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173 chapter 6 Lapo life + Begadang Malvinas! Malvinas! you are a bastard! sir! sir! you are a bastard! you knew very well that i was sleeping you knew very well that we are up here, playing guitar and and yet you have the nerve to play singing down here, and yet you your guitar have the audacity all night underneath my window! to continue with your sleeping! —from the routine of nai Malvinas, a popular toba comedy troupe on any saturday night, Padang Bulan residential streets are alive with impromptu performance. clustered at the side of the road—on the porches of private houses, or around the shophouses that act as the local public space for a few contiguous houses—any number of people sit and sing together . During the core of my Medan doctoral research in 2002 and 2004, my nightly walk to the palm wine stand two blocks away brought me into contact with at least three groups of people with whom i shared a passing acquaintance and garnered me as many invitations to sit and sing awhile. sometimes i accepted, sitting and singing or just listening until the bags of peanuts were shelled and swallowed. other times i went on to gather my talented brothers and sisters together to sing and play the songs we liked best. it was difficult to opt for quiet and solitude at night, because the sounds of someone’s merrymaking almost always made it through the slotted windows. if an impromptu neighborhood gathering is a social practice, then the lapo tuak is a civic institution, both socially and musically. the palm wine stand is a roadside stall that offers camaraderie, libation, relaxation, and a little, mostly innocent, vice. Most neighborhoods with a significant number of Batak residents have a tuak stand within an easy distance. in the evenings the sounds of men singing to the accompaniment of guitars spill into the street until after midnight, audible through the noise of mufflerfree cars and puttering vespas. the lapo is located both in and out of a antiphonal histories / 174 community’s public space. on the one hand, the structure has no walls and is usually constructed out of wood and thatch, reminiscent of old-style communal structures prevalent throughout indonesia. Music expands to the borders of earshot, no matter the ethnicity or musical taste of the ear in question. theoretically, any passerby could stop for a drink or a bit of conversation . at the same time the space is understood as a place where toba behaviors often considered unacceptable are tolerated and even celebrated. Raised voices and thick village accents are the rule here, not the exception. in the lapo tuak tobas are no longer a minority, and those who would criticize their behavior had better judge from the side of the road. not all the men who hang out at a lapo are toba—karo and simalungun Batak groups have their own stands, with their own popular songs in their own Batak languages. yet palm wine stands (as opposed to the more general indonesian kedai kopi, “coffee stands”) are part of a long-standing highland tradition of communal drinking and amicable gambling. When the gambling is considered next to the drinking and the eating of forbidden meat (for tuak is nothing without a plate of roast pork or dog to accompany it), the lapo begins to resemble a celebration of all that is haram, a defiant performance of mainstream transgressions. Batak lapos are emphatically non-Muslim, and in these sites, at least, the local historical division between the Malay (indonesian-speaking Muslims) and not-(yet)-Malay (infidels maintaining local language and customs) is fully apparent. in the Padang Bulan tuak stand that i frequented, the language for both general conversation and song lyrics was toba. as a result, lapo discourse was ordered by the limits and nuances of toba-ness and imprinted by a language that corralled a diverse set of experiences into a common vocabulary . these experiences were as broad as all of toba history—regulars debated tarombo and partuturan and national politics in the breaks between songs that latently reference opera Batak and gondang, mariachi and Freddie Mercury. But by coming to the same space at the same time, they also revel in sense of cultural unity. Performances of “lissoi,” the tuak drinkers’ anthem with an “oom-pah-pah” rhythm, reveal this cultural fraternity. “lissoi ” requires closed eyes and an almost spiritual intensity from singers, who sway gently back and...

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