Hard Rock

After the show, the biggest rock star Burma has ever produced stands on the concrete parking apron of a shabby hotel in Taunggyi in Shan state, alone in the cool midnight air. Zaw Win Htut’s fans came by the thousands today to see him perform, chanting his name for hours before he took the stage. But they’ve left, and his band mates and family have retired to their rooms. He looks almost peaceful now, smaller somehow than when he was in front of the crowd. It’s quiet, something the 38-year-old could get used to. “I’m tired of being famous,” he says, his voice raspy from rough use.

If that discontented sigh came from a rock idol in some other country, you would figure merely that the hassle of having millions of adoring fans had finally become a bore. After all, amassing a fortune large enough to buy an island and indulging in enough random sex to overpopulate it can get a little wearing. But for Burmese artists and performers, fame is less about feast and more about frustration. Celebrity in this country is minor, yet it is only sustained through an endless series of personal and artistic compromises. Zaw Win Htut owns a cherry red Chevy Impala and has enough money to be considering sending his daughter to an Australian boarding school. These are the fruits of 20 years of performing, again and again, watered-down Burmese covers of rock relics by the Eagles, Rod Stewart and the Beatles.

He writes his own songs, too. They are mainly ballads about lost love. Several have the word dream in the title. He may want to perform more provocative material, but he knows he can’t. Though their profession calls for them to strut onstage like rebels, Burma’s rockers can only mime the anti-establishment part. Zaw Win Htut works in the sanitized vacuum of a country run by military rulers who view him automatically as a threat, a potential subversive, because he holds a microphone. Burma’s cultural input is zealously monitored and artistic expression heavily censored. Musicians are controlled right down to the length of their hair. Outdoor concerts are seldom allowed, and order is always maintainedtonight in Taunggyi by platoons of soldiers, cops and the white-helmeted riot squad.

But if you want that red Chevy and a future for your kids, you must be willing to carefully negotiate the rat mazes that lie before you. Zaw Win Htut has played guitar with the son of pro-democracy dissident Aung San Suu Kyi and has performed for the children of former dictator Ne Win, who were arrested in March on charges of plotting a coup against the current leadership. His family background has worked in his favor. His mother was a professional singer of traditional folk music. His grandfather, at the behest of General Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father and the leader of Burma’s independence movement more than half a century ago, wrote a song called When the Army Is Strong, the People Are Strong. It is still played at military functions. As a child, Zaw Win Htut listened to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. His father, a doctor and a rock fan who bought records on trips abroad, pushed him to sing as well as play drums and guitar, and financed his first two albums, both failures. A third album, produced after his father died of an allergic reaction in the mid-’80s, was a hit.

Years later, four floors above a decaying side street in Rangoon, the artist sits at a small desk in a video production office. He’s wearing jeans and a T shirt, and is barefoot, his flip-flops resting by the door with everyone else’s. On his last album, Zaw Win Htut says, “I tried to introduce the blues to my fans.” But sales were sluggish, so today he’s putting together videos to help sell the album.

Outside, vendors are hawking cheap sunglasses, fabrics, and Star Cola in bottles that ape the ones made by Pepsione of the many multinationals that once operated in Burma and have since fled. This office, which belongs to a friend, is less ersatz, less dilapidated than most. It is stocked with sophisticated soundboards and equipment, including two Mac G4s with big color monitors. An engineer cues up a video and Zaw Win Htut appears onscreen, earnestly singing and strumming on a river barge, then walking down a dusty road. This is interspersed with stills of his mother in her youth and clips of his son playing guitar. “It’s a song about how the music was passed down to me, and how I want to pass it on to my son and other people,” he says.

He watches contentedly but nervously, bouncing from one foot to the other, his arms crossed tightly across his chest. Maybe it’s showing new work to strangers. Maybe it’s that the strangers are journalists. Last summer, the International Herald Tribune carried a story about him. He was circumspect, but following its publication, he received a number of inquiries from other news outlets. The story wasn’t the problem; the publicity was. He was called in for an official visit to explain the article, line by line. He received another scolding after doing an interview on a Tokyo radio station a few months ago.

Zaw Win Htut became a local hero in part because early in his career he resisted singing the propaganda songs that all musicians in Burma are pressured to record. This has earned him a lifetime of official scrutiny. He was once prohibited from performing because his hair was too long and again laterafter a spell in a monasterybecause he had no hair. (Today, it’s shoulder length.) In 1994, a power outage cut short a show and fans rioted. Zaw Win Htut was blamed and forbidden to play publicly for six months. His fellow rockers get similar treatment. They adapt, or stop performing. In the mid-’90s, musician Lay Phyu somehow slipped past the censors an album titled Power 54a subtly subversive reference to Suu Kyi, who lives at 54 University Avenue. The number was dropped from the title after authorities caught on and ordered a recall. Another band plays Twisted Sister’s tune We’re Not Gonna Take It but with love song lyrics.

Zaw Win Htut has likewise sterilized more controversial parts of his workthus avoiding the fate of Par Par Lay, a well-known comedian who in 1996 received a seven-year prison sentence for satirizing the country’s ruling generals. Not everyone is willing to bend. Mun Awng, a popular musician in Burma in the 1980s, left the country in 1988 after participating in a wave of antigovernment demonstrations. From Thailand, he released an album titled Battle for Peace, and activists sang his songs while facing down the military in 1996 street protests. He now lives in Norway, performing occasionally for Burmese exiles. He sings what he wants to sing. But almost no one listens. “In Burma, I produced one album a year,” says Mun Awng. “During 14 years in exile, I have only recorded two albums.” He vows to return and restart his career “as soon as there is freedom of expression.”

Zaw Win Htut cannot afford to be so idealistic, not publicly. One night in Taunggyi, he was sitting with band mates in a hotel bar, plates of grilled rabbit and feral cat in front of them. On several occasions, he started to bemoan his working conditions, then abruptly changed the subject. Later, he admitted he’s thought about leaving the country, about moving to Australia perhaps and maybe opening a studio there. But he isn’t going anywhere. His mother is here, his friends, fans and band mates. And he knows he couldn’t equal the success he’s had in Burma.

So he stays put, assuring himself that he can keep everything on track by striking the right “balance”a word he pantomimes by holding out his hands and moving them up and down like a scale. He talks about how he angered his fans when, after the government lifted his ban and he was allowed to play to audiences again, he recorded some songs about the Burmese Kings of yore written by a friend he used to jam with but who had since joined the military. He was called a sellout for kowtowing to the government. Ethnic fans were outraged, as the Kings had subjugated their people. Another official requested he make an album about the nation. He agreed again, but said he wanted to write the songs: he completed eight, one dedicated to each of Burma’s major ethnic groups. These are the pragmatic choices of a father with a son who wants to perform some day and a daughter who wants to go to medical school.

He says he might make another album this year. But afterward, he wants to move out of the spotlight, into producing and painting. There may be battles he wants to fight; he acknowledges that all art is political, whether intended as such or not. Yet he insists, because he must, that his work is not political. Instead, he sings about love and dreamsuntil the day when he can sing about something else.