Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali 9780822390343

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© 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 䊊 ⬁ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Bulmer by Newgen–Austin Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Mama and Mei

CONTENTS

Note on Spelling, Names

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1. Messy Decay

15

2. Gesturing Elsewhere

49

3. Reggae Borderzones, Reggae Graveyards

73

4. Punk’s Beginnings

91

5. Grounding Punk

113

6. Metal Blossoms

145

Conclusion

177

Notes

187

Glossary

199

References

205

Index

217

N OT E O N S P E L L I N G , N A M E S

All Indonesian terms and names should use new spelling (by which u replaces oe, j replaces dj and c replaces tj) except for names of people who prefer to retain the old spelling. In this book they are Megawati Soekarnoputri, Soekarno Sabdo Moelyo, Soeryadi, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Sincere thanks are due to all those people who agreed to be part of this book by sharing their opinions and experiences with me from 1996 to 1999 when I researched this book. Among them are Wayan Ferry, Cak, Age, Agung Alit, Ngurah Karyadi, Agus Sacrilegious, Sabdo Moelyo (Moel), Agus Lempog, Agus Yanky, Ari Phobia, Cahyadi, Gregor Casanova, Gus Martin, Made Arthana, Micko GMR, Rahmat Hariyanto, Gus They, Frit, Romy Isnandar, Dedi and Forqon of Lithium, Rudi Jamasyah, Hendra Epilepsy, and Yayat Jasad. Thanks to members of these bands: Triple Punk, Superman Is Dead, Soul Rebel, Triple Six, Angel Head, Suckerhead, Turtle Junior, Arwah, Ritual Crypt, Behead, Criminal Assholes, Djihad, No Man’s Land, Obligasi, Rest in Peace (rip), Deadly Ground, Storing, Suckerfinger, Total Riot, and Utero. Degung Santikarma’s lively, funny stories about Balinese rock fans and practices piqued my interest and inspired me to visit Bali and check this scene out. This book owes much to Degung’s alternative, pioneering takes on

contemporary Balinese culture and politics. I am also grateful to those who, although not directly part of my research, made my life in Denpasar all the more enjoyable for their presence: Benny swr, Yonas Sestakvisna, Jocelyne Dubois, Pokpok, Wiwit, Endang, Ari Phobia, Ngurah Karyadi, Degung Santikarma, Agung Alit, Andre Syahreza, Benito Lopulalang, Eri Setiajid, and the team at Bali Echo. I began to write this book as a phd student at Monash University in Melbourne in 2000. The faculty of arts at Monash funded the final six months of the writing of the dissertation. The Monash Research Graduate School gave me an office and two travel grants. My father, Geoff Baulch, bought me a car. Under Pete Lentini’s supervision, I was awarded a degree in the summer of 2003. I could not have achieved this without his skillful editing, as well as his enthusiasm and optimism, which always helped me emerge from the postpartum slumps that followed the completion of chapters. Ed Aspinall, Chaerul Putra, Sue Blackburn, Yonas Sentakresna, Ariel Heryanto, Benny swr, Liz Gunn, Degung Santikarma, John Hartley, Agung Alit, Andre Syahreza, and a number of anonymous referees all read chapters in progress and offered valuable critiques. Tony Mitchell and Krishna Sen examined the thesis, and both included in their reviews suggestions for improvement, for which I also am grateful. Editors of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Popular Music, Perfect Beat, and International Journal of Cultural Studies generously agreed to publish versions of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. An earlier version of chapter 2 (Baulch 2003) was published in Popular Music (Cambridge University Press). An earlier version of chapter 3 (Baulch 2004) appeared in Perfect Beat (Department of Contemporary Music Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney). An earlier version of chapter 4 (Baulch 2002b) was published in International Journal of Cultural Studies (Sage). Sections of chapter 1 appeared in an article (Baulch 2002a) in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Routledge). Claire Lucas, Robin Lucas, Kate Baulch, Josh Kempin, Libby Baulch, Tamzin Rasmussen, and Liz Gunn lent their support by often reminding me to take time out and enjoy life beyond writing. The staff and co-residents at Odyssey House in Victoria helped me to regain my health after returning from the field. Halina Garnys’s deft guidance, enduring patience, and constant presence saw the dissertation through. xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I revised the dissertation for publication as a postdoctoral researcher at the Indonesian Mediations Program at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and I am grateful to Patsy Spyer and Ben Arps for allowing me the time to do this. I am especially grateful to Patsy and to Wiwik Sushartami, a fellow researcher and writer in Leiden. Both gave generously of their time in reading and commenting on drafts of the manuscript. Also, Robin Lucas and John Arnold very kindly helped me compile the illustrations. Finally, I would never have found the time to complete the final draft of this book were it not for Benny, who kept our new daughter company for hours on end, did all the housework, and plied me with my favorite black rice and fermented cassava ice cream.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

