“I don’t make happy songs,” says Phúc, the lead singer and guitarist of Saigonese rock group COCC. He and I are sitting in the middle of the band’s “cave” — a homemade recording studio they began putting together ten years ago. “I dreamed about it for a long time,” Phúc says of the studio. “In 2015, when I finished this house, the vision came true. We invest in it all the time, buy a little bit here, buy a little bit there. We’re still adding and improving the system and the equipment.”
It’s quiet and cool in the cave, which is actually the basement of Phúc’s house. Dark blue curtains drape the walls. Acoustic panels are affixed to the ceiling. Instruments and equipment abound, but the general effect is one of order and tidiness. The other two band members — Quốc, the bassist, and Cường, the drummer — are here as well, tinkering with the drum kit. Above us, on the building’s ground floor, is the darkened office of Phúc’s private architecture business; his staff has gone home for the weekend. Beyond that is Phúc’s home. Everything he needs is here, in one place. And yet contained within this single unit are two disparate, clashing worlds — or perhaps two disparate, clashing Phúcs is the better way to put it. More on that presently.
COCC's home studio set-up. Photo by Michael Howard.
I first became aware of COCC a couple of years ago. I was rather late to the party: COCC have been a fixture of Saigon’s indie — or “underground,” if you like — music scene since releasing their debut record, “6 Giờ,” in 2011. It’s easy to see why. The band is indie in the original sense of the term, meaning their ideas, compositions, and production are all their own. The music is hard and raw, with an aggressive edge not commonly seen in Vietnamese music; yet it is distinctly Vietnamese. By design, it defies neat classification.
“OK, I’m Vietnamese, and I cannot copy other music,” he says. “So I combine influences. And I think that is the path for anyone to make their creative work. I don’t want to limit the language and the tones of Vietnamese [when I sing]. More and more, I find a way to combine everything together.”
“When I was young I listened to the music my father listened to,” Phúc recalls. “When I grew up I explored more. But at that time in Vietnam, in the 1980s and 1990s, people listened to Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses. We missed a lot of things. We missed post-punk, like Depeche Mode and the Cure. We missed bands like Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine. I had no idea. We had no internet. But I kept exploring. I listened to classical, blues, jazz.”
All of which had a hand in guiding COCC’s aesthetic vision. So too did traditional genres of Vietnamese music; Phúc mentions cải lương and dân ca specifically.
Loài người bị điên | Insane Humans. Video via COCC's YouTube page.
“When I write music, I think, ‘OK, I’m Vietnamese, and I cannot copy other music,’” he says. “So I combine influences. And I think that is the path for anyone to make their creative work. I don’t want to limit the language and the tones of Vietnamese [when I sing]. More and more, I find a way to combine everything together.”
Phúc wears his hair cropped tight to his head, in a style that recalls a military crew cut, and he articulates his thoughts in a mild, soft-spoken tone, albeit with a few F-bombs tossed in. To look at him and hear him speak, one could be excused for thinking Phúc incapable of the “dark, angry” (his words) attitude that defines COCC’s image. He sings, and often screams, his lyrics into the microphone with a sort of desperate abandon, as though literally needing to get something off his chest. There’s a pugnacity in his on-stage manner that suggests deep inner reserves of disaffection, resentment, rebellion.
COCC - Live show at Le Cafe des Stagiaires, Jan 2025. Photo by KiCu KiCu.
Which brings me back to the point about the disparate worlds, the clashing Phúcs. How to reconcile Phúc the clean-cut, bespectacled architect with the feral and ferocious man behind COCC’s music? After all, they inhabit the same mind. Or do they? Phúc is happy to acknowledge the discrepancy. For him, it’s a simple matter of self-awareness, of recognizing — and, indeed, embracing — his own duality. We all have it. It’s the one Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about. “In my career as an architect,” he tells me, “I have to make other people happy and satisfied. In that world I have to kiss the client’s ass and say, ‘Please pay me.’ But the dark side of me fucking hates it. I need something to release that feeling. In my music I have freedom.”
And he returns shortly to a recurring theme: anger. “Let’s be honest when we do things,” he declares. “Today I’m angry about this, so I write about it; I don’t care if people like it or not. It satisfies me, and it satisfies the band. The most important thing is the freedom and the spirit. When you lose them, there’s no more art. Maybe our songs are not happy songs, but they’re honest. Many artists are afraid to be honest. When I listen to what is called Vietnamese rock, most of them make me think, ‘What is this about?’ There’s no spirit, no emotion. That does not give me a release.”
