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Producer-emcee Kan Kyi draws on his roots to unite a diverse crew of emcees to say in Chiang Mai what often can’t be said in Myanmar.
By RAMONA DROSNER | FRONTIER
Kan Kyi is quick to call himself a third culture kid. This label, which means he grew up in a country other than his parents’ homes, suggests an uncertain sense of belonging. Sure enough, for much of the 29-year-old hip hop producer, emcee and impresario’s life, that is exactly what he’s been striving to find.
Kan Kyi was raised in Thailand but is ethnically English, Shan and Bamar – groups with a history of warring against one another. He says he feels partly but not wholly any of these identities. Yet, rather than allow himself to be made an outsider everywhere, Kan Kyi has used his uniquely split heritage to unite a diverse group of artists and emcees around a politically conscious hip hop community in Chiang Mai.
In a bedroom in the home he built for his wife and parents on the outskirts of the northern Thai city, with little more than a laptop and a microphone, he creates beats and song concepts, rapping over some and sending others to a constellation of rappers in Thailand and Myanmar.
He founded the rap collective Triple Edge six years ago with Bxmb, a Thai rapper, and the Shan rapper Zaa. His wife later joined as well, rapping in her native Thai under the name Baby Butter. At any given time the crew can include as many as 20 others. Its structure – like its socially conscious lyrics – harkens back to the so-called “golden age” of American hip hop, in the early-to-mid 1990s, when loose associations of artists made jazz-laden raps about Afrocentrism and self-empowerment; think Okayplayer or Native Tongues, or even the greater Wu Tang Clan. Artists “come and go”, Kan Kyi says, so it can be hard to track official members at any particular moment.
Rather than claiming one city and local subculture like most of their American counterparts, Triple Edge sprawls across borders and languages. One member is a Thai farmer, another a frontline medic in Myanmar’s Kayin State. Others are Mon. Collaboration happens mostly online, with Kan Kyi serving as a creative director, sending out tracks and ideas – even writing prompts – for others to rhyme over in a Babel of tongues. He is to Triple Edge what the RZA is to Wu Tang.
“He attracts all – everything,” Baby Butter told Frontier recently at the Sode Cafe, a leafy coffee shop in Chiang Mai’s Suthep student district, where Kan Kyi spent much of his teenage, after-school hours.
Zaa agreed. The 26-year-old grew up in Chiang Mai with the stigmas and limitations of statelessness, and it would have been easy for him to remain in the shadows, were it not for Kan Kyi’s urging. “You have a message, so rap about it,” he told Zaa.
“He’s like a black hole, pulling everyone in,” Zaa said, but Kan Kyi quickly objected.
“Noooo,” he said. “More like the sun.”
Everyone laughed, forcing a bashful smile from Kan Kyi, who, despite his ability to pull the best from others, can appear markedly more reserved when the spotlight is turned on him.
Suddenly, realising he’d provoked their laughter, Kan Kyi raised a clenched fist, as if gripping a microphone, and hid his smile behind it.
Mob Party
Kan Kyi’s father is a Bamar revolutionary who fought in the Shan State Army – one of the largest ethnic armed groups that rose to resist Myanmar’s Bamar-dominated central government, shortly after the newly-independent country descended into military rule following a coup in 1962.
His father fled the jungle for Thailand in 1982 with his mother, the daughter of a Shan woman and a British man.
Born and raised in Chiang Mai, his family’s dinner conversations were usually political, often revolving around the Myanmar military’s latest war crimes – its land grabs, its burning of entire villages and fields, its routine use of rape as a weapon of war. Even as young as five years old, he says, he always knew what was going on across the border.
“My mom always made me aware,” the 29-year-old said.
As an aid worker, she would often take Kan Kyi with her to visit Shan refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border, in Mae Hong Son province and elsewhere.
“It gave me a reality check from a young age that there are children like me who are struggling and people who are fighting,” he said. “It reminded me of how lucky and privileged I am.”
Privileged, but also somehow outside – outside of the camps, outside of Myanmar, separate from his Thai classmates.
“I speak English like a foreigner, and the way I move [in and among social circles] is like a foreigner … There are nuances to etiquette in Asian society, a lot of conformity and being quiet,” he said. “I’m kind of loud, I stand out, am maybe a little outspoken … So I have always had a longing to connect with my roots.”
