songs, to lift them out of the past and insert them, however awkwardly, or even painfully, into the present. Though purists might bemoan the addition of drum machine and god-knows-what-else (Casio?), for me, there's something beautiful about the gesture, as blasphemous as it might strike many others.

It means one thing to archive, to select from and to present artifacts from one's (personal or cultural) past; it means something different altogether to contemporize these same artifacts, to attempt to situate them within one's present. It isn't, in this case, an act of rewriting history; it's something more complicated. More painful, perhaps, but closer to how memory, the past, does live within, or haunt, the here and now.

I started this blog two years ago as a way to share some of the music that meant the most to me with a handful of friends who I thought would derive some pleasure from it. But there was always another agenda behind taking on and continuing this project, which was to foreground the extent to which the United States has always been haunted by a fluctuating but nonetheless steady stream of immigration. An immigration not just of people and their pasts, but of cultures and their pasts (and presents). These recordings are not just glimpses into other cultures, they're clues into our own constantly evolving culture, as well as our own recent past. (Consider: How did a Cambodian grocery store wind up in Portland, Oregon? Is it, in other words, a direct consequence of the U.S.-Soviet proxy war in Vietnam, or more specifically of the U.S. bombing of PAVN targets in Cambodia and Laos for more than a decade in the 60s and 70s?)

Watching the 2012 GOP primaries and the pandering to what one can only assume to be a white middle-aged heterosexual Western-religion-identified male American target, the insanity of any genuinely held belief that America is, in fact, that hardly needs me or anyone else to point out just how absurdly out of sync with reality that it is. But being who we are and knowing who we are are two entirely different things. 

I was at a wedding reception last month where a second- or third-generation Asian-American referred to other (first-, second- and third-generation) Asian-Americans as "Asians" and white Americans as "Americans; it was hardly the first time I've heard that particular distinction being made.

"die Vergangenheit ist klar vorbei" ("the past is clearly over"), wrote Ernst Herbeck, an Austrian schizophrenic patient whose poetry I've been translating off and on over the last 10 years or so. (Ugly Duckling Presse, here in New York, will be publishing a selection of some 30 of my Herbeck translations this summer--I'll post an announcement when it's available.) I love that line, not because it's obviously the case ... but because it, so clearly, isn't.

Rare Cambodian 60s-70s Rock Collection

Listen to Track 7


Listen to Track 8

Reupped by special request here.

[Originally posted April 30, 2014.] As some of you are tired of reading about by now, I gave a talk this past Friday on Rebecca Pan and the Hong Kong indie / underground music scene at this year's EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. On Saturday, perhaps hypnotized by the atypically beautiful, rain-free weather, I decided to head down to one of the Emerald City's most diverse neighborhoods: Othello. My plan was to hit a Lao market I'd seen reference to on Yelp, pick up a few CDs, hop back on the light rail, and get back to the conference with enough time to see a whole panel on K-Pop and then hang out with a couple of fellow poets I'd met there the day before.

My plan didn't work out like that. The first in a long line of reasons, this place:

where I got to talking with the woman behind the counter. At first, she was convinced that she had nothing I might want. "No older Cambodian music?" I asked. Smiling, she shook her head. "Do you have anything on CD rather than VCD?" was my next, hopeful, question. She looked doubtful, but turned to start digging through the discs of polycarbonate plastic piled up in their "jewel" cases behind the register.

"Oh, here's one," she said, suddenly, setting it down on the counter. "This looks like one, too." Again and again, the hero of this morning's story found another and then another CD-not-VCD. Fifteen-twenty minutes later, she'd built a wall of some two dozen albums on the counter between the two of us. "I ... I'll take them all ..." I said, my voice obviously shaking. Her face registered something between confusion and happy surprise. This shit has been sitting here for decades, she seemed to be thinking. Where was this idiot in 1998?

I have a dental appointment in a couple of hours and then I have a three-hour radio show to host this evening, so I need to go jump in the shower and brush (and, yes, I will floss) my teeth. But later this week, or perhaps this weekend, I'll recount more of my adventures in The Rainy City. Until then, feast your eyes on the above, just some of the Seattle haul I took home ...

Oh, before I go: About today's offering. You've heard a few of the tracks before. A few will be new to you, no matter how many previous collections you have. I haven't titled them; if anyone wants to take a stab at a track list and leave it in the comments, you'd be Everybody's Hero Forever. (Well, not forever-forever, but certainly for a few days or so.)

