Celebrated noir author Christopher G Moore examines the dark lyrical content of Krom, whose Neon Dark was recently declared Best Album of 2013 by BBC broadcaster Mark Coles
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AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS essay I’d like to divulge that I neither play any musical instrument nor can I read music. It would be rather like reading a book review by a ‘book’ critic who was illiterate but had someone read the book to him.
Those are surely limitations worth keeping in mind as I explore the music of Krom.
As editor of last year’s Phnom Penh Noir anthology, I selected the lyrics written by Christopher Minko for Krom as a contribution. Minko’s lyrics use a subtle mixture of Khmer and English. Songs From The Noir, the band’s first album, conveys the dangers, preoccupations and injustices of a society seeking to recover from the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The lyrics in Ying, Phnom Penh and Tango Traffic ring true as pure cries from the heart. Christopher Minko and Krom continue the ancient tradition of ballad singers. They are part of the tradition of creative artists who travelled from village to village, bringing along musical instruments and telling stories through their songs. Songs From The Noir and the most recent album, Neon Dark, are evocative folk tales as black as night.
Sophea Chamroeun’s voice rings clean, liquid and clear like a troubadour. Christopher Minko’s voice, with its haunting, masculine, deep, throaty husk, is elegant with a soulful depth that follows us into our dreams. Minko’s guitar picking has the precision and timing of a well-placed knife blade. He conveys with the instrument and his lyrics an emotionality that at times can be overwhelming. Minko’s lyrics dance around the sound of his guitar like moths darting near an open flame. Krom was born out of a huge desire to tell a string of stories that feature alienation, regret, despair and hardship.
Krom will be a new name in the music business for many. To understand why it’s an important group, at the right moment in the artistic development occurring in Southeast Asia, requires some context, both in Asia and internationally.
Listening to Krom is to evoke a similar experience to great poetry and literature. Each generation of musicians seeks to express what it means to be living now, the nature of our feelings, and our sense of clench-fisted rage. Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood has two lines that describe Krom: “Do not go gentle into that good night”, and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” A sense of terror lurks in Christopher Minko’s lyrics. His words coil like a cobra around our most ancient of fears: that of annihilation of selfhood by forces larger than oneself, forces that can’t be contained or restrained.
One example of the powerful lyrics which take a moral, social position is found in She’s 7 Years Old, from the first album: a ballad to expose the evil of sexual abuse against children.
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
Yeah – It’s so bad
So very, very sad
In a world where humanity
Has gone stark raving mad
Yeah – It’s so bads
So very, very sad
In a world where humanity
Has gone stark raving mad
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
She’s 7 Years Old is a lullaby from the dark underbelly of a world that most people are only vaguely aware exists. Most people living in developed countries are shielded in their tidy lives and filters remove the nasty content that may be disturbing and complex. Into these sheltered lives comes Krom like a dragon, breathing fire and circling them, showing exposed talons. See, this is the world outside of your home, office, club, church and neighbourhood. Krom makes it difficult for those who live at a distance – deep inside a safety belt, protected and smug – to turn away from the fact that there are places where children have few protections from predators.
The lyrics have an undertow of violence. The desire to hush the cries of a child, to save the child from the terrors of a world gone mad, suggests the uselessness of tears and the helplessness of those wishing to protect the child.
The next example is of how sexual exploitation has been turned into a commodity in the tourist industry. Market forces create a category of labour in the sex industry. Sex workers are the labour component in a commercial transaction where there is an unequal power relationship with the buyer. There is only one direction for the career trajectory and that is down. Down Sukhumvit Road, on Neon Dark, captures the treadmill of a street walker down a road in Bangkok that is a magnet for foreign residents and tourists. The Sisyphus-like nature of their daily routine strips away the pleasure of these sexual encounters and substitutes it with a mindlessness and hopelessness of the activity. Hookers are condemned to roll the stone up the mountain every day on Sukhumvit Road. Greed and violence have a long history as inseparable bunkmates who use each other. Evidence of their handiwork is found in the mugging of our most vulnerable innocents, creating the fire in the lyrics of Down Sukhumvit Road and making Minko’s voice boil. His lyrics define a territory of physical and physic violence and he takes you down that road.
