5 Global industry, national politics
Popular music in ‘New Order’ Indonesia
Most of us are not so much inspired by the themes of death metal lyrics… The attraction is more the music itself, it gives us hope, it's about freedom, it's an expression of our soul.
Kadek, guitarist in Balinese death metal band, Behead (Baulch 1996a)
Indonesian music has never been ‘autochthonous in the (relatively) pure sense of the term, except to a very limited degree’, for it is overlaid by a cornucopia of musical forms which have continuously washed ashore (Kunst 1973: 1), making it virtually impossible to declare any currently existent forms ‘purely’ or ‘authentically’ Indonesian. Historically the musics of Indonesia have always been syncretic and absorbed outside influences — long before the contemporary coining of the terms ‘globalisation’ or ‘world music’.
At its most general our purpose is to place Indonesian popular music within the polarised debate over globalisation, which has swept over the social sciences in the last 20 years. At one end are those who see globalisation as the product of a single hegemonic culture and, at the other, those who see the process as the creation of ever more complex hybridities. Increasingly, though, there are those in the middle (like Appadurai) who collapse the processes of homogenisation and heterogenisation, obliterating the demarcation between the global and the local, finding neologisms like ‘glocal’ (Robertson's term) in an effort to emphasise the hybrid. What are lost in these accounts that, however sensitive to the notion of the local, seek constantly to apprehend the whole, the ‘globe’, are the different ways in which the global and the local rub up against each other, the way in which one ‘glocal’ is different from another.1
It is possible to tell at least two stories about the incursion of the multi-national (= ‘global’) music industry into Indonesia in the 1980s–1990s, the period frequently dubbed the ‘late New Order’.2 The first is the story of the incorporation of Indonesian music into the regulatory frameworks of global capitalism — the familiar story of globalisation as the forward march of capitalism. The second story (and the one upon which we concentrate in this chapter) is less straightforward. Here we try to show that the same global musical codes and icons — the Beatles, Mick Jagger, heavy metal — marketed by the multinational companies also became new dimensions of radical opposition to, or at least anarchic disregard of, the New Order regime's political order.
We argue that, in particular political circumstances — such as in 1990s Indonesia — foreign cultural imports become sources of codes and symbols of local opposition. We document the indigenisation of foreign musical forms and their mobilisation as Indonesian political discourse in the closing years of Suharto's rule. Western music as political opposition in Indonesia goes back to the early 1960s, when Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, banned the Beatles. Then, as in the 1990s, what was at stake was not so much the lyric or the music, but a performative style, which symbolised an attitude. We look at two genres in particular: ‘dangdut’, which became national music in the New Order, and semi-underground ‘hard rock’, which remained in many ways the foreign foil to ‘national music’.
Dangdut: hybrid and national
With the international prominence of Anglo-American popular music in the early 1960s it became common for successful entertainers in Indonesia to incorporate into their music and live performances elements of this Anglo-American ‘pop’. The most durable band which emerged in the early 1960s featured the Koeswoyo brothers (known initially as Koes Bros, then Koes Bersaudara, and later still as Koes Plus), who became popular with their ‘Everly Brothers’ style of pop. When the popularity of the Everly Brothers declined in the West, and following that in Indonesia, the Koeswoyos started performing in the Beatles' style. However, Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, was highly critical of what he dubbed pejoratively ‘ngak-ngik-ngok’ music (rock'n'roll). Such (Western) music was forbidden on Indonesian radio. Accused of playing ngak-ngik-ngok music, the Koeswoyo brothers were arrested at the height of Sukarno's radical nationalism on 29 August 1965 and detained for three months until after the 30 September coup brought Suharto to power.3 The Koeswoyos had turned a combination of apolitical lyrics and rock tunes copied from the west into a symbol of political radicalism.4
After the fall of Sukarno in 1965 and the reopening of Indonesia to Western cultural imports, Anglo-American recordings flowed freely into the country and again graced the airwaves. This stimulus reinvigorated attempts to synthesise an identifiably ‘Indonesian’ modern popular music. Rhoma Irama is credited with the invention a national-popular music. With his Soneta Group and co-performers like Elvy Sukaesih, Rhoma Irama transformed older-style Malay orchestral music into up-tempo dangdut (dubbed onomatopoeically after its syncopated drum beat, dang then dut), and in so doing became ‘one of the best-paid and most widely recognized contemporary Indonesians, and a musician who changed the face of Indonesian music’ (Frederick 1982: 108). Rhoma Irama took the rhythmic style of Indian film songs, popular with lower-class urban Indonesians, and transformed it into a ‘national’ treasure, favoured in the 1980s even by the middle classes, and with the patronage of cabinet ministers. In the 1990s about 35 per cent of total record sales in Indonesia were dangdut.