I

n 1996 the sidewalks of Jalan Raya Kuta1 were like lips: cracked, broken, split open; a gaping frontier land of which anthropology rarely spoke. Throughout the tourist boom of the 1990s, these lips voiced Kuta’s edge, for they raged with charged encounters between tourists and street-side watch sellers, drug dealers, drivers, pimps, and whores. Sucked to Kuta from neighboring islands, East Java, or Lombok to seek their fortunes in this “Gateway of Indonesia” (official tourism publication-speak for “Bali”), many of those who made a living on Kuta’s main street slept five to a room in boardinghouses on the back blocks, but they spent the bulk of their days on the sidewalks. This frontier land was pumped with Introduction an angry optimism, a persistent hope. At the southern end of the street, punk jams chafed against the pop soundscape emanating from the Hard Rock Cafe across the road. Mohawks, feigned brawls, Bad Religion, metal spikes, hefty jackboots, and leather jackets thrived. The building where these punk jams took place was the main hangout for members and fans of the Kuta-based punk band Superman Is Dead. Superman Is Dead is central to the narrative of this book, for its role in pioneering the independent Balinese punk scene that emerged in the late 1990s, largely inspired by the emergence of a panIndonesian underground music scene around 1996. In that year, distinctive styles of dress and posture associated with punk and death metal subcultures became evident in the streets of Java’s major cities: Malang, Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Jakarta. The punk aesthetic was very textured, aggressive, and sharp, and included mohawks, chains, jackboots, and leather accessories studded with metal spikes. The plainer death metal style featured jeans, long hair, and black t-shirts adorned with illegible band names. Across Java, both styles could be seen at shopping malls where, on Saturday nights, punk and metal enthusiasts

came together in ritual gatherings, as if to exhibit themselves. During the week, punk and metal fans gathered in merchandise outlets to exchange self-published ’zines, badges, self-produced albums, t-shirts, and stickers, as well as to socialize and plan “underground” concerts. These people came from all over Java, and nearly all of them were amateur musicians who found opportunities to perform at such independently organized gigs, which furthered interprovincial solidarity among them. Unequivocally, enthusiasts defined their underground in opposition to music television and major recording labels. Although death metal developed in Bali as early as 1992, an underground scene similar to that in Java, in which punk and metal converged, did not emerge until around 1997. In the beginning of 1996, the Balinese band scene had been invigorated by the establishment of the island’s first-ever biweekly, pangenre show, which took place in Denpasar and catered to a growing number of amateur death metal and punk bands as well as professional reggae bands that played in tourist bars. It was at this event, Sunday Hot Music, that I first saw perform many of the reggae, punk, and death metal musicians cited in this book. In early 1996, I encountered Balinese reggae, punk, and death metal enthusiasts who often unproblematically subsumed our discussions about music beneath broader identity discourses which attributed certain moral and ethical qualities to Jakarta, the metropolis, Balineseness, and the tourism industry, respectively. This did not surprise me. Balinese regionalist sentiment, voiced by the local press, had been gathering momentum during the 1990s. My own initial inquiries concerned the link between young men’s music-related activities and this regionalist discourse, and my questions must have prodded our discussions in this direction. But in my early chats with Balinese musicians, the inconsistent moralities musicians attributed to this regionalism’s cornerstones—Jakarta, tourism, and Balineseness— inspired queries different from those I had formulated in preparing to go live in Bali. These questions seemed more complex and sustaining than the simple one of how and why youths’ ideas about music referred primarily to Balinese regionalism. Although regionalism seemed to form a core toward which musicians gravitated in expressing their ideas about reggae, punk, and death metal in

2

introduction

early 1996, they variously constructed Balineseness and frequently defied the dominant regionalism’s routine center-periphery dichotomies. In hindsight, and on reflection some months later, I recognized generic patterns in these divergent views which enabled me to later characterize these young peoples’ choices to play reggae, death metal, and punk as distinct political strategies. But in early 1996, seeing them with the kind of optimism newcomers briefly inspire, I embraced those divergent views as a magnificent mess which defied Suharto’s thirty-year-old, stodgy, and acharismatic New Order regime and its totalizing aspirations. Here was something different, suggesting that the state’s capacity to control was less than I had been taught as a student of Indonesian politics in the early 1980s. In 1996, I encountered young Balinese musicians whose sensuous, performative, music-related identities seemed to feed their more cerebral, yet no less heartfelt and insistent political opinions. Such synergies bore intricate sociocultural nuances too confounding for more farsighted lenses, such as those of officialdoms and formal political oppositions. The very complex sociocultural nuances of the scenes this book describes—particularly those of punk and death metal—owe much to an uncertain political climate, for these genres flourished at the very end of the New Order period. In 1997, just as an underground music scene began to emerge in Bali, the last election under the New Order system took place. In March of the following year, presidential elections, in which members of the People’s Constituent Assembly would vote for or against the seventysix-year-old Suharto’s return to the presidency for another five-year term, were due. In the lead-up to this vote, the question of presidential succession pervaded discussion of Indonesian politics. The president’s age made it a question impossible to ignore. Megawati Soekarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, became inextricably associated with the issue of succession in the final years of the New Order regime. In 1994, she assumed the leadership of the Indonesian Democratic Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, pdi).2 In 1996, Megawati began to hint publicly that she might stand as candidate in the 1998 presidential election. 3 The government responded by ousting her from the leadership of the pdi in a rigged party election that replaced her with Soeryadi, who was more sympathetic to the government.

