Jamie Uy
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
Image: Scout Magazine
The year is 2018. Tonight, the viral internet music sensation Phum Viphurit will perform for the first time in Singapore. To say I’m excited to hear the twenty three-year-old Thai-born, New Zealand-raised indie folk singer-songwriter perform in person is an understatement. I’ve been bothering my mom for days by singing Viphurit’s easy-breezy, heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics at the top of my lungs in the living room, and by trying to explain on multiple grocery runs just what it is about Viphurit’s mellow, homegrown acoustic melodies that are so soul-pangingly endearing to me. To put it lightly, I’m hyped.
On the night of the concert, I carefully choose my outfit—a rainbow pride crop top, washed-out jeans, vintage suede teal mid-top Nikes, and a bangle bracelet with a daisy charm. I make my way downtown to Kilo Lounge, a hip nightclub near Chinatown that my brother dubs “a classy place with good gigs” and “where you go if don’t want to get trashed.” I meet my Hawaiian shirt-clad best friend and fall in line with the many artists and queer folk in Singapore who have come out of hiding to see Phum Viphurit live. It strikes me that everyone in the crowd is young, wearing 80’s-90’s-inspired or ironic-rad-kitsch fashion to match with Viphurit’s own retrogaze aesthetic. There must be over one hundred and fifty of us waiting outside the bar’s back entrance in the sticky summer heat. In true alternative gig fashion, the venue boasts just one freshly-plastered Phum Viphurit poster, the artist’s name in bright yellow font.
Being the kiasu fan that I am, I’ve already purchased my advance ticket online. I’m waiting for a third friend, who works part-time at a pottery studio, and I start to worry that he won’t be able to snag a ticket at the door. True enough, he is turned away. He messages me sadly, “why must Phum be such a popular dude :(”, which is pretty terrible, but also quite phenomenal for an indie artist. You see, Phum Viphurit is the kind of musician you discover by trusting the tides of what one of his interviewers, Karen Gwee, aptly called “the uncertain musical waters of YouTube”. If you’re already deep into what I affectionately call “artsy hoe shit” music (e.g., if subcultural subgenres like vaporwave, shoegaze, or dreamcore ring a bell) you’ve likely stumbled into Phum Viphurit from the recommendations these algorithms drum up based on your past preferences. What’s funny is that perhaps directly because of Viphurit garnering over 23 million views on the music videos posted by his label, Rats Records, he’s viewed as a digitally native artist without the respective merch-collecting, poster-making, airport-greeting fandom following.
I get the sense that everyone in the crowd is sort of surprised to see each other, as if we’re lowkey wondering, oh, damn, I was the only indie music lover in my school who knew this guy, there’s more of us? (a lot of Snapchat stories are being posted right now to document this turnout). Back high school, I was never part of the cool crowd, but standing amongst everyone rocking platform shoes and edgy graphic tees and trendy beanies, buzzing to see this guy perform, I get this inexplicable wow-I’m-in-the-Cool-Kids- club feeling that only the weird, off-filter camaraderie an indie music gathering can deliver.
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So what makes Phum Viphurit so popular? Like most Phum Viphurit fans, I discovered Viphurit’s music by happy accident. I was playing some of my favorite Japanese 80’s disco music in the background and the next song that YouTube queued was Viphurit’s first viral hit, a groovy, blissful, summery song called “Long Gone”. I looked up from my Chinese homework after jangling my foot to the tune for a while and thought, okay, I need to know who this artist is, and then listen to everything they’ve ever created.
I couldn’t look away from the music video, which was directed by Viphurit
himself, a Bangkok film school graduate. It’s the stuff of MTV dreams, filmed old-school like an AV home video, with nods to the delightful color- coordinated symmetry of Wes Anderson. A Thai girl wearing dungarees and Converse pops a cassette tape into her walkman and the first sunny notes of “Long Gone” start playing, with the title stylized in nostalgic bold WordArt as “a loop song”. The setting is school recess in the 80’s, with neon green yellow-pink stadium seating, and Phum Viphurit, clad in dungarees and firetruck red Converse as well, crooning into a karaoke box set up on the soccer field. The 3-minute, 37-second video sees the quirky pair in various locations around school (the playground, basketball courts, classroom exits) jamming out and dancing in that chilled-out way only the coolest of the cool can pull off. The relaxed vibes—with the gentle shower of cymbals, carefree guitar riffs, and shimmering synthesizer—is the 1980’s-esque 2018 hit you never knew you needed.
