Modern Vietnamese Music I Actually Dig

Vietnamese music is... not for everyone. This is probably an understatement! But after 7 years, I've finally started to 'get it' and I couldn't be happier about it.

Den, my favorite Vnese rapper... a true gem.

While Japanese music has its faithful adherents and K-Pop is having its biggest-ever moment, with BTS and Blackpink actually singing entire songs in English and catering to a worldwide audience, other Asian countries have been somewhat left in the dust. That's not to say there's nothing here worthy of the world's attention, however!

When I first got to Vietnam in (holy shit) 2013, I absolutely hated, HATED, all the music I heard. This is because most of what I heard was bolero (largely wistful songs of love, loss, and an imagined idyllic countryside existence of yesteryear). I'm also not a romantic and don't much care for ballads, so this whole package is massively unappealing to me.

In recent years, however, I've had the pleasure of being proven very, very wrong.

Click through for my thoughts, and my favorite Vietnamese pop, rap, and hip hop music videos!

Vietnamese is a tonal language, with different tones making wildly different vocabulary words. Words are not related by spelling in any way; there are no 'families' of related words using just the spelling but different tones. 

If you haven't read it, check out my blog post on the Musicality of Vietnamese Tones - it's worth a gander, I promise.

An example is the variation in the spelling 'Chao.' Here are three of the tones:

• Chào (downward intonation) is hello.
• Cháo (upward intonation) is porridge. 
• Chảo (bouncy hook) is a pan.

It's very musical in nature. So, take this and combine it with the fundamentals of music: melody, harmony, etc., and you can quickly come to the conclusion that a composers' desire to impose melody on an already musical language... is complicated.

Things have changed for me in the last few years. I've made some friends that have more interest in modern pop and rap, and Vietnamese artists have become unusually committed to experimenting, layering techniques picked up from all over the world into distinctively Vietnamese packages.

My big disclaimer here is that Vietnamese music video production is often VERY cool. 

Here's an example of a video I LOVE with music that doesn't really do it for me. Hoa Hai Duong kills it in this neon-drenched ancient warrior-for-love epic, and the rap sequence is also solid - It's just too bad I don't care for the music itself. However, super pretty to look at:

But on to the music that I DO like! 

Lots of modern Vietnamese pop music is breaking the link between the tones and vocabulary, requiring the listener to do more of the heavy lifting in terms of understanding, but rewarding them with more intricate and enticing sung melodies, some of which are getting traction outside the country.

Here's one from ĐỨC PHÚC x SUBOI that imagines a group of friends getting back together and reminiscing about all the trouble they got up to back in school together, with the passing time having taken none of their group dynamics away. Very nostalgic; very Vietnamese:

My first revelation came with Truc Nhan, and his adorable gay anthem about the bisexual boyfriend that got away and married a woman, and his fantasy of getting back together. True, it's about lost love, but it's modern, catchy, and super-duper fun. Plus, the video is a corker:

Gotta plug my boy Den here. Den has been making music for 10 years and is currently the most streamed Vietnamese artist, period (he used to be a garbage man - he's come a long way!). His songs are sophisticated, introspective, and chill, and his delivery tends to be wry, experienced, and assured. Also, because he's such an understandable speaker, I CAN UNDERSTAND HIS VIETNAMESE! Holy lord!! A recent Den song that I like a lot:

A newer love for me is Chillies. This is technically a boy band, and although this track commits my cardinal offense of having too much (or any, frankly) saxophone, this single from earlier in 2020 is a catchy bop that I kinda love and vibes perfectly with a summer in Ho Chi Minh City:

Last week brought a complete surprise in the form of Ca Hoi Hoang, a three-man indie outfit from Saigon doing something totally unlike any of their Vietnamese peers. While the tempo is still a little low-energy for me, this is still easily a song I can bop to, regardless of the language:

Finally, for this post, I gotta hand it to Vu for putting some skip into a downtempo indie track that I like a lot. No stunning video production here, just vibes for days. Check them out:

So there's some gems in there! Go forth, music lover, and keep an open mind.

To end this post, here's a video of Den rapping from a helicopter, probably just because he can:

I'm always looking to give new tracks a try - if you've got something you like, please drop it in the comments!