introduction 3

Megawati and her supporters established a rival pdi, which they called the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (pdi-Perjuangan), and which was not officially recognized. In the lead up to the 1997 election, the group’s Jakarta headquarters became a center where opposition groupings of various hues would gather and speakers opposed to the government could air their views. On 27 July 1996, the military and hired thugs stormed and ransacked the pdi-Perjuangan headquarters, provoking the worst riots in the capital in more than a decade and increasing support for the new party. As I discuss in chapter 1, the pdi-Perjuangan was enormously popular in Bali, and in 1997, just as the underground music scene began to emerge there, Denpasar swelled with red—the color of the pdi-Perjuangan. The underground music scene, then, took shape in the anticipation of Megawati’s succeeding Suharto. When the presidential elections were held in March 1998, the People’s Consultative Assembly voted to return Suharto to the presidency for another five-year term. By that May, however, abandoned by his closest allies, and as the plummeting rupiah plunged Indonesia into deeper economic crisis, Suharto resigned in favor of his vice president, B. J. Habibie, who became Indonesia’s third president. As this book will make clear, in the more liberal climate of Habibie’s presidency, the Balinese underground music scene flourished. Readers may infer that the title of this book defies the reprimand to which parents of willful youth often resort (“Don’t make a scene!”), or that it revels in the spectacular lashing out so often attributed to adolescence. But “making scenes” refers, rather, to something quieter: the pivotal role of space and territory in the articulations of the music-related identities we will examine. The young men cited in the book consumed global musical texts by “radically territorializing” them (Olson 1998).4 Therefore, my references to “music” in the book implicate not just sound but also, in important ways, visual and spatial dimensions, which were central to how reggae, punk, and death metal were received and reworked in Bali. Such reworkings, that is, were visually and spatially present because they were expressed sartorially. In the book, I consider how subcultural dress styles can be read, and observe that death metal, reggae, and punk enthusiasts’ sartorial manipulations frequently correlated with the extent of

4

introduction

their control over other important cultural resources, primarily, particular Balinese territories.5 Furthermore, as a result of their territorial conquests, they mastered, and ironically manipulated, dominant and elite discourses of identity. The importance of territorial claims and struggles to all of the scenes in question certainly turns our enquiries away from the “cultural impact” of global media and toward the discursive intricacies of young peoples’ attempts to gain control of particular territories in which to celebrate their music-related identities: as soon as we consider the struggles of Balinese enthusiasts to claim local territories, their interactions with official and metropolitan “Indonesian” ideologies inherent in “Balinese” discourses of space seem difficult to ignore. Official and dominant ideologies infused Balinese punk, reggae, and death metal spaces and subjected scene participants to discourses of youth that favored the powerful. In the final decade of Suharto’s rule, such discourses were in flux and unstable. Throughout the book, I frequently refer to “media deregulation” as a pivotal event which prompted certain shifts in the dominant discourse on Indonesian youth. In chapter 1, I foreground this gloss by elaborating on some important mediatic changes in the final decade of the Suharto regime. These changes implicate several symbiotic developments, including the establishment of private television in the early 1990s, a consequent advertising boom, and the globalization, in the late 1990s, of the Indonesian recording industry. They gave rise to a new media environment which promoted consumerism and caused an ideal image of young, wealthy, hedonistic Indonesians to eclipse more established, official idealizations of patriotic youth. As I also discuss in chapter 1, these celebrations of consumerism signaled a shift away from preexisting tropes of Indonesian rock fandom, cast as lower class and exclusively masculine. By the late 1990s, a deregulated media constructed rock fandom as a (feminized) realm of consumerism, and rock fans as stereotypically bourgeois. I view the very different paths by which each genre reached Bali as separate instances of globalization; hence I refer to them as “global” media texts. Insofar as music is a medium, all are examples of media globalization, but state policies of media deregulation did not allow all of them to enter Bali. Reggae, for example, rode tourism’s wake, and its commercialization

introduction 5

indicates deregulation of that industry in the late 1980s, as I discuss in chapter 3. Balinese death metal enthusiasts established links to global underground extreme metal networks in the early 1990s, prior to the arrival of private television and the globalization of the Indonesian recording industry. In the late 1990s, however, the death metal scene was revitalized as enthusiasts began to identify, along with Balinese punks, as part of a panIndonesian underground music scene. Balinese punk, on the other hand, had no late-1970s or early-1980s precedent, and the scene’s emergence in the late 1990s may be understood as a direct consequence of media deregulation policies.6 Rather than as a requiem or postscript to consumerism, then, the practices described here ought to be understood as part of its celebration and, by extension, as a subset of a broader bourgeois identity quest which the media does not freeze, but to which it gives voice. In this sense, this book may be seen to join a body of literature which applauds media globalization for its fragmenting, hybridizing, and diversifying cultural consequences. I will frequently cite Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996), which also has been an important reference for other studies of global music codes’ indigenization. This extensive use of Appadurai may be attributed to the particular attention he pays to electronic mediation, central to his argument for a theory of rupture, and which differentiates his work from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) earlier study of the role of print media in the imagination of a postcolonial future, and in providing conceptual bases for nationalist movements. In Appadurai’s view, the electronic media offer qualitatively different resources for the constitution of imagined selves that can more easily transcend discourses of state and nation—discourses to which the print media so significantly contributed earlier in the century. In certain respects, the cases presented in this book epitomize Appadurai’s characterizations of the “global modern.” For example, they attest to the revolutionary potential of electronic media with global reach, and they refute the possibility of cultural homogeneity resulting from media globalization. However, these cases also attest to metatheories’ inability to leave room for the specificity of local scenes, particularly the uncertain dynamics of control among consumers, market forces, and the state that take place in them. This failing, I argue, can be seen as a result of the polarization of the debate about media globalization’s cultural effects. That is, 6