Some established ‘pop’ performers have adopted dangdut as part of their repertoire since the 1980s. University students saw in it a way of playfully adopting lower-class music as a gesture against commercial ‘pop’. The armed forces' monthly music programme on the state-run television station, TVRI (Televisi Republik Indonesia), Aneka Ria Puspenhankam ABRI frequently featured dangdut, often played by military bands. State officials began to include dangdut entertainment in formal and social events. By the mid-1980s dangdut had become an established vehicle for populist politicking, endorsed by the highest levels of government. It was championed by State Secretary Moerdiono, who declared when opening a nationally televised epic dangdut concert celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence in 1995 that ‘This country [has been made] of the people, by the people, for the people. And so is dangdut of the people, by the people, for the people.’ It is, he was earlier quoted as declaring, ‘very, very Indonesian’.5
Rhoma Irama's attempt to use his music as a medium for Islamic evangelism also made dangdut a point of party political contention. His lyrics, rhythms and performances tapped the early 1980s Muslim resentment against the New Order and were well received by Muslim scholars and students in Muslim schools and colleges around the country. He aligned himself with the moderate Islamic opposition political party, the PPP, campaigning for them in general elections and singing at the campaign rallies. For this allegiance, the state-owned TVRI blocked his television appearances for most of the 1980s, and strict security conditions were applied to his public performances. But by the 1990s Rhoma was back on television. In 1991, when he appeared on the first private commercial television channel, RCTI, to celebrate the Muslim festival Idul Adha, he was paid Rp30 million (about $US15,000) and made it a condition of his appearance that it was not cut or censored in any way (Kompas 1992). His allegiances were shifting too, as he and dangdut were becoming a vehicle for the New Order's rapprochement with the Muslims, finally enacted in the ‘Raja Dangdut's’ candidature for the Suharto government's political organisation, Golkar, in the 1997 elections, after which he occupied a Golkar seat in the parliament (DPR). Rhoma suffered a decline in popularity, due at least in some part to his being tainted by his association with Golkar. This became more evident after the fall of Suharto in May 1998. On resigning his membership of Golkar and his parliamentary seat in November 1998, Rhoma Irama declared that he did not intend to join any of the newly emerging parties, but would be content to be a neutral Islamic preacher (mubaligh) (Kompas CyberMedia 1998). Like several other popular singers, he recorded songs with a ‘reformasi’ theme, but sales of the cassette were modest. In contrast to his high profile in previous elections, Rhoma was absent from the general election of 7 June 1999, campaigning neither for Golkar nor any of the Islamic parties, perhaps marking by this absence the political, non-partisan, ‘national’ spirit of this music.6
If dangdut's message, played out on the national political stage, was one of moderation, piety and religiosity, there was another secular and very sexual face to dangdut, seen in tamed forms on television, but in the main played out in humbler venues by unnamed performers. This dangdut was performed at local fairs, festivals like Yogya's Sekaten, or in open-air entertainment centres like Yogya's Purnawisata. Here heavily made-up bespangled female singers in body-hugging micro-minis, some as young as 14, performed to the backing of an all-male band.7 The singers were almost exclusively women from kampungs (villages), their audience predominantly (90 per cent) young, lower-class males. The singers' ‘stylised pelvic gyrations’ (goyang pinggul) were ritualised flirtations in a matter-of-fact, even bored, manner, periodically bending backwards, legs apart, pelvises thrust forward as the audience beneath the stage craned to view their sequined g-strings (Pioquinto 1995; Tony 1996; Susanto 1992). The songs performed were mostly current hits by recording artists. But what Pioquinto calls the ‘genital focus’ of these acts stripped dangdut of both Rhoma Irama's religiosity and the cute televisuality of singers who made it into the national media. On television, the ‘goyang pinggul’ was necessarily toned down, and sequined undies were replaced by glamorous calf-length dresses, modifying the implications of the same love-lorn lyric by a very different kind of embodiment of the song.
While dangdut was frequently labelled ‘as the authentic music of the Indonesian people [musik asli rakyat Indonesia]’ (Harahap 1996), its legacy from Indian film music popularised through imported films since the 1960s was also readily acknowledged. One critic of Rhoma Irama even identified several of the ‘king's’ own tunes lifted directly from Indian movies (Harahap 1996). Moerdiono's archetypal ‘Indonesian’ music was arguably quintessentially hybrid and trans-medium — a foreign film form transformed into a ‘national’ music. Indeed the persistent popularity of dangdut since the early 1970s has partly been due to its hybrid character, constantly incorporating and synthesising other musical genres, potentially in competition with it in any section of the Indonesian market. Many older provincial popular music forms have spawned their dangdut variants, like ‘dangdut Sunda’ (in West Java) and ‘dangdut Jawa’ (in Central Java). So have new imported musical genres. In the 1970s there was ‘disko-dangdut’. In 1996 Remix Dangdut House Mania was all the rage as dangdut adjusted to the latest international trends.
