Dangdut

Dangdut is far more popular today, and it can be heard blaring from the loudspeakers of bemos (minivans used for public transport), storefront TV sets tuned to the music video channel, and, at night, from karaoke bars. As in rock music, there is a fairly wide range of music that gets classified as dangdut , an onomatopoeic word ( dang-dut dang dang! ) that refers to its modern, hard-edged dance rhythm. The instrumentation and song forms of today's dangdut are obviously influenced by rock music, but it has its roots in orkes melayu , a syncretic ensemble music that combined Malay and Western elements, as well as in Indian film music and urban Arab pop. The one singer most responsible for the rise of dangdut in the last two decades is Rhoma Irama, a working-class hero whose songs manage to combine Islamic piety, social criticism, and family values, while simultaneously glamorizing his rags-to-riches tale. Dangdut has also become part of Indonesian cinema, and Irama's 1980 film, Perjuangan dan Do'a (``Struggle and Prayer'') may well have been the first Islamic rock film ever made. Women have also made their mark in dangdut. Elvy Sukaesih, who purveys a more indigenous style, is the reigning queen, while Detty Kurnia is making headway overseas in the lucrative Japanese market.

Emerging from Sunda (West Java) in the 1970s, jaipongan has rapidly spread to other parts of Indonesia, riding the wave of a dance craze that can be arguably traced back to a decree by President Sukarno in the early Sixties that banned all ``foreign'' music including rock n' roll. Young musicians who had been happily playing the twist and jive for eager audiences were forced to invent purely indigenous replacements. One enterprising student named Gugum Gumbira Tirasondjaja embarked on a study of rural dance and festival music that occupied him for twelve years. By far his most popular experiment proved to be the updating of a village ritual music called ketuk tilu , which is the name of a pot-gong used in the ensemble. The rest of the group typically consists of other gongs, a rebab (spike fiddle), barrel drums, and a female singer-dancer, ronggeng , who is often also a prostitute. Gugum's contribution was in expanding and energizing the drum section, redefining the singer as just a singer, and giving the music a catchy onomatopoeic name. In jaipongan the gongs are tuned to a pentatonic scale, while the melody carried by the rebab and the vocalist are usually in a heptatonic scale. The subtle dissonance between the two scales comes and goes as microtonal inflections in the melody play on this effect. Within a song, the texture alternates between sections in which the singer lyrically unfurls tales of love, money, and agriculture over a stately gong cycle, and passages of frenetic drumming, whooping, and grunts by the rest of the band. It was hard to miss the irony when the authorities tried to crack down on jaipongan , offended by the ``overly sensuous'' nature of the dancing, which was based on an authentically traditional form--the government got what they asked for.

The official ban on foreign pop music lasted only a few years, and today's bands are free to play anything from reggae to heavy metal to covers of John Denver. It is a tribute to the vitality of the local musical traditions that modern Indonesian pop has not been completely dominated by such foreign forms, as has happened in neighboring countries like Malaysia and the Philippines. It's about time that the rest of the world discovered the flourishing Indonesian music scene beyond the gamelan .