Here's something nice and light today, since it's my birthday (if only for a few more minutes). I think an occasional musician profile will add some more cultural variety to the blog. The first one will be the rock band Silly Fools (ซิลลี่ ฟูลส์).
Silly Fools was the first Thai band I came to like, back in aught-two, mostly through sheer virtue of the band's ubiquity at the time. I think the first song I ever heard was the single วัดใจ from their album Juicy, which came out a few months before I arrived in Thailand for the first time. They're not my favorite Thai band, but I still enjoy listening to those singles I "grew up" to Thai pop culture with.
วัดใจ - Thai and English lyrics - from the album Juicy (2002):
For the less rock-inclined, there's also a cover done by high school-age kids for the film Seasons Change.
ขี้หึง - from the album Juicy (2002):
น้ำลาย - Thai and English lyrics - from the album King Size (2004):
Another earlier track I like is คิดถึง, off their 2000 album Mint. I can only find one copy on YouTube, and embedding is disabled for it. So you can watch it on there, if you like.
Sadly, the band as I came to know it is effectively dead. The frontman for Silly Fools, Toe (โต), quit the band in 2006 for religious reasons. In an apparent international crossover attempt a la Shakira or Thailand's own Sek Loso, the band replaced Toe with Benjamin Tuffnell, a Korean-born American singer. The band's new material is now exclusively English. I don't know what they're doing about their back catalog, though, so it seems like a strange choice.
I like จิ๊จ๊ะ, although directly translating "แต่อย่ามาจิ๊จ๊ะให้มันมากไป...หากเปลี่ยนเป็นจ๊ะจ๋าจะดีกว่ามั้ย" into natural sounding English is something of a challenge!
ReplyDeleteIt seems strange to me that they can carry on calling themselves Silly Fools once the lead singer has gone and the sound is totally different. Then again, it seems to be a not all that uncommon practice in Thailand as Potato and Hyper both carried on after changing lead singers too.
จิ๊ิจ๊ะ is a good one, too. I've always thought that line is a very clever use of the language.
ReplyDeleteYeah, there's a short shelf life for band lineups here. It's interesting how the band you first got famous in becomes your nick-surname (to coin an ugly new word). Like เสก โลโซ or แอ๊ด คาราบาว. Even when you've gone solo or are in a new band, people still refer to you by your nickname+old-band-name.
And if you become famous as a solo artist, the pattern is nickname+real-first-name, as in เสือ ธนพล or เบิร์ด ธงไชย.