Sound Check - Columnist Geoff Carter: Surveying the musical landscape in a foreign land

Friday, Nov. 26, 1999 | 9:51 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com

On the second day of my two-week vacation, I began to hatch an elaborate plan that would keep me in Thailand indefinitely. I would peddle my talents to one of Bangkok's English-language newspapers (neither the Bangkok Post nor The Nation seemed to have a music columnist, probably by choice). I would work as a club DJ in the evenings under the nom de guerre "Mr. Vegas," playing sets rich with Apollo 440, Louis Prima and the obligatory Ricky Martin (Latin music is huge in Thailand clubs).

In fact, I would do just about any damn thing to stay in Thailand as long as possible -- subsisting on fresh fruit and green curry, duckin' and dodgin' through the extraordinary traffic jams on a secondhand Honda scooter and just plain marveling at Thai culture, which is exactly five feet to the left of everything you know. The people are physically and spiritually beautiful, and the cities and towns they've built around themselves are so rich with wonder that I felt like I was sleepwalking most of the time, led by visions whose shape and color couldn't be intellectualized or even rightly described.

So ... with the Chao Phraya, the Reclining Buddha or the Chatuchak Weekend Market waiting at the end of a 100-baht cab ride, what the hell was I doing at Tower Records, listening to Thai pop music at the listening station?

Oh yeah, that's right -- I'm an idiot. Did I mention that you could get a really good one-hour massage for about 10 bucks?

Actually, music is one of the clearer windows into a culture. Film aims to refract the world in which it was made, instead of reflecting it; art is as much about an individual's vision as what inspired that individual; literature is subject to what mind the reader brings to it. Music, by comparison, is relatively guileless -- it is, after all, created with the intention of being heard by somebody -- perhaps a bunch of somebodies.

Judging by what was selling at Tower's Bangkok Emporium store, Thais are really into the soft-rock thing. The local sound is closer to Counting Crows than Korn -- think of a gently rolling rhythm track, acoustic guitars and lyrics that probably express how absolutely stunning you look tonight. There's a few wildcards -- the best-selling Thai pop release at Tower last week was by house music diva Kinetic Kristin -- but by and large, most of what I previewed was fairly sedate.

But that's not the whole story. As I mentioned before, the Thais have gone coco-nutty for Latin beats: Bangkok clubs play Ricky Martin and Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5" as if they were going out of style. A fierce techno underground rages, according to reports -- I never found it myself. (I was too busy getting massages.)

Marches blast at a deafening volume in supermarkets. Love ballads pour from every hotel lounge (one such lounge, in Phuket, boasted a keyboardist and six, count 'em, six female vocalists, who took turns). And His Majesty, The King of Thailand -- a jazz/blues composer of the first water -- sells CDs by the truckload. The King. You can't come up with an American equivalent of that amazing true Thai fact, because none exists.

It was little short of liberating to my jaded eyes and ears. Here were a people that, as near as I could tell, didn't necessarily know music, but knew what they liked. They picked what they liked of Western sounds (Mariah Carey, Leftfield, Savage Garden, the Latin beats) without fretting over how those sounds fit together. Thai popular culture is not being weighted down by irony, as is ours; rather, it is a culture of subtlety.

Meaning: There are no "alternative" weekly papers, whining about the raw deal local musicians are perpetually getting, or freezing out artists celebrated in their pages last year with snot-nosed malice this year. There is no second-guessing -- if the Thais like a band, they really like it, and if it disagrees with them, they simply ignore it.

Inspired by their integrity, I made a new plan at the end of my trip. In this scheme, I would return to Las Vegas, resume work on my column, and simply review records. I've been concentrating too hard on the why (irony) and not hard enough on the what (subtlety). If you're anything like me -- and if you've gotten this far, you are -- you don't give a damn about major label politics, music delivery systems or the almighty MP3. You just want to know what to listen to, and, as an afterthought, why.

I don't presume to know your tastes. All I know is that there are an awful lot of records on my desk, and beginning next week, I'll begin to tell you about them, two or three at a time. From my reviews, you can build your own judgments, because I trust you to know your own mind, your own tastes.

I'm going to try and cut most of the irony from my diet. We'll see how it works out. In its place, I'll boost my intake of green curry -- which may not do anything for you, but it will sure make me a lot happier. I'll see you next week.