It’s mid-tempo, kick-back-and-ease-into-it, the perfect funky dorm party song for unwinding. Viphurit’s earnest, boyish voice sounds smooth and honeyed through his braces. Finally, the feel-good video closes out with a montage of pining-for-the-past photographs shot using 35mm film cameras — all that starry-flared, saturated, soft goodness. This is Phum Viphurit doing the equivalent of Huji Cam for music before Huji Cam was a thing, recycling the flower power aesthetic before Harry Styles’s “Sunflower, Vol. 6” burst on the scene and mainstream pop artists started really milking 70’s vibes like nobody’s business.
As a literary scholar and fumbling poet, I adore Viphurit’s whimsical lyrics, charmingly honest about the bread-and-butter of young person insecurities (“You hate the odd gap between my teeth / I love your curls”). But while Viphurit may sing of wistful subject matter like “The Art of Detaching One’s Heart” (the title of his song co-written with Jenny & The Scallywags), playful lyrics like “You love your bags of potato chips / I love them too / Who’ll make the next refrigerator trip?/ It’s always you”, “If we meet at the rendezvous / Take me away, sunray”, and “I’ve been hanging about on cloud-nine / Sippin’ on ageing fine wine” make Phum Viphurit’s debut crowdfunded EP, Manchild, a much more uplifting album than the work of his peers (compare, say, with fellow internet favorite Mac DeMarco’s soft rock/lo-fi sadness in Salad Days).
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And then there’s Viphurit’s global reach. When I told my Costa Rican friend over Skype that I was seeing Viphurit live in a few days, she gave a half shriek, half-bark, “THE Phum?!”. Perhaps because of Viphurit’s own transnational childhood, his use of English as musical lingua franca, and YouTube fame, his audience spans countries around the globe. He’s gone on tour around the United States, Europe, Southeast and East Asia, filling hole in-the-wall bars and nightclubs and tentpole music festivals. Over the course of October 2018, he will play in Poland, Germany, the UK, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In November 2018, he’s slated to play at the two-day music and taco festival, Tropicalia, in Long Beach, California alongside other cult indie artists like boy pablo, Kero Kero Bonito, Summer Salt, No Vacation, Peach Pit, and, of course, the psychedelic pop/slacker rock king Mac DeMarco himself.
It was at New York University Abu Dhabi that I first pondered the amusing surreality of a Filipino-Chinese Singaporean in Abu Dhabi (me), forcing my Russian, Slovenian, and Indian-raised-in-the-UAE suitemates to sing along to a song by a Thai/New Zealand artist during one of our many Thursday night karaoke-and-movie sessions. Viphurit, who moved to New Zealand at age nine and returned to Bangkok at age nineteen for college, has been nicknamed Thailand’s “lover boy” after the title of his latest hit single, which quickly amassed over 16 million views alone on YouTube. The tongue-in cheek moniker is quite fitting given Viphurit’s handsome babyface and his numerous songs on the elusive nature of millennial generation romance, but I’m also fascinated by how Viphurit presents a very different kind of “Neo Soul sweetheart” in the English indie music scene, by virtue of his Thai heritage. It’s hard to say where he fits in: the Bangkok music scene doesn’t seem completely home for him, although he has mentioned that the cheesy aesthetic “Long Gone” was in part inspired by the music videos of Tata Young, a late 90’s Thai pop singer.
I’m fascinated by Phum Viphurit because before I discovered him, I had never followed a South East Asian musician so closely. Phum Viphurit’s real name is Viphurit “Phum” Siritip. After some digging, when I learned that Phum Viphurit had grown up in-between New Zealand and Thailand, I felt like singing. Like Phum Viphurit, I grew up in a country (Singapore) that was not my parents’ country (Philippines). My mother tongue is English, not Tagalog, Hokkien, nor Kapangpangan (the languages my Filipino-Chinese parents spoke growing up in the Philippines) – a privilege that has granted me numerous study opportunities, but also means I cannot converse freely with my grandparents and cousins at holiday parties.
I sympathize with Viphurit, who is always being asked in interviews whether he will write songs soon in Thai. He carefully stylizes himself in artist biographies as a “Thai-born, New Zealand-raised” musician, and I think about how those hyphens tug at my heart. I, too, am hyphenated and often lost: Filipino-Chinese heritage, Singapore-raised. I read an interview in which Viphurit recalls that the cheerful albeit wistful vibes of “Long Gone” (“So tonight, we’ll dance, let’s pretend we rule this town / In tomorrow’s dawn / I’ll be long gone”) were inspired by the realization that he would leave his friends and his hometown of Hamilton, New Zealand to go back to Bangkok. I’m struck by how Viphurit’s songs float, buoyant across the seas of information on the World Wide Web, and defy passport categorization.