introduction

used as a measure for cultural forms spawned by global media products, the “homogenous-hybrid” dialectic can blind observers to more complex interplays of power and nuances of meaning at the local level. As the cases I will present show, there is an urgent need to acknowledge both the continued salience of state power in mediating the global, and the continued importance of center-periphery dynamics in nation-states, as well as the potential for irony and agency in identity practices spawned by media globalization. For example, in Balinese reggae, punk, and death metal scenes, discourses of the nation-state endured in the form of center-periphery dynamics, to which musicians were sensitively attuned. Although they expressed their understandings of such dynamics in different ways, it was nevertheless consistently Jakarta, and not “the West,” which drew their attention first and foremost. These love-hate relationships with the metropolis only reinforce its centrality as a primary reference point. In consuming these “global” media, then, young Balinese men edged around “Jakarta” in tentative ebbs and flows, and the scenes presented in this book do not epitomize the Appaduraian mode of electronic media’s localization, in which global fandoms may be expressed as locally rooted, diasporic spheres of global texts (Appadurai 1996). That is to say, the enthusiasts whose stories fi ll this book did not engage with global media texts as a way of bypassing discourses of identity imposed by a national center. With one hand firmly gripping the national center and the other busily making scenes on its fringes, the young men I discuss contest Appadurai’s argument that discourses of the nation-state are weakly expressed in localized consumptions of global electronic media. But Jakarta was much more than a malleable resource readily available to Balinese musicians and which served them well in their scene-making endeavors, for the center often flowed with more force toward them than they toward it. That is, the New Order state retained a determining role in how Balinese youth engaged with global media. This was particularly true of the reggae and earlier death metal scenes as described in chapters 3 and 6, respectively. State developmentalism impinged on and marginalized these scenes, inspiring more rational articulations of death metal and reggae identities in Bali, in contrast to the rather ludic practices initially displayed. In the late 1990s, as New Order legitimacy began to give way to that of reformasi—as the veiled calls for Suharto’s resignation and broader political introduction 7

change that emerged in the mid-1990s are often glossed—the Balinese underground scene enjoyed greater freedom of movement than had earlier death metal and reggae scenes. In other words, the center’s capacity to impinge on Balinese music scenes appeared to wane as the New Order regime neared its end. In 1998, during the regime’s final months, punk and death metal musicians relaxed into Denpasar by putting down deep and lasting roots in the provincial capital. Uninterrupted now by obsessive developmentalism and ordering state discourses—each of which bear the power holders’ hopes for particular spatial orderings—Balinese underground enthusiasts more freely territorialized global media texts in their attempts to exert local control over them. That their capacity to do so increased as the state declined suggests that state ideologies act as more forceful agents of cultural homogeneity than does transnational capitalism. Balinese reggae, punk, and death metal scenes reproduced established power dynamics inherent in discourses of masculinity in addition to those of the nation-state. In their references to predominant identity discourses, the musicians I discuss attempted to rework preexisting notions of masculinity, and the gendered (exclusively male) character of all the scenes I study is notable. This maleness may be partly attributed to the masculine character of the guitar, which served young men as a cultural resource in their efforts to gain mastery over public space and, by extension, their public selves. In Bali, very few women play the guitar, but most men do, and they use them at street-side jams which, all over Indonesia, gel around “base camps” where young men drink and jam into the wee hours. It was at street-side jams in the 1990s that Balinese men practiced reggae and punk repertoires. Death metal was rarely rehearsed at these jam sessions, and was reserved for the more exclusive realm of the practice studio. At street-side jams in the 1990s, people covered music by the celebrated Indonesian folk singer Iwan Fals, as well as Green Day and Bob Marley, but not death metal. Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, these jams nurtured death metal identities, and enthusiasts closely identified with street-side gatherings. Undoubtedly, the centrality of arak (palm wine) to these gatherings made them distasteful to women hesitant to take on a transgressive persona, such as cewek nakal (naughty girl)—a trope by which men identify women who booze, especially those who drink with men on the street, as sexually active and, by extension, voracious.

