Underground Music Scene Research Articles

Islamic Underground Movement: Islamist Music in the Indonesian Popular Music Scene

Since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, music has become a site of religio-political resistance among the new Islamist generation in Indonesia. This research examines the emergence of Islamist music on the Indonesian underground music scene to show the deepening influence of the Islamist movement among urban Muslim youth and the shifting strategy of the new Islamist generation from structural politics to cultural politics. The emergence of Islamist music indicates how a new generation of Islamists negotiates an Islamist worldview with contemporary popular culture. By maintaining the aggressive character of underground music, they adopt the Western popular culture as a code of resistance against the secular cultural hegemony. They also use popular music as a cultural approach or a strategy to promote the Islamist ideology to all urban Muslim youth.

Desain Album “Collide” Band Dieonic

Dieonic is an Alternative Rock music group with the Shoegaze subgenre hailing from Padang, Indonesia. Formed in 2022, Dieonic presents a fusion of key shoegaze elements within a series of alternative rock tracks, refining the essence of emo music. In the midst of Padang's vibrant underground music scene, Dieonic emerges with a distinctive sound, deviating from the conventional trends. This latest project aims to develop a visual communication concept that mirrors the artistic visualization of Dieonic's musical creations and their unique identity. Beyond offering educational insights into the significance of album design in the music industry, this endeavor concentrates on fortifying Dieonic's visual branding as a pivotal aspect of the band's identity, employing a semiotic approach. The cover design for Dieonic's 'Collide' album underwent a meticulous process, utilizing the 5W+1H analysis and the 4D method design for data analysis. The subsequent creative design seeks to encapsulate the band's essence. The resulting design serves as the primary medium in the form of the album itself, accompanied by supplementary materials such as album CDs, booklets, Spotify previews, posters, t-shirts, and flags. These diverse media will undergo thorough testing for their efficacy with a verified target audience to gauge their overall success.

The History and Possibilities of Distributing Music in the 21st Century

The goal of the present article is to observe the evolution of streaming services, this being one of many prospects for the distribution of alternative music. It would be unrealistic to compare the first of them, which arose at the end of the 1990s, to today’s methods, which provide multiple ways and techniques to support the artists and simultaneously satisfy the hunger for new sounds in audiences. Discussing it from the scientific perspective of studies regarding the legality of musical distribution, in conjunction with the development of the underground music scene, the author – as a musician himself – attempts to introduce the functionality of sound-streaming media as an area for shaping the musical taste of individual listeners, an artistic activity firmly reliant on the cooperation of the artists and their audiences. The article is based on studies conducted by the author in 2021–2023.

More Than Just Devotion’: The Conservative Turn Among Subcultural Muslim Youths in the Indonesian Underground Music Scene

Scholars of Indonesian politics and Islam use the phrase ‘conservative turn’ to explain the increasing religious influence in contemporary Indonesia’s social, political, and cultural life. Although their literature provides insightful explanations about this trend, scholars fail to include subcultural Muslim youths in their analyses. The term ‘subcultural youths’ in this context refers to a diffuse network of young people that share distinctive identities, ideas, and cultural practices associated with underground music subcultures (such as punk, hardcore, hip-hop, metal, and ska) as a way to deal with a sense of marginalisation and/or to oppose mainstream society. In Indonesia in the 1990s, these youths were mostly secular, pluralist, and politically progressive and leftist. Their community welcomed all people from any social background, and religion was considered a personal matter. The social, political, and economic conditions following the fall of the New Order regime (1966-1998) changed the nature of this community. Some of its participants shifted ideologically and organisationally to Islamic conservatism and right-wing Islamism, marked by their support of and involvement in various movements such as the Islamic underground movement and the hijrah movement. This paper attempts to fill a gap within the existing literature on the conservative turn of subcultural youths in Indonesia by introducing the most recent subcultural theory as an analytical framework that can be used to explain the ideological and organisational shift. Studying the conservative turn of subcultural Muslim youths from a perspective that emphasises critical political economy allows this paper to present new insights against conventional wisdom and purely culturalist readings of the conservative turn in Indonesia.

