Two recent additions to Bangkok’s Royal City Avenue party zone suggest a greater acceptance of house music. ‘Time Out’ on the main strip had its official opening this month, soon after the arrival of the tucked-away ‘JazzIt’. Both opened as dedicated house music clubs, but how have partygoers responded in a scene dominated by hip hop? We met with the folks behind both venues to ask them.

It is a touch ironic that Marco Wong, the shaven-headed Music Director at Time Out, began as a hip hop DJ on Soi Cowboy sixteen years ago.

“At the time, I liked Run DMC and LL Cool J, so I got my tapes and played rap music. People went crazy, the girls went crazy... So I started DJing with hip hop tunes. That was the beginning of my career,” he recalls.

After graduating to Patpong, he formed an award-winning dance act before becoming Thailand’s first white hip hop singer. Tommy, Time Out’s larger than life Manager remembers it well. “You should have seen the videos when he had hair and everything. He was like the Vanilla Ice of Thailand! It's weird: He's German, but he's been here since he was seven.”

In Germany, Marco discovered techno and house music and was the first to book DJs from Germany to Thailand.

“I moved on from being a hip hop DJ because hip hop became too aggressive. You know, if you go to the Love Parade in Germany, there are more than one million people having fun without killing each other. But you put 300 hip hop kids in one room... So, I thought, hip hop is in the heart and I stopped listening to this kind of music. I started listening to music that makes you happy: trance, house,” explains Marco.

So, is hip hop dying?

“No, no. Hip hop will never die. Hip hop is just out, Time Out is in. I would never say hip hop is dead. Hip hop now seems like fashion. People just follow MTV, follow Channel V, it's not real.

“There's only good music and bad music... Cheesy music is music that makes people dance. It doesn't matter if it's cheesy or not, if the people have fun, they're happy. If there's a smile on their face, then the music is good.”

House music began to fall out of favour when the government began cracking down on drug use, suggests Marco.

“It used to be big, but because of the drug problems about three years ago, things changed. With hip hop, you don't need drugs. It will be the same, you know, but different. It's coming: house music, trance techno. It's coming. It's never-ending. Thai people's blood runs fast and they like to drink. When you drink, you want to move faster - it's human nature. I think, next year, house music is going to be big again.”

Tommy also moved through several different musical genres before finding his home in house. Growing up in Washington DC’s hardcore punk rock scene, he fell into the goth raver scene before working in nightclub security.

“I wasn't a very good bouncer,” recalls Tommy. “I was too nice. I was the bouncer who went into the ladies’ to hold back the hair of the puking drag queen… After that, I got into promoting. Then I started DJing.”

Managing a Virginian indie beer house for “hippies, goths, punkers… and executives” naturally led to a stint managing Bangkok’s QBar.

“Then I did something called Love Launch, all for charity. We only made 250,000 baht from the event, it cost us four million baht to put on. And BangkokRecorder reamed our ass. It was the first event, a lot of things went wrong.”

Tommy stumbled across the venue for Time Out when searching for a site for the city’s doomed ‘Mystique’. They decided to go with somewhere near Sathorn instead. When it was still called ‘Drift’, Tommy tried a few house and hip hop club nights with DJ Octo and DJ Ofay.

“But it was too different for Thai kids. Even the hip hop wasn't the radio-friendly hip hop they wanted. I brought in Lisa Loud, she did really well,” he recalls.

When Time Out launched as a dedicated house club, Tommy says he wanted “a farang at the bar to see a cute girl and be able to approach the table and I wanted a Thai table to see a cute farang and invite them over. I wanted to see what would happen, it's a risk. I don't know whether that's going to work, but so far it has.”

While giving shout-outs to Astra and Tapas for advancing dance music in Bangkok, Tommy doesn’t see them exactly as competition.

“It's something different,” he explains. “We complement each other. Thai-style is one big bowl of rice: We're all the rice and you can be this beetroot and you can be this piece of pork...but it's the same bowl of rice and the same people have to eat from it, so you don't have too much of one thing.”

One of the main attractions so far has been Daniel, the club’s 22-year old Argentinian dancer-slash-model.

Across the road, and tucked inside RCA's Block C, JazzIt, opened by Jon Bellagamba, an Italian lover of house music.

After his first club in Thailand was destroyed by the tsunami, Jon moved to a safer destination.

“I always came to RCA and I always believed in this area. Then with the zoning, the parking, the fact that it's easy to get here, I spent three, four months looking around until I found this place. It was a very bad hip hop club. They used to have fights all the time. The guy who ran the club was very young, he ran away and left everything,” he recounts.

So, from hip hop to house, but is the music policy working?

“The idea was to play funky and hip house, but we changed because house... people don't like it,” says Jon bluntly. “And people who like house don't like to go to RCA for house. It’s starting to happen a little with Flix, it took one year. [Before] downstairs was very bad. They change the DJ, they changed the style and now it's better. Then there's Time Out, Astra is a bit of everything. So, maybe. But now [JazzIt is playing hip hop] because it's working. But sooner or later, we'll go back to the original concept.”

JazzIt has hosted several successful parties for the Britpop-loving Dude/Sweet and Arcadia mobs as well as live bands with SuperSub, but alternating genres can confuse clubbers, especially those that don’t read BangkokRecorder’s listings section.

“You've got to know where you want to go...you have to be focused on where you want to go, and go,” suggests Time Out’s Marco. “It's hard to start it off. For example, Pattaya is changing. There are a few clubs that are starting to change to house music. Next year, it's going to be big. Hip hop will never die, but it's going to slow down.”

So, is house music really making a comeback?

“House is coming, not coming back,” stresses JazzIt’s Jon. “All over the world, house arrived and stayed. House is the style and trend. I lived in Miami for seven years, and if you want to listen to [hip hop], you need to go with two guns... because this kind of music is played in the worst clubs. It's cultural, in Thailand there's a gap. The people who like house speak English, they travel or they went to a good school. They're not the normal people.”

However, Tommy from Time Out thinks that Thailand’s party people are ready for house music: “It could take ten years, but the idea is that I make this club strong, I help develop the music culture…

“Then we build a little Ibiza over here.”

By Laurie Osborne & Karuna Garung

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