Thailingual 对于说唱，她有不一样的见解

Rap in Thailand has become very big. It’s big business with big streaming numbers and big personalities. But it’s still young as a culture. There are only so many roads available to success and it’s pretty much a boys’ club. Tsunari wants to help change that. As a mixed-race woman who grew up in different parts of the world and made her name without corporate help, she thinks she’s got a new perspective to offer on rap.

Her music video ”Mula” is immediately clear upon viewing that it’s a banger. But with a Black woman front and center, posing in front of a cold grey city, the whole package isn’t obviously Thai—that is until you realize half of the autotuned lyrics are in fact rapped in Thai. “I call it ‘Thailingual’,” she smiles. “It sounds better than ‘Tinglish’, which is what it’d usually be called.”

Listen to select tracks from Tsunari below:

Tsunari’s music and videos all speak to her unusual background. As the child of a Trinidadian dad and a Thai mom, she moved around a lot as a kid. “My dad went to Thailand on vacation where my mom was a tour guide, and they fell in love,” she says. She spent her school days moving between England, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand. “I grew up in Thailand for about 60 percent of my childhood. In Saudi Arabia, I went to an American international school so the curriculum was American, and there were students from all over. In Thailand, I went to a bilingual private school in Korat that was mostly attended by middle-class kids. The city center there was cool but then twenty minutes out it was very rural, lots of rice fields. The difference between my schools was huge.”

She says school in Thailand as a mixed-race kid was difficult, and she dealt with a lot of bullying: “They saw me as an alien,” she says. “They’d never seen a Black child before. I wouldn’t say they were racist but it was more of a colorist thing. They didn’t understand what they’d never seen before. It was childish bullying, nothing very harmful, just teasing, but it definitely affected my self-confidence.”

Despite feeling like an outsider, Thai music made its mark on Tsunari around this time, and the local music filled her ears everyday on the way to school. “I’m from the suburbs, so we grew up listening to luk thung. My dad loved it too, so I couldn’t avoid it. He even named me after Sunaree Rachasima, a famous Thai country singer,” Tsunari laughs. “I’ve made tracks incorporating these Thai sounds, samples, and instruments and, I hope to do more.”

After high school, Tsunari moved to London, but while living there, she built a name for herself in Thailand by way of the internet. “London feels like its own country compared to the rest of England, it’s full of people from everywhere,” she says. “There’s also a big Caribbean community here, it’s like a mini-Caribbean. I’ve never been there, so I’m finally learning about this side of my history.”

“Mula” was Tunari’s first solo hit, dropping last year and reaching a million views within a few short months. But she’d been active in the Thai rap scene a couple of years prior to that. She first caught the ear of Daboyway, an OG of the Thai rap scene, who heard one of her cover songs and decided to reach out for a collaboration. They filmed a music video together in 2018 called “Fire,” a pop-infused dancehall track, building on her Caribbean roots. After that initial splash, she uploaded a music video for her remix of “Doo White,” a popular song by Youngohm, one of Thailand’s most famous rappers. He liked her style enough to cosign it and repost it on his feeds for his fanbase. “That song was kind of a test of whether I wanted to release music in Thailand,” she says. “It happened to blow up, so I was like OK, let’s go, let me do this thing!”

Although most artists who find fame in the Thai rap world rely on television competition shows to reach that level, Tsunari prefers avoiding that route. “I wanted to be a singer-songwriter as a kid and went to so many competitions that I always lost,” she grins. “I’m not interested in doing that anymore.”

Tsunari hasn’t been able to visit Thailand since the pandemic broke out and has only been able to connect with her fans online. “Thai commenters tend to be very encouraging,” she says. “But of course I get tons of comparisons, probably because I’m Black and I rap. They’re like, ‘You’re the Nicki Minaj of Thailand!’ It helps them to have a reference to understand who I am.”

She plans on returning to Thailand once travel restrictions loosen up, and her main goal is to give back to the Thai community—especially the girls. Although many Thai pop singers do a rap verse now and then, and some female rappers like Milli have found success recently, women are still not very visible in the Thai rap world. “I feel like there’s a lot more talent out there and I want to help wake people up. Not just in music, but in self-confidence, too. You can do whatever you want if you put your mind to it.”