Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001

5. On Location: Shooting Music Video Clips

5 On Location     As is the case with recording studios, a discussion of Indonesian music videos must take into account the interactional dimension of cultural production: the negotiation of meaning and the concretization of metacultural abstractions that take place “on location,” in this case, at taping sessions for Indonesian video clips. In the following discussion I also wish to extend my arguments regarding social class in Indonesia. While the ascendancy of mass-mediated popular culture coincided with (and arguably anticipated) the elision of class stratification and the rise of the middle class in Western countries, in Indonesia and elsewhere in the developing world the national popular cultures that have emerged in the last half century have had to respond to perseverant class distinctions—most conspicuously, the continuing presence of a poor and uneducated majority that nonetheless possesses some purchasing power. We have seen how in the Indonesian national popular music industry there arose a two-tiered hierarchy that distinguished between westernized, cosmopolitan national music and non-Western— but still national—music genres. Keeping this normative market segmentation in mind, I now turn to a discussion of Indonesian music videos and how they embody and develop assumptions about the social constitution of their audience and index class-inflected differences vis- à-vis cultural debates on modernity, cosmopolitanism, and Indonesian national identity. 121 Recorded Sound and Televisual Image I view both static and moving images as contextualizing supplements to sound in popular music. My approach is therefore the opposite of the one assumed by cinema studies and generally prevalent in Western thought, which tends to elevate sight as the most “truthful” of the senses (Feld [1982] 1990). I am thus sympathetic to Andrew Goodwin’s (1993) critique of studies that focus on music video’s fragmented, “postmodern ” character (e.g., Kaplan 1987). These analyses draw on film theory to elucidate the often disconnected, pastichelike visuals of music videos while largely ignoring their sonic dimension. Goodwin argues that it is precisely the soundtrack of music videos that provides them with coherence and affective unity, for music videos are intended to be not miniature films but rather imaginative visualizations of particular songs, and they follow a musical rather than a cinematic logic. In general, the visual marketing of popular music tends to erect boundaries around its audience, while musical sound allows for greater ambiguity and social polysemy. This property may be intrinsic to the aural medium itself, which crosses physical boundaries with ease. Cultural critic Rey Chow writes: “While the image marks the body, in music one has to invent a different language of conceptualizing the body, that is, of perceiving its existence without marking and objectifying it as such” (1993, 392). In other words, musical sound is a felt presence that transgresses the boundaries of self and other that are traced by visual images. It is only through specific framing devices—both discursive and visual—that the embodied, affective intensity of musical encounters can be channeled efficiently into identity projects, lifestyles, and social narratives. In their attempt to promote the consumption of a specific musical artifact, music video producers make a series of explicit , if often contradictory, claims about the identities of artists and listeners by deploying a rhetoric of moving images that locates powerfully ambiguous sounds in visible bodies and in imaginary but recognizable social spaces. On a more fundamental level, exploring the tension between the polysemy of sound and the markedness of image can provide insight into a paradoxical feature of popular music everywhere: the fact that a medium that contains such powerful associations with particular social categories so easily transcends those categories in its reception. 122 Sites • Music Video in Indonesia When I arrived in Jakarta in October 1999 to begin my dissertation fieldwork, the city’s attention was focused on a Special Session (Sidang Istimewa) of the recently elected People’s Consultative Assembly. Fears of a repeat of the massive rioting that had engulfed Jakarta in May 1998 caused the normally congested thoroughfares of the city to be eerily quiet. No one could predict what the outcome of the session would be or whether it would lead to an eruption of violence. I, too, followed the session’s proceedings on television, watching the representatives of competing political parties debate and deliberate over which candidate should become Indonesia’s fourth president. To my surprise, the soberminded television coverage was periodically interrupted by Indonesian pop...