The Sound of Khlong Toei

“Gu Na Khlong Toei” was my first song. It went immediately viral and became a kind of unofficial anthem for the neighbourhood. The title translates as “I am Khlong Toei” and it tells of life in our community. I started making music to fight prejudice against slums. The song is meant to show that I'am proud to be from Khlong Toei.

I heard “Dead And Gone” for the first time in Khlong Toei when the song was shown on TV, I think it must have been MTV. I immediately thought the song was cool, even though I didn't understand the lyrics back then. I knew right away that I wanted to do something like that, I wanted to be like that.

Pae is one of the new generation of Thai rappers. Like me, he grew up in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood in Sathorn, not far from Khlong Toei. Many of his songs are about his neighbourhood and the struggles he faced growing up. In “Chumchon”, he raps about drug addiction and violence, but also about the special cohesion in the community. The song is also aimed at people with prejudices about settlements like ours. The track begins with the words “I'll tell you what's true and what's not, from the stories you've heard about slums.”

When this song came out, I wasn't even born yet. Like most of my generation, my friends and I were crazy about video games as kids. We spent a lot of time in game shops and played ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’. That's when I first heard the hip-hop classic by Ice Cube, when the song was playing in the game. I immediately liked the mood and whenever I hear the song, I think back to that time.

In 2024, I founded “Ramaflow Dirty” with a few friends. There were hardly any hip-hop groups in Khlong Toei, and we wanted to change that. We all come from the same neighbourhood, hence our name: Ramaflow refers to a street in our neighbourhood. “Dek Ban” is a song about us, the youth from the slum. We didn't want to talk about drugs and guns, the things that everyone already knows about Khlong Toei. We rap from a different perspective, talking about local people, the good and the bad, and how we just get on with our lives despite everything.

The song is particularly meaningful to me because it's about my family. I thought long and hard about whether to write it, but then decided to tell the story of my parents. The song is a kind of farewell, but at the same time it's a way for me to keep my mum and dad in my thoughts forever.

I also got to know this song through a video game. It was part of the soundtrack to ‘Need for Speed: Underground’, a car-racing game. Rap, hip-hop, whatever songs were playing in these games, we just listened to them over and over again and soaked up the music.

The inspiration for the song “Slum Light” came from a photo of me sitting in front of a house in the neighbourhood with the sunlight shining on my face. One of my friends saw the picture and said: “Hey, the light of the slum!” I wanted to capture that light. The song is not only about the people in Khlong Toei, but is meant for all such neighbourhoods in Thailand, because we all belong together.

For me, being a rapper from Khlong Toei also means representing the struggle of the people in the slum. But we don't always want to rap about the problems, we also want to rap about the power of the community to make Khlong Toei even stronger in the future. This song by 18Crowns does just that, we show everyone out there: “Khlong Toei di wa”-“Khlong Toei is rad”!

As told to Mira Schwedes