8

introduction

But the Balinese underground communities that began to emerge in the late 1990s were not street-side jams. In many ways they innovated on the legacy of street-side jams. Such innovations did not, however, extend to including women. In these later scenes, masculinities were upheld in different ways, including the way participants related to predominant or official discourses of youth identities. As I have mentioned, media images of rock fandom underwent important shifts in the late 1990s. At this time, in media imagery, rock/pop distinctions came to be increasingly conflated, and more women began to appear in images of fandom which associated rock/pop with emerging bourgeois ideals of hedonism and consumerism. This contrasted with the formerly dominant images of rock fandom as an exclusively male realm with underclass connotations. Balinese death metal and punk enthusiasts saw these later images of rock/ pop fandom as commercialized and Othered them. This Othering testifies to underground participants’ concerns about being ordered by commercial forces which they understood as beyond their control. But in their Othering, they also frequently conflated commercialization with feminization. For example, among underground enthusiasts, a particular band could be discounted as part of a commercial, mainstream Other due to its female fan base.7 This suggests that underground enthusiasts’ concerns about recuperation may be understood as a peculiarly male ambivalence about the opportunities for self-expression that an emerging and increasingly dominant bourgeois discourse of Indonesian identity, which idealized consumerism, offered to young Indonesian women in general, regardless of their class position. I prefer to characterize the Othering of women in the scenes under question as expressions of ambivalence rather than as intent to subjugate women. The exclusive maleness of Balinese death metal and punk scenes, that is, may be read as an attempt to root themselves in preexisting and stable identity discourses, such as those of masculinity (which necessarily contain discourses of domination) while they experimented with others. Punk and death metal enthusiasts staked out their relationships both to actual women and to an imagined feminized commercial culture through orchestrated presences in and absences from mall space. Young Balinese women’s interest in using an emerging consumerist ideal, upheld in new images of rock/pop music fandom, became evident in how they claimed the

introduction 9

mall as a feminine realm. Ngeceng or mejeng refers to a ritual hanging out at the mall, and to how young men and women engage one another in mall space by means of exhibitionary practices. Such interactions are different from the kinds of interactions that take place between young men who drink on the street and female passersby. Feigning suggestive tones, the men would call out to these women, “Hey cewek [girl],” and the women would respond by feigning disinterest and/or disgust. The men took pleasure in watching the women squirm. The male–female interactions at the Matahari mall in central Denpasar during my time there exemplify ngeceng and show these objectifications to be much less one-way, and much more mutual, than those described above. To step off the escalators in Matahari’s basement on a Saturday night and glide through the walkway that separates the laminex booths of Swensen’s from those of kfc, is to cut a path that separates the cewek from the cowok (boys). Regular Matahari boys take the shortcut that leads from the escalator straight to the back of Swensen’s. This allows them to scan the space and quickly decide which table to head for before they are singled out as a friendless geek. Prepare the required (as if ) narcotically induced, unstable gait. Position the sunglasses. Slick back the hair. Make for one of the booths of four or five boys who have arrived early enough to be already slumped in forced relaxation, scratching, sniffing, exhibiting their notquite-thereness.8 When girls enter, the never-ending hum of Muzak, interspersed with its indiscernible, husky-voiced announcements, suddenly becomes audible as the boys cease their one-upmanship, the drug tales each has prepared for that night. They lower their shades ever so slightly to get a better view of the sway of the girls’ hips under their slinky, polyester flares. The boys group together at Swensen’s, but the tables in front of the kfc counter harbor the girls’ solidarity. From there, they return the boys’ gazes and eye them too as they pass by, and revel too in watching them squirm. Young Balinese women used the mall to consent to their assigned roles as consumers and simultaneously to reject virtuous ideals. That is, the mall offered itself as a space for young women to gather, and to express and exhibit themselves relatively free of the fear that in doing so they would be cast as cewek nakal by their male peers. Here, they could appear to be in place,

10

introduction

as they also were, notably, at full moon and dark moon temple ceremonies which young women used to similar ends without compromising their pious, virtuous covers. Ambivalence among Balinese underground participants about the increasing feminization of Indonesian youth culture becomes clear in metal and punk enthusiasts’ interactions with the space of the mall. Both groups’ use of mall space was distinct from practices of ngeceng which entailed more equitable male-female interactions than those that took place on the street. Death metal enthusiasts absented themselves from the mall and therefore from such equitable interactions. Also, in the early days of Balinese punk, enthusiasts attempted to associate the games parlor in the Nu Dewata Ayu mall in central Denpasar with a punk masculinity. Later, Balinese punks ritually intervened in mall space to distinguish themselves from consumerist ideals. They experienced these interventions as exclusively masculine time/space. Underground enthusiasts refrained from the kinds of male-female interactions possible in the mall. They shied away from the mall girls and their novel femininities despite the fact that these girls’ plight—a quest for a certain “modernity”—was not far removed from that of the young men who participated in the Balinese underground scene. As I have noted, young women could be idle in the mall without fear of being cast by their male peers as cewek nakal. Indeed, girls who frequented the malls were rarely described by their male peers as cewek nakal. Nevertheless, just as certain time/spaces in the mall emerged as feminine realms, many boys and young men, including participants in this study, complained about the cewek matre—material girls. Similar to their depictions of the Jakartanized commercial culture they reviled, late-1990s Balinese punk and metal enthusiasts alike cast the cewek matre as both increasingly numerous and predatory—their prey being men with material symbols of success (cars, mobile phones, and ready cash) that the underground participants claimed to reject. Cewek matre became a trope, therefore, to which punk and metal enthusiasts referred in their denunciations of “commercial, consumer” culture. Contrasting the enthusiasm which they toyed with, and hence deconstructed, dominant masculine ideals, Balinese punk and metal enthusiasts did not applaud the aggressive and subversive femininity of the cewek matre.

