LYRICS
Please note that following words are the rough translation of the French versions of the songs. Sometimes, there is a certain gap between the Khmer and the French, so these English translations only represent one side of the band’s repertoire.
Four-wheel drive
You show off with your big four-wheel drive
Among the motorbikes in the grey city
You don’t care about the pollution
You’ve earned your dough selling the Earth
Na, na, na, na, na
Na, na, na, na, na
Na, na, na, na, na
Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, hé, hé, hé, hé, hé, hé !
Your car is the proof of your success
The one that allows you hit-and-runs
You believe that law is not made for you
It’s something for the poor; it has nothing to do with the kings
Na, na, na, na, na…
A question which keeps running through my mind
How can such a stupid guy like you
Earn the money to get a car like that?
Me, I have got a very good one and I only have a bicycle…
America is so far away
Go on, go on, I cannot stop you
What are you doing? Where do you want to go?
The decision is yours,
But don’t you really like the Cambodians anymore?
America is so far away
Please babe, think about it
You will be all alone abroad
You don’t even speak English!
We are lucky to be born Khmer
Let’s stay here to save our land
We all have to make efforts
Please don’t go, I will hold you
Cambodians are often faithful
Once they love, it’s for life
So why do you want to leave?
Please don’t go, we will be fine here
America is so far away...
Go on, go on, I cannot stop you
What are you doing? Where do you want to go?
The decision is yours,
But don’t you really like the Cambodians anymore?
Mother nature’s injustice
When I was born, I didn’t choose
The tons of misfortune that weight down my life
When I was born, my parents told me:
« Love the pain and above all, love you bed! »
Mother nature’s injustice
The rich and the misfits
Disabled that aren’t loved
By mother nature
The rich and the misfits
Like twins: the ugly and the beautiful!
When I was born, I was so small
The growing hormones have not been good enough
Today I’m the dwarf
Of the family that can’t understand it
Mother nature’s injustice…
Here’s mother nature’s judgment
Everybody doesn’t eat the same jam
That’s why it is sometimes so hard
And that’s why I dream of another future
When I die, nothing would have changed
I will still have the same stinky body
When I die, nobody will cry
End of the story, everybody will then be happy
In days gone by
« We » belongs to the past
Our memories are well lined-up
Dust covers yours
So I’m their only guardian
Remember the beautiful things!
When our life was rose-tinted!
But you replaced me so quickly
Did I not count for you?
Our oaths and our promises
Were etched in stone
So when we are old
They would have brought us light
Remember the beautiful things!...
I can’t turn the page
I keep on living in another time
While you are forgetting me
In the other sheets of some other beds
The smell of your body
Keeps on intoxicating my nights
And you golden triangle
Had the taste of paradise
Flooded
The sky is filling up with dark clouds
The people hurry up before the thunderstorm
In their country they live more outside and inside
And their drying laundry is like praying flags
The clicking of the first raindrops
On the corrugated iron roofs
Announces the beginning of the troubles
The city will be soon flooded
Flooded…
30 minutes are enough
So that people are hard up
Rats do swim and garbage does float
While ground-floor occupants scoop out
Traffic is almost jammed
Bicycles, cyclos, motorbikes have all stopped
Under the dirty surface,
Potholes are traps for everyone driving
Flooded…
You’ve got a saying telling
“After the rain comes the nice weather”
But here, everything is different
Nice weather is before the rain
Flooded…
Smasher
You besought me
Not to go
You can’t stand anymore
My bruises and my black eyes
But I really have no choice
I’m a smasher
And the punches in the liver
Please the spectators
On the ring, animal instinct
I only think of hurting
My life is only worth of few dollars
And it depends on my fate
But I really have no choice...
When I bite the dust
Sometimes I want to die
I feel ashamed for my buddies
I’m too scared; I don’t want to go outside
I know that people wait for me
Because of the money
That they have bet
For they were sure that I would win
Whatever I do, one just hates me
There is only you to support me
When everybody left the place
Apart from the losers insulting me
But I really have no choice...
Akosal
My name is Akosal
I do have a family nevertheless it is as if I am all alone
I have many bothers and sisters
But we don’t have the same father
I’m 8-year old and I’m very hungry
I have to beg from dawn to dusk
I try to fill up my stomach
With all the food you leave on your plates
It that a human life?
When you live in the streets like a dog!
It that a human life?
When you live in the streets like a dog!
I’d like to think about tomorrow
But I don’t dare think too far
I can’t read, write and count
So I’ll always be despised
It that a human life?...
I haven’t done anything to deserve all that…
But who cares about me!
Street kids!
Lost kids!
