Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali (review)

Baulch’s ethnography is a much needed alternative perspective on musical production and consumption in Bali, one that adds to the slowly growing body of literature on Indonesian and Balinese popular and underground music. (See Lockard 1998; Wallach 2008; and Laskewicz 2004 for other important contributions to this topic.) Making Scenes represents a further move toward rectifying a serious bias in ethnographic and ethnomusicological attention in Indonesia, especially present in Bali-ography, which has favored “classical”(and assumedly wholly indigenous) cultural forms over popular, hybrid, and borrowed genres. Such a bias is already evident in, for instance, McPhee’s preference for pelegongan over kebyar and his negative evaluation of stamboel (1966). Baulch presents a high resolution, deeply informed image of Bali that anthropologists (and ethnomusicologists) rarely write about. Her description of the scenes of punk fandom in urban Bali, for instance, the KFC in the basement of the Matahari mall, is spot on and testifies to the level of her entry into a deliberately closed subculture.

Chapter 1 deals primarily with the “messy demise” of Suharto’s New Order and the history of youth movements in Indonesia, providing contrasting images of fandom in the tensions between poorer fans of underground music and the children of the middle and upper classes, the so-called ABG or “anakbaru gede” (“newly grown children”). Through this Baulch handily problematizes Birmingham school notions of resistance and subculture. Here, Baulch moves beyond conventional notions of hybridity and cultural imperialism in a nuanced introduction to Balinese underground scenes. Chapter 2 is concerned with the political significance of early Balinese death metal consumption and production, focusing especially on the band Superman is Dead, and investigates how foreign forms of popular music were not indigenized through hybridization, but by a complex “gesturing elsewhere” through the consistent use of English and referencing foreign scenes (primarily Jakarta). Chapter 3 describes the Balinese reggae scene and the ways in which it sought to “revise and reformulate Balineseness on the margins of local elite discourses of identity” (12). Here reggae is seen as a form of accommodation to the demands of the tourist industry to paint the island and its inhabitants as a tropical, peaceful paradise.

In chapter 4, Baulch describes youth engagement with the newly deregulated media of 1990s Indonesia and the nature of identity formulation in the punk underground through its relations to territory and space (primarily in malls and warung hangouts). Chapter 5 investigates the merging of death metal and punk in the late 1990s, describing how a riot after a 1993 Metallica concert in Jakarta impacted rock fandom and the relationship between the state and fans. Here Baulch looks to Turner’s analysis of communitas in carnival to talk about how chaos is “orchestrated” in alternative band showcases in Bali. She deftly describes how “anarchy” is not necessarily inconsistent with communitarianism, but illustrates how the mode of group socialization in this case is different from those offered through the traditional banjar social unit. Chapter 6 is an investigation of the Balinese underground metal scene, its self-bureaucratization in the mid-1990s, and the ways in which the scene was spatialized. Here we find almost baffling levels of distinction as when the genre of “Blasphemical Balinese Black Death Metal” is distinguished from other ostensibly more common forms such as “Ethnic Lunatic Death Metal” (161).

Making Scenes is an extremely well-written study; it is primarily an example of cultural studies rather than ethnomusicology as Baulch’s engagement is with scene analysis, ethnographic observation, and problematizing the theories of Birmingham school and not with the “music itself.” Generally, Baulch mobilizes theoretical concepts not to prop up prior ethnographic insights, but in order to feel out the ways in which previous theories do not neatly match the Balinese case described here. The level and intensity of her engagement with cultural studies theory intensifies throughout the book and only at moments does it seem to obfuscate rather...