i n t r o d u c t i o n 11

In chapter 1, I elaborate on the discourses of Balinese reggae, death metal, and punk enthusiasts to deconstruct and hence contextually ground the ensuing analyses of these practices. Balinese reggae, death metal, and punk’s main discursive references—“rock,” “youth,” and “Balineseness”— were various and shifting. Through an evocation of the in-flux and contested nature of these discourses, I attempt in the first part of the chapter to characterize the New Order’s messy demise. The second part of the chapter discusses the history of Balinese identity politics. Here, quoting Michel Picard (1999), I introduce the notion of “reflexive essentialization,” to which I frequently refer throughout the book. This term foregrounds my discussions of how Balinese punk, reggae, and death metal enthusiasts engaged the notions of a Balinese essence that prevailed in the late 1990s. Chapter 2 discusses the political significance of early Balinese death metal fandom. In the early 1990s, the emergence of a death metal scene paralleled growing criticism of accelerated tourism development on the island. Locals began to resist the increasing ubiquity of Jakarta, “the center,” cast as threatening to an authentically low, peripheral Balinese culture. Similarly, death-thrash enthusiasts also gravitated toward certain fringes, although they rejected dominant notions of Balineseness by gesturing elsewhere, toward a global scene. Chapter 3 explores the fate of the Balinese reggae scene, which flourished in the early 1990s and sought to revise and reformulate Balineseness on the margins of local elite discourses of identity. Kuta provided such a margin. There, local youth and tourists came together in their common appreciation of reggae, each bringing to the interaction their own specific readings of reggae. Chapter 4 focuses on how Balinese youth engaged with images of a deregulated media. It explores identity politics in an early Balinese punk scene, inspired by media images of alternative concerts which took place in Jakarta in early 1996. Balinese youth commonly associated punk music with a metropolitan superculture, revealing how globalization of the electronic media does not always give consumers direct access to foreign repertoires. In the context of a dominant regionalist discourse, this “center” provided Balinese punks with an Other, and a margin toward which they gestured. Such gestures were territorialized in their ambivalent cultivation of the mall, also symbolic of the metropolitan superculture, as a hangout. 12

introduction

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the Balinese underground music scene, in which punk and death metal came together in the late 1990s. Developments in both of these scenes reveal correlations between participants’ control of territory, their distinct dance and dress styles, their mastery of the resources of cultural production, and their capacity to ironize dominant and elite discourses of identity. As I discuss in chapter 5, punk’s localization was achieved as enthusiasts gained control over resources of cultural production—control which became increasingly devolved in the scene as time progressed. In turn, this devolved control was rooted in a devolved territorialization by which punk came to coexist, spatially, with “Balineseness,” as punk home territories settled in or near family compounds. The securing of intimacy and solidarity in these home territories was important for the increasingly aggressive performances of “punkness” in the public sphere. Chapter 6 covers the evolution of the Balinese death metal scene from 1993 to 1999 and includes two sections. It begins by exploring how riots that occurred at a Metallica concert in Jakarta in 1993 impacted metal fandom in Indonesia. The state’s repressive response to the riots deprived the Balinese death metal scene of its original home territory at the radio studio, and of opportunities to perform at village-level shows. Subsequently, enthusiasts who had previously coveted officially demonized identities came to define themselves in accordance with an official youth ideal. In the second section of the chapter, I examine developments in the Balinese metal scene in the subsequent period, between 1996 and 1999, and pay particular attention to the metal enthusiasts’ increasingly devolved links to local territories in ensuring their practice’s local relevance, and I explore their feigned transgressions in ensuring the maintenance of a coherent marginality.

i n t r o d u c t i o n 13

CHAPTER 1

Like guerrillas, washed up and depleted, Aryo and his gang retreated from the battlefield at Lebak Bulus, destroying any property their enemies may have found useful. Seven cars were set alight. Hundreds of others were damaged. Rich and poor, roadside stalls and shops alike were ransacked. . . . Even before the battle had begun, Aryo’s gang had been beaten. They came from the slums in the early morning, and packed themselves tight around the outer bounds of Lebak Bulus stadium, where the biggest, most spectacular thrash metal concert was going to be held. For seven days, they had been preparing for this struggle: to see their adored thrash metal kings. Live! “We’re all gonna go thrash style,” said Aryo, his hands on his hips. “With fake tickets. Better to use any money we might have to buy pills.” Six days before d-Day, the local metal crowd started boasting that they had already devised a strategy to foil security guards at the concert, and began to count down the days. Five days before the show, they got their metal outfits together—bell-bottom jeans and a scruff y old jacket, adorned with chains and pins and other angry, defiant metal accessories. Then they started revving themselves up in anticipation of the concert, and assaulted their eardrums daily with their favorite thrash songs, which they played at full volume over the neighborhood loudspeaker. . . . When security guards herded him across the road, away from the entrance to the stadium, Aryo, humiliated, screamed: “Apocalypse now!” They had been anxiously waiting all day for a chance to slip into the stadium. Baking under the sun, they gaped dumbly at the mollycoddled kids who sailed through the gates, simply by flashing their 30,000 or 150,000 rupiah ticket, which they’d paid for with some of daddy’s spare change. Stress, frustration. When the shot went off, there was no stopping them. Panicking, the crowd of strangers came together as one, like cattle in a cowboy fi lm. Run! The mass got hysterical and started lashing out indiscriminately. Gang leaders were put to the test: Would their flunkies follow them, or not? Darmanto Jatman, perilaku kelas menengah indonesia (1996), 142–43

