by Hugh Wilikofsky
I sometimes fret over how much attention I give to the context around music. When I try to sell a strange or challenging album to a friend and find myself talking more about the story behind it than the music itself, that gives me some pause. This concern isn’t helped by the cult-of-personality bent of so much music journalism, and how it often elevates mediocre work while sweeping its much better influences under the rug. I could never argue in good faith that a work of art should be viewed as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object—particularly when its coming from a culture that’s largely unfamiliar to you—and yet I’m always hungry for something that will floor me before I read a word about it. With his fantastic second album Crazy World, Thai rap phenom JUU4E has gifted me, and us all, with exactly that and so much more.
JUU4E’s (more commonly known as JUU; the 4E stands for the four elements) international profile rose a bit with the release of his excellent 2019 debut New Luk Thung. The collaboration with Thai rapper/singer G.Jee and Japanese producer Young-G of stillichimiya saw them updating the beloved genre best described as “songs of the country” with trap aesthetics. Referential and reverent, it made clear that JUU was not interested in plundering his nation’s musical history to merely give his work a unique flavor in the global hip-hop market, but that he had abiding love and deep knowledge of its varied, nuanced history. Throughout the recording and touring of New Luk Thung the seeds of Crazy World were germinating, and hot off the former’s success, JUU was eager to incorporate elements of regional folk music traditions from across the continent into the latter. The result is another compulsively listenable gem, further establishing JUU as a prodigious producer, lyricist, and musicologist to boot. Did I mention it’s also fun as hell? It opens with a fat bong rip, so don’t let my pseudo-intellectualizing deter you. This is, after all, the beauty of JUU’s work; it will instantly win you over with its goofy, affable stoner vibe, but its rewards are manifold if you’re willing to dig.
The production on Crazy World is top shelf no matter your familiarity with the source material, and the lyrics are suitably weird and affirming for someone sowing such a distinct artistic path. “Netizens” instantly grabbed me with its aqueous, dubwise beat—calling to mind EM Records label-mate 7FO—and sees JUU cleverly sidestepping cliches about toxic online culture by casting the hordes of volatile online voices as an entirely different species with the tone of an ambivalent war zone tour guide. “Knee Scars” is a beautifully languid perseverance anthem (“When I look at the scars on my knees / I remember my childhood / I fell over many times, but got back up”), and JUU’s lovely autotuned crooning pairs well with gentle plucking on the beat (I only wish I could ID the instrument). “Rhythm from Da Hut” feels like another new luk thung classic, an inviting jam extolling the virtues of JUU’s countryside lifestyle: “Nature is enveloped in green / You don’t get hangovers there / The open air of the countryside / There are no rules of social classes.”
JUU’s casually egalitarian, perhaps even socialist views are peppered throughout the album, particularly on the absolute banger “Who is Drunk?” Even if you don’t speak Thai or have access to the translations, it’s easy to glean that JUU is all about the virtues of intoxication, but the drunks he’s taking shots at here are capitalist louts. “You’re always belly-full and fat / You go on holiday to Europe, America, Bali / You’re drunk on taxes,” he chides, later asserting, “We get drunk the right way.” The track draws on a Japanese minyo (folk song) from Ibaraki Prefecture called “Oyama Odori Bayashi,” which is itself derived from the folk song from Tōkamachi “Shinbokōdaiji Bushi,” as Takehiko Sato—one half of the Japanese folk song research and DJ duo Riyo Mountains—lays out in his illuminating liners. Similarly, the glorious closer “Angel Have Mercy,” is JUU’s ganja flavored riff on the 1979 Mandopop track “Tian Mi Mi” by Teresa Teng, which became a hit after her death when it was used as the theme to the 1996 film Comrades: Almost a Love Story. The original itself was adapted from a 1940s Indonesian gambang kromong piece called “Dayung Sampan.”
It feels important to acknowledge these cultural lineages when discussing JUU’s work given how much they drive it. And here’s where I must clarify the semi-specious stance I took at the start of this piece. While I do harbor those misgivings I laid out, quite frankly I love context. I’ve found so much joy and inspiration delving into musics’ backgrounds, and doing so has helped me find and appreciate loads of music and art that once felt unapproachable or was otherwise invisible to me. Sometimes the lore can feel out of hand, beside the point, or like a cynical marketing ploy, but then an artist like JUU comes along. If you really want to know what he’s about once you air out all the weed smoke, look no further than “Anurak and Phattana (Preservation and Development),” the title of which might as well be his mission statement. “Preserve and regenerate old things / Listen to old songs and think about what you can do with them,” he advises, and I can’t wait to see where this approach takes him next.