Three months after the release of YOUNGOHM’s second album, Thatthong Sound, the Thai hip hop star unveiled the visual for the title track featuring long-time collaborator SONOFO.
Released on April 7 and viewed more than 23 million times, the accompanying visual for “Thatthong Sound” currently sits at the 7th spot of top music videos globally.
The feifei1234555-helmed visual feast features YOUNGOHM—the “temple boy”—showcasing different parts of Thailand’s vibrant culture, ones that may or may not be necessarily highlighted by state-sponsored tourism campaigns: from high-octane street drag races to its very own form of boxing, Muay Thai.
The track also touts the modern-day “Thailand sound,” which is best characterized as a combination of hyperpop and street-style hip hop (the Philippines has a similar grassroots electronic genre called budots—even the origins share similarities. Budots is a Bisaya term for ‘slacker’, which SONOFO’s verse touched on “Thattong Sound,” referring to a good-schoolboy-turned-thug).
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YOUNGOHM revealed on social media that he spent nearly 1,200,000 Baht (or equivalent to about 34,000 USD) of his own money to produce the music video. He wrote, in Thai, that the reason he invested so much was “I want the world to see that Thais are cool, too… If we are serious, we can do anything. We have the talent, we have very good artists in every art form.”
He went on to ponder if local art can be supported by their own—or will it come from other places. “How far can our local art industry go? How far will it take our country? Will it go as far as Korea?” he continued.
YOUNGOHM also acknowledged his background as a “former temple school boy who wants to see this country cooler.”