The lyrics on the House Mania album point to the diverse sources of dangdut's inspiration, and the hybrid character of the genre. The titles of the songs are Indonesian, the refrains are all in English! The first song of the album starts in a distinctly American accent: ‘Right now we want you to get your hands together and we're going to start a party’, then cuts into the lead male singer Amry Palu's voice: ‘Party time, party time…’ and ‘let's move those feet, let's move those feet’ in the voice of the female lead, Neneng Anjarwati. The rest of the lyric is in Indonesian, with periodic repeats of various English phrases, particularly ‘all aboard now’, which carries through most of the album. A Hindi phrase, ‘a-a-a-ao bai’, broken into a rap beat cuts into some of the numbers. The Hindi phrase ‘ao bhai’ means literally ‘come brother/s’ but would not be understood as such by the overwhelming majority of the listeners to this album. The collection also includes a devotional song from a 1950s Indian film sung entirely in its original Hindi, interrupted briefly by English phrases ‘now what do you think of the women's liberation’ and the repeated ‘let's let's let's do it now’ and ‘all aboard now’!
This was not an instance of an Indonesian cultural form being overwhelmed by foreign cultural imports. Rather it was a particular localisation of codes circulating in the global cultural markets — a hybrid which would not make sense in either of the linguistic/cultural contexts (India or the USA) from which this album, and dangdut more generally, draws its various elements. In other words, this was an Indonesian form, though the lyric and the melody may be copied from Hindi cinema and the refrain and the beat from American rap or house or some other musical fashion. On the other hand, we need to understand that dangdut, one of Indonesia's most successful national popular cultural forms, cannot be explored within the bounds of the nation alone.
It proved too to be one of the country's most successful musical exports. Dangdut is also common in Malaysia, which shares a common national language and hosts a large population of temporary Indonesian workers. Albums by popular ‘dangdut queen’ Elvy Sukaesih were available in Japan where occasional tours by big-name Indonesian bands were reportedly well received. Islamic-influenced qasidah band Nasida Ria Group had an album on sale in Germany, and Sundanese singer Detty Kurnia was marketed in the UK. Mostly such performers were distributed by small independent (‘indie’) labels like Wave (Japan), Piranha (Germany), and Flame Tree (UK). But even large multinationals like Sony tested the international market for dangdut.8
Underground
In the 1990s, at the other end of the Indonesian musical spectrum (whether we see the continuum as either local–global or traditional–modern), ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ bands, closely following the latest global trends in youth culture, also operated outside the mainstream recording companies, though individual bands aspired to, and some were co-opted into, the mainstream. They produced their own albums on small independent or ‘indie’ labels9 using the marketing strategies and technology of the ‘pirate’ cassette producers of the early 1970s (Sen and Hill 2000: 168). For as little as Rp1.5 million (about $US625), they could hire a cheap studio (or record ‘live’ on rented equipment in someone's home), reproduce in small production runs and sell by word of mouth, through a local radio station, at gigs or by mail order, priced to undercut commercial cassettes and sometimes even at a loss. Most were fiercely proud of their creative independence from the major record labels and their rejection of middle-of-the-road Indonesian musical styles. They adopted ‘creepy, “whitey-sounding” names’ (HAI 1996), like Closeminded, Full of Hate, Insanity, Sonic Torment, Trauma, Koil, Sadistis and so on. Bandung, the Indonesian city known for its art, its engineering schools and student radicalism, was the centre of the ‘indie’ industry, and home to one of the first successful ‘indie’ bands, Pas, whose initial album 4 Through the Sap was produced in 1991 by Samuel Marudut Sitompul, the musical director of local Bandung rock radio station GMR. Through his innovative SAP Music Management company, Sitompul arranged to have the cassette distributed in Jakarta and West Java. After their initial success Pas was contracted by the major label Aquarius Musikindo which re-released the first album and followed it up with a second, In (No) Sensation, and a third, IndieVduality (whose cover image incorporates Australia's AC/DC and alludes to the Beatles' Abbey Road zebra crossing). Most of the tracks on the second album (and several on the third) are in English, as was increasingly common among underground bands (Theodore 1997).
Other underground bands have been similarly absorbed into the mainstream media. Surabaya band Boomerang opened the ‘live’ Indosiar broadcast of the Gong 2000 concert (staged to celebrate Armed Forces Day) at the former Ancol racing circuit before a crowd of 50,000 on 12 October 1996. But this institutional cooptation did not appear to tame either the radical message of the lyric or the anarchic message of the performance. The first track on Boomerang's 1996 cassette Disharmoni, is a Who-like rock anthem, ‘Generasiku’ (My Generation), whose gravely voiced refrain yells out: ‘Raise your hands high / Yell out This is my generation / Raise your hands high / This is my generation.’ It challenges ‘those who are sharp-tongued, poisoned / by ambition and crazy for power / Don't be taken in by their tricks / This world belongs to us!’ (mulut-mulut tajam berbisa / ambisi dan gila kuasa / jangan hiraukan ulah mereka / dunia ini milik kita). Another track, ‘OKBM’, expressly attacks the leaders of the country: ‘a million dreams you've offered / but you've only left frustration / you've tricked and destroyed me / you've sucked all my blood dry. / It's false … everything that you have done for me/ desire [nafsu] … it's only to satisfy your own desire / … / where are you taking the kids of our country?’ And their advice to their fans on their cassette cover: ‘enjoy and play it loud, stay crazy okay …!!!’(in English).
