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

Introduction: A Brief History of Popular Music and Society in Indonesia

Introduction           This book is an ethnographic investigation of Indonesian popular music genres and their producers and listeners during a period of dramatic political and cultural transformation. Through a ground-level examination of the production, consumption, and discursive representations of popular musics in Indonesia, I hope to shed light on complex cultural processes that play a vital role in contemporary young urban Indonesians ’ imaginings of the Indonesian nation, its place in the world, and its future. Furthermore, I intend to show how young Indonesian women and men from various social classes use popular musics to reconcile their disparate allegiances to and affinities for local, global, and national cultural entities. The notion that cultural production and reception are linked to identity formation has become a commonplace in cultural studies, anthropology , ethnomusicology, and other human sciences. Such a premise suggests that the actual encounters of producers and consumers with particular artifacts—in situations both mundane and spectacular— should be taken seriously by scholars wishing to explore the construction of identity in particular times and places (see Porcello 1998). This ethnography, then, aims to highlight the social and experiential context of subjects’ encounters with cultural objects, thus grounding its 3 interpretations of those objects in the details of concrete settings and everyday experience. The interpretations of Indonesian popular musics contained in these pages are also informed by another key insight of cultural studies: due to the contested nature of its meanings and ownership , popular culture (especially popular music) is an important site of cultural struggle, and it can reveal a great deal about gender, class, and other social divisions characterized by unequal power relations operating in a society (see Frith 1981; Frith, Straw, and Street 2001; Middleton 1990; Ross and Rose 1994; and Walser 1993). Inspired by recent work on the production, circulation, and reception of mass-produced cultural artifacts in modern societies (e.g., Anderson [1983] 1991, 1998; Appadurai 1996; Mahon 2004; Mazzarella 2003; F. Miller 2005), this study takes a “sonic materialist” approach to popular musics in Indonesia, examining the processes by which musical sounds—understood as forms of audiotactile material culture—are created, mediated, and disseminated, and the ways in which these sounds become meaningful in diverse everyday contexts.1 Particularly valuable to this project is anthropologist Greg Urban’s account of the production, discursive framing, and social circulation of cultural forms in modern complex societies (2001). Urban characterizes contemporary, mass-mediated societies as operating under a “metaculture of modernity ” in which cultural forms (such as popular songs) are both disseminated as mass-produced artifacts (such as music recordings) and replicated through the creation of similar yet novel forms (for example, new songs in a familiar style). Urban argues that unlike societies that operate under a “metaculture of tradition,” which value the precise reproduction of expressive forms (such as the recitations of myths), contemporary complex societies emphasize innovative elements when producing cultural objects, and the successful circulation of culture in such societies depends on these innovations and on how they are interpreted by audiences. This ethnography aims to examine the processes of production, dissemination , replication, and interpretation of popular musics in Indonesia by tracing how these processes implicate and connect producers, performers, and listeners—all of whom play an active, creative role in the ongoing circulation of musical culture. To arrive at an understanding of these complex processes, this ethnography for the most part adopts a street-level perspective, engaging with the concrete details of the everyday lives of individuals in specific social settings. Thus the following investigation differs from the many anthropological studies of 4 Introduction • cultural processes under modernity that adopt a macro-level—often transglobal—analytical perspective. Instead, this book is composed of situated ethnographic narratives that illuminate the lives and concerns of actual people involved in the various stages of those cultural processes . As such, it seeks to reinsert human agency into our understandings of processes of cultural production and reception, which are too often reducible to a reified dialectic of commodification and resistance whose totalizing logic tends to discourage the sensitive, nuanced empirical inquiry that constitutes the ethnographer’s greatest contribution to the study of modern national cultures. In every context explored here, perceptions of genre connect sounds with particular meanings, and preoccupations with the maintenance or transgression of genre boundaries play a vital role in everyday understandings of popular music (Frith 1996, 75–95). Music scholar Richard Middleton writes...