| Volume XIII Number 8 April 15, 2005 |
Beachcomber Photo by Steve Propes CAMBODIAN RAPPER Prach Ly. |
Local Rapper Keeps Cambodian Culture Aliveby: Steve Propes
At age 25, Cambodian hip-hop artist Prach Ly is Long Beach's most recent successful music entrepreneur, having sold his second CD, "Dalama...The Lost Chapter," one CD at a time, nearly into the six figures. Not long ago, Sony approached him for a deal, but he turned them down. The deal wasn't right.
But now he's moving to the majors. "I've been in the triple-A minors too long." But that will happen only after the release of the third of his trilogy, "Dalama...Memoirs of the Invisible War" on his own Mujestic label.
He's ready to share his observations in songs like "Sic (Society's Illest Chapter)," a reference to 9/11. Or on "Great Escape," with a Cambodian classical music background, a reference to his own escape from Cambodia. "It was basically over a mountain filled with snakes and man-made booby traps. We only took what we could carry. We had to stay awake and search for water."
Two months ago, Ly made a three-week sojourn to Cambodia, his first visit since his escape at age four. "I went to where I was born, to see the hut and the tree. Those in charge had taken the hut down. They didn't want memories of the camp, so they actually burned the tree down."
"After I came back from Cambodia, I had a whole direction for the CD. 'The Invisible War' has nothing to do with a particular war, this is my war, what I'm seeing through my eyes. I went through Cambodia twice. I went to some places that broke my heart and some places where I was inspired.
I met most of the musicians that are still alive, but are being neglected by the government. I saw everything clearly. When I went there, my vision was murky."
"I want to say stuff the big label might not let me say if I got a deal," said Ly. "I'm still going to maintain my personal beliefs, though I'll have to respect the opinions of others."
As reported in Cambodia Daily on Jan. 27, Ly stated, "'I'm not here to start a revolution, but if it does, it does. I say what I see, and I see what I say. I'm working on my last independent album .... and when it comes out it's going to raise a lot of eyebrows and a lot of people are going to be upset. I don't really care. I'm not going to mention names, but they're going to know who I'm talking about."
And what he's talking about is 1975, which notorious Cambodian dictator Pol Pot called "The Year Zero." "That's when three million Cambodians died," said Ly, though others place the number at between 1.75 to 2 million.
"We try to understand why. He wanted to bring social classes back to the glory days of Cambodia, but you can't do that. He never should've gotten power. Though the three million people died, there's not much documentation to back it up. But we have living documents and I'm here to remind people."
Ly's impressive career as a best-selling rap artist began during the 2000 Cambodian New Year's event. After being turned down by the organizers, during a power failure when people were beginning to leave, he commandeered the still-live stage microphone in what he calls an "act of Buddha." He had brought his first CD, the now impossible to find "Dalama... The End'n' Is Just the Beginnin'" to pass out to fans.
According to an article in PBS "Frontline" website, "he didn't have a mixing board. He used a karaoke machine and sampled sound bites from old Khmer Rouge propaganda speeches to create what he calls an ' autobiography,' reciting stories he'd heard from his refugee family to deliver a blistering history lesson about Cambodia's genocide.
The first 1,000 released, all individually numbered, sold out quickly. Ly retains #1 and #1000.
But the best sales of this first CD were totally off the books. A disc jockey from Cambodia, DJ Sope, was at the New Year's celebration and took the Ly CD back to his homeland. From radio play, the bootleggers took over and Ly's CD became a Cambodian best-seller under the name of "Khmer Rouge Rap," until it was taken off the air by government censors. None of the profits from the bootleg reached Ly. But he's not worried about that. He's going to break into that market yet.
During his visit, Ly went to Cambodia's largest CD store and saw a copy of his bootlegged CD on the wall. "They were selling it for $3."
A clerk told him, "This is one of our top selling CDs, it's the first CD that introduces rap to our culture and that gets into our culture." Prach asked him, "Do you know what he looks like?" "I have no idea," the clerk answered. Ly didn't identify himself. "I left it at that.
He'll see my picture when the new CD comes out."
In 2004, Ly was a major part of the "Spirit of Cambodia Tour," which traveled from coast to coast, from Rhode Island and Massachusetts, through Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota to Washington.
Audiences varied. In Tacoma, 20,000 showed up, while only 50 came out in Massachusetts. That wasn't a setback. He likes smaller crowds. But it was this person-to-person contact that helped him sell 93,000 copies of his second CD, well over what most major labels do on many sophomore releases.
Ly uses classical music of Cambodia and traditional dances in his performances. "Cambodian traditional instruments are like the Pin Peat, made out of wood and metal and played for royalty. No one has ever used it in other ways. It's a reflection of what we do, what we buy."
Other tracks on the upcoming CD include "Therapeutic" and "Poison Tree," which has to do with stress disorder. "Art of Facts" is about a messenger delivering the art of facts. Themes have to do with discipline and what the western world might consider child abuse. Some customs persist. Of the Cambodian population in Long Beach, Ly estimates that about "30 percent are bilingual." Despite that statistic, "I refuse to let my culture die."
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