COCC - Live show at Le Cafe des Stagiaires , Jan 2025. Photo by KiCu KiCu.
It doesn’t occur to me to ask whether it’s fair to say that, in his case, anger functions as a sort of muse (I have this thought later, after we say goodbye), but I do inquire as to its origin. Where does the anger come from? Is it provoked by his observations, or has it always just been a part of him? Phúc considers this, and is slow to respond, eventually pointing to some of the lyrical content from “6 Giờ.” “On our first album, I sang about daily life, everyday things: traffic jams, conflicts with my family, seeing children on the street without parents. But I don’t have the solution. I just express my feeling about it.”
2024 live show at Soma. Photo by KiCu KiCu.
Intent on drawing him out a bit further, I remind him of a moment from a recent COCC show at Le Café des Stagiaires in District 2. At one point, about halfway through their set, Phúc addressed the audience in English. He regretted, he said, that the foreigners in the crowd were unable to understand what he was singing about. So he summed up the meaning of the next song, titled ‘Chất Ăn Mòn’ (“Corrosion”): “Life is full of traps and full of holes. There are many people who want to manipulate you. They want to pull you down into their dirt. They give you poison but they promote it as food. And it slowly destroys you. They want to make you an empty person. And one day there’s no more fight, no more motivation.”
From that metaphor we get a broader and deeper sense of where Phúc and COCC are coming from. Inherent in the music is an ethos of defiance, a fierce opposition to falling in line with a social order that has no use for individuality — that is in fact hostile to it and seeks to stamp it out. It’s a universal problem, and, for Phúc, resisting the pressure to capitulate is what the creative process is all about.
In my career as an architect, I have to make other people happy and satisfied. In that world I have to kiss the client’s ass and say, ‘Please pay me.’ But the dark side of me fucking hates it. I need something to release that feeling. In my music I have freedom.
“When someone does something different, when someone goes beyond the crowd and the lies, there’s some invisible force that manipulates the crowd to attack the person who wants to be different,” he says. “If you raise your voice, if you do something different — trói [you’re tied, bound, lassoed]. I want to tell people, ‘You have to do something your own way. Don’t belong to the fucking crowd. Don’t let them pull you down into their shit.’”
Since their debut in 2011, there have been ebbs and flows in COCC’s output. Periods of quiet led some fans to think that maybe they’d packed it in. Not at all. On the contrary, the band — who regard themselves as a family, and their music as a hobby — tell me they have been practicing together at least once a week for almost twenty years. That streak isn’t likely to be broken anytime soon.
The band hanging out together off the stage on New Year's Eve, 2024 Photo via COCC's Instagram page.
COCC are, in fact, busier than ever. They have concrete plans for the year ahead: releasing a new album, to be precise, in a physical format. It’s to be a concept album about a Vietnamese allegory involving a drought and a heroic toad that leads an army of animals to fight the gods. Here I suppose I ought to shed some light on the band’s name (pronounced c-o-c-c). It has, according to Phúc, a double source of inspiration. One is this fairy tale about the toad; the other is the expression con ông cháu cha — a reference to being born into privilege and power.
But it’s the allegoric toad that has inspired COCC’s current project, which is ambitious in scope.
“The album we are doing now is a concept album about the toad,” Phúc says. “We’re thinking about doing something like a rock opera. Like Tommy by the Who. So there’s a concept and there’s a story line, and we’re thinking about using more instruments, traditional instruments. The idea has been in my head for a long time, and now is the time to do it. We’re looking forward to completing the physical format. We have to do it.”
Recent show flyer featuring the all-important toad. Artwork by KiCu KiCu
Vinyl? CD? He’s not sure yet, but he’s hoping vinyl. As for upcoming gigs, Phúc tells me that they’ve had to turn some invitations down as they prioritize their work on the album.
“We like to bring a new thing to the audience,” he explains. “So the right procedure is to release something new in a physical format, and then we’ll do a tour from the south to the north. We haven’t thought about marketing yet. We have just told our fans, ‘We will do something in 2025.’”
I’m tempted to ask whether, in COCC’s interpretation of the tale, the toad lives happily ever after. But I can take a guess.
