From Beyond Underground: Celebrating fifty years of subcultural independence and youth turmoil from the Indonesian peripheries
By Luigi Monteanni, CHASE funded doctoral researcher at SOAS University of London.
When talking about Indonesian political movements, one hardly thinks of leather jackets covered with patches and aggressive music. Yet, underground music subcultures have been one of the greatest factors of bottom-up change in the archipelago. Besides building scenes connecting Europe and Indonesia thanks to names such as Burgerkill, Jasad, Yes No Wave, Voice of Baceprot, and Senyawa, the nation's young audiences have managed to realise the utopian dream of making music a political force. As part of my CHASE-funded PhD project on the indigenisation of extreme metal in Bandung (West Java), I have organised, along with Hyperlocal Club - an Italian event platform chronicling the relationships between scenes and the urban areas where they are born - a night celebrating the Bandung underground as an example of empowerment between grassroots communities.
A lineup composed of Turtles JR, pioneering hardcore punk band active since thirty years and inspirational to other scenes in the archipelago, Tarawangsawelas, the only project bringing Tarawangsa - a ritual music genre played to homage the rice goddess Dewi Sri - to the avantgarde through digital effects, Ensemble Tikoro, a metal vocalists choir executing compositions by counterpoint teacher Robi Rusdiana, Ariel William Orah, multimedia artist and founder of diasporic Indonesian collective Soy Division and Myria Idha a French-Indonesian DJ based in Marseille: a LYL radio resident where she conduces Warung, a broadcast focused on Indonesian artists. The event was a success, bringing the history of the Indonesian underground to the people while contributing to the artists’ careers. Besides registering more than 1100 subscriptions, the event showed how movements considered marginal have opposed state power, while providing a context to re-examine the last time the youth had a political influence outside the circuits we are used to thinking of as the only possible; proving once again that the official ways of doing things are usually the wrong ones.
Indonesia's encounter with loud popular music starts shortly after the declaration of independence from Dutch colonialism. First president Sukarno (1959-66) restricted access to western music, believing that they would pollute the new national identity (1). Music from the west was criminalised. However, this did not prevent people from consuming western rock, which became a symbol of youth opposition. In the aftermath of the mass killings of 65-66 and the seizure of power by General Suharto, the cultural landscape had changed radically. Unlike his predecessor, Suharto promoted a liberal and pro-Western government, allowing the penetration of emerging consumer cultures, largely represented by the American middle-class lifestyle (2). As part of a strategy to promote an etiquette of ‘responsible’ and ‘respectable’ citizens, the Indonesian media even replaced the political term pemuda (young) with the apolitical remaja (teenager). The difference was huge: while pemuda implied political or social affiliations, remaja was a fictitious model based on personal taste (3).
And yet, while music was co-opted by state propaganda, youth dissatisfaction didn’t. Indeed, it was underground rock music in the form of punk and metal that galvanised Suharto’s toppling in 1998 (4). The underground was accustomed to rely on unofficial networks. Therefore, relying on alternative infrastructures of production and circulation of cultural artefacts such as cassettes and zines, young Indonesian ‘undergrounders’ took advantage of this control gap and used subcultures as powerful imaginative resources to manipulate their place in Indonesian society. Being active in the music scene, suddenly, meant building a platform for political discussion. Indeed, more than on definite musical genres, the underground was the promise of a political stance; a rejection of the music entertainment-industrial complex together with an anarchic and egalitarian stance expressed through the pragmatism of self-production; strategies leading to radical freedom of expression and independence in an era of severe social restrictions.
If the remaja wanted to sever the political and social associations of young people in order to push them towards a state of bourgeois anomie, the underground reaffirmed these affiliations with political movements and local communities by rejecting the new consumption models (5). Being underground depended in fact on producing music that aestheticised political transgression with dangerous content, including criticism or celebration of ideas of sexuality, politics and religion not in line with the regime. The central argument is that, although the remaja was a device to forge a new, bourgeoise, national middle class, the unintended consequence was the underground: a window on the world outside of state control, an accidental oppositional culture that read globality as a way out of the nation's constricting imagination. Incredibly, the student circles that listened to Sepultura and Minor Threat and that read Chomsky and Marx were also the ones who organised for the riots that Suharto, with good reason, feared and that in the general uproar dethroned him (6).
After Suharto’s fall there was, finally, a chance to imagine a new future (7). Yet, these hopes of a new Indonesian state roam Indonesia like bizarre ghosts. Although five presidents have alternated, the hope that the archipelago would enjoy prosperity and independence after the New Order has dissolved into capitalist extractivism, Saudi Wahhabism and renewed authoritarianism. Sure, the underground has gained worldwide recognition. Festivals such as CTM, Hellfest, Wacken, and Unsound have represented in Europe the victory of these communities over state or commercial networks. But on the other hand, in a context where metal T-shirts were recently worn by the outgoing president Jokowi in famous promotional campaign photos, the underground’s challenge to remain relevant in an era where musical transgression is a commercial and political asset is more and more pressing. But coming back from a year of Bandung research, the centre of clashes between students and state forces from the 1970s to the 2000s, I can say that if you open social media and search for videos of protests against evictions or government ‘development plans’, although the participants’ faces are often covered, you can see a Sepultura T-shirt or a Minor Threat patch popping up here and there. Our task as researchers, I believe, is just to create occasions to show that if it is loud enough and it happens in a community, it probably contains politics.
(1) Hill, D.T., & Sen, K. (2005). The Internet in Indonesia's New Democracy (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203403273
(2) Jellinek, L. (2000). ‘Jakarta, Indonesia: Kampung culture or consumer culture?’. In Consuming cities: The urban environment in the global economy after the Rio Declaration, edited by Nicholas Low, 271-286. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
(3) Siegel, J.T. (1986). Solo in the new order : language and hierarchy in an indonesian city. Princeton University Press.
(4) Wallach, J. (2018). Rock Music in Indonesia. Norient, Agosto 7. https://norient.com/stories/rock-in-indonesia#:~:text=Performing%2C%20listening%2C%20and%20recording%20underground,democratic%20society%20in%20its%20place.
(5) Kimung (2012). Ujung Berung Rebels: Panceg Dina Galur. Minor Books.
(6) Addy Gembel, intervista, Bandung, Novembre 2023.
(7) Adams, K. M. (2018). In Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia, edited by Robert Hefner, 197-208. Routledge.