Also, two tracks are near duplicates of two other tracks -- Track 4 is a near-dupe of Track 3 and Track 6 is a near-dupe of track 5. That said, these are ORIGINAL recordings, digitally restored (in the 90s or early aughts) by someone in Phnom Penh. Trust me, you need this album. 

Want to hear three hours worth of music I found on this Seattle trip? Bookmark this page and come back to listen a week from tonight.

Awrighty, then; I'm off to shampoo and floss. Wish me luck!

Rare Cambodian 60s-70s Rock | Disc 13

Rawk out to track 1 

Reupped a third time by special request on Feb 15, 2015, here. 

[Originally posted in January 2013.] I recognize track 1 as the basis for Dengue Fever's "Tiger Card" from 2008's Venus on Earth; the rest of this album is completely new to this listener, a listener who--I should point out--has amassed somewhere between 750 to 1,000 Cambodian songs from the 1960s and 70s over the last half decade or so. I picked up this plus two other similar compilations at Thai-Cam Video in Portland, Ore., in December, and this one includes some of my absolute favorite tracks. (I'll upload the other two discs in the coming days.)

I asked Thai-Cam's owner, Nang, if she wouldn't mind ordering me the entire series while I was there in Portland, seeing as how the CD's back cover said they were right over the river in Vancouver, Washington; alas, she explained that this company had long gone out of business.

Even More Rare Cambodian 60s-70s Rock

Listen to an awesome track from this magical disc of polycarbonate plastic

Reupped a second time by special request on Feb 15, 2015, here.

[Originally posted on February 24, 2013.] Tonight, as most of the U.S. tunes in to the Oscars, I'll be finishing up the latest "New Life" comic for Rain Taxi using text from Mellow Actions, a new book by an old friend of mine, Brandon Downing. I don't mention Brandon idly: He was, after all, the person who introduced me to Cambodian music of the 60s and 70s in the first place.

Today's offering comes to us via Thai Cam Video on Foster Road in Portland, Oregon (get volume 11 here and 13 here). I have a lot more stuff I brought home from Thai Cam that I'll eventually upload, but this is the last of the 60s-70s Cambodian collections.

Awrighty. I'd love to stay and chat, but I really do have to get back to this comic; deadline's tomorrow morning. 

Rare Cambodian Tracks | BP1 | Reupped!

Reupped once again by reader request here.

Most of my files were reset to "private" mode by my file hoster, ADrive. This means most of the (especially older) albums are currently unavailable. Let me know if there's anything particular you'd really like reupped and I'll see what I can do. 

I'll try and get the other Cambodian stuff back up soon. 

Meanwhile, don't miss this on Wednesday night.

[Originally posted May 2013.] At least nine compilations of Cambodian rock have been released for western consumption over the last decade, making this incredibly rich pop from the 60s and 70s some of the most talked-about and listened-to around the world. But for every song now readily available on CD, there are 10-20 more that most people outside of Cambodia haven’t yet heard.

Over the last year I’ve scoured the furthest reaches of the Internet, pulling together a collection of nearly 1,000 songs, ranging from pretty darn okay to unimpeachably great. The selection I’ve put together here is an attempt to showcase the greatest of what has yet to see major distribution. Every song on this mix-CD is a personal favorite and, to the best of my knowledge, not otherwise available on any of the Cambodia Rocks, Cambodian Psych-Out, Groove Club, Dengue Fever or Sublime Frequencies compilations.

If I had a CD series of my own, this would be the first thing I’d release. Alas, I don’t. And, because I don’t, it looks like you’ve just saved yourself $16.95.

Unknown Cambodian Singers | Angkor Wat #21

Listen to the haunting second track

Grab the whole album HERE

Last April I flew out to Seattle for a few days to give a talk at the Experience Music Project's 2014 Annual Conference on Rebecca Pan, the migration of Chinese-language pop from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and the emergence of the Special Administrative Region's indie music scene in the early to mid aughts.

My third day in the city I took the light rail from where I was holed up downtown to the Othello stop in Rainer Valley, home to the area's most culturally and economically diverse population. On my way in from the airport I had seen a largish Lao grocery store, which subsequent Yelping revealed to be the most likely place in the city to find international music on CD. 

Even before I found the Lao store--which required a 15-20 minute walk back up north from the station--I stumbled onto the Phnom Penh Market (7123 Martin Luther King Jr Way) just a few short steps up MLK from the station.

I walked in. I approached the counter. I smiled at the three women, from what seemed like as many generations, futzing around, reordering things. I noticed a couple of tallish stacks of CDs near the register. I feigned an interest some immeasurable sum milder than the actual interest I was feeling and which was causing my body to intensely vibrate from within.

