#john pirozzi

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Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (Xan Cassavetes, 2004).

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No One's Easy to Love by Sharon Van Etten from the album Remind Me Tomorrow - Directed by Katherine Dieckmann

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Don't Think I've Forgotten (2015): Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll

A documentary film Don't Think I've Forgotten by John Pirozzi is a great work unveiling and exposing the obscured refinement of Cambodian rock and roll of the 1960-1970s, as well as the most poignant events of the Cambodian history occurring under the rule of Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian culture of pre-communists' era had almost disappeared, as the regime has been seeking to eliminate all the links with the past Western influence and older cultural achievements while establishing a new agrarian state. However, some shreds of evidence and memory had survived, and the film Don't Think I've Forgotten aims to revive the beautiful Cambodian music.

The film consists of interviews with the survivors of Khmer Rouge Genocide, historical footages of the 1960-1970-s, Western news reports on the events in Cambodia and of course lots of music. After all, Don't Think I've Forgotten is a musical film, and during the first hour, the viewers learn about Cambodia's development in 1960-s and prominence of their music. The last part of the film is more focused on historical accounts. Cambodia gained independence in the 1950-s overthrowing. Under the leadership of Prince Niradom Sihanouk, the music was encouraged to grow and spread across the country. It was highly influenced by the Western and particularly American culture, so the most important and popular genre was rock and roll. This music has been also in the zenith of popularity at the time of Lon Nol's Khmer Republic (1970-1975), however, Khmer Rouge had put an end to it after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975.

The first singer of the 1960-1970-s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten tells about is Sinn Sisamouth (born in 1935). The most influential Cambodian singer of the 1960-1970-s, he has been mixing different genres from rock and roll to jazz and blues. His popularity was tremendous. Don't Think I've Forgotten tries to recall the details of his biography, though very little is known. Being one of the obvious targets of Khmer Rouge elimination of cultural influencers, he disappeared in 1976, and the circumstances of his death and unclear.

Ros Serey Sothea (born in 1948) was the most prolific and prominent lady in Cambodian music of the following period. The film features an interview with her sister who had survived the Cambodian Genocide and other musicians and music fans sharing their memories. Ros Serey Sothea had recorded hundreds of songs during her short career and died under unknown circumstances at the age of 28-29. In Don't Think I've Forgotten the viewers hear the records of her golden voice and see the rare footages and pictures with Ros Serey Sothea and the front covers of her original records.

Pen Ran credited as the Second Voice of Khmer music scene shares the same fate with Ros Serey Sothea and Sinn Sisamouth. Nobody knows the way she died. Yet her music and distinctive strong voice still live, and this film is a great claim we have not forgotten the beauty of this music. This documentary also comes across the stories of other Cambodian bands and singers, such as Baksey Cham Krong, Drakkar, Houy Meas, Yol Aularong and others. It’s not only focused on Cambodian rock and roll, as the singers used to mixed genres. It’s about the obscured music culture of Cambodia in general. Profiling the work and commitment of these musicians is the greatest achievement of John Pirozzi's film.

Above music and accounts of Cambodian musicians' lives and careers, the viewers get a historical glimpse into the rapid change of regimes in Cambodia in the 1960-1970-s ending up with Khmer Rouge tyranny and Cambodian Genocide. How could anybody allow such a slaughter of their own people is a question we are asking ourselves while watching this film. The Cambodian Genocide had killed around 2-3 million people (which is 25% of the country's population). The target of the regime was to eliminate any influence of the Western world and to build the reserved self-sufficient economy and agrarian state. To prevent dissidence, the soldiers have been killing educated people, artists, musicians and those who refused to leave the cities for working at the collective farms. They have been spotting everybody who could possibly be a dissident, in order to kill him or her. Elimination of the musicians was one of the main points, as the music is very influential. One could have been killed for listening to the old music, singing the old songs or having a record of pre-communists' musician in possession. Khmer Rouge wanted to erase the memory of the past open culture, and the obscured musician of the 1960-1970-s became martyrs along with the whole Cambodian nation going through one of the most brutal crimes against humanity committed by any regime.

