Bangkok Subcultures: Fast, Furious & Safety First

 

                                                                                                Viriya Sawangchot

 

 

 

Introduction

This article is concerned with the complex relations between youth subcultures and cultural soundscapes of Bangkok in the oppositional form of pop culture. It is also interested in how these Bangkok youth subcultures come into being through organising around radio programmes and their extra activities.

 

 

Rethinking Subculture Theories

By the 1970s, what had emerged as a åsubcultureπ from the Birmingham school was understood to be groups of youths who pursued a wide variety of different forms of social dissent through shared behavioural patterns, musical tastes, and dress codes. Such groups were a remarkably effective vehicle of social change, and were involved in dramatically reshaping social norms in many parts of the world. However, subcultures are not homogeneous groups with clearly defined boundaries, but are to be understood as useful ways of representing processes of collaborative social action which characterise the activities of identifiable groups. It should be said immediately that this approach entails macro-sociological phenomena such as power, social structure, or patterns of inequality.

 

Since the 1970s the critics proposed that such phenomena must be understood as the outcome of the activities of real people in real situations, and the ways in which these were represented. In the early π90s, following Foucault, de Certeau, Boudieu and others, post-subculture studies and cultural studies shifted the focus of social research towards what is sometimes called ≥micro-politics≤ or the politics of everyday life. The latent political nature of cultural studies and cultural identities came into focus during these years. By emphasizing ≥micro-cultural politics≤, what had previously been considered ordinary politics became increasingly less defined .[1]

 

However, I do not think subculture studies could have avoided the characteristics of the heroic phase of cultural studies in the π70s. The study of subculture groups should be open to being perceived and used in different ways by different groups represented in different societies, in different locations, depending on their position in the exchange of cultural economy.

 

Fat Festival and the Commodifiying Soundscape of Bangkok

Bangkok has become a critical site where power has been contested through changing landscapes since World War II. Such landscapes are not free-floating entities; they are sited power relations and locations of groups, ideologies and practices. In the 1990s, Bangkok urban space was controlled by bureaucracies but also was commodified by many big companies.[2] Moreover, the matter of contested space becomes much more complex when we begin to consider, as we must, the range of conditions within urban culture experiences.

 

Taking Paul Virilioπs attempt[3] to understand contemporary urban sites as bounded by two networks, the geopolitical and the electromagnetic, we observe that many of us, especially those in urban sites, spend our everyday lives between those two networks. They provide an area where the human being is increasingly caught up between two worlds: one is the ≥real space≤ of an increasingly limited environment, and the other is ≥real-time relation≤ at a distance. These two worlds are simultaneously part of us and apart from us, phenomena that we respond to and react against.

 

The electromagnetic and information systems interact with the geopolitical system in the cityscapeπs attempt to make itself local and global. Both the electromagnetic and information realms have had profound effect on the notions of public and private discourse, which were once the Greek domain of urban agora.[4] Moreover, in Fast Capitalism, Ben Agger points out that the private has become public and the public has become private, so that the Greek ideal of agora must give way to the privatised consumption of the administratively public space.[5]

 

For instance, the real-time urban radio can be situated as a media relationship within the rapidly increasing (post)modern urbanisation, which has always had a powerful effect on social experience in its production of youth subcultures in Bangkok. But in Thailand, each radio programme has only a one-year licence, so they do not have enough of a real-time relation to construct a permanent åreal mediaspace relationπ. In 2001, the Click Radio Company, a new face in commercial radio programmes in Bangkok, did something markedly different. The Fat Festival was organised by Click Radio that year and has become a åcool festivalπ since that time. This festival was about music festivals in general and about the new urban mediascape in particular. Let me turn to my fieldwork about the Fat Festival to explain this further.

 

 

On November 27-28, 2004, the fourth Fat Festival, organised by Fat radio 104.5 FM and sponsored by Heineken, took place at Nang Loeng Horse-Racing Stadium, Phitsanulok Rd. This stadium had always been rumoured to harbour gambling, an underground economy and the military mafia. And this fastival turned into the greatest free rock festival Thailand had ever seen. Thus, I think this is the first free rock festival in the world ever to have taken over the place of the mafia.

 

At the front gate of the stadium, there was only one entrance to the festival. The cops were checking most punters for weapons, and getting through the gates of the horse-racing stadium was excruciatingly slow. There were not nearly enough police to regulate the crowds. On Phitsanulok Road a couple of thousand youths were hanging out, drinking beer, immobilising the traffic. Although Heineken were present with banners and logos beer sales were out early. The other rival beer to Heineken was sold enough throughout the festival.

 

A two-day programme featured 140 local bands who played their own songs, countless tents, stalls, movies, and about 100,000 teenagers. But the variety of musical consumables was so overwhelming that much of the audience just drifted from stage to stage. The huge crowd surged all around the hip-hop stage when Joey Boy and his company were singing. But at the front of the stadium, the others saw the Day Tripper playing his powerful songs. I could not know which stage was the highlight of the day. Moreover, from the youthsπ fashion styles, it appeared this festival was an important urban landscape event in which the contemporary forms of subculture that we call Dek Naw, such as hip-hop, punk, rock and indie, could come into being. Bangkok youth (sub)culture seems to be post-everything: post-modernism, post-punk, post-indie, and post-subculture as well.

 

My first impression of the fourth Fat Festival was the utter chaos of a commodified community. The youth deconstructed the highly administrative public space, to which it gave its own value and took as its private realm. So the days of the festival were not only free days but also freedom days. And the culture has also replaced consumerism with åsubcultureπ. I am not suggesting that the Fat Radio programme itself works to channel pre-existing forms of urban mediaspace to subculture. On the contrary, itπs the Bangkok subculture style itself that provides Fat festival as the site for the coming into being of the subculture.

 

Conclusion

Bangkok subculture is not an entity; the term stands for certain discursive strategies. Subculture signals a discourse that raises issues of power, if only because it tends to contest what is being affirmed about culture. By focusing upon Fat Festival, in the last five years, it has altered Bangkokπs mediascape both in meaning and practice. Moreover, where the Fat Festival constructed a new spatial form of Bangkok urban space over the old one, a new alternative lifestyle was created as well. Consequently, when we want to define the notion of subculture, we should concentrate on what it makes appear and become known, rather that agonize over the adjective åsubπ.