Everyone does their part in this country to love what we used to be.”įor many members of the diaspora who grew up in exile, music was often the only real tie to what the country once was. “We’re scared that we’re being culturally erased off the face of the earth because of the genocide, everything has been about rebuilding. “For the last 20 years, the idea has been to preserve our music-don’t touch it, don’t change it, don’t do anything that might affect its dignity,” says Mam. Yet for all the effort to salvage the history of Cambodia’s musical traditions, until very recently, little attention was paid to creating new ones. Organizations like Cambodia Living Arts, which was founded in Cambodia in 1998, have since worked to track down and support the few surviving artists of that lost generation. As a result, during Mam's childhood, most of the music coming out of Cambodia consisted of pirated songs or karaoke-style covers of Western music.

With the currency ruined by hyperinflation, aspiring artists had little hope of earning a living by writing original songs. Virtually all of the musicians who survived the purges fled the country and remained in exile. Sinn Sisamouth, who John Pirozzi, director of Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock And Roll compared to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, earned considerable acclaim for fusing elements of traditional Khmer vocal stylings with the rhythm and blues coming out of the West.Įven after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the once-thriving Cambodian music scene was too decimated to recover. King Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Norodom Monineath were musicians and fervent patrons of the arts. In the late 1960s and ‘70s, Phnom Penh was a flourishing musical hotbed, where legendary crooners like Ros Serey Sothea and Yol Aularong belted out love ballads or garage rock songs to adoring crowds.

“This is exactly what I came to do, because we’re much more than that. “When many people see Cambodia, they think of the temples of Angkor Wat or they think of genocide-they don’t think about our music,” Mam says. Now, she is working to build a future for a new generation of Khmer singers, songwriters, and musicians. For Mam, this moment has been a lifetime in the making.īorn in San Jose, California, to refugees who fled the Cambodian genocide, she grew up listening to her mother reminisce about the grandeur of Cambodia’s past and the culture that was all but ended by the Khmer Rouge.

Khmer old songs 1975