Messy Decay

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n the above account, translated from the Indonesian and excerpted from his essay, “Metal or Fight,” Darmanto Jatman offers a snapshot of the life of a slum dweller and Metallica fan, Aryo. Jatman weaves a story which places

Aryo at the center of riots that took place when the L.A.-based thrash metal band Metallica played at the Lebak Bulus stadium in Jakarta in April 1993. The riot was sparked when fans, gathered outside the concert venue because they could not afford thirty thousand rupiah1 for the cheapest tickets (the most expensive cost Rp150,000), attempted to force their way past security guards and into the Lebak Bulus stadium. During the several hours of mayhem that ensued at the stadium and in surrounding suburbs, cars were set alight and overturned, luxury houses were robbed, and people who had attended the concert were attacked as they left in their cars. The government blamed the riots, officially dubbed the “Metallica Incident,” on tattooed preman (underclass thugs), who provided an antithesis to the officially idealized, patriotic, and well-educated youth (pemuda). Much media analysis, however, contested this official view. Contrasting the official identification of the rioters as criminals, a Tempo report aligned them with the Indonesian Democracy Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, pdi), which had appropriated some metal symbols in its 1992 election campaign. In the truly oblique style demanded of the press during the New Order period, Tempo (1993: 22) noted that “many of those attending the concert were familiar with the metal symbol Metallica displayed as a way of communicating with their fans, as it was adopted by one of the political parties as a symbol of their campaign [in the last election].” This report depicted rioters as authentic rock fans, the riots as politically and economically motivated, and rock fandom as an arena for class conflict as well as a channel for the expression of dissent. When the first international rock concerts to take place since the Metallica riots occurred three years later, the media image of rock fandom had changed. Media images of alternative music fans generated by two alternative rock concerts in early 1996 celebrated wealth, privilege, hedonism, and consumerism. In these images, unlike in those of the Metallica riots, poverty was presented not as a sign of rock authenticity but as a menace. Following the Metallica riots, tensions had emerged between the official version of rock fandom, which depicted it as a criminal realm, and other media analyses, which presented it as accommodating discontented lowerclass Indonesian men. In 1996, media images of alternative fandom began to include growing numbers of young, metropolitan, bourgeois men and women and their transnational and consumerist aspirations. These images of rock and pop fandom as a realm of hedonistic and con16

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sumerist youth clashed with a number of established identity discourses. Their idealization suggested a desire to revise the official ideal of Indonesian youth as humorless, diligent, and patriotic university students—a will expressed in a different way by the student activists who hijacked this legacy and helped overthrow the regime in 1998. It also chafed against the military’s cultural policy in the final years of the regime, which pronounced liberal ideologies and “globalization” to be threats to Indonesian identity, and which forcefully attempted to eradicate these influences.2 Ariel Heryanto has documented both the economic and cultural/political aspects of the New Order’s ideological decay over the course of the 1990s. He shows the illogical nature of the operation of both authoritarianism and its successor and observes “how authoritarianism, and by anticipation postauthoritarianism toward the next millennium, operates in ways that are much more diff use, insidious and messy than familiar labels capture” (Heryanto 1999b: 148). 3 Such messiness also emerges in conflations of (formerly distinct) youth ideals and menaces, as well as shifts in discourses of rock fandom toward the end of the New Order. This chapter elaborates on these fluctuating discourses, which serve as the book’s contextual frames. In the first part of the chapter, I attend to events on the national level which made apparent, and exacerbated, tensions and shifts within discourses of “youth” and “rock.” I begin with an account of the broader genealogies of these discourses in Indonesia, then discuss the media deregulation policies that prompted shifts within them in the final decade of New Order rule. Finally, I evoke these tensions by juxtaposing my analyses of two media events which took place over the course of 1996, seeking thereby to highlight the contrasting yet coexisting moods of celebration and repression that were a feature of New Order’s demise. I begin this evocation by analyzing a report on the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival in Hai magazine (at the time the only national teen publication in magazine format), which depicts a wealthy class of metropolitan youth who, inspired by the images of a deregulated media, celebrate increased opportunities to experiment with global, transnational styles. The idealized nuances of these images of wealthy teens challenged negative stereotypes of the rich, upheld in the official version of the national identity, and echo similar identity expressions by other new rich groups, as discussed by Heryanto (1999a). I then focus on a police campaign, dubbed Operasi Kilat Jaya, conducted in m e s s y d e c ay

