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Dim Sum Down-low

Dim Sum Down-low: Pyra predicts the apocalypse

“The importance of history is so that we can learn from our ancestors’ mistakes & not repeat them.”

LiFTED | Pyra | 20 Aug 2021


What do you do besides music? LiFTED takes the long-loved afternoon talks at a dim sum joint in Asia to get the scoop of what artists enjoy besides making music in Dim Sum Down-low. This month, our spotlight shines on Thailand’s Pyra and her ability to predict the future.

Pyra can come at you from any different angle. Her music flirts with HyperPop with middle-fingers-in-the-air Hip Hop attitude. She protests in arty ways, which seems to keep her under the radar for now. She not only lives in the dystopian present, but she also nerds out on history, philosophy, psychology, and conspiracy theories. This knowledge enables her to predict what’s going to happen in the future, and things don’t look good. Her new EP, My fkn bad pt.1 with the lead single ‘Paper Promises’ was written two years ago and they are ominous in their accuracies.


My prophecy reading is nothing like the super psychic, gypsy granny picture you’re imagining in your head right now. I’m talking about learning the data points in history so that we can use them to predict future occurrences. It’s more like an analytical forecast.

The subject I hated and scored the worst at in college was history, but I’m now super into it after reading ‘Homo Deus’ by Yuval Noah Harari two years ago. Why? Because my college professors never taught me why history means so much, but Yuval did. The importance of history is so that we can learn from our ancestors’ mistakes and not repeat them.

My fkn bad pt.1 EP is a prophecy of the future from an outlook of the world’s timeline. The shit we’ve done to the world will eventually come back and bite us like ‘fkn bad’ karma [figuratively speaking, I’m neither superstitious nor religious]. There’s always a price to pay for our actions. Since we’ve been making ‘paper promises’ with one another in the past, getting fucked right now is only a natural consequence.

I’m writing these songs from a dystopian lens to give people a red-flag warning that this could be where we’re going to end up if we don’t do something about it right now. But it’s not like I’m tryin’ to drag everybody down to hell with me because these are strong songs that inspire and empower people to do something bigger than they think they could. It’s ultimately positive and hopeful despite its title ‘fkn bad.’

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Prediction 1: The rally for democracy in Thailand

I wrote ‘Bangkok’ in Feb 2020 knowing that there’s going to be a rally sometime soon for damn sure in which the rally broke out a bit later in July 2020.

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Prediction 2: I wrote ‘Paper Promises' which talks about warfare & how the world’s shittiest leaders are trampling on the lives of the 99% just for their personal financial gain

‘Paper Promises’ comes at the same time as the Taliban's seizing of power and control in Afghanistan. Also, the fall of democracy & the rise of dictatorship regimes around the world [in Thailand, HK, and countries in South America]. It’s not a coincidence that all this is happening to us at the same time. If you know your history, you will know that democracy doesn’t really work in the Information Age. That's why governments have decided to seize control by limiting our freedom in every possible way you can imagine.

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Prediction 3: My release of ‘Yellow Fever’ which talks about the fetishization of Asian women and feminism

During the same week of the release of this track, Asian hate crimes were really the hot topic in the West. It’s the same time as the Atlanta spa shooter murdered eight people of which 6 were asian women. I was really shocked to learn of that news.

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Prediction 4: My release ‘Dystopia’

I feel like all these dystopian novels and films always portray dystopia in the far future but dystopia is actually right now. We’re in one right now and we’ve been in one for a long time. It’s our past, present, and future. But 2020 is the [what I call] the ‘grand opening’ of dystopia where we all came to realize that the consequences of our actions are coming to get us and they won’t slow down. I think we started the year with natural disasters like forest fires in multiple parts of the world then came the pandemic.

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1 Wrong Prediction: The timing of all these occurrences.

I wrote ‘Dystopia’ just so that people in the future could come back to find out that what I said in the past is actually true. I thought the grand opening of the dystopia would arrive in 20 to 40 years...not a year ago...Oh god.

BONUS Prediction: Thailand’s Future

In my honest opinion, I don’t have one sure answer so imma give you the two options I think could happen:

1] Thailand will become a Republic of Thailand, but this might come after a civil war and some bloodshed. The country will change for the better and the economy will flourish

OR

2] We will become a semi-communist country with China as our military government's reference, but since we don’t have the technology nor the money, we will turn out more like Myanmar and not China. Thailand will fall behind its neighboring countries in SouthEast Asia so investors will move out and we’ll return to being a developing or third world country.