STRANGERS IN PARADISE: ESTRANGEMENT AND WORKING-CLASS EMOTIONAL CONVERGENCE IN LUK THUNG SONGS (1970s-1980s)

Abstract

This article examines how Luk Thung songs, popular Thai songs commonly associated with rural life, from the late 1970s-1980s articulate working-class subjectivity among rural-origin men and women entering urban and industrial wage labor through three interrelated affective modes: rural estrangement, transitional desire, and working-class emotional convergence. Rather than treating these subjects as rural-urban workers in a formal or institutional sense, the analysis focuses on how rural individuals experience emotional transition as they move into wage labor in Bangkok and its industrial peripheries.  The study analyzed four influential songs from the period of 1970s-1980s —Sao AM, Num Na Khao Sao Na Kluea, Chanthana Thi Rak, and Chanthana Top Rak—performed by major Luk Thung singers. Together, these works illuminate an affective continuum: from rural defensiveness toward Bangkok-centered modernity, to anticipatory rural-urban encounters, and finally to the intimate emotional negotiations of industrial factory workers. Through this progression, the Luk Thung music genre emerges as a sonic archive that not only reflects but actively shapes emotional trajectories of migration, labor, and belonging. Methodologically, the study employed qualitative analysis of lyrics, sound recordings, and performance practices, combining close reading, sonic interpretation, and sociohistorical contextualization. Drawing on theories of affective circulation and aurality, the study treats Luk Thung music genre not merely as a representational genre but as a site of affective production, demonstrating how songs actively organize estrangement, aspiration, and emotional convergence during Thailand’s late-twentieth-century industrial transformation.