Why the soundtrack of ‘The White Lotus’ season 3 is so mindblowing

The show’s soundtrack consists of songs which, by and large, emerged in the late 1960s. Influenced by Western tracks imported by American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War, the influx of rock, go-go and jazz commingle with Thailand’s indigenous folk music to produce subgenres with disparate tonalities. The White Lotus foregrounds this eclectic characteristic by highlighting Carabao’s “Made in Thailand” in the first episode of this season. The most popular track from Carabao, the song’s wryly nationalist lyrics are undercut by oblique observations on the commodification of the nation by “farang,” a word which has no direct equivalent in English but which roughly translates to “foreigners.”

Carabao is emblematic of the phleng phuea chiwit (music for life) musical subgenre, whose name derives from silapa puea chiwit (art for life), a philosophical concept originated by the Thai Marxist Chit Phumisak. Phleng phuea chiwit is known for its focus on the quotidian aspects of Thai life, particularly of the proletariat (the buffalo, a symbol of agrarian workers, gives Carabao its Tagalog name) and reached the zenith of its popularity following the popular uprising of Oct. 14, 1973. The democratic idealism of that uprising would come to a swift and brutal end with the Oct. 6, 1976 massacre, which saw police and right-wing paramilitary forces slaughter left-wing student demonstrators. Nevertheless, as Aed Carabao’s ongoing activism attests, the commercialization of phleng phuea chiwit didn’t entirely eradicate its fundamental affinity with the working class and pro-democracy advocacy.

The songs featured on The White Lotus’ soundtrack that most explicitly lift riffs from Western music reinforce a cross-cultural fusion riddled with diegetic or subtextual tension. Sroeng Santi, defined by his distinct mixture of funk rock with luk thung, a subgenre that vivified rural life in the northeast, is also memorably featured in the first episode. His “Kuen Kuen Leung Leung” incorporates the famous riff from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” as he sings about the volatile rising and setting of the sun, allegorizing the fluctuating cost of Thai products. Played against Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) eyeing a potential sexual conquest, the song’s socioeconomic critique extends to patriarchal privilege, squaring Santi’s lyrics against the capricious whims of a wealthy, budding predator.

That said, White’s depiction of power dynamics privileges the interpersonal rather than the geopolitical. The musical choices accordingly accentuate the slippage of control, heightening the insularity of White’s coterie of rich people behaving badly. The fleeting nod to go-go music’s influence in Thailand extends to “Phom Rak Khoon Tching Tching,” a smooth ditty by The Viking Band whose title (meaning “I Really Love You”) is repeated with growing mania. The song’s feverish intensity satirically accompanies the gradual realization of Jaclyn Lemon (Michelle Monaghan) and her two girlfriends (Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon) that they’ve been directed by a Russian beefcake (Arnas Fedarivicius) to another resort crawling with older clientele.

Where the series presents its most explicit and meta-textual acknowledgment of Thailand’s musical cultural history is in the casting of Lek Patravadi and Lalisa Manobal. Both women represent different generations of Thai musical giants, the latter (better known as just Lisa) world-renowned as a member of the South Korean pop group BLACKPINK. The former, known largely by her moniker “Lek” in her native country, plays Sritala, the hotel’s owner and a former actress and chanteuse who serenades her guests with one of her most famous songs in the second episode. Outside of the show, Patravadi performed the song “Ordinary But Not Ordinary” on Thai television in 1992, and that clip is prominently featured in the seventh episode.

Patravadi’s role as the wife of a man (Scott Glenn) who gained his fortune through the violent suppression of land owners complicates her presence on the show as a cultural vanguard for Thai nationalism. Manobal’s character Mook, a love interest for the kind-hearted but hapless security guard Gaitok (Thayme Thapimthong), voices her acceptance of a cutthroat competitiveness as part of surviving in Thailand. But neither of these characters deepen the show’s exploration of socioeconomic inequity, a symptom of White’s character-based writing as much as it is of political timidity (though Coon’s admission that a subplot involving her non-binary child cut following Donald Trump’s re-election blunts the show’s incisive stabs at social commentary).

The spiritual and moral purgatory of these farang parallels the cycle of coups and repression that have dogged the people of Thailand since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. These parallels are decidedly subtextual, with White’s outspoken motivation to boost the nation’s tourism industry enervating his critiques of wanton, incestuous consumption. Nevertheless, these twinning states of psychological stasis are inextricable, and the show’s soundtrack consequently performs as a ghostly avatar for democratic utopianism that’s antithetical to the suffocating, lethal malaise of global oligarchy.