Yungtarr is easy to spot in a crowd. Although he’s only 17 years old, he’s tall and stocky with silver fronts that shine above most other people’s heads when he flashes a big grin. The underground Thai rapper makes a lofi R&B style of music with some school kid charm, which clearly resonates with fans who’ve streamed several tracks millions of times each (and even more if you include songs he’s featured on).
“I was just a nerd on the internet and found Rap Is Now,” Tarr says, recalling how the local battle rap channel first inspired him. “I was only 12 years old, but right away I was like, ‘I’m gonna make my own music.’ I knew I had something in me. I didn’t give a fuck what anybody said about me.” Without a second guess, he jumped right into things. At first, he worked with some locals doing sound engineering, but he found a real home among other young artists from around the country on Facebook and Discord, where everyone would share their music and talk about it. They were all eager to experiment and try out new stuff, and all that activity and friendly competition helped to motivate him.
Tarr, who’s from Krabi in the south of Thailand near Phuket, has always felt it was important to be himself and not try and imitate anyone else: “I’m not from a bad place, but it’s not good. I’m just a citizen. A regular person.” A lot of kids who want to get into rap think they have to act like Western artists who might come from very different backgrounds, and he feels that can slow artists down from finding their own thing. “If more people would just be themselves from the start, we’d have all these new sounds and styles and flows.”
He uses three different languages, switching between a Southside dialect, regular Thai, and English. “People not from the Southside don’t understand the accent or slang, but they fuck with me,” he smiles. He learned most of his English at school but also a great deal came from social media. “I grew up on the internet, seeing all this weird stuff online in English.” Occasionally he uses all three languages on the same track, and sometimes he’ll do whole songs in one language or another. But mostly it’s about the sound the words make—he doesn’t think much about what he’ll say or what language he’ll use other than his main topic for each track. As long as the words hit right and their melody works, that’s what really matters to him.
Like many of the artists in this new wave of underground rap, Tarr has dropped several club pop tracks, rapping over hyperpop, dnb, and Jersey club beats. His first try was a house track produced by Nonstate, his former teammate at Dha Vision who recently moved over to Hype Train’s label. “People didn’t know what type of genre it was, I didn’t call it house. But they liked it,” he says. His next was a Jersey club track. “I didn’t want to do some badman stuff like drill music, so I made a goofy love song instead. I talked about school stuff. I wanted it to be relatable.” He also released official remixes for his new track “iPhone,” including a baile funk beat. (Funk has been popping up in Thai rap lately, with both Trippytung and Jarvis releasing their own separate baile funk tracks around the same time as Tarr.)
Tarr’s age has been an issue occasionally. When he first wanted to go to Bangkok alone to perform, his parents wouldn’t let him. He had to show them the money he was making from streaming to convince them he really needed to go. His first performance was the SoundCloud Rising event two years ago, which was something of a watershed for this new scene, bringing a lot of people together in person for the first time (and it’s where he met CHXID, who we also recently covered). “I was so nervous when I got on stage and saw all those people looking at me,” he laughs. “I had to wear sunglasses and squeezed my eyes closed when I started performing. After a while, I opened them and saw the crowd was bopping and they were fuckin with it. Now I have fun at every show.” But he still has to limit his performances to once a month to make sure he graduates on time. That’s only a year away and then he plans to pursue music full-time. “Now’s my chance, I gotta take advantage of the moment.”