The Singer
He told me he wanted to write songs
His music would be the revolution
He wanted to be the voice of a country
Where corruption would be finally banned
But when he was talking about politics
In his mind he was only thinking about dough
Wanting to change people’s mind
Was before all a way to make money
The singer, the liar, the cheater
We, the naïve, we believed him
We drank his sweet words
Behind his hypocritical smile
We didn’t see all his limits
But when he was talking about politics…
Hi everybody!
How are you? I feel good
Yeah, you love my music
It’s true… that I sing so well
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m so handsome
Thank you, thank you
You admire me, he?
You are right because I’m brother number one
I will write a book<
I will write a book...<...
I will write a book...
I carry on selling wear braces for two years
Gherkins for three years,
But after you know,
There are my wife and the kids
My book, I will write it in 25 years.
I will write a book...
On Saturday night
When I go to my friends
I tell them all my stories
Those are never finished
Because from page to page
I’m the King of talking
I will write a book...
I will...
Strangled love
I can’t sleep, my mind is blank
I don’t live, my body is insipid
Just carry on faking
And muzzling my true feelings
Please, help me!
Don’t leave her indifferent
Moun Snà Sarika Linthoung
Please make her become my sweet lover
I’m dying from living without you
From counting the days that are not
The promised sweet hereafters
That are stolen from us
My princess who has no idea
About the misfortune inside my heart
You always tell me that patience
Is also some sort of hope
I’m dying from living without you...
Srey Lancer
When I see you
Lost among those shades
I keep on telling me that it’s not you
It’s another dark skinned girl
The one I know
Is a good mother
Who, all day long,
Takes good care or her child
Every night
You pretend that there’s nothing wrong
You force yourself to drink
You forget the one you love
The one with most money
Will be your one-night lover
You try not to think about it
My Srey Lancer
When I ask you
If you’re married
With your almond eyes
You tell me you’re widowed not divorced
You know that all
Will one day finish
When you youth and you beauty
Would have gone away
Every night...
Night butterflies
Crumbling hotels, cheap wooden dumps
Smoky karaoke, massage salons
Is that your small girl’s dream?
Or is it only a bad chapter?
Days and nights
You sell your intimacy
Forgetting has a price
When you have to eat
Unknown faces, dirty hands on your naked beauty
Closing the eyes and fleeing to not see the tainting ugliness
The desire of the paying guys has the taste of pus
Which eats into you when they wet you
Days and nights...
Not dead yet, but you have already known hell
It’s not only the Devil’s tail that you rub
You always think about the time you will leave
To kiss this martyr’s life goodbye
Souvenir photographs
On the table, some souvenir photographs
Imprison my youth and its smiles
Dreams and illusions have been wasted
During years spent living nothing
I’d never thought it’d be so difficult
To leave behind such a fragile life
I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror
I have been scared by own sight
Silence and obscurity
Have a perfume of eternity
I’d never thought it’d be so difficult…
On the table, some souvenir photographs
Remind me I’m going to DIE…
Big Bulb
« Darling, darling look how beautiful the moon is!
I can’t live without it
When I’m sad, I look at its face
Its ingenuousness and its sweetness relieve me
- But you forget
- What do I forget?
- Or maybe you don’t know?
- What is it?
- That there was a time
When the moon made the people suffer
Take you handkerchief
And listen to that story… »
Under the moon, in the rice fields
The Cambodian people
Had to work the land
The land, the land, the land…
The night became the day, endless journey
Working oneself to death
And ending by sinking
Sinking, sinking, sinking
Rats, lizards and roaches
Only food to survive
But don’t get caught
Last prayers for the dying
Under the moon, in the rice fields
The Cambodian people
Has known hell…
Hell… hell… hell…
Hell… hell… hell…
Darling, darling, I didn’t know all that
Please, forgive me.
Around us, I can feel the ghosts
Hold me in your arms, protect me...
The Rice fields of Souvenir
Oh my rice field, cradled by the wind
You tell me our story
All my tears mixed with blood
Write this black moment that nobody wants to believe
How come we drifted so far?
How come we agreed?
How come we dirtied our hands?
Why so much hatred? Why so much sorrow?
All of you who have left us
I’m praying for you to find the peace
All of you who have left us
I’m praying for you to find the peace
We have lost our writers
Our musicians, all our thinkers
Our traditions and our honour
By our own hands, by our own hands
Because of the war, all our parents
Who used to live together under the same roof
Are now either in exile or dead
And my heart trembles, and my heart trembles
All of you who have left us
I’m praying for you to find the peace
All of you who have left us
I’m praying for you to find the peace
You my brothers, you my sisters,
You the Khmer People
You can’t forget all that
Cause it may happen again, it may happen again