Viet Rap

It was another hot and muggy night in Brooklyn so we (me, the wife C., and the little 4yo son J.) ate out. After dinner, we strolled over to the home of C.'s second elder sister, H.C. Some weeks ago H.C.'s second son C. asked me to help him re-setup VNC for his local network of one iMac and one PeeCee. It worked before and they had fun playing pranks on friends but for some reason it stopped working.

While fiddling with Chicken of the VNC and OSXvnc on the iMac, I couldn't help hearing Vietnamese lyrics in the rap music blaring from iTunes. I don't like rap and think they all sound the same but most teenagers I know seem to love it, and H.C.'s two sons are no exception. The particular song I heard was supposedly sang by Azn Rap and is titled "One Life One Love". It was rather amusing. It sure got my attention. There were phrases like "Anh yêu em" ("I love you", said by a male person to a female person, usually) and "Anh đi ngang nhà em" ("I walk past your house", again said by a man to a woman.) I suppose if I was at the home of my Vietnamese-speaking nephew, A., it wouldn't be so surprising.

My nephew H. thought the non-English lyric was in hakka, a Chinese dialect. I knew it was not because I could understand the Vietnamese portion. There was another portion that sounded like either Thai or Cambodian. I speak neither but heard them before to recognize them. A quick Google search indicated that it's Khmer (Cambodian).

I made some more searches for the lyric itself but found nothing useful. Either it's too hard to type Vietnamese and Khmer, or nobody cared enough to type it up. What's more, the more I searched the more it appeared less likely that the singer or band is really called Azn Rap. So much for the reliability of MP3s downloaded off Limewire and similar P2P networks. Give me iTMS any day - a buck a pop but I know who sings it. Some people don't care who sings what or who plays what roles in what movies, but these things are important to me.