Perhaps the most successful band bridging ‘underground’ and ‘commercial’ genres of popular music was Slank,10 which since its first album in 1990 has had a string of ‘best-selling album’ awards and maintained a hold on the commercial ‘Top 10’ listings with a mixture of soft sentimental songs like ‘Kamu Harus Pulang’ (You Must Come Back) and ‘Terbunuh Sepi’ (‘Killed by Loneliness’, rated amongst the ten best video clips on RCTI's Video Musik Indonesia programme for 1995–6) (Republika Online 1996)11 and growling angry protests like ‘Feodalisme’ (Feudalism) and the Led Zeppelin-ish ‘Generasi Biru’ (Blue Generation), the title track from their 1995 fourth album, on ‘PISS Records’!12 Slank's ‘Blues Males’ (Lazy Blues) is a laidback blues track. The lyric plays on sleep/sleeping around (tidur/tidurin), about how great it would be to get a (girl-)friend (the band is all male) from a (powerfully connected) conglomerate, ‘so life wouldn't be destitute any longer / waiting for inheritance while sleeping around … / If you know the most powerful people / you can let troubles pass you by / you can get a well-placed position to sleep around / … / A water-bed to sleep around / A (five-)star hotel to sleep around/ a stack of money for whoever you're screwing’. In the scribbled lyric on the cassette cover, the final line is ‘Punya jabatan … Buat nidurin bawahan!!!’ (‘Got a (high) positions to screw the underlings!’) — the word ‘nidurin’ struck out but visible through the pen stroke. On the audio track in place of the word nidurin (‘screw’, ‘sleep with’) there is only the sound of a piercing ‘beeeeeeep’, which deletes the offending word, but simultaneously draws attention to it. It was not a form of audio censorship generally used in New Order Indonesia, where anything unacceptable was editorially omitted without any indication of this intervention. Slank's ‘beep’, however, implicated the explicitly sexual expression, its political use in the lyric and its censorship while managing to stay within permissible limits of broadcast language.
‘Generasi Biru’ went ‘double platinum’ as BASF's best-selling cassette across all musical categories in Indonesia in 1994–5. Slank diversified to establish a management bureau, recording studio, production house and recording company, as autonomous enterprises. Slank market research on their first five albums indicated that 43 per cent of the buyers were between 15 and 19 years old, and 35 per cent were between 20 and 24. Fifty-eight per cent were males. Though the majority of Slank's fans were in Java (21 per cent in Jakarta, 18 per cent West Java, 16 per cent Central Java and Yogyakarta, and 2 per cent in East Java), their appeal was national, their sales broadly reflecting population densities (12 per cent in Sumatra, 9 per cent in Kalimantan, 5 per cent in Sulawesi, 3 per cent in Maluku and Irian Jaya, and 2 per cent in the Lesser Sunda chain).13
One of the bands at the 1996 Bandung Underground II concert, which drew about 4,000 people to the local badminton stadium, was Jasad (Corpse), who gained prominence not only because of their 1994 underground mini-album C'est La Vie, but also by establishing a independent recording studio, Palapa. ‘We want Palapa to have a broad scope, ranging from punk to grindcore. Basically the idea is to work with all those genres thought to be anti-social by the mainstream’, said guitarist Yayat. ‘Most of us underground musicians feel now that we've got to start building up a system that's independent of all the snakey fucks with the major labels’ (Baulch 1996b). In an ironic play on symbols, Jasad's studio Palapa, through which Bandung's underground bands attempted to circumvent the commercial companies to reach a rebellious national youth subculture, shared the name of the New Order's telecommunications satellites, through which the New Order government tried to control the national electronic media.
Such underground bands were quick to take to the potential of the internet as an alternative to mainstream recording companies. By 1997 there were nearly 50 internet sites on ‘Batavia.net’ promoting Indonesian music, often with audio files that could be played and downloaded. ‘Syahreza's Radio Station’, which prided itself as ‘the First Indonesian Live Internet Radio Station’, had audio (MIDI) clips, the latest Indonesian Top 10, a ‘live chat show’ and links to various music sites at www.hway.net/syahreza. A music mailing list [email protected] was started in early 1997 with a strong interest in ‘underground’, ‘heavy/death metal’, ‘punk’ and ‘thrash’ genres including Indonesian bands like Rotor, Suckerhead and Alien Scream. Bandung underground band Koil was one of the early bands with its own web page at www.melsa.net.id/~karatan, with lyrics, biographies of the musicians, mail-order paraphernalia, quizzes, and ‘demo’ audio-clips of unreleased songs. Individual composers or singers are also putting their work directly on the web for global consumption, bypassing national and multinational recording companies.14
In their lyrics, the projected personalities of band members and their mode of address, this ‘underground’ music was intensely conscious of its identification with the young and obsessed with the ‘generation gap’. The concept of a generational identity as political ideology goes back to the pre-independence nationalist discourse, which gave the ‘pemuda’ (youth) a revolutionary anti-Dutch role (Anderson 1972: 1–16), a role which was reinforced by the part played by university and high school students in their crucial support for the army in the establishment of the New Order (Raillon 1985). But by the mid-1970s the New Order had depoliticised campuses — ‘normalization of campuses’ equated ‘normal’ with ‘apolitical’, breaking the long-established identification of youth with political mobilisation.