Uncovering Cultural Capital in Indonesia’s Underground Music Scene: A Discourse

Underground music is considered to have a very strong context in terms of cultural capital. By examining the capital and musical concepts of the underground music scene, it is possible to elaborate and explain the collapse of the regime. So that it raises a reaction to freedom in voicing certain class ideologies. The role of music was finally able to represent the voices of the politicized or oppressed people overpowering, one of which occurred in the New Order. Underground music emerged as a cultural capital which Bourdieu called an artifact in dissecting the problems of the social field. The purpose of this research is to uncover the cultural capital possessed by Underground Music which creates views that open the minds and hearts of representatives of certain classes. This research is carried out by reviewing literature, musicology, and historical records of Underground music, which will be presented and dialogued with the concept of Modal theory from Bourdieu and popular music analysis from David Machin. This research tries to answer the image anxiety that emerges from the dark and loud Underground Music Scene but instead has a sacred context in the development of the socio-cultural situation in Indonesia.

Masculinity and underground music scene participation across time: A case study from Indonesia

The Ujung Berung (Bandung, Indonesia) death metal scene arguably peaked in the years 2009–13. Based on personal interviews and conversations with musicians, we identify four factors adversely affecting the scene at present: (1) decline in community nongkrong/relocation of Serak store at Jalan Cihampelas; (2) those left behind – the disillusionment of the older second-division bands; (3) the new generation’s attitude and perspective and (4) the turn towards religion. We also explore whether Indonesian masculinity is in crisis, because of young Indonesian men’s subordinated place within global capitalism and the threat that capitalism poses to traditional hierarchies. Hypermasculine death metal culture inspires because it is western in origin but not bourgeois – it is a mysterious mix of signs, symbols, sounds and mythologies, which attracts by its very obscurity; it quietly challenges, in its indirect way, the power of Indonesian hegemonic identities such as ‘pious Islamic family-man’ and ‘businessman’.

Music against Fascism: DIY Versus the Right Wing Safety Squad

ABSTRACT Five days after the Ghost Ship fire killed 36 people in Oakland, CA, a group of 4-Chan users calling themselves the Right Wing Safety Squad began a campaign to shut down similar do-it-yourself venues that they saw as “hotbeds of liberal radicalism and degeneracy.” This essay argues that these venues were targeted not simply because of their politics but because the embodied practices of music-making that occur there—performing, dancing, singing along, applauding, and having fun—have the potential to create community across perceived differences. These kinds of communal connections are a threat to alt-right ideologies that leverage difference to keep people frightened of one another. Taking cues from cultural rhetorics, I embrace my identity as an old scene kid in order to share my relationship with underground music scenes, tell the story of the alt-right’s campaign, and discuss the significant role music-making practices play in creating underground communities

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2020

‘There has always been a state of crisis’, we are told in Ziad Nawfal's wonderful introduction to the underground music scene in Beirut. That the corona restrictions comprise a rather different crisis to that of Lebanon's capital should be stressed, yet it will have been no easy task creating any kind of Huddersfield festival this year. That any event could occur at all is an achievement on the part of the festival team and the ensembles, musicians, broadcasters and composers with whom they work. Adaptation and renewal are a vital part of a new musicians’ toolkit, even if the pace of change can be bewildering.