But those roots are complicated. He despises Myanmar nationalism, for instance, and sees in the ethnic Bamar, or Burmese, majority a long history of oppressing other groups.
“That’s definitely not what I want to be,” he says. “But I can’t deny that I am Burmese. I am half oppressor.”
These feelings could only have been exacerbated by the military’s 2021 coup, though Triple Edge’s activism did not begin then. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic the previous year, Kan Kyi realised that the ensuing economic shutdown was leaving Shan refugees starving at border camps, unable to find work picking tea leaves when global trade halted. The group responded by releasing an awareness-raising song called “Rice for Life”, then worked with the Shan State Refugee Committee to raise enough cash for 12 tonnes of rice, helping feed the residents of six border camps for four weeks.
Since the coup, however, that activism has only increased. Over the last several years, through ticketed live performances and donation drives, Triple Edge says it has raised more than US$6,000 for humanitarian and other causes.
These efforts culminate each year in Chiang Mai with the annual Mob Party, a hip hop show which takes place from 5pm this Saturday, November 30 in the parking lot of Cool Maung Coffee, next to Tha Phae Gate in the old city. Kan Kyi said the group expects about 500 attendees this year – Mob Party’s third. It will include live band instrumentation and several freestyle sessions, with Thai soul singer Rasmee headlining.
Stakes is high
Although Kan Kyi can have a rough exterior in music videos, with his dark shades and furrowed brow, in person he is thoughtful and reflective.
When he began rapping six years ago, he was hesitant, conscious that he might be seen as appropriating a culture that wasn’t his. Luckily, a mentor – an American emcee known as Binky – urged him to step up at an open mic event held at the North Gate Jazz Co-op, a venerable live music venue on the northern edge of Chiang Mai’s old city.
It was also Binky who showed him that there is more to rap than a “gangsta” visage, that “it could also be conscious hip-hop”.
Kan Kyi feels a connection with the spirit of the music’s roots in Black urban America – specifically, the pervasive fear of police, and the sense that just speaking one’s mind could get one arrested.
“I understood that fear of being caught, the fear of doing illegal things. It’s the same with political activists – you live a dangerous life.” he said.
As the legendary New York duo Mobb Deep rapped, “For every rhyme I write / that’s 25 to life.”
This fear, he knows, is even more pervasive for stateless refugees and migrants like Zaa. He realises his life in Thailand provides him with relative privileges and freedoms, and he wants to use that freedom to speak out against injustice. Or, as he puts it on the track Borda Boiz II, “My mouth is my gun / for my people on the run.”
“Censorship over there is super tight, you can die,” he said, referring to Myanmar. “But we are here.”
He wants his music to inform his fans about the political strife and struggle across the border.
“Rap is so powerful. It touches a lot of people… I don’t know if a lot of people really listen and really watch the news these days,” he said, but “they can feel our words directly, you know?” He sees Triple Edge’s music as a more impactful way of telling the same stories, with more emotional punch. Some of their videos include scenes of the Myanmar military’s abuses.
Among his favourite emcees is the Peruvian-American rapper and activist Immortal Technique, who gained attention throughout the 2000s with pointed, cutting lyrical takedowns of President George W Bush’s Global War on Terror, an American foreign policy he saw as neocolonial and involving the widespread scapegoating of immigrants.
“We all share this kind of story, you know – the story of exploitation and the oppression we receive,” Kan Kyi said. He thanks his mother and father for opening his eyes to these realities. “I think my parents are the sole reason that I feel like I can’t sit around and do nothing,”
In turn, he’s even turned his mother into a reluctant fan. As she once showed him the world of humanitarian aid, he in turn now shows her the world of political music. When he played her an Immortal Technique record, she found it catchy. “You sound like him,” she said.
“I put her on to rap,” Kan Kyi said.
Through hip hop, he’s connected with a community that spills beyond the bounds of any one region, and is part of something global. In July last year, the group was invited to perform in Compton, the Los Angeles neighbourhood famous for birthing some of rap music’s most celebrated artists, including Dr Dre, Easy E, Kendrick Lamar and others.
For many rappers, this would be something of a pilgrimage. But for the formerly stateless Zaa, it also meant something different. It was the first time he could travel with his new passport.