As Siegel has pointed out, in the New Order young men and women have been redefined from ‘pemuda’ to ‘remaja’, more recently dubbed ‘ABG’ or ‘Anak Baru Gede’ (‘a child just grown’). The remaja ‘comes as a result of the depoliticisation of youth in the New Order. In that sense it replaces the Indonesian term pemuda (youth), a term whose sense always includes political activity of the sort that the Suharto regime has made difficult’ (Siegel 1986: 224–5). One is not remaja by being a certain age. ‘It is by having certain “tastes” (selera) and certain aspirations that one is or is not a remaja’ (Siegel 1986: 204). Writing on Solo in the mid-1980s, Siegel noted the centrality of music and various discourses surrounding it in the definition of the remaja. Writing of a punk concert in Bali in the mid-1990s, Baulch (1996a) suggests that ‘“alternative” music has fast become an integral part of what it is to be an ultimately modern teen’.
Politics and fashions/tastes may not be as clearly distinguishable as some of the foregoing analysis suggests. In the 1990s the musical messages about bosses screwing everyone, and indeed screwing up the younger generation, was fashionable, bought and listened to by the thousands of remaja fans of the ‘alternative’ music scene. The message and the medium are so much the defining ‘taste’ of the remaja, that large recording companies embraced these bands for the sake of the markets. The anti-authority message and the invitation to disorderliness underlying the medium — ‘alternative/underground’ and rock music in New Order Indonesia more generally — may well have been more important than the verbal discourse of the songs. Disorder, always the political antithesis of the New Order, became ‘in’ for the younger generation. But we need to move from the confines of recordings to live performances to understand the politics of this disorderliness.
Concerts/carnivals
In October 1988, after more than two decades as a rebel hero, Mick Jagger finally performed in Jakarta. One cartoon captured Jagger's popular image, with young Balinese musicians downing their gamelan instruments to pay him obeisance. On the day of the concert slum youths stormed the huge outdoor venue, charging the security cordon around the stadium, and swarming over middle-class patrons who had paid for the expensive tickets. Rocks were thrown, cars (a symbol of middleclass achievement) torched and the entrance damaged as the gatecrashers surged inside. It took several hours for the military to re-establish law and order.
After a February 1989 concert by the immensely popular rock musician Iwan Fals and his band Swami in central Jakarta's Senayan stadium, some of the estimated audience of 100,000 stormed down Jakarta's main boulevard, Jalan Sudirman. Iwan's group was promptly banned from touring Sumatra in March 1989, a prohibition later extended briefly by the Jakarta police commissioner to ‘all rock performances … for an unlimited period’ (Harsono 1989: 14). Iwan Fals later joined with several other well-known musicians, including businessperson Setiawan Djody (friend of Bambang Trihatmodjo, one of President Suharto's sons), rebel poet Rendra and Sawung Jabo, to form the ‘super-group’ Kantata Takwa (‘Cantata of Piety’). Kantata Takwa embraced something of the Islamic lyrical iconography employed so effectively by Rhoma Irama. The first line of the Muslim Confession of Faith, the Syahadat, namely ‘la ilaha illallah’ (There is no god but Allah) echoes through the chorus of the title song ‘Kantata Takwa’. The album contained several poems by Rendra set to music, most powerfully ‘Kesaksian’ (Witness). The musical style was dubbed ‘Rebana rock’ (after a traditional tambourine) and described as ‘a blend of Jimi Hendrix and Rick Wakeman, to a Betawi [Jakartanese] “rebana”’ (Ensiklopedi Musik 1992, vol. 2: 171).
Kantata Takwa performed in Jakarta in 1990 to an enthusiastic crowd of tens of thousands. At one point it seemed likely that a brief power black-out in the stadium would erupt into arson, as the crowd ignited cigarette lighters and matches to illuminate the arena, but peace prevailed. Three Swami songs had become anthems to the fans and their performance stirred tremendous emotions: ‘Badut’ (Clown), interpreted by many to be a satire on the Minister of Information, Harmoko; ‘Bento’, about a spoilt young entrepreneur, said to be directed at the President's youngest son, Tommy (Hutomo Mandala Putra); and ‘Bongkar’ (Rip it down), whose stirring lyrics include the exhortations to take to the streets: ‘Obviously we must take to the streets to / Overthrow the devil that stands over us / Oh … Yes … Rip it down!’