The brilliance of Cambodian traditional rock and roll of the 1960-1970-s and these sublime voices the Cambodian singers used to sing is something the world has to know more of. A documentary film Don't Think I've Forgotten is a glimpse into those days with the eyewitness accounts of the musicians, artists, directors who had survived the Cambodian Genocide and more than twenty catchy tunes of the 1960-1970-s. John Pirozzi's film is a glance at the tragic events from the eyes of the musicians whose contribution to the nation's culture was essential. Even though almost all of them have been slaughtered, beauty is immortal, and this film is a manifestation of the fact that the world has not forgotten those days and culture.

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Jupiter 4 by Sharon van Etten from the album Remind Me Tomorrow - Director: Katherine Dieckmann

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The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret by Queens of the Stone Age from the album Rated R - Director: John Pirozzi

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"Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll is a 2014 documentary film, directed by John Pirozzi, about Cambodian rock music in the 1960s and 1970s, before the Khmer Rouge regime and Cambodian genocide." (Don't Think I've Forgotten - Wikipedia)

Interview with John Pirozzi

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#91 Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten / Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (2014)

Director: John Pirozzi

Cambodia

Currently, America spends a lot of time bitching about globalism and the curses of neo-liberal expansion through the twentieth century. The same people doin’ the bitching probably don’t want to give up a tasty meal, that might very well be a result of cultural fusion. It’s not all bad. It’s not always agendas of empire expansion and might makes right. Good things, great things, can happen when cultures collide.

So what happens when a country like Cambodia begins to emulate and transform an American music genre like rock and roll, (which in turn was a spin–off of African, blues, and gospel)? This is the subject of the documentary Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten. A wonderful film that chronicles the important performers of music in Cambodian culture during the 1960s and 70s. A nostalgic and progressive time frame before the internal political conflict that resulted in the problematic Khmer Rouge.

Caught right in the middle of twentieth century nuclear power proxy wars, Cambodia strove to remain neutral. It was to suffer a similar fate as a country like Iran, in which a period of cultural and economic prosperity was toppled to give way to a repressive political regime, with a mandate to eradicate any trace of Western influence. It was in the midst of this turmoil that the film introduces the top Cambodian singers and songwriters that actively sought and mimicked those musical cues specific to rock and roll coming out of Europe and America.

With this kind of cultural grafting, came Cambodia’s unique take on American / Cuban / European sounds and rhythms. And just like what happened in the United States, rock and roll became the soundtrack for the social and political upheavals of the generation of the last half of the century. We don’t watch footage of napalm and choppers pulling the wounded off the Vietnam battlefields to the songs of Glen Miller. Swing had given way to electric amplification and the electric guitar. The Cambodian took cues from a spectrum of American greats like Sinatra and Santana, and blended it into their own exotic manifestation of Cold War soundtracks.

It’s interesting in these kind of cultural mutations to see what is maintained from the outside influence, and what gets discarded or distorted in favor of more local stylistic treatments. In some cases, the Cambodian version of an American rock and roll riff sounded better than its source of inspiration. And once you had the Cambodians utilize influences like James Brown or Sam Cooke, things got really interesting.

Culturally, the problem with a political stance like nationalism. A nation can isolate its own people and “culture,” and while it maintains its own sense of “purity”, it loses a lot of potential that could make its way in from outside sources. So, the cost on maintaining your singular uniqueness is, you resist outside contribution, things stagnate, and become a bit too incestuous.

The documentary does not separate the musical changes from the political context of the time. Cambodia’s cultural renaissance was a top down implementation, and its political machinery was responsible for the nation’s endorsement and active popularization of all the arts. Not a bad thing, but once again a situation very close to what happened in Iran right before a fundamentalist revolution put the brakes on the liberal ideas and re-imposed a hard line, anti-western, cultural cleansing.

Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten is a good documentary, especially for music fans, or those like myself, that had no idea this stuff was out there, let alone it’s cultural origins.

Playlist is available on Spotify. Crank it up, have a flashback to grooves of the Cold War!