Alternativne umetničke prakse između moći države i granica slobode

Starting from Theodore Adorno's point of view that the sociability of art is shown through its anti-social character, the paper deals with a sociological analysis of alternative artistic practices and their social reach and boundaries. Associated with a very specific social context, with a clearly established deviation not only from the mainstream of the official, elite art (artistic formalism) but also from the dominant culture and prevailing social values, alternative artistic practices are considered in the context of critical cultural counter-public, which is positioned between the formal and the symbolic powers of the state, on the one hand, and the personal / creative and social freedom of the artist and recipients, on the other hand. In the first part of the paper, we are presented with a general review of the transformations as regards the spheres of artistic creation, reception, and evaluation, which started establishing themselves within Western societies as of the beginning of 20th century, as well as with questioning their most important social functions. Following the existing research and using secondary data sources, the paper continues with an analysis of the underground music scene and lifestyles of young people in Western societies, as well as of those that emerged under the influence of the spread of Western popular culture and art in authoritarian regimes of some Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Although still sporadic, rather marginalized and regime-controlled, these alternative artistic practices contribute to trans-cultural communication and creative and value synergy, gradually undermining rigid social frameworks and belief systems within different societies (Western and Arab-Islamic) but also between them.

Women Rock! How A North-East Music Blogger Redefines Women’s Role in Rock Music: A Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACTThe blog North East Women in Music (NEWM) was founded in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2017 and featured emerging women musicians. Employing critical discourse analysis, I analyzed all fifteen articles on the blog. My study suggests that NEWM took important steps in challenging stereotypes about women musicians in the North-East underground music scene by reclaiming femininity and redefining gender constructions. Using a modest sample, this article represents a preliminary study whose conclusions suggest the need for further investigation. The findings have implications for future research on how feminist media producers challenge depictions of women musicians in British rock music discourse.

This must be the place: Venues and urban space in underground music scenes

Art subcultures, and music scenes in particular, have featured prominently in academic discourse on gentrification in the neo-liberal city. Although scholarly accounts have done much to clarify the process through which music scenes become implicated and entangled within wider patterns of urban transformation and redevelopment, these studies often leave us with a flattened and undertheorized picture of the scenes themselves. Departing from David Ley’s conception of the ‘cultural field of gentrification’, I sketch out an analytical framework for understanding the heterogenous and contested character of music scenes in the face of urban change, focusing on a case study of the underground music scene in Rome’s Pigneto neighbourhood in 2017. As variegated waves of scene participants drift into new spaces, scenes coalesce into distinct territories, administered by venues and delineated by ‘scene ideologies’ – matrices of ethical and aesthetic values and judgements constituting a collective scene habitus. This complicates any facile conception of artistic communities as either unwitting agents of gentrification or isolated underground enclaves; rather, premised on collective rituals of aesthetic judgement and differentiation, music scenes constitute a continuum of cultural production whose spatial practices both generate and subvert conditions for their eventual appropriation by market forces.

Can Egypt's Democratic Hopes Be Revived?

In today's Egypt, commitment to democracy appears scarce among actors both within the regime and in civil society, and public-opinion polls further suggest that demands for democratic governance have been abandoned. An undemocratic political understanding and disenchantment with the concept of democracy seemingly prevail among a majority of the population. Rather than seeking a return to democratic government, Egyptians are once again hoping that an authoritarian regime will succeed in raising the standard of living. Only a few groups of activists are gradually articulating a peaceful democratic culture of resistance, found in universities and professional associations as well as on social media and in the underground music scene. Their efforts offer grounds for hope.

Uma resenha do livro Keep It Simple Make It Fast: an approach to underground music scenes (vol. 4)

Uma resenha do livro Keep It Simple Make It Fast: an approach to underground music scenes (vol. 4)

Constructing black metal mythology for global monopoly: #ittakescourage

Abstract This article examines the creation of marketplace myths in the realm of the more recent North American ‘black metal’ (quotes deliberate) scene at the hands of a large multinational corporate entity working in tandem with one of the scene’s signature bands. I argue that this collaboration between global media, global fashion and ‘independent’ media has resulted in merely the same corporate co-option of an underground music scene that we have seen time and time again, and that as hard as some artists try, there is no escaping the powers of the marketplace.

