Where transglobal crosspollinations used to be a side product of conquests and crusades, religious pilgrimages and silk and spice trading, aggressive US foreign policy has industrialised the process, restricting it to one-way exchanges at PX stores. American wars took rock´n´cola culture into deepest Indochina, but along with the terror, some good came out of it. Though the American presence in Saigon was cynical and corrupting, the bacillus culture forming around military bases developed disease-ridden freezones where local outsiders were permitted a precarious existence Hó! Roady Music From Vietnam (Trikont US-0249) is a stunning document, celebration even, of Saigon´s resilient streetlife 20 years after the US´s defeat. The appeal of American pop, most likely heard leaking out of squalid girlie bars, is evident in its impact on these electric guitar wielding grannie buskers with backpack amps, bar singers, Vietblues players, hustlers, funeral drum´n´bass combos and bizarre US folk-ethnic fusioneers, taped amid screeching traffic noise, cop whistles, barking hawkers and insect-buzzing heat. Just as the jungle reclaimed detritus left behind by Gis, so these musicians have remoulded fading American melodies around Vietnamese templates, transforming them into vivid, shocking pink Vietpop and street music. And these slithering brass tunings and clattering percussion of Saigon´s funeral combos are truly worth dying for.
(The Wire)