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

Notes

 Introduction 1. For a more detailed explanation of the sonic materialist approach, see Wallach 2003b. I use this notion to establish the materiality of popular music products, as objects that intervene in and shape social life. Moreover, perceiving musical sounds as audiotactile material culture invites researchers to trace their distribution through a cultural field and examine their various uses by different social agents. 2. Multigenre ethnographic studies of popular music in the West include Finnegan 1989 and Berger 1999. These two studies have provided valuable models for the present work. 3. My notion of “musicscape” is derived from Arjun Appadurai’s famous essay on the various overlapping “scapes” of the global cultural economy (1990) as well as R. Murray Schafer’s influential concept of the environmental “soundscape ” (1977, 1994). The musicscape is thus both a fluid, translocal and a localized , immediate phenomenon. 4. Gus Dur was appointed by the elected representatives of the People’s Consultative Assembly. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who became the country ’s sixth president in 2004, was the first Indonesian president chosen directly by the Indonesian people in a nationwide general election widely praised by international organizations for its transparency and high voter turnout. 5. In order to address translocal cultural phenomena, Ulf Hannerz divides the contemporary “social organization of meaning” into four “frameworks of flow”: state, market, movement, and “form of life” (1992, 46–52). The first two frameworks are characterized by relative asymmetry of resources between producers and consumers of meaning, while the second two are characterized by more-egalitarian forms of organization (60). (I would add that popular musics are shaped by all four frameworks, often simultaneously: they are subject to state control, market forces, appropriation by grassroots social movements, and incorporation into communal lifeways.) Though the four frameworks can be separated analytically, Hannerz notes that they “do not work in isolation from one another, but it is rather in their interplay, with varying respective strengths, that they shape both what we rather arbitrarily demarcate as particular cultures , and that complicated overall entity which we may think of as the global 281 ecumene” (47). In 1988, the journal Public Culture was launched to analyze macro-level cultural “flows” (Appadurai 1990) at the local, global, and national levels. 6. The accompanying illustration on the T-shirt depicts a student protesting for Reformasi confronting a corpulent, smiling man in a suit holding a bag of money labeled uang negara rakyat (the people’s state money). The man is holding a sign on which is written (in English) The Best Corruptioner; a caption pointing to his head reads cueq aja ( just blowing it off). T-shirts like this one were sold all over Jakarta in traditional markets for 11,000 rupiahs (less than US$2 at the time). See figure on page 10. 7. Daniel Ziv, a longtime expatriate resident of Jakarta, notes sardonically, “Each year in Jakarta we optimistically repeat the same stupid joke: that this coming December krismon will finally be over because it becomes ‘krismas’. . . . Christmas still hasn’t arrived” (2002, 80). 8. See Widjojo et al. 1999 for a collection of detailed firsthand accounts of the student movement that helped topple the New Order. For an examination of the role of song in the Indonesian movement for Reformasi (and in Southeast Asian politics more generally), see Dijk 2003. 9. The Indonesian rupiah slid from 2,450 to the U.S. dollar in July 1997 to 15,000 to the U.S. dollar in January 1998; in May 1998, the month Soeharto stepped down, the exchange rate was 14,000 rupiahs to the dollar (Dijk 2001, 71, 130, 193). 10. For a fascinating, if hardly impartial, insider’s account of the political machinations behind Gus Dur’s ouster, see Witoelar 2002. An Indonesian TV personality and Wahid’s former presidential spokesman, Wimar Witoelar sums up the ordeal as follows: “From the beginning, President Wahid was doomed because he was made president by an unholy alliance whose only purpose in electing him was to block Megawati from becoming president. And that alliance had hoped that Gus Dur would play according to their tune. But when he asserted his independence and basic values of humanism and democracy , he lost the political support” (193–94). 11. Throughout this study, English loanwords, such as social gap, used by Indonesians are italicized. See appendix A for more information regarding how foreign terms and translations appear in the text. 12. In later statements, this phrase ngak-ngik-ngek became...