"Are those C-C-Cambodian CDs?" I asked. 

"Not CDs," Generation One snapped. "Those are VCDs." 

I played dumb. "Could I maybe see a couple? I'm a, uh--" and here my voice trailed off, as I realized just how little she probably cared what I was, other than some dopey-looking white guy who clearly wanted something from her. To my happy surprise, she brought over a few to let me have a look.

She was right. Sort of. All but one of the grime-encrusted jewel-encased discs of polycarbonate plastic said "VCD" rather prominently on their covers. I lifted the one that didn't, and pointed at it, my finger clearly trembling.

"Do you have any more like this?" I ventured, "any, uh, CDs?"

"CDs? Not VCDs?" the kinder, gentler Generation Two asked.

"Yeah. CDs."

She dug around. And found one. And then another. And then another. Generation Three offered her help. Together, they found 10. And then 11. And then 12, 13, 14, 15. By the time they were done, there were 20 Khmer / Cambodian CDs, most from the 1990s, stacked up on the counter before me. I tried to hide my excitement. 

"I'LL TAKE THEM ALL," I heard myself blurting out. 

This is one of them. 

You can hear cuts from the rest of the haul here.

Awesome Contemporary Cambodian CD

Just reupped by special request. Drag the thrills down to your world. 

Yet another awesome find at Thai-Cam Video on Foster Road in Portland, Oregon. (See below for several others.)

I've had a long, busy week at work and now I just want to (a) catch up on Project Runway All Stars and then (b) fall asleep reading more of Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls, so please forgive the lack of rambling on my part this evening. Do you really need me to tell you how great this is when you can listen to the samples above?

I'll be back when I'm rested up. 

Ros Sereysothea | Khmer Rocks 48

Listen to track 7

 
Listen to track 9

Get this 12-track album here, you lucky bastard, you.

My god I have a lot of CDs. I'm not bragging. (Okay, I'm kind of bragging.) I'm still unpacking and there's just -- there's so much. So, so much. How is it that I've never shared this with you? 

I don't care how many Cambodian rock comps you've already got, you most likely don't have at least a few of these Ros Sereysothea tunes.

So, a big shout out to everyone who has bought some art in our Help Put Bodega Pop on WFMU campaign. I have thrilling news: Someone has come through and is sending us a used Mac that we're 98% sure will work to stream the show. Fingers crossed. And final word in a week or two.

Meanwhile, there's some art left if you wanna put something sort of groovy on your wall. Check eet oot!

Various | Roots of Cambodian Rock

 

Grab this mind-blowing collection here.

I'm tempted to post every single song to Soundcloud because this is one of those records where your first impulse is grab the lapels of everyone who passes by your bodega and pull them in, throw them into the chair, and crank up the volume.

This isn't what it looks like. It's not a Cambodian rock album. It's traditional Cambodian music. Some sounds like it could be Sinn Sithamouth or Ros Sereysothea singing, perhaps, and if so, that would explain the cover. But, trust me, I don't care how massive the Cambodian album posse you've managed to assemble over the years, you haven't heard anything quite like this. I sure hadn't before this evening when I popped the disc into Mr. Smarto. (My computer. I'm a bodega proprietor; I'm required to spew a certain amount of colorful, idiosyncratic language.) 

Various Cambodian 60s Singers | Mini Ago-Go

Want it? Ago-go here.


Found last night on my way to meet my good friend Carol, with whom I saw the legendary Jonas Mekas's recent film Outtakes from the Life of a Happy Man. At one point, Jonas, who is now 90 years old, kept insisting: "These are not my memories. This is not memory. This is real. What you are looking at is real. This is all real." 

If you want to be reduced to a blubbering emotional idiot on the verge of an uncontrollable weeping jag, you could do worse than sit in an intimate movie theater watching images shot in the 60s and 70s flicker by as a very, very old man -- indeed, the man who shot them -- insists that this has nothing to do with his memory, but what is, in fact, taking place.

The songs on this rather life-affirming Cambodian a-go-go compilation are also very much taking place. 

More Rare Cambodian Rock | CSP Disc 11

 

Listen to track 7

 
Listen to track 14


You've heard 15 before, right?

Get the whole 17-track CD here.

Another rock-solid--if slower, bluesier--collection of Cambodian rock from the 1960s-70s, found at Thai-Cam Video on Foster Road in Portland, Oregon last month. I have one more of these that I'll post soon, as well as several more-or-less contemporary Cambodian, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese albums plucked from the City of Roses. Plus, I just got a rather impressive new stash of Tamil Film CDs, Bengali modern songs, more Bappi Lahiri than you can shake a Bappi at--and a few other surprises waiting in the wings.

