Making His Voice Heard in Cambodia

Cambodians tend to treat the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime as a period to be forgotten: School textbooks barely mention it; popular literature glosses over it; parents are often reluctant to delve into their private horrors.

Now, a brash new rap album made in Southern California is breaking the taboos by telling young Cambodians about the darkest chapter of their country’s history.

At parties, in bars and homes here, the album has teens buzzing about songs on death, forced labor and broken families.

“The End’n Is Jus the Beginnin”--written by a Cambodian American--reflects on the years in the 1970s when 1.7 million people died in the communist Khmer Rouge’s attempt to turn Cambodia into a large agrarian commune.

The 17-song album was recorded in a garage in Long Beach by Prach Ly, a 21-year-old who has never returned to Cambodia since emigrating to the United States in 1983, at age 4.

He said he never envisioned the music having an impact in Cambodia. “I was very surprised at how big this got. When I did it, it was just a demo, to pass around to a few friends,” Prach Ly said in a phone interview from Long Beach.

“The lyrics, the message had been inside me a long time, and I wanted to release it,” he said, adding that he is hoping a record company will help him record the songs in a studio.

Three songs are in the Khmer language, and the rest are in English interspersed with Khmer.

“When I first heard this, it was, ‘Wow! This is exciting,”’ said Nguon Phan Sophea, 24, who owns the Galaxy CD shop in Phnom Penh. He said he heard the CD last year at the home of a friend who had bought it in Long Beach, where many Cambodian immigrants live.

He borrowed the CD, made 50 copies, designed a yellow-and-green CD cover, called it “Cambodian Rap” and put the discs up for sale for $2 in his shop.

There are no laws protecting intellectual property rights in Cambodia, and virtually all of the music sold here is pirated.

Nguon said he has sold nearly 300 copies of the CD and let Cambodia’s largest music store, CD World, burn copies from his. CD World has sold more than 400 copies, store manager Chy Sila said.