From Country Hick to Rural Hip: A New Identity Through Music for Northeast Thailand

Northeast Thailand, known as Isan, was long the disreputable brother to Thailand's other three regions because it was considered poor, backward, and strange. Although thousands of people from Isan came to work in Bangkok, central Thai tended to look down on them as inferior. During the 1980s and up to the present, however, the image that non-Isan people have of Isan natives has changed toward the positive. In fact, Isan culture, particularly its food and textiles, has become fashionable. One of the major reasons for this change of attitude has to do with the remodeling of Isan music that has taken place in recent years. This article traces these changes to the present.

Thailand's northeast region, known in Thai as Isan, consists of nineteen provinces out of the country's total of seventy-six and approximately one-third of its total population of 62 million. Of the country's four regions—the others being the central plain, the north, and the south—Isan has long had the most problematic image. When I arrived in Thailand in 1972 to begin my doctoral dissertation study of Isan music, at a point when development of the region was only beginning, Isan's reputation was decidedly negative. Upon telling Thai friends that we were going to live in the northeast, we were strongly encouraged to reconsider. They told me the region was extremely hot, poor, and undeveloped, the people were lazy, stupid, and dirty, and the food smelled bad. Bangkok flourished then, as it does now, on the cheap labor of Isan migrants, especially as maids, taxi drivers, and laborers. Better to keep the family in (civilized) Bangkok and make short visits to Isan for research material. Roger Crutchley (1999, 22), whose columns in the Bangkok Post reflected a colonial-style "ex-pat" sensibility, wrote the following about his time in Yasothon province visiting the home of his maid: "All in all, we had a typically hectic Isan schedule—sleep, get up, eat chicken, doze, eat more chicken, drink, doze, try a bit of chicken. These people in Isan aren't stupid."

Elsewhere in Thailand, Isan music was little known and poorly understood. While the free-reed mouth organ called khaen was pleasant enough to listen to, no one outside Isan could make much sense of the seemingly interminable texts sung in Isan dialect, a regional form of Lao, by the mawlam singers who performed from dusk to dawn for villagers seated on the cold, hard ground. While the Isan language is part of the Thai language family, the texts are replete with local cultural allusions and double entendres opaque to non-native speakers. And Isan culture was considered to be as low-brow as you could get in Thailand.

It is my contention that the profound changes that have come to Isan over the past thirty years, including to its music and theater, not only obliterated much of what was considered "traditional" in earlier times but changed the way the rest of Thailand viewed Isan. As its entertainments modernized and expanded, they took the country by storm and have come to dominate the popular music scene. With the exception of Bangkok, where most modern entertainments naturally begin, the rest of Thailand could mount no response as effective as that of Isan, resulting in the latter's music and theater coming to be seen as the "coolest in the kingdom." As a result, the public perception of Isan and its people has been transformed from "country hick" to "rural hip."

Since Isan music has attained a higher cultural profile than anything else from the region, it has been the primary engine for changing negative perceptions to positive ones.

I now feel strangely nostalgic as I reflect on how historical my 1974 dissertation on the music of northeast Thailand seems today. The world I knew then and described in my 1985 dissertation-derived book has mostly disappeared (Miller 1985). When I arrived in Mahasarakham, in the heart of Isan, in early 1973, the "Friendship Highway" from Bangkok to Nong Khai on the...