It was another two years before Iwan Fals was permitted to perform in Jakarta again, and then only for two benefit concerts (December 1992, January 1993) for victims of the earthquake that devastated the Indonesian island of Flores. The January 1993 concert was held not at the central Senayan stadium, but at Lebak Bulus soccer stadium on the southern outskirts of the city, ‘for security reasons’, possibly (according to some young fans) because Senayan's plastic seats were more susceptible to arson than Lebak Bulus' concrete tiers.15 Tickets for the main arena were Rp4,000 (about $US1.90). Constant drizzle throughout the evening did nothing to dampen the exuberance of the fans, most of whom were males between 15 and 30 years old. Iwan's voice was often drowned out by the mass chorus of fans, who had memorised his anthems of opposition — ‘Bongkar’, ‘Bento’, ‘Wakil rakyat’ (Representatives of the People), a caustic comment on the lives of parliamentarians, and ‘Penguasa’ (Powerholder).
Patrons had been thoroughly frisked several times before entry. All cigarette lighters, glass bottles, heavy belt buckles and sharp objects were confiscated. Antagonism was evident towards the estimated 2,100 troops present, particularly during songs with overt political messages. Patrolling police were frequently jeered at and occasionally showered with plastic bottles or discarded muddy sandals. The rock star tried to calm spirits, urging the audience to ‘dance, not fight’. As the drenched crowd surged out at the close of the performance, public transport was non-existent. Taxis were conspicuously absent, afraid of being set upon by the crowd. Youths piled onto the roofs and bonnets of any passing cars, some hurling rocks at glass windows in multistorey buildings. A church was pelted and private cars had their windows smashed.
These incidents were insignificant compared to the aftermath of the April 1993 concert by the American heavy metal band Metallica, when ‘about 70 people were injured, a mini supermarket was looted and scores of cars were vandalized’ (Jakarta Post 1993a). The crowd, many without tickets and hoping to gatecrash, had become impatient as they waited for the Lebak Bulus gates to open. They pelted security guards and, with the arrival of the anti-riot police, a running battle and rampage began as the crowd retreated towards the elite suburb of Pondok Indah, stoning and looting houses, shops and cars along the way. The Minister of Justice, Oetoyo Oesman, was trapped in his car by the crowd, which smashed his windscreen, attacked his driver and took his carphone. Police arrested 88 people during the mêlée.
The Jakarta Post editorial on 12 April noted that ‘there is almost always an element of class resentment’ in such rampaging, given that the ticket prices were high: from Rp30,000 ($US14.25) to Rp150,000 ($US72), that is 10 to 50 times the Rp3,000 ($US1.40) minimum daily wage for a factory worker. ‘The fact that the stadium is surrounded by elite housing districts might well have heightened the youths' anger and shortened their tempers’, the paper wrote. Sociologists and political observers cited in the press argued that ‘there is a crisis of authority in a society where social jealousy is a problem’. Gadjah Mada University psychologist Djamaludin Ancok argued that ‘The public was frustrated because of the huge gap between the rich and the poor’ (Jakarta Post 1993b). The Military Commander of the Jakarta Region (Panglima Kodam Jaya) Brigadier-General Hendro Priyono appealed to academics and intellectuals not to analyse the riot ‘excessively’, lest any ‘polemic’ be ‘politicised’. He warned bluntly that ‘If there are signs in that direction, then I will follow them up and take firm action’ (Kompas 1993). It was not clear precisely what he meant by the threat, but it was widely interpreted as silencing any analysis that emphasised social and class tensions as the root cause of the disturbance.
After the 1993 Metallica riots, mass public concerts (both dangdut and rock) were usually permitted only under the auspices of either a government instrumentality or military division. In the case of Iwan Fals such arrangements were no guarantee of public order. His Bandung concert in January 1996, sponsored by the local military command, ended with rioting. Later in the year, in Ujungpandang, at the eleventh hour the local police withdrew permission for him to play at an ‘Environmental and Musical Appreciation Performance’ because of concerns at the ‘community order and security situation’ (situasi kamtibmas) (Kompas 1996). His concerts remained a flashpoint for public disorder.
At the other end of the political spectrum too, concerts and political rallies merged into each other. Dangdut performances were so integral to Golkar rallies that Tempo Interaktif (1996) dubbed it the ‘official music’ of the electoral campaign in 1997: ‘the dangdut singers … have rendered the greatest service in attracting the masses in their thousands to the rallies … All the top dangdut singers “came down” [turun] to strengthen the ranks of [Golkar]’. Rhoma Irama (as mentioned earlier) had appeared at opposition PPP rallies in previous campaigns. His transfer of allegiance to Golkar prior to the 1997 elections was highly contentious. When riots broke out in the PPP stronghold of Pekalongan on 28 March, the eve of his performance at a Golkar election rally, many press reports presented it as a protest against the ‘dangdut king's’ political shift.
