Don't Think I've Forgotten

I think I've mentioned a group blog that I read where one of the posters once a week "recommends" mostly schlocky stuff that's available to stream for free on Tubi. A few weeks ago the guy picked a movie that's so raunchy that I won't name it here. But I mention that because in looking for the title, Tubi's search algorithm gave me a documentary I'd never heard of but which sounded interesting: Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll. Naturally, being intrigued by the subject matter, I decided to watch it.

As you can figure from the title, the documentary covers the music, most of it pop, if not quite the harder rock and roll, that was developed in Cambodia in the years after it gained independence from France in the early 1950s up to 1975, when the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War and and basically destroyed the entire urban population in their drive to create an agrarian paradise. Many -- but not all -- of the musicians profiled in the movie were killed during the nearly four-year reign of terror, and some of the surviving musicians are interviewed along with a host of other people from western historians to people who were just plain fans of the Cambodian pop of the era. Also needless to say, but a lot of that music gets played over the course of the movie.

But you can't discuss a topic like Cambodian pop music without discussing the political situation that developed the music. King Norodom Sihanouk had learned French during his childhood when the country was a French colony and had some sympathy for western culture, to the point that when he became king of an independent Cambodia after the French left, he set about trying to modernize the country which included musically, with a fusion of traditional Cambodian singing patters and western (not just French but Latin American and eventually US American) rhythms and melodic structures. The led to a flourishing of live bands, recording being a nascent thing in Cambodia until the national radio set up a recording studio.

However, politics was never far away, especially after the French left Vietnam and that country split in two. The movie charitably portrays the King as trying to walk a tightrope, and this portrayal made me think of King Mongkut from Anna and the King of Siam, a man who was trying to modernize his country against the backdrop of outside forces who want in along with a domestic elite that may not want modernization. That domestic elite doesn't seem to be quite present in Cambodia, although I would think that's in part because Cambodia had had almost a century of modernization that Siam hadn't had.

Sihanouk also officially tried to keep the country neutral between the US and France on one side, and the various Communist countries on the other, although in reality he also had some sympathy for the Communists. But his political party was officially non-Communist and set up a one-party state. However, when the army leader Lon Nol led a coup in 1970 that deposed Sihanouk, he went into exile in the PRC and supported the Khmer Rouge.

Meanwhile, Cambodian music was developing throughout this turbulent period combined with the war in Vietnam that eventually spilled over into Cambodia. Cambodian singers picking up American musical ideas from Armed Forces Radio and integrating that into the genre is mentioned and interesting, as when one of the popular singers does a mostly-Khmer rendition of James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend". The widening of the Vietnam War eventually doomed the Lon Nol regime, leading to the Khmer Rouge takeover that killed quite a few of these singers.

The documentary is fascinating, although it does have one minor problem. I was reminded of the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, and how it showed a bunch of clips that expected viewers to already know who the actors on screen were. Don't Think I've Forgotten doesn't go quite that far, although at times I got the impression it might have been a bit helpful to know a bit about some of these musicians before seeing the movie. As for the music, I'm generally somewhat intellectually curious in that I find shorter looks at completely different musical genres to be interesting, although I'd probably go nuts if I had to live with such a genre being the dominant style of music. Cambodian pop is definitely that way. But for the length of a documentary like this, it works, and Don't Think I've Forgotten is one you should definitely seek out.