Various | Cambodian Rocks |Parallel World | Cambodia

For the uninitiated, the 1996 LP was an early example of the anonymous-Whitey-finds-weird-Asian-music phenomenon (see these reviews for other examples). No artist names, no song titles, no band pictures, just a charcoal rubbing from Angkor Wat and a blurb describing a traveler's discovery of the psychedelic-era Cambodian circle dance music on the record. The record was an artifact from a mysterious place and an instant classic.

Last year saw a re-issue of Cambodian Rocks, this time on CD with several cuts added. Incredibly, there are still no artist names, still no song titles, still no pictures... and presumably still no royalties paid to any surviving artists or their families.

Eight years ago, these omissions were totally understandable--Parallel World was a tiny label without the resources to travel back to Cambodia and do the necessary research for a "legitimate" release. In fact, the original Cambodian Rocks is a perfect example of something great that couldn't have existed if our Draconian copyright laws had been followed. It's been good for listeners and probably sent Cambodia a few desperately-needed tourists it wouldn't have otherwise gotten. It's also true that Cambodian artists don't get paid for their recordings in their own country--I've watched merchants in Cambodian market stalls make copies of copies of copied cassettes and I own a few hiss-buried examples myself.

But aren't these all just reasons to get things right on the new CD? Would it really be so hard today to get the names of the artists? You could try--I don't know--the internet? Or how about asking one of the thousands of Cambodians living in the U.S.? Until now, the royalty issue doesn't seem to have crossed anyone's mind, but it's time it did. We're talking about a country where some of the luckier Khmers are reduced to selling Cokes among the ruins of their once-magnificent civilization. Some peasants eat ants to survive while digging a fiber optic cable ditch so hotel guests can enjoy broadband and CNN. In Cambodia even a token attempt at paying royalties in U.S. dollars could make a tangible difference in someone's life. If paying royalties is prohibitively complicated, give ten or fifteen percent of the net profits to the Cambodian Landmine Museum Relief Fund.

It's worth noting that many Khmer musicians were savagely killed by the Khmer Rouge, who many historians believe were actually empowered by the illegal U.S. bombing of Cambodia. The turbulence of the times and the depth of the U.S. influence in the country is reflected in the wild fuzz guitar solos that appear throughout Cambodian Rocks. The CD doesn't reflect on this or its own status as an echo of U.S. imperialism at all.

In an interesting twist, a new label, Khmer Rocks has taken advantage of Parallel World's dubious legal position to put out their own Cambodian Rocks I and II compilations including fully annotated booklets. I'm trying to learn more about these upstarts and hope to review some of their releases in the near future, but already one irony is apparent: I'm pretty sure they're Khmer. Judging from their website (as of this writing, the Parallel World site is down), however, it's unclear whether artists or their survivors are getting paid from these releases either.