Hip-Hop About Pol Pot.(Prach Ly rap music in Cambodia)(Brief Article)

Prach Ly seems an unlikely voice for Cambodia's lost generation. The skinny 22-year-old spends his days hawking karaoke videos to middle- aged Cambodian women out of a closet-size shop on a gritty street in Long Beach, California. He wears low-slung bluejean shorts, sneakers and a backward baseball cap. And on a recent day he was more excited about meeting the town's mayor at a local protest than about events 10,000 miles away in Cambodia, his parents' homeland. So it was with some surprise that he received a call from a journalist in Phnom Penh a couple of months ago informing him that the CD he'd recorded in his parents' garage had somehow made its way to Cambodia, where it was causing a sensation. Prach Ly, it turned out, had become Cambodia's first rap star. And he'd never even really lived there.

His parents did open his eyes to Cambodia's brutal history. On the CD, "the end'n is just the beginnin," Prach Ly, who fled with his parents as an infant, spins out tales of genocide. Over hypnotic drumbeats and sampled piano and guitar riffs, alternating between Khmer and English, he tells the stories of political meetings, starvation, fear and executions that his parents impressed upon him virtually every night of his childhood in their Long Beach apartment. "We need help, now!" he shouts after narrating the devastating descent into Pol Pot's Kampuchea that began with the fall of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Later he details the resurrection of his family's fortunes, riffing, "It can only get better!" as he tells of their journey from the misery of Thailand's refugee camps to joyous freedom and California. His father, one of the few Cambodian actors to survive the genocide, wanted to make sure Prach "would never forget that I lost aunts and uncles and that we barely made it," he says. The CD "was personal. I had to let it out. It was building up for so long." Apologetically, he adds: "I did it last year, so I sound kind of young."

The rebirth of Cambodia's decimated artistic landscape is in its infancy as well. The nation right now is hungry enough to devour even the exotic--the virtually unknown form of expression familiar to most of the world as American hip-hop. After 30 years of war and a genocide that claimed one life in four, the ...