Sonic Modernities in the Malay World: A History of Popular Music, Social Distinction and Novel Lifestyles (1930s–2000s) ed. by Bart Barendregt (review)

Sonic Modernities in the Malay Worldis about popular music and the discourses and practices of modernity, mainly in Indonesia and Malaysia during the twentieth century, with some additional insights on neighboring countries such as the Philippines and Singapore. Although the five parts follow a chronological structure, allowing a historical outlook on the problematics, they also reflect the perspectives of popular music makers, the entertainment industry, and changing audiences.

Bart Barendregt introduces the project, based on musical memories, and crosses many disciplinary fields such as anthropology, history, cultural studies, and musicology. The book converges to the study of the interplay of the popular and shifting ideas of the modern (as a discursive concept rather than authenticity), which produces social differentiation. However, if popular music represents a challenge to social boundaries, it does not appeal to their erasure, and tradition can be thought as a remedy for "unhealthy" generations adopting modern values and aesthetics often perceived as foreign. Ultimately, this book illustrates how popular music articulates local, regional, and global levels in participating to the connection of people across borders, with Malay as a discursive category, as well as to the strengthening of singular national domestic markets in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore after the 1960s.

Part 1, "An Emergent Entertainment Industry," begins with Philip Yampolsky's chapter focusing on the important role of radio in shaping the popular music industry and audiences in Indonesia during the 1930s. At that time, modernity was seen as the incorporation of Western (European and American) popular music and raised ambivalent reactions of acceptance (as technical and economical improvements) or rejection (as a social threat). Radio also represented an ideology of essentialism distinguishing East and West, which resonated with an identity policy that made no allowances for crossover. This confinement of cultures was partly relieved by broadcasting kroncong(in the Indonesian language), Hawaiian music (in English), and gambus(in Arabic and Melayu), offering supraethnic regional, almost international, categories. In doing so, radio maximized its audience, but the author denies any nationalistic consciousness at that time. Yampolsky considers Indonesia as an "ethnically" fragmented society throughout the twentieth century into the beginning of the twenty-first century, social divisions that are considered by other authors later in the book.

Jan van der Putten's chapter concretely integrates the notion of the Malay world through a study of ronggengas professional dancers' and social dance practice. Focusing on Malaysia between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, when ronggenghad transcended dance practices by integrating popular elements, the author argues that dance worked as a synonym for the modern, as an impetus behind social and political changes in Southeast Asia. Van der Putten demonstrates that conservative reactions to global pop culture expressed at that time were socially and culturally defined, as part of both a religious and moral purification trend, as well as a political agenda that favored indigenous Malays over Malaysian immigrant communities during the economic downturn of the 1930s.

Adil Johan's chapter on pop yeh yeh in the Malay Peninsula of the 1960s constitutes an illuminating contribution to the understanding of future cultural discourses and policies at stake in the 1970s. Pop yeh yeh, identified as the localization of British and American rock by means of translation into the Malay language as well as the use of popular fashion, is presented as a countercultural practice as it embraced new ideas of self-fashioning. Triggered by external trends, it became a uniquely local expression of Malaysian and Singaporean youth aspirations that raised social anxieties by challenging state-sanctioned boundaries of modernity and morality, a "Malay ethnonationalism" based on ideologies of cultural purity...