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List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: A Brief History of Popular Music and

Society in Indonesia 3
Part One: Sites
1 Indonesian Popular Music Genres in the Global
Sensorium 27
2 In the City: Class, History, and Modernity’s Failures 42
3 Cassette Retail Outlets: Organization, Iconography,
Consumer Behavior 67
4 In the Studio: An Ethnography of Sound Production 91
5 On Location: Shooting Music Video Clips 121
6 Offstage: Music in Informal Contexts 139
Part Two: Genres in Performance
7 Onstage: The Live Musical Event 171
8 Dangdut Concerts: The Politics of Pleasure 190
9 Rock and Pop Events: The Performance of Lifestyle 210
10 Underground Music: Imagining Alternative Community 226

Conclusion: Indonesian Youth, Music, and Globalization 247

Appendix A: Notes on Language in This Book 265

Appendix B: Other Indonesian Popular Music Genres 267
Appendix C: More on Nonstandard Speech Variants 271
Glossary of Indonesian and Jakartanese Terms 279
Notes 281
Works Cited 299
Index 315
CD Track Listing 328
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Modern Noise, Fluid Genres is a study of Indonesian popular music and

its audiences written by an American anthropologist and amateur mu-
sician. The book is divided into two parts. The first half examines the
cultural dynamics of particular sites for the production, mediation, and
reception of popular music, including record stores, recording studios,
video shoots, roadside food stalls, and other public and private spaces
where music is performed, consumed, discussed, and debated by Indo-
nesians from all walks of life. The second half of the book investigates
specific live performance events as occasions when musical production,
mediation, and reception processes occur simultaneously. The chapters
in that half focus on three major youth-oriented popular music genre
categories: dangdut, pop, and “underground” rock.
Through the book’s focus on concrete sites and practices, I attempt
to illuminate the complex affective politics of identification and exclu-
sion that characterizes responses to contemporary popular music genres
among people from different social classes in Indonesia. I conclude that
access to globally circulating musics and technologies has neither ho-
mogenized nor extinguished local music making in Indonesia. Rather, I
argue that this access has provided Indonesians with a wide range of
creative possibilities for exploring their existential condition in a time of
political transition and heated debate over Indonesia’s future as a multi-
ethnic, democratizing nation in a globalizing world. Moreover, the book
posits that the popular, inclusive nationalism implicit in nearly all na-
tional Indonesian popular musics provides a viable alternative to the var-
ious forms of extremism and exclusivism (religious, regional, ethnic) that
continue to threaten national integration, social justice, and democracy
in post–New Order Indonesia.
In the acknowledgments to The Religion of Java, a landmark study
of Javanese village life during Indonesia’s last great experiment with
democracy, Clifford Geertz (who sadly passed away while I was com-
pleting the final revisions of this book) thanks the many ordinary Indo-
nesians who assisted him in his research and wrote of his “hope that
in some way [his] book [might] contribute to the realization of their
xi
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aspiration to build a strong, stable, prosperous, and democratic ‘New

Indonesia’” (1960, x). I humbly wish the same for the present study,
which portrays life in Indonesia once again during a time of cultural fer-
ment, political upheaval, and cautious hope for a more just and demo-
cratic future. It is my hope that this book will advance scholarly under-
standings of Indonesian national culture as it evolves in the current era,
and that it will serve as a model for ethnographically grounded popular
music research in contemporary urban settings throughout the world.
Most of all, I hope it will bring to the attention of the scholarly commu-
nity the diversity, creativity, and exuberance of Indonesian popular music
and reveal how an informed understanding of this music can forcefully
challenge ossified, monolithic Western preconceptions of Muslim and
Asian cultures.