True Noise: Defining Scenes in Toronto’s Underground Music Community

Underground music refers to genres which are not mass disseminated in the same way as mainstream styles, often due to their abrasive and lo-fi aesthetic. In large cultural centres, such as Toronto, underground music listeners develop their own communities and infrastructure – the framework of musical scenes – and seek out likeminded music fans both locally and virtually. Scholars such as Will Straw, Sarah Cohen and Holly Kruse have all developed theories concerning the development and definition of musical scenes which, while helpful, do not sufficiently examine how scenes are created and interact beyond geographically shared space. To address this gap, I have developed a theory which posits all musical scenes can be placed in one of two categories: local scenes, which are based around a specific locality and the infrastructure available for local scene participants, or super-local scenes, which are not bound by any one locality and can consist of multiple local scenes as well as independent participants. This presentation defines the Toronto underground scene as a super-local scene comprised of several smaller music scenes in the GTA. I will analyze the interactions between these local scenes, as well as with non-local participants, touring international acts, the mass media and the city authorities in order to model the structure of the super-local Toronto underground music scene. I suggest this framework will be useful to other scholars, even those outside of musicology, who are studying similar types of communities.

The Survival Struggle and Resistant Politics of a DIY Music Career in East Asia: Case Studies of China and Taiwan

Indie music in East Asia has experienced tremendous growth in popularity since the mid-2000s, especially in China and Taiwan. This trend has encouraged a number of indie bands to pursue more radical and alternative ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) careers within their local underground music scenes. Taking two bands from Beijing and Taipei as case studies, this article argues that their DIY music careers help them both to survive through their aesthetic freedom and to confront the paradoxical government involvement in the local music market. P.K. 14, a band from China, practice a pragmatic DIY music career with an oblique resistance to political authorities. Touming Magazine, a band from Taiwan, pursue a DIY career through punk ethics to fight against an overwhelming neoliberal discourse and a promotional state policy of developing a cultural and creative industry. While DIY career practitioners have opened up alternative possibilities to preserve the autonomy of making music, such a career path is still challenged by an unsustainable market, a shortage of financing, and the continued dominance of major music companies’ own platforms. The situations these musicians face illustrate a more ambivalent type of politics, beyond mere emancipation, in their pursuit of a DIY career.

True Kvlt? The Cultural Capital of “Nordicness” in Extreme Metal

In this article, we respond to the question of, "What is the cultural capital of Nordicness in heavy metal?". Through examining the popularity of Nordic symbolism in metal music, scenes and practices, we argue that the Nordic has been ascribed significant value in metal, wherein it offers a vehicle for narratives of masculinity, nationalism and ideology. Here we contend that the cultural capital given to Nordicness underpins not only the prevalence and market success of metal in Northern Europe, but also the ongoing circulation of narratives about the North in metal scenes across multiple global regions. Through analysing the repeated motifs of Nordic mythology, ecology and imagery as they emerge throughout metal's historic and contemporary manifestations, our article demonstrates the cultural capital with which the North is continually imbued in heavy metal. We call into focus how metal's aesthetic fascination with Nordicness as a site of heathenism, resistance and frontier landscapes is intertwined with a longer thematic history of masculinity, rebellion and affective community. This article therefore interrogates the cultural capital of Nordicness in metal scenes, and how this continues to shape the trajectories for the genre both in Northern Europe and throughout the world.

Creativity, Precarity and Illusio: DIY Cultures and ‘Choosing Poverty’

Young people investing themselves in DIY cultures have to negotiate the complex but now normalised nexus of employment, unemployment and underemployment to make ends meet, while maintaining space in their lives to pursue their creative and artistic passions. This article presents research with young people in an underground music scene across Australia who are balancing economic pressures with their desires to generate and uphold DIY and punk-influenced activities in a networked community of likeminded friends and collaborators. Many of the participants actively ‘choose poverty’, that is, they knowingly and strategically make decisions that ‘keep overheads low’ to free up temporal and mental space to continue to be creative. Their ideas of being successful are not expressed in material terms, but are contingent upon a future where they continue to have the opportunity to invest themselves in their interests even if that means living in relative poverty. Using the oft-ignored Bourdieusian concepts of illusio, struggle and strategy, this article provides a case study of some of the ways young people deal with the risks and opportunities of a precarious existence. In this case, living an ethical life trumps material concerns, projecting a hopeful attitude towards the future.

