It’s December, which means it’s time for me, as a dutiful blogger, critic, and self-appointed cultural arbiter, to put together my best-of lists. I need to listen to that Raekwon album again to confirm that I really do think exactly the same thing everyone else thinks. I need to check back in with that Mariah Carey album to make sure I really do think exactly the opposite of what everyone else thinks. I need to compare Of the Cathmawr Yards by the Horse’s Ha with Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest and Antony & the Johnsons’ The Crying Light to figure out which romantic, indie-folk-tinged work of idiosyncratic genius is the most geniuslike. I need to decide if I have to download the new Lightning Bolt album (legally, of course) and form an opinion on it, or whether it’d be safe to simply put it on my list on the assumption that it sounds like all the other Lightning Bolt albums.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I enjoyed the campy staging, but what really hooked me was the hook. “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” weds overdriven techno-pop to what from my uneducated perspective sounded like traditional Thai rhythms and instrumentation. The result is a little like American pop’s Bollywood fusions—e.g., Amerie’s “Heard ‘Em All”—though the Bowden song has a stiffer beat and less sinuous, more percussive Eastern interpolations. The whole package feels like some sort of robotic exotica, with all the resolutely corny unhipness that implies—except that Bowden’s pure, light phrasing occasionally detaches itself and goes wandering free, a little throb of lyricism amid the frantic thumping. The song is funny, surprising, impossibly catchy, and unexpectedly affecting. If it had come out this year—the video I saw was posted in 2007, which ruled that out—I would’ve put it on my best-of list without blinking.
Like many Thai pop stars, Bowden is mixed race; from the tidbits I’ve found scattered online, my best guess is that she’s partly Australian. (Though she’s a natural brunette, she sometimes plays up her Westernness by going blonde.) I’m reasonably sure that her first album was 1995’s Pretty P. The hit from that record is a by-the-numbers new-wavish pop-punk tune called “Sorry.” Its video features lots of neon colors and various nerdy guys who are all hyperbolically intimidated by Bowden’s tight DayGlo clothes and general hotness. The beat is overdriven and irritating, the guitar is formulaic, and Bowden sounds thin and strained trying to make herself heard over both.
Perhaps, as Chris says, this all coalesces logically into a single genre if you can understand the lyrics. But when I watch the video for “Sao Esan Raw Ruk,” with the gazebo tube and the floating Tron bits and the spangled dancing girls, I find it hard to believe that what Bowden’s singing has anything to do with rural poverty. The title translates roughly to “Looking for Young Love,” which isn’t all that helpful.
Certainly it’s fun to categorize and put things in order and make definitive pronouncements. (Ina Unt Ina‘s “Teacher” is the best song of the year, dammit!) But it’s nice too to remember that it really isn’t possible to judge the totality of the world’s music, or even anything close to it. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Be comforted, small one, in your smallness.” Whether or not I download that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, the world is still going to be bigger than my list. Which is a reassuring thought.