But you won’t find salvation
On Sukumvit Road
Just eternal damnation
Come into the fold
Yeah so many stories, they remain untold
‘Cause truth is we’re all walkin’
Down Sukumvit Road
Yeah, where many, yeah many a body has been sold
Yeah we’re all walkin’, all walkin’ down Sukumvit Road
Where many a body has been sold
Yeah that’s life in Sukumvit Road
The lyrics of prostitution slam home the nature of inhumanity and the price paid in terms of family, self-respect and innocence. Instead what reverberates in Tango Traffic Tango is the inescapable cycle of exploitation, where third-world families become breeding stations to satisfy the sexual appetites and needs of men. There is no god, no authority, no institution with the resources, mandate or inclination to end the sexual servitude of poor women and girls, as well as boys. Like cattle they will be sold at markets, where buyers, as during the plantation days, have few restraints to purchase the life of another. Whether it was for an hour or a lifetime, the effect was to rob the purchased person of their place as an equal. The loss of innocence is the realisation that such a person is nothing more than meat and they have been born into a world with a heavy appetite for flesh.
The cattle class of ancient men
Are greeted with open arms
Welcome to our daughters
We breed them on our farms
Ripe for human trafficking
We sell their innocent charms
Two other songs stand out: Where Are You and Don’t Go Away. Each features the lead singer Sophea Chamroeun and on the videos you are at street level in the slums and alleyways of Phnom Penh. Sophea sings in front of a massive slum complex, one that through sheer talent she has managed to break free from. All of the Cambodian members of Krom come from this impoverished community. Krom is a group of messengers who have never shed or denied that community and give voice to the hardship, caring, love, violence and abuse: the panorama of the best and worst of the human condition. No community stays static and over time the pressure builds until there is change or a social explosion.
Christopher Minko draws his inspiration from that hellish pressure cooker and stirs his lyrics with the hot chili peppers that burn and sting.
The lyrics and music of Krom establish an open line that lets the rest of us listen in on the conversations inside this ignored community. Once we are connected by the music, we take a journey through a landscape where social justice and equality are merely ideas and words, into a place where political slogans are the official lyrics everyone is supposed to sing and dance to. Krom is having no part of that charade, and serves up instead a counter vision: one that exposes the lies and delusion, one that pulls us to one side to listen to the bleakness of true noir, an invitation to experience an authentic cry from the heart.
When I listen to Krom, I am reminded of the opening lines from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1974):
‘A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.’
Krom is such a scream from a wounded soul. The lyrics consolidate into a dark pitch blasting our sensibilities in an echo chamber of pain. There is an existential scream and nothing prepares us for it in our cosy world of shopping malls, social media, offices, clubs and homes. In a critical stage, the world is hollowed out and in many cases those left with nothing but the empty husk move forward seeking to survive, looking for redemption.
Krom’s music, like Chris Coles’ art, is part of the noir movement in Southeast Asia. Like a noir novel or painting, it opens a window onto a troubled society and brings into focus the tensions that give birth to the political, social and economic dimensions, ever shifting, inside ordinary lives. To understand behaviour, reactions and feelings, the lyrics in Songs From The Noir and Neon Dark provide a valuable cultural map. The best music, art and crime novels function like a GPS that guides us through winding back roads, local streets and little undeveloped hills.
Krom’s music shows the damage inflicted by the tsumami of rapid globalised change swamping many cultures. We have entered in the past ten years what Auguste Comte called a ‘critical stage’. That stage for Comte arrived after the French Revolution. There is a new cycle, a revolution driven by technology, one that has proven to be as disruptive as an old-style revolution. The past is not a reliable guide because technology has exposed the limitations of institutions, the authority of old elites and the old power arrangement. It is a time of the great dismantling. Krom’s vision may be dark, but it may prove a warning of what’s to come. Our lives have become fragile and unstable and Down Sukhumvit Road is about how easily we are turned from human beings with hopes and dreams into a commercial object with a price like any other livestock.
Christopher Minko and Krom are busily singing songs you should pay attention to. The songs are about how disharmony balloons filled with the helium of discontent are circling over all of our heads. Listen carefully to Krom’s screaming across the sky. Look up and you’ll understand there is nothing to compare to the moment when the engines of the V-2 rocket cut out and there is that long, long ache of silence before the explosion. Minko’s lyrics are a testament to the fact that there are legions of victims waiting inside that cone of silence.
Christopher G. Moore is a Canadian writer of 24 novels, five works of non-fiction and two anthologies of short stories, Bangkok Noir and Phnom Penh Noir. He is best known for his trilogy A Killing Smile, A Bewitching Smile and A Haunting Smile, a behind-the-smiles study of his adopted country, Thailand, for his Vincent Calvino Private Eye series set in Bangkok. This essay was first published in the December 2013 issue of Australian magazine Arena.