But even apart from the contrived general elections, which passed as the five-yearly ‘festival of democracy’, the New Order promoted vast public spectacles, with musical entertainment as their centrepiece — intended as displays of the regime's ‘popular’ support. The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of independence involved a 12-city Rp3 billion ($US1.3 million) concert tour ‘Pesta Rakyat 95’. Hundreds of tonnes of equipment were ferried by Indonesian air force Hercules aeroplanes, obviously requiring high-level political endorsement. Major national anniversaries were often celebrated with huge concerts broadcast live on television, such as the ‘Dangdut Ria HUT ABRI’ celebrating Armed Forces Day in October 1996. Under the banner of ‘National Discipline Movement’ and the Jakarta Military Command, the audience was treated to synchronised dance displays by armed men in uniform alongside bespangled female and male dangdut singers. Uniformed soldiers gyrated in unison and carried out mock flirtations with some of the biggest names in dangdut, and for the finale the Jakarta Commander himself joined in the act, which was punctuated throughout the night by the compères' cry of ‘Long live the Armed Forces!’ (Hidup ABRI).
The undirected communal passions of live concerts, much more than even the most politicised lyrics on the recordings, seemed to represent both the threat and the promise for the New Order state. Compared to other popular media, such as the press, radio, television and film, the record industry was the least censored and the least used for state propaganda. Performers from Rhoma Irama and Iwan Fals to some of the more radical ‘alternative’ bands were banned from television and live appearances, but were not stopped from reproducing or marketing their records. Similarly the New Order state attempted to mobilise the communally felt and expressed pleasures of live performances for its own benefit, but paid scant attention to recorded music. These practices seemed to acknowledge the political power of the performances in generating communal expressions of pleasure and frustration that were always just a breath away from exceeding the orderly bounds of time and space into which these carnivals were restricted through permits, procedures and military guards surrounding the venues. In a way the records were just that — records, accounts, memories of the real thing, and consequently far less potent than the performance itself. Increasingly from the late 1980s, however, deregulated television was the medium for both a closer reproduction of the performance and for containing its carnivalesque excesses.
Recorded images
State-run television, TVRI, always had studio performances by established recording artists and new faces. During the 1980s the Saturday night spot was crucial to the success of the ‘Safari Artists’, a group which had emerged out of Golkar's efforts to recruit musicians and entertainers to perform at election rallies. The opening of competing private TV stations since 1987 has fostered new music programmes, and spawned the video clip industry. Recording companies began running new video releases like advertisements in the middle of popular television programmes. When new band Junior (which included two sons of members of Koes Plus, mentioned earlier) released their album Bujangan (Bachelor) in early 1996, their video clip was broadcast about ten times on a single day on the private station RCTI, including several times in the middle of the popular evening feature film. At a reported cost of about Rp7 million ($US3,000) per screening this was a risky investment of Rp70 million ($US30,000) by Billboard Records, which paid off when the album was a runaway success. A video itself may cost anywhere between 5 and 30 million rupiah ($US2100-$US12,600) to make and even leading feature film directors, such as Garin Nugroho, crossed over into music videos. The clips were not retailed, but produced exclusively for TV broadcasting to boost cassette sales.
As a rule television excluded the headbanger bands of Bali and Bandung, and the highly sexualised lower-class dangdut, and promoted on the whole a sanitised dangdut, bubble-gum pop and middle-of-the-road rock. Access to television was regarded as a huge boost to marketing. But being banned from television could also stimulate interest in an album. In March 1990 a rock song called ‘Pak Tua’ (Old Man) by Elpamas was ‘banned’ by TVRI (and other stations fell into line) because the lyric, deriding an old man no longer capable of doing his job, was regarded as alluding to the ageing President Suharto.16 A 1992 song called ‘Jagung Bakar’ (Roast Corn) by Ellyn Tamaya was also ‘banned’ from television broadcast for including sexually explicit sounds. Such prohibitions appeared to generate increased listeners' requests and consequently increased airplay of these songs (Theodore 1992). But such instances were few and far between and required actual prohibition and publicity to generate special interest.
In the 1990s, technology and finances made possible and profitable the direct broadcast of live performances on television. As mentioned earlier, in the mid-1990s most large concerts involving Indonesian performers were sponsored by the army or other state institutions. And increasingly these concerts were pre-sold to one or another of the private television stations. Television was, as we have noted elsewhere, more restrictive in both sexual and political discourse than either the recording industry or even radio (Sen and Hill 2000: 108–36). Moreover, direct telecast erased the separation between the relatively ephemeral performance and the relatively durable record of it — a record that could be checked and used as evidence in a variety of institutional contexts. Through this erasure, television's co-optation of Indonesian musical concerts may have brought these into a more ordered domain of the New Order media. Even as this process of ‘taming’ took place, the critical lyrics and communal gestures of defiance against the political (and sexual) strictures of the New Order remained inseparable from the pleasures of many of the performances in the 1990s.