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Various Artists—Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten (Dust To Digital)

Next time you feel oppressed by the rate of change, consider what Cambodia has gone through since the end of World War II. In 30 years the country shook off Japanese occupation and French colonial domination, simultaneously adopted a royal government and a fast track to modernization, and then became a collateral victim of indiscriminate American and Vietnamese actions during the Cold War. The most wrenching change, of course, was the half-decade reign of the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist movement that wanted to remake the country into a non-industrial, subsistence economy without religion or outside culture. Their efforts to do so wiped out infrastructure, culture, and a quarter of the population, and set the country up for decades of poverty and domination by neighboring nations. 

The movie Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten looks back at an emerging popular cultural that was able to accommodate royal and military co-option, but could not survive outright extermination. It focuses on the people who made and loved Cambodian rock and roll, and serves up plenty of music that justifies that love. While it’s impossible to tell such a story without delivering a gut punch of tragedy, the documentary rightly spends more time celebrating its subject rather than it does lamenting its fate, and this mostly delightful album reflects that balance. 

This soundtrack overlaps with similarly themed compilations like Cambodian Rocks, but more than justifies its existence despite some duplication and a couple dodgy song selections. For a start, while any annotation would be better than the total absence of artist and track names on Cambodian Rocks, the booklet’s artist bios and color illustrations are on a par with the good work of the Soundway and Analog Africa labels, which is an especially remarkable accomplishment when you consider the ruin wreaked upon record collections by war, genocide, and Cambodia’s steamy climate. And while other Cambodian collections are often sourced from tapes that have had anachronistic keyboard and drum machine tracks added, this one is sourced from brutally rare vinyl. It’s as close to the real sound of the music of Cambodia’s golden age of modernization as you’ll ever get. 

The album starts with a decidedly non-rock piece of choral music called “Phnom Penh” (named for Cambodia’s capitol city) that was composed by the nation’s ruler, Prince Norodom Sihannouk. Sihanouk was a bit of an aesthete — he played clarinet, wrote songs, and made movies, often representing himself as a heroic figure. If he had lived in saner times, one can imagine him being viewed with a combination of bemusement and appreciation, given the primacy he gave to the arts. The song is probably present more for narrative than musical reasons, but it’s easy enough to skip. 

The next 18 tracks portray a musical culture that thrived on the ethos of change and newly possible cultural exchange much like Ethiopia’s did in the years before Haile Selassie’s death. The music, some of which assigns Khmer lyrics to blithely appropriated familiar rock and roll melodies, encompasses pre-Beatles crooning, post-Mersey beat garage rave-ups and heavy rock that freely flies the freak flag. Some performers turn up again and again, most notably the honey-voiced dean of Khmer crooning, Sin Sisamouth. “Under The Sound Of Rain” sounds like a cross between Frank Sinatra and Gene Pitney, except for the mellifluous singing, which imports a pre-Westernization fluidity of pitch. The slow bongos, silvery strings and glowing organ notes on the title song, which was recorded the year before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, bring him closer to French soundtrack pop, or maybe the Algerian approximations of it that have turned up on certain Sublime Frequencies collections. His female counterpart was Ros Serey Sothea, whose exquisite command of her higher register combined with her ability to impart both vulnerability and exuberance. This made her sound equally appropriate crooning the dreamy “Heaven’s Song” and belting the swaggering, fuzz-encrusted “Old Pot Still Cooks Good Rice.” Pretty much everything hits the spot except for Pou Vannary’s wobbly cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got A Friend,” which, like the Prince’s song, seems to be present for reasons of narrative rather than quality. 

All of the aforementioned performers disappeared once the Khmer Rouge took over. This music expresses an enthusiasm for foreign influences and modernism that was exactly what the new regime wanted to expunge, and musicians were held a high position on the long list of people marked for death; Sieng Vanthy, one of the few singers on Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten who is still alive, escaped murder by passing herself off as a fried banana vendor. It falls to the final song, Cheam Chansovannary’s “Oh, Phnom Penh” to express the desolation. It’s not rock and roll at all, but an a cappella cry of loss and defiance. You might skip over this one too, not due to any lack of quality, but because silence is the only thing that makes sense before or after it. It deserves to stand alone, a monument to a people brought low by foreign powers that carried on like some jerk throwing cigarette butts out of the car window during a drought and murderous, home-grown extremism. 

Bill Meyer