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To me, the Phum phenomenon is inextricably tied up with transnationalism. Part of it is personal. In 2011, my father got a new job, and my family moved to Bangkok for about three years. I cannot claim any further roots in Thailand, other than I lived there for a while, found people to be awkward and laugh with in middle school, and cried when I left to return to Singapore, but I still remember my time there with utmost fondness and clarity: the sizzling of the 24-hour Took Lae Dee restaurant by our apartment, the green mango snacks my brother and I would buy at school, the aroma of floral garlands sold on the street, the Loy Krathong banana leaf boats we would set adrift in Benchakiti Park, and the comforting rhythms of my friends speaking Thai in the cafeteria. I started writing poetry seriously in Bangkok. When I moved to university, oddly, the two foods I missed the most were sinigang, a Filipino tamarind soup, and tom yum goong, a hot and sour Thai soup with shrimp which I hadn’t had the authentic version of in years. Phum Viphurit, who sings in English with adolescent sincerity, who declares in his interviews he wants to show the world what “Thai kids can do”, is my odd connection to the Thailand I lived in as a preteen. In other interviews, Viphurit says his debut EP Manchild was borne out of “reverse culture shock” and the awkward process of becoming an adult in a country he hadn’t lived in for a decade. Viphurit’s music, bittersweet as mangos, is also inextricably linked to nostalgia. It reminds me of the dizzy jig of placemaking.
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When Phum Viphurit and his band finally come onstage, all the phones whip out (I surreptitiously notice there’s a lot of Huji Cam and LOMO cameras). The cheers are utterly raucous. He goes straight into “Strangers in a Dream”, and without prodding, the whole crowd is bobbing along as best we can in a jam-packed space, shouting all the lyrics word-for-word. I can’t help but be cognizant of the fact that this is one of the first concerts I’ve gone to for a Southeast Asian music talent, which I immediately feel ashamed of – why do I know Mitski’s discography, but not a single Southeast Asian up-and- coming singer? At the same time, I wonder how “Asian” one has to be to represent your ethnicity. Phum Viphurit, with his strange cross-cultural musical beginnings, represents a rare note of Asian-ness in the English indie mixtape. I wonder if the entire room, filled with Singaporeans from various backgrounds (Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasians, Filipinos, and so on and so forth) feel the same way as I do to see a Southeast Asian, one of our own, killing it on stage.
Of course, Viphurit isn’t read as a groundbreaking Asian talent by everyone — for example, my childhood Thai friends say that he’s not really seen as a Thai musician within Thailand; besides that, his accentless English and pan-Asian good looks afford him a precious global mobility that few Thai, or even Singaporean kids can attest to. But Viphurit is good, the sort of good that makes you want to claim that he was raised back in your ASEAN neighborhood. Years later after this Collective Minds sold-out show, he will release his 2023 album The Greng Jai Piece with folk bops like “Temple Fair”, Lady Papaya”, and “Greng Jai Please” slyly winking at Thai society from a kaleidoscopic local and foreign lens (“Welcome to society / member of the land of smiles / be sure to brush your teeth”, “You’ll say anything to save your face / this is how we all survive / what a time to be alive”).
In person, his voice is much thicker, but still tender and passionate. It’s an intimate performance, and impossible not to like. Once, he fumbles the intro to one of his hits and, at the sight of his sheepish expression, the room peals into bell-like laughter. He banters about unfortunate first loves and cringey first song-writing attempts and congratulates Singapore on our recent 53rd birthday, which makes the crowd go wild. He apologizes for drinking water mid-set, and every time the crowd knows the lyrics to one of his songs, he gives a delighted, “hey, thank you” and appears genuinely dazed, smiling even wider. At one point he asks if there is anyone from Thailand in the crowd and a gaggle of girls feverishly wave their hands. Viphurit bows respectfully and says hello in Thai. Tonight, at a Phum Viphurit concert in 2018, transcendental tropical songs go on forever, Asian kids and the culturally confused sway to the guitar, and everything will be alright. Phum sings, “My international mystery/I let you in” in “Strangers in a Dream”. Joy needs no translation.
Jamie Uy is a M.A. English candidate at Nanyang Technological University researching environments in Singapore science fiction. Her academic and creative interests include ecocriticism, popular culture, and postcolonialism. Her creative writing appears in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, and OF ZOOS, among other publications.