Emma Baulch

Making scenes : Reggae, punk, and death metal in 1990s Bali

In 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. Her chats with young people led her to an enormously popular regular outdoor show dominated by local reggae, punk, and death metal bands. In this rich ethnography, she takes readers inside each scene: hanging out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island’s most renowned tourist area. Baulch tracks how each music scene arrived and grew in Bali, looking at such influences as the global extreme metal underground, MTV Asia, and the internationalization of Indonesia’s music industry. Making Scenes is an exploration of the subtle politics of identity that took place within and among these scenes throughout the course of the 1990s. Participants in the different scenes often explained their interest in death metal, punk, or reggae in relation to broader ideas about what it meant to be Balinese, which reflected views about Bali’s tourism industry and the cultural dominance of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city. Through dance, dress, claims to public spaces, and onstage performances, participants and enthusiasts reworked “Balinese-ness” by synthesizing global media, ideas of national belonging, and local identity politics. Making Scenes chronicles the creation of subcultures at a historical moment when media globalization and the gradual demise of the authoritarian Suharto regime coincided with revitalized, essentialist formulations of the Balinese self.

Alternative music and mediation in late New Order Indonesia

On 14 January 1996, Jakarta hosted an Alternative Pop Festival (hereon JAPF: Jakarta Alternative Pop Festival), at which US acts, Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys and Foo Fighters, performed alongside local bands Pas, Nugie and Netral. In the following month, Californian punk band Green Day played in the capital. These gigs were the first international rock concerts (although organisers carefully dubbed the Festival a ‘pop’ event) to take place in Jakarta since riots occurred at a Metallica concert in 1993...

Book Review: Hip-hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalisation

foreigners and of multiculturalism; these views, too, must be taken seriously rather than dismissed as voices from the past. The book’s introduction states ‘Japan . . .will never again be able to hold on to an unchallenged model of homogeneity’ (p. 23). But it remains unclear what model will take its place. Given the fact that Japanese society has been based overwhelmingly on notions of ethnic belonging, with a comparatively weak sense of civic belonging (as several chapters of the book discuss), what kind of society will an ethnically heterogeneous Japan turn out to be? How exactly will the historically powerful Japanese emphasis on ethnicity and ancestry come to coexist (as well as conflict) with growing ethnic diversity? This book’s contributors provide a number of tantalising hints, but finally do not fully address these important questions, as perhaps no book written today yet can.

Introduction: Studying Indonesian media worlds at the intersections of area and cultural studies

When preparing this special issue,1 our discussions with the editorial board of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (IJCS) included a moment of simultaneous surprise and reflection, which we would like to use as a starting point for our introduction to the articles appearing here. This occurred during communications about the number and length of the articles required for a special issue. The board’s representative stipulated that a specific number of articles were to be written by Indonesian scholars. The request surprised us. We had neither discussed nor anticipated ethnic or national quotas for authorial participation. But although the request caught us off guard it also stimulated us to think about the two disciplinary terrains traversed in the articles to follow.

Longing Band play at Beautiful Hope

This article enquires into the contextual dimensions of Indonesian consumerism by presenting the rise to national fame of provincial boy band, Kangen (Longing) Band. The case of Kangen Band suggests that Indonesian consumerism entails new ways of heralding the masses that rely on and play with old generic terms, kampungan (hick-ish) and ‘Melayu’ (Malay). It also reveals some of the specificities of the Indonesian consumerist environment, in which ring back tones, pirate recordings and corporatized fandom are important resources in the formation of consumer subjectivities.

Cosmopatriatism in Indonesian pop music imagings

In this article, cosmopatriotism is seen to describe an effect of transnational capitalism’s need to “settle down” in particular localities. The self-imaging of female singer Krisdayanti and punk band Superman is Dead serve as agentive forces in the working out of novel, post-New Order modernities. The body, in particular, is an important site to inscribe a sense of authenticity and social mobility, as well as to work out a sense of post-Suharto Indonesian-ness.

The Everyman and the Dung Beetle: New Media Infrastructures for Lower-Class Cultural Politics

Noting the increasing tendency of Indonesian pop performers to organize and agitate politically, the article aims to locate these celebrity politics in a history of media change, and to explore their implications for lower-class collective organizing. Through a discussion of two pop performances that explicitly address the lower classes—the Jakarta-based rock band Slank and the Balinese solo performer Nanoe Biroe—the author traces the increasing recognition of pop idols as politically authoritative figures and the emergence of a new form of corporatized associational life (the fan group) as a site for attending to that authority. The author argues that these developments in public culture can be linked to changes to the media environment since the end of the Cold War, which include but are not limited to widespread digital uptake. The article engages work investigating prospects for critical forms of belonging within a neoliberal communicative environment–especially Jodi Deans writings on communicative capitalism. It examines the vulnerabilities and possibilities of lower-class performances and solidarities and brings to light the broader media infrastructures that enable them.

Genre Publics: Aktuil Magazine and Middle-class Youth in 1970s Indonesia

This article attempts to change our thinking about the formation, development, and growth of the middle class(es) in Indonesia during the early Suharto regime. In the dominant story about the formation of the Indonesian middle classes, a particular configuration of economics and politics caused the formation of the middle class, and shaped identities, values, and behaviors. According to analysts, these middle classes were heavily dependent on the state, and politically ineffectual. To challenge that notion, this essay studies how the pop music magazine Aktuil (1967–84) addressed its readers, and shows how this treatment allowed certain people to feel as if they were part of a tangible social entity that inhabited a middle social space, between the state and the masses. This is an important and necessary intervention that recognizes the significance of media and popular culture in the construction of identities. The author positions Aktuil in the context of the radical reorganization of the press and of popular music, which enabled the quiet evolution of the Indonesian middle class—a cohort constituted not only by musical taste, but also by the practice of reading. Aktuil gave rise to a virtual social entity heralded into being by overlapping modes of address, that is, those that touched not only on a rhetoric of print, but also on discourses of popular music genres. By proposing that the middle class was a virtual entity, the imagination of which was enabled by the reorganization of the press and of popular music, this essay departs from a dominant perspective that attributes to the state a pivotal role in the tangible growth of the middle class in the 1970s.