Burmese Super Trouper: How Burmese Poets and Musicians Turn Global Popular Music into Copy Thachin

Abstract

Copy thachin, or Burmese cover songs of international hits, dominates the popular music scene in contemporary Burma/Myanmar. These songs in Burmese often retain melodic and stylistic patterns with international popular hits, but have lyrics rewritten by Burmese poets with varying degrees of fidelity to their original meaning. As I will argue, because of its explicit transience, copy thachin constitutes a mimetic transcription device whereby Burmese poets and musicians can engage an international other, but do so in a way that points to—yet does not always reveal—the global character of popular music.

Keywords:

• Burma/Myanmar
• Popular Music Censorship
• Ethnomusicology
• Rock Music

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Andrew Willford, Marc Perlman, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Mariam Lam, Tammy Ho and Deborah Wong for their helpful comments and feedback on previous versions of this article. The ethnographic research for this article was supported by the Fulbright Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.

Notes

1. Also relevant to this article is that the Jamaican/American singer Shaggy borrowed and sampled from Steve Miller's ‘The Joker’ and Chip Taylor's ‘Angel of the Morning’ in the creation of ‘Angel’.

2. Cover renditions do not generally mean recording song lyrics in another language; the language switching is a point I will discuss in detail later in this paper.

3. On another side of this reception, when I have played examples of copy thachin for groups of undergraduate students in Australia, some students would giggle out of recognition of the original popular song and the dissonance that hearing the song in Burmese created.

4. This was the case at the time of research, but with the relaxing of censor regulations in the past year, this could present new opportunities and challenges for the recording industry in Burma.

5. Copies of lyrics are supplied, and producers pay a per page ‘reading fee’ for the censors to scrutinise the texts. When texts are not in Burmese, producers must supply a Burmese translation as well.

6. Contacts in Yangon have told me that street vendors in Burma who sell unlicensed copies of CDs and DVDs are not punished, but those caught selling media which lack censor board approval are subject to stiff penalties.

7. Though these have been diminishing in popularity in recent years.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane M. Ferguson

Jane M. Ferguson is a Research Fellow at The University of Sydney