Countering MTV Influence in Indonesia and Malaysia

4. Pop Music, Cultural Imperialism, and Localization

4 Pop Music, Cultural Imperialism, and Localization In the previous chapter I examined and discussed how nasyid music, with its Islamic flavour, has become both a religious movement as well as part of Malaysia’s pop music industry. In this chapter, which includes discussion of the results of observations, contents analysis, focus group discussion, and personal interviews, I explore other more secular Malaysian and Indonesian genres of pop music, and examine how they are responding to the globalized music industry, which is now very much part of the pop music industry in the region. I will also discuss how local musical identities have developed as a result, especially with regard to dangdut music, in the context of the theoretical perspectives examined in Chapter 1. Pop Music Industry in the Age of Globalization To the outsider Malaysia and Indonesia appear to share a common Malay or Melayu cultural heritage. Yet within this seemingly uniform culture there is a diversity of regional and ethnic cultural expressions and musical forms, which continue to interact with each other as well as with the Pop Music, Cultural Imperialism, and Localization 135 globalized musical culture coming from the West and other areas such as India and the Arab world. There is an attempt to provide some form of fusion of musical culture with which the nation can identify. Over the past four decades the governments of both of these countries have been trying to guide or develop just such a contemporary cultural expression, with Malaysia seemingly more successful than its larger neighbour Indonesia. In the case of Malaysia, for the purposes of this study, the focus will be on the musical culture of the dominant Malay community. As I suggest in Chapter 1, the history of Malay pop music goes back to the early twentieth century when in the 1920s and 1930s bangsawan1 troupes developed a form of popular Malay music from traditional asli (pure) music. It was performed live in bangsawan theatres, amusement parks, and in dance halls in urban centres. The 1930s saw the arrival of the gramophone. At the time, half of the recorded music was derived from traditional Malay folk social dance and entertainment music; the other half was influenced byAnglo-American and LatinAmerican dance music. Western dance bands, known as orkes Melayu (Malay Orchestras), were introduced into the music scene around this time. Following the end of World War II, a Malay film industry began to take shape, produced by Chinese-owned companies which employed Indian directors who relied upon local actors and actresses (Matusky and Tan 2004). The Malay film industry was subject to a strong Indian influence resulting in playback2 singing becoming a major component of the industry. P. Ramlee, the legendary Malay singer and actor of the 1950s and 1960s, appeared in 63 films and sang more than 200 songs (Baharudin Latif 136 Countering MTV Influence in Indonesia and Malaysia 1989, p. 63 cited in Matusky and Tan 2004) mainly derived from traditional Malay music such as asli, inang, joget, masri, zapin, and keroncong. Included in the repertoire were elements of Western Latin American dance music. With the emergence of the Beatles in the West taking the world by storm, the Malaysian pop music of the 1960s became greatly dominated by Western influences, with only a few singers recording hits based on Malay rhythms. In the 1970s and 1980s transnational recording companies began marketing their products in Malaysia, products that became available even to the rural masses via cheap transistor radios and cassette players. By the end of the 1980s local musicians began to fight back with the Hindustani-influenced pop music genre known as dangdut, which first became popular in Indonesia in the 1960s. With Indian Bollywood movies very popular in both Indonesia and Malaysia, dangdut music, which used local rhythms, became fused with the tabla and the Indian film industry vocal style, which was accompanied by the electric guitar, a synthesizer, and drums. The popularity of dangdut peaked in the mid-1990s with the phenomenal success of local star Amalina. But her mysterious disappearance from the music scene saw dangdut’s popularity plummet (I elaborate upon this later in the chapter). The 1990s also saw the worldbeat3 music bandwagon enter Malaysia. Tan (2002) notes that exposure to worldbeat helped to stimulate music production in Malaysia, creating a resurgent interest in the use of indigenous elements in contemporary Malaysian pop music. Zainal Abidin and M...