EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 18 - Wong Shadow

Genre of the Day - Wong Shadow 🇹🇭

Album of the Day - Shadow Music Of Thailand by Various Artists (2008)

For today’s inaugural feature of a Thai genre, I have to boast a little bit. I’m always simultaneously bewildered and pleased to remember that the first ever Thai restaurant in the United States lies a leisurely walk from the home I grew up in in Denver. Chada Thai in central Denver was established in the early 1960s; today, there’s 5,342 Thai restaurants in the US, an astounding number relative to the size of the Thai American community. It’s all thanks to a gastronomic diplomacy program launched by Thailand in the early 2000s to politically and culturally capitalize on the world’s love for their cuisine, and judging by the fact I’ve eaten Thai food twice this week, I’ve been hooked. Today, we study the inverse in how western culture has permeated Thai music—but, just as the country remained one of the few countries in Asia never colonized by Western powers, the musical results never sacrificed native sounds. 

Surf rock was revolutionary to how people across the world experienced the newfangled electric guitar. It promised the guitar’s role as a vivid narrator, detailing the winding path of a surfer coasting a gnarly monster or a hazy afternoon’s ocean breeze. The genre’s innovators like Dick Dale and the Ventures stretched out the guitar’s melodic and sonic possibilities, and unearthed the instrument’s sheer power by evoking the intensity of ripping waters. 

Though British band The Shadows were a little farther from a sun-dappled ocean than other surf rock counterparts, their string of instrumental runaway hits like “Apache” in the early ‘60s cast massive shadows (sorry) during the genre’s heyday. Where The Beatles birthed such animal-christened groups as The Monkees and The Byrds, The Shadows became the namesake of an entire short-lived chapter in Thai music history as the country’s more western-influenced music genres shifted with the rest of the world from jazz to rock ‘n roll. Wong translates to group. It’s evident these bands loved the Shadows so much that they were all grouped in via the label wong shadow.

Wong shadow pulled surf rock guitar sonics and rhythms from across the sea, while maintaining distinctly Thai percussion and melodic sensibilities. Musical manifestations that fuse traditional, regionally-specific sounds with genres beloved by indie tastemakers in any era like funk, jazz, and surf rock inevitably become objects of hipster fascination (looking at you, city pop and Ethio-jazz). Khruangbin, one of the most successful American psych-rock bands of the past couple decades, initially formed when its members bonded over rips of cult wong shadow music records from niche blogs. 

Today’s compilation album, though unfortunately resembling blackout poetry with the amount of songs unavailable on Spotify, covers a range of wong shadow takes by in essence three acts (the various groups under the PM title were all organized by the same guy). The dense traditional drumming and dramatic vocals setting the tone of “Kratae” puts forth the message that these songs will be elementally grounded in traditional Thai musical features; once that’s clear, it gives way to the twangs and wails of surf guitar. At times, this pairing is most striking when a familiar melody floats to the surface of the water; the metallic, thumping rhythms make an aptly intriguing counterpoint to the frenzied guitar voicing of the James Bond theme. Though the psychedelic twirls of the blistering “Klongyao” thrill, other compositions are more languid and rich, such as Johnny Guitar’s “Lao Kratob Mai” with the Thai xylophone-esque ranat front-and-center, the taphon drum anchoring the rhythm, the guitar and laid-back organ simply sharing space. The heady “Bangkok by Night” pays homage to Hawai’i’s influence on surf rock, its gentle melody mirroring those of slack-key guitar. For a short-lived scene that often gets one sentence of attention in Thai musical history, it suggests that Thai musicians are as deft in bridging traditional sounds to novel and resonant aspects of global music as the government is at building a global gastronomic empire.