Rap in Indonesian Youth Music of the 1990s: "Globalization," "Outlaw Genres," and Social Protest

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s, ‘‘alternative’’ musical genres such as rap, punk, and hard rock, derived from North American and European commercial cultures, captured the enthusiasm of large numbers of Indonesian youth, propelling the songs of local Indonesian rock/punk groups such as Slank and rapper Iwa-K to the top of the Indonesian pop charts. Rap music had become popular enough that by January 1995 the Indonesian government, in the person of then minister of research and technology and now former president B. J. Habibie, publicly denounced the genre as crude and alien to Indonesian culture and values (Kompas January 8, 10, and 15, 1995). Indeed, in a nation with an astonishingly rich variety of traditional musical forms, it may seem yet another lamentable instance of global commercial culture’s erasure of local variety that Indonesian youth were so powerfully attracted to these musical forms. Yet, I will argue that the appropriation by Indonesian youth of genres like rap and punk actually reveals a far more complex story. It is a story in which particular aspects of global commercial culture, although certainly displacing elements of previous traditions, may also be seized upon and deployed in specifically local struggles. These genres serve as weapons of social protest and/or as expressions of a desire to create a new social space or even identity that flaunts its difference from or rejection of the kinds of social identities and behavior authorized by an authoritarian government and the dominant social groups in society. The possibilities of this deployment are particularly germane to situations, such as that in Indonesia, in which the regime in power seeks to engineer modern culture while also, in order to aid in its pursuit of comprehensive control over all aspects of society, endeavoring to monopolize authority to determine the practice and meaning of ‘‘traditional’’ culture.