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

2. In the City: Class, History, and Modernity’s Failures

2 In the City , ,  ’  Light reflects off my computer monitor, not the glittering rice paddy, not the sewing machine’s glittering needle dipping like a cormorant into tomorrow’s Nike shoe and this is the Culture at work. Sun Yung Shin 2004 Jakarta is the least exotic locale in a country famous for being exotic. Although it has all the amenities one would expect from an ultramodern, globalized metropolis (for those who can afford them), foreigners and Indonesians alike tend to view the capital as an example of a failed, dystopian modernity—a blighted urban sprawl of traffic snarls, crime, poverty , open sewers, and pollution. Despite its political, economic, and cultural centrality, I spoke to very few residents of this massive city of approximately eleven million people who seemed to like living there very much. There is a saying in Jakarta: Ibu tiri tak sekejam ibukota—“A stepmother is not as cruel as the capital city [in Indonesian, literally ‘mother city’].” The perceived lack of communal ties between people 42 and the difficult, competitive struggle to survive that confronts residents of the city are frequently given as examples of this “cruelty.” Despite these misgivings, however, few residents would deny that Jakarta is the major center of production of Indonesian national culture, and has been so for the country’s entire existence. In Clifford Geertz’s memorable words, Jakarta is “where Indonesia is supposed to be summarized but perhaps is manufactured” (1995, 52). The following overview of the cultural terrain of post–New Order Jakarta serves as a prelude to the ethnographic study of popular music that follows. Three themes emerge in a discussion of the spatial organization , speech styles, and social conditions that characterize everyday life in the capital city: first, a persistent dichotomization of rich and poor in everyday discourse, often based on an erstwhile urban/rural divide; second, the relationship between Indonesian historical memory and these class-based, discursive bifurcations; and third, the ongoing process of cultural innovation by social agents from all walks of life in response to the conditions of urban life. As the following discussion makes clear, this continual process of innovation and improvisation occurs against a backdrop of sensory unruliness created by the chaos of an overpopulated , divided, and indeed often cruel metropolis. Jakarta as an Ethnographic Field Site When I tell people in Jakarta that I’m from Surabaya, they say, “Oh, you’re from Java!” As if Jakarta wasn’t also on Java! Samir, lead guitarist for Slowdeath Jakarta is the main field site of this study, and in many ways, it is unique. Its size, level of commercial development, multiethnic population, and political centrality set it apart from Indonesia’s other major cities, all of which are nonetheless influenced tremendously by developments in the capital. In this sense, Jakarta is an “exemplary center” for the rest of the nation, a site in which cultural power is consolidated and flows outward to the periphery (see Anderson 1990, 35–38; Guinness 2000), where it is both accommodated and resisted by local agents (Steedly 1999, 444). Indonesians often consider Indonesia’s capital city a separate entity unto itself. Jakarta is located in the western portion of the island of Java, but the city is a Special Capital District (Daerah Khusus Ibukota) not included in the province of West Java. It is certainly not considered part of In the City 43 • “Java” (see Pemberton 1994b and the epigraph preceding this section), which as an unmarked term in Indonesia generally refers to the provinces of Central and/or East Java, where the majority of the population is ethnic Javanese (West Java, in contrast, is dominated by Sundanese). To many Indonesians, Jakarta represents certain trends in contemporary Indonesian society taken to an extreme, including deepening class divisions, consumerism, westernization, and the replacement of reciprocity-based economic systems by economies based on discrete single-transaction exchanges. Each of these trends is present in most parts of Indonesia, including small towns and villages, but Jakarta is viewed as the exemplar for all of them, and many Indonesians in the provinces are wary of following its lead. Most people who live in Jakarta are migrants who often speak longingly of their home villages or cities elsewhere in the archipelago, but many admit that Jakarta is the only place where they can find real economic opportunity. For them, living in the capital is a necessary...