‘Nevermind the jahiliyyah, here’s the hijrahs’: Punk and the religious turn in the contemporary Indonesian underground scene

Like the country itself, the Indonesian punk/underground scene is rich with the diversity of its members. It was once known for its radical Left activism against the authoritarian state of the New Order (1966–98) in the late 1990s, but following political change in 1998 and the subsequent period of Reformasi, the image of the Indonesian punk/underground scene has gone through a shift. Its intersection with religious conservatism following the fall of the New Order creates a perception that Indonesian punk has become susceptible to what some people call ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. This is reinforced by the emergence of religious underground collectives and hijrah groups that work on Islamic proselytization in the scene. This article examines the state of the Indonesian punk/underground scene following the decline of punk’s Left activism, the expansion of neo-liberal capitalism, and the rise of religious conservatism in post-authoritarian Indonesia. This article suggests that the birth of religious underground collectives and hijrah groups within the underground music scene is a result of the absence of a coherent political Left within the subculture and the high financial and social cost of maintaining underground culture and ideology.

Review of Jennifer Milioto Matsue. 2009. Making Music in Japan’s Underground: The Tokyo Hardcore Scene . New York and London: Routledge

Jennifer Milioto Matsue’s ethnographic account of Tokyo hardcore in the late 1990s situates the scene both within the context ofJapanese society and underground music scenes in urban centers around the world. The author characterizes this enclave of hardcore music making as both distinctively Japanese and simultaneously comparable to other music scenes outside Japan. Matsue’s research spans from 1996 to 1999 and revolves around the band Jug and the club or “livehouse” they frequent, 20,000volt. Other bands and participants on the periphery of this particular group are discussed, although the ethnographer is most intimately involved with Jug, and eventually joins them during a few live performances as a guest vocalist. Crucial to Matsue’s narrative is a concept of performance that includes both acts onstage and (inter)personal contributions within the scene. Making Music in Japan’s Underground: The Tokyo Hardcore Scene is divided into four chapters that progressively delve into the tightly-knit world of Tokyo hardcore. The first chapter gives context for the ethnography, providing an overview of Tokyo at the end of the century and establishing the dominant traits of American and Japanese hardcore music. While not attempting the dubious task of defining a genre, Matsue begins by outlining the basics of American hardcore, briefly touching on the genre’s birth out of the punk rock movement, and its subsequent connection to both grunge and alternative rock in the 1990s. Taking punk tempos and speeding them up, hardcore is described by the All Music Guide (cited by Matsue) as incorporating guitars with a “monochrome” timbre and “half-shouted lyrics venting the most inflammatory sentiments the singers and songwriters could devise”. Leftist politics are central to the early strain of hardcore in the United States and, as Matsue writes, citing Roy Shuker, the music created in the hardcore scene was “initially distinct from mainstream production systems”.While Matsue fails to explain how and when hardcore made its way to Japan, her cursory overview of American hardcore allows her to compare and contrast the Japanese scene with its Western antecedent. Stylistically, the hardcore scene in Japan that she analyzes is “a range of musics loosely connected under the umbrella style of hard core … [incorporating] a guitar rock or kitschy punk aesthetic, with quite a lot of screaming … or intensive mumbling”. Although independent modes of musical production remain important, radical politics are far less prevalent, and the performative aggression is more about momentary release than attempting to effect permanent political or social change. Matsue writes, “Performance in the scene allows participants a space to negotiate distinct individual and collective identities that can at times be further characterized by a sense of resistance, but this resistance is often temporary, even playful”. This description is in keeping with Matsue’s understanding of play. In her usage, play denotes a temporary leisure activity outside of work. Play also encompasses her definition of performance, which is specifically the creation of music onstage and the methods of production and distribution offstage (such as creating promotional flyers or starting independent record labels) that perpetuate the scene and facilitate live performances. Play can also include shifting aspects of one’s identity and persona that may result in resistance against conventional societal roles, although in a fashion that is not permanent.