Unknown Cambodian CD dated 1996

Listen to the mind-blowing second track


Listen to the broken ethereality that is the third song


Attempt to wrap your mind around the snakey male-female duo of track seven

Get the baffling whole here.

I have a lot I'd like to say about this and a couple dozen other fabulous CDs I picked up at Thai-Cam Video in Portland, Oregon last month ... but it's in the 50s in Queens today, and I need me some bike time. Let's reconvene in a couple of days when the weather forces us both back indoors again, yeah?

Khmer Rap Boyz | Da Homeboyz LP

Listen to "Toul U (Whatever)"

Get it all here.

NOTE: If you have a moment, please take the poll to the right.

I first came upon this video:



in late 2007 while curating an "around the world in 80 days" kind of global music video trip for my previous blog. I think the phrase I typed into YouTube's search engine was either "Khmer rap" or "Cambodian rap," and I remember watching this thing, totally mesmerized. I loved the sound of it, right down to the Carly Simon sample (that is Carly Simon, no?), and I periodically checked YouTube and other places, hoping to hear more.

Well, several months ago, using Filetram, I finally found a whole album online, what I'm guessing to be the Khmer Rap Boyz's first, and possibly only, full-length recording.

I admit that I was disappointed at first that the songs I'd grown to love by them ("Baeuk Chak," in the video above, and "Sexy Sexy," which you can watch here) were completely remixed and had shed their raw funkiness for something more--golly--what? What's the hip hop word meaning "hardcore"? Well, let's put it this way: I listened to the album once and promptly forgot about it. The cover, with the KRBs in the most ridiculously "hip hop"-coded outfits, striking the most ludicrously "hip hop"-coded poses, says it all. (Word up, Boyz: What makes any particular example of international hip hop successful is not how properly coded the shit is; it's how awesome it rocks. And, really, if it's street cred you're gunning for on that cover, isn't your neighborhood--bombed by the U.S. and turned into one of the most horrific nightmares in Planet Earth's history by Pol Pot--far more "impressive" or whatever to have come from than, say, Compton?)

Okay, where was I? Oh, right. Fast forward to a couple of months ago, back when I was putting together this mix. While looking for hidden gems to delight my visitors' ears, I went back to the Khmer Rap Boyz's album, no longer saddled with the expectation of hearing the older stuff, and could now hear the LP for what it was: A genuinely rock solid contemporary hip hop record. (Despite the lame-ass cover.) And, where the nature of hip hop in the hands of some international artists (think PSY) is to grow increasingly pop-y, the Khmer Rap Boyz went from a sort of bright, super-charming funkiness to a dark, chunky, pou-pounding oomph. (That is what the hip hop kids are calling it these days--"pou-pounding oomph"--right?)

And you know what? I totally love it. 

THAIPOP! | A Bodegapop Original

Listen to an unknown song by Jintara


This actually sounds more Cambodian than Thai to me


Listen to an unknown song by Yui 

Get it all here. 


Most of this egregiously soulful collection came from Thai Thai (76-13 Woodside Avenue), a little bodega run by Noi Sila in Elmhurst, Queens. By request, Sila will burn copies of CDs from her personal collection for you for a mere $2 a piece. (I was unsuccessful convincing her to start a music blog.) Four of the songs came from a Thai-Cambodian store on SE Foster Road in Portland, Oregon, and may, in fact, be Cambodian.


If that weren't problematic enough, "pop" is undoubtedly the wrong word for this stuff, which I'm guessing is considered by Thais to be "country." But, sigh, I already made the groovy mix cover (image from, as you probably guessed, the cover of a Thai 5-baht comic book), and I don't care if some of it is Thai, some Cambodian and none of it is pop. Whatever it is, it's 100% rawk solid gold.

Cover Me | 2 Dozen Super Awesome Covers

Listen to Melt-Banana's mash-up/deconstruction of the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA" and "You're Welcome"

Hear Crowd Lu fearlessly scale the upper registers of Minnie Ripperton's "Loving You"

Dig Anthony Wong's Lou Reedy take on Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind"

Let your jaw drop in utter disbelief as Kahimi Karie reconceives Jimmy Cliff's "Harder They Come" for the 21st Century

Thrill to Mika Nakashima's dead-pan run-through of Sid Vicious's version of "My Way" (Note how "fucking" passes the censor several times, but not a reference to killing her cat, which gets bleeped out)

Sweat and fret as O.N.T.J detonate The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb"

Grab it all in one big glop, here.

