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

Conclusion: Indonesian Youth, Music, and Globalization

Conclusion  , ,   Obviously critical study should retain self-doubt, especially about the status of knowledge. But for anthropologists to wait around until someone gets epistemology right would be like Sisyphus waiting for Godot. D. Miller 1995 Fieldwork is practical, messy, empirical, difficult, partial, step-by-step, but it grounds our explanations in the dialogue between self and other. It counteracts the intellectual tendency to theorize the world without living in it. Titon 1997 Our journey is nearly at its end. In this book I have attempted to capture the musical life of young urban Indonesians at a unique historical moment . Through ethnographic accounts of various musical practices— recording, performing, listening, purchasing—I have also tried to reveal some fundamental dynamics in contemporary Indonesian national culture and to explore their implications for the identity projects of contemporary Indonesian youth. In this final chapter, I return to four main themes of this study— globalization and the nation, sociality, social class, and hybridity—and 247 discuss my major findings in each category. I close with some tentative predictions about the future evolution of Indonesian popular music genres and suggest how the disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusicology can benefit from ethnographic studies that take popular musics seriously as meaningful loci of cultural contestation and consensus in modern complex societies. The Global Sensorium The Indonesian archipelago has a centuries-long history of absorbing and indigenizing foreign cultural influences, from Hinduism, Buddhism , and Islam to the ideology of modern nationalism. It is therefore hardly surprising that the current wave of worldwide cultural globalization has had a dramatic impact on Indonesian society and culture. The United States of America has emerged as a geographically distant center of power with a palpable impact on the fantasy life of Indonesian youth, and global institutions, from fast-food chains to MasterCard, have become familiar presences in urban daily life. Global (predominantly Anglo-American) popular culture enjoys great prestige and exerts a formative influence on developments in Indonesia’s “national culture-under-construction” (Suryadi 2005, 131). Thus globalization in Indonesia has transformed not only the physical and visual landscapes of settings such as Central Jakarta but also the cognitive and emotional landscapes of acting subjects (cf. Greene and Henderson 2000; Liechty 2003; Mazzarella 2003). A key indicator of this change can be found in recent innovations in the milieu of Indonesian popular music, the most grassroots-derived and populist branch of the mass media, and in the ways those innovations (re)configure relationships between local, national , and global cultural forms. Following Urban (2001), I view the local and the global as metacultural constructs. In Indonesia, “global culture” is culture that is present in the form of particular signs and objects perceived to have come from a distant “elsewhere” (cf. Baulch 2003), while “local culture” originates in particular, proximate, physically accessible places, or at least appears to do so. Recognizing “the global” in everyday life always requires a leap of faith aided by “the work of the imagination” (Appadurai 1996, 5). An example in Indonesia is the Kansas brand of cigarettes, the motto of which is (in English) Taste the Freedom. Kansas is actually not a common brand in the United States (if it exists there at all), but its advertisements in Jakarta would lead one to think so, and the Kansas advertisement 248 Conclusion • poster affixed to an outer wall of the Warung Gaul (see chapter 6) generated much curiosity about “American” cigarettes among the warung regulars. Yet identifying “the local” also requires a leap of faith—though it is not always recognized as such—since products that seem to come from nearby places may actually originate in a distant elsewhere or contain conspicuous elements that come from other locales. Consumption of global cultural forms may discipline and channel desire (toward Western women, for instance) and reinforce hegemony (for example, the seemingly undisputed ontological superiority of Western popular music), but it may also open up new ways of making sense of the world. The explosion of new youth-oriented musics in Indonesia appears to have had little impact on either family relationships or religious belief or practice. Indeed, as conspicuous as cultural globalization seems in Jakarta and in other major Indonesian cities, many of its effects could be viewed as limited primarily to the ephemeral patterns of youth culture. These patterns are not inconsequential, however. In the words of “Monster,” an underground metal musician...