Summing up
We have argued that there are a number of axes along which we can plot the global connections of popular music in Indonesia. We can think of the historical pattern of foreign musical styles that swept onto the shores of the archipelago, spawning new musical genres or transforming existing ones. We can think of the recording technologies invented and continually transformed in the West, opening up new creative possibilities for making and reproducing music in Indonesia. More recently we have seen the articulation of Indonesian music into the marketing economies of the multinational recording industry. In each instance we find that the ‘outside’ has not overwhelmed the local. Rather, the foreign has been indigenised and transformed into something other than a mere copy of an imported product. But, more importantly, some of the foreign imports were re-interpreted in the Indonesian context to become signifiers of opposition to the New Order.
Ever since Sukarno implicated Western music in his nationalist rhetoric, certain forms of foreign music have signified opposition to the rulers. Of course, as we have suggested above, transgressions were not limited to those who (relatively self-consciously) adopt Western music. Even dangdut, the New Order's ‘national music’, in some contexts escaped the moral order of the New Order regime. In the late New Order, however, certain kinds of rock music adopted from the Euro-American scene came to signify a gesture of generational opposition to an ageing national leadership. Translations, transmutations and transformations of Western rock are not only more popular than the imported originals, they signified in the 1990s a political statement against the New Order that the original did not carry. Our account of the music scene suggests some parallels between the early 1960s and the 1990s — both periods when codes of Western popular culture were pitted by the young urban population against an old and increasingly unpopular ruler.
Notes
1 This chapter draws heavily on Sen and Hill (2000).
2 The ‘New Order’ is the term used by Major-General Suharto to refer to the government he established after coming to power in a brutal countercoup in October 1965. Its twin platforms of political stability and capitalist development remained its central legitimising rhetoric until Suharto was forced to resign from the presidency in May 1998, facing a rising wave of popular opposition and an economy in deep crisis. For an overview, see Hal Hill (1994).
3 On Sukarno's foreign and domestic policies during this period, see Legge (1972: 358–84).
4 After their release they became one of the biggest bands of the 1970s whose re-released albums were selling well even in the late 1990s, when they were still performing polished cover versions of Beatles hits on television. See entry on Koes Bersaudara in Ensiklopedi Musik (1992, vol. 1: 296–7).
5 Arguments here and quotations from Moerdiono's statements are taken from Simatupang (1996), with the translations slightly adapted from the originals on p. 55. We would like to thank Made Tony for providing a copy of this article.
6 Our thanks to Theodore KS for information on the place of music in the 1999 general elections (personal communication, 10 June 1999).
7 One dangdut singer we spoke to privately after her performance at the Yogya Purnawisata entertainment park in 1996 admitted to being only 14 years old and still in junior high school. In a separate conversation the middle-aged male leader of the backing band had earlier told us she was ‘about 17’.
8 Broughton et al. (1994: 432), lists among other international releases, the following: Elvy Sukaesih's Elvy Sukaesih and Return of Diva (Wave, Japan); Detty Durnia's Coyor Panon (Flame Tree, UK/Wave Japan); Nasida Ria Group's Keadilan (Piranha, Germany); and Maryam Mustafa's Kau Mulai Tak Jujur (Sony, Japan).
9 Thanks to David Bourchier for bringing to our attention various articles on the ‘underground’ scene, particularly HAI (1996) and Baulch (1996b), which provide much of the information included in the following paragraphs.
10 The name ‘Slank’ derives from the youth slang expression ‘slenge'an’, meaning ‘whatever I want’ (according to Nug Katjasungkana, ‘Slank's Music: A Portrayal of Current-Day Youth Culture’, typescript dated Sunday, 7 April 1991, photocopy provided by Bimbim Sidharta, 22 May 1997).
11 We would like to thank Slank's Bimbim Sidharta for detailed background on the band.
12 The band's publicity material translates their record label ‘PISS’ as peace!
13 Statistical and background information on Slank from Bimbim Sidharta (fax, 21 May 1996).
14 For example, Budi Rahardjo's music page had links to songs he has composed on http://www.ee.umanitoba.ca/~rahard/music.html, and singer Irma Pane, whose 1979 album got into the Top 10 charts, marketed her third album, Haruskah, released on her own independent Indonesian music label IPB-Disc Productions, via her homepage, http://users.aol.com/hbraam/musicians.htm. The California-based independent record label, Ragadi Music, ‘formed primarily as a vehicle for Indonesian artists to market their music in the US … and around the world’, was located at http://members.aol.com/ragadi/home.html.
15 Our comments are primarily based on observations of the January 30 performance.
16 Elpamas's homepage http://www.lookup.com/homepages/74753/alb2.htm had details of the band, and both an audio clip and the lyrics of ‘Pak Tua’.