According to George Plasketes’ Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, there are an estimated 40,000 songs floating around out there with at least one recorded cover version. This strikes me as an incredibly conservative estimate.

Whatever the real number might be, there are degrees of covering, and not all acts of covering mean or resonate in the same way. There’s a significant difference, for instance, between a Cambodian pop musician of the 70s swiping guitar licks from Santana or Creedence Clearwater Revival and a contemporary Latino group in Los Angeles basing a whole career covering songs from The Smiths catalog.

Neither act is better or worse, neither more nor less interesting than the other. But they are, in terms of their meaning, different enough to note.

Likewise, and more recently, Gwyneth Paltrow’s covering Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You” (the clean version of “Fuck You”) on an episode of “Glee” exists on a whole other meaning-plane from that of Gnarls Barkley’s cover of the Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” despite the common denominator of Cee Lo.

Speaking of which, what is UP with Gnarls Barkley’s “Gone Daddy Gone”? First, take a look at this official video. (Sorry, you'll have to click the link; embedding has been disabled.)

The song was a huge hit in the 1980s for the Violent Femmes, who were, if memory serves me, THE voice of the geeky white ectomorph. Every song seemed, regardless of the lyrics, to be about the experience of being extremely uncomfortable in one’s distressingly reedy, pasty body. So, what could a rather larger-than-normal black guy possibly be wringing out of this song?

As it turns out: Everything. The video, which pictures Cee Lo as a plump fly, his band mates as other insects, emphasizes and expands on the discomfort of the original, even as the actual musicianship slickens and pop-readies the song up from the much more spastic original. Cee Lo’s and Gordon Gano’s meaning are not exactly trans-racial equivalents, but there are interesting echoes going on. In the context of Cee Lo’s later smash-hit “Fuck/Forget You,” the “Gone Daddy Gone” cover makes even more sense: both recordings pitch Cee Lo as heroic outsider, marginalized underdog. But Ceelo doesn’t feel uncomfortable in his body; it’s more about him wondering what your problem is with it.

So, getting to the mix at hand. While listening to one song after the next might make it all sound entirely random, there are reasons for each inclusion—though there was no one single criterion that covered everything. First, and at bare minimum, I only included a cover if, in transit, some significant border was crossed: ethnicity, gender, nationality, race. Beyond that, I chose sublime examples of reconfiguration, amped-upness and unlikely verisimilitude.

Rap Around the World | A Bodega Pop mix

Listen to "Phnom Penh Hip Hop" by The Khmer Rap Boyz (Cambodia)

Listen to "Haiti" by Elza Soares (Brazil)

Listen to "Eat Around" by Missile Scoot Girl (Japan)

Listen to "Γουστάρει Η Παλαβή" by Εισβολέας (Greece)

Listen to "DK Anthem" by Divided Kingdom Republic (Zimbabwe)

Get the 24-song mix here.

As anyone who has spent a bit of time in the Bodega knows, this here shop keep has a particular predilection for international rap and hip-hop--the further the language from English, the better. That said, rap & hip-hop from around the world comprise a small percentage of the CDs in my collection, maybe 1%, if that. But you wouldn't know it, looking at the BP tag cloud.

I'm not exactly picky when it comes to pop; though I suppose I do have some standards. But, while there is certainly a goodly amount of bad hip-hop out there--mostly stuff that simply mimics rap in the USA--there are people in all corners of the world who, picking up cues from Western examples, take it somewhere else, occasionally somewhere totally unexpected. 


I'm not going to sit here this morning and tell you that every hip-hop artist in this mix is some sort of insane genius, turning rap & hip-hop up to 11. But some of them are. And those that aren't, at least among what I've tried to include here, are at bare minimum making the genre their own.

If you visit here often and have partaken of the dozen or so hip-hop related CDs I've posted over the last couple of years, fear not: I tried really, really, really extra-special hard not to duplicate, whenever possible. So there's Fama in here, but not the Fama you can get elsewhere on this site. I didn't actually count, but I think maybe 4 or 5 songs in this mix can be found in other full CDs or mixes on this blog.

I also didn't just rip stuff from YouTube videos, although--Jesus God Almighty, it was certainly tempting. Everything here is from my own personal CD collection, with a few things I downloaded myself from other sites that I wasn't able to find in CD anywhere (e.g., the Khmer Rap Boyz).


Okay, I'm going to shut up now and let you get to this. Would love to know what you think. It's my personal favorite Bodega Pop mix, and--at some point in the future, assuming people like this--I'll probably put together another (or two, or three).