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1996. Operasi Kilat Jaya tempers the optimism inherent in media images of alternative fandom: although society was poised to celebrate the New Order’s end, this had not quite arrived, for one of the Order’s most sturdy vestiges, the Indonesian Armed Forces (Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, abri), continued to launch terror campaigns in an effort to cling to power. In Bali, this context of flux and uncertainty was compounded by unprecedented development fed by the tourism boom, the increasing presence of Jakarta in local landscapes, and the subsequent emergence of a local regionalism, which will be the subject of the final part of this chapter. This sudden shift from “national” to “local” is, in its very clumsiness, in the spirit of 1990s Bali, and I intend it to evoke a sense of the increasingly dichotomous notions of “center” and “periphery” that prevailed at that time. As will become clear in the stories to unfold throughout this book, Balinese punk, reggae, and death metal enthusiasts straddled center-periphery divides in their attempts to revise dominant identity discourses about Balinese youth. In their performances and self-descriptions, they referred to national and local politics, revealing their enmeshment in both. In the interests of the book’s coherence, it is worth elaborating on these political references, which extend in two directions. First, toward official, New Order institutions of “rock” and “youth” (and various contestations thereof), and, second, toward dominant Balinese identity discourses, which have their roots in local peoples’ interactions with tourism and in a long history of “reflexive essentialization” (Picard 1999), by which Balinese people appropriated images of Balineseness designed for tourists in order to generate notions of ethnoreligious solidarity among themselves. Pemuda, Preman, Remaja, Gaul

On 28 October 1928, members of a protonationalist student organization, Budi Utomo, came from all over the Netherlands East Indies to a gathering at which they proclaimed a Youth Oath (Sumpah Pemuda), identifying their movement as one for a single nation-state with one official language. The Sumpah Pemuda is a significant signpost in the emergence of a transethnic anticolonial movement which made the imagining of “Indonesia” possible. It is in this history that the patriotic and educated connotations of the word pemuda (youth), have their roots.

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Much later, in 1965–66, students were key to the fall of Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno. They aligned with the military and supported the establishment of the New Order regime. Subsequently, the New Order drew parallels between anticolonial and anti-Soekarnoist pemuda, which became an important trope in the regime’s attempts to legitimize its foundation. Ironically, given the importance of the pemuda trope in the regime’s politics of legitimacy, in the New Order’s final years, a similar class of people— privileged, educated, and casting themselves as patriotic—organized demands for political reform and Suharto’s resignation. In 1998 their victory was spectacular. When Suharto stepped down in May, students in yellow blazers (indicating that they attended the prestigious state Universitas Indonesia) mounted the twin domes of the parliament building and colonized these mounds with their moss-like presence. As early as the beginning of the 1970s, students had grown publicly critical of the government, particularly of Suharto’s nepotistic excesses, and the New Order pemuda ideal began to prove problematic. Loren Ryter (1998: 58) observes that the New Order’s frequent reference to the important role of young people in nation-building posed a dilemma for the regime: On the one hand, the role of pemuda provided an ideal way to legitimate the new regime within the teleology of the nationalist struggle. On the other hand, too much emphasis on the role of pemuda left open a possibility of an undesirable repeat performance. If youth had been designated as the embodiment of radical change, and change was now to be stalled in favor of stability and regime consolidation, the question became how to contain the excess of youth. Having established the historic role of pemuda, the task for the New Order, somewhat ironically, was to establish youth’s role as merely historic.

But the New Order government was unable to do this, despite its introduction in 1978 of a policy known as the Normalization of Campus Life (Normalisasi Kehidupan Kampus, nkk) by which campus-based political organizations were outlawed. By the late 1980s students had begun to devise ways to skirt the nkk and organize surreptitiously. Moreover, as Edward Aspinall (1993) observes, student activists of this generation began to cast themselves and their antigovernment activities as patriotic and nationalist. They built an opposition movement that culminated in the scene described

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above, one that has come to symbolize the end of the New Order: the yellow-blazered student mass atop the parliament building. Contrasting the privileged, patriotic ideal encapsulated in the campus was the threatening gangland of the bus terminal, cast as the womb of one of the regime’s prime moral demons—the preman. In fact, the preman often enjoyed official patronage.4 The military engaged such groups to massacre suspected communists in 1965–66 and to storm the headquarters of pdi-p and instigate the ensuing riots on 27 July 1996.5 However, the regime also found it useful to cite the existence of an unlawful underclass when seeking a scapegoat for increasing rates of crime in the early 1980s. Between 1983 and 1985, it conducted Operation Combat Crime (Operasi Pemberantas Kejahatan, opk), popularly dubbed petrus (short for penembakan misterius: mysterious killings), in which the military initially concealed its role, aimed at the elimination of alleged preman, supposedly identifiable by their tattooed bodies. The opk resulted in the execution of between five and ten thousand people (Bourchier 1990: 193). In the month following the Metallica riots, the specter of the 1983 petrus campaign reappeared in the Indonesian press. At the end of May 1993, Indonesian police announced that they were cracking down on crime in the nation’s capital. Reporting that in May at least twenty-five suspected criminals had been killed, some of them “shot in the head and trussed up in sacks,” local newspapers surmised a return of the petrus death squads.6 Just as tattoos had been the main identifiers of criminality in the early 1980s, they emerged again in the official interpretation of the “Metallica Incident” in 1993. In his analysis of press reports on the Metallica riots, Edmund Thompson (1993: 6) notes how, contrasting those press reports which intimated that the rioters were politically motivated, “the main thrust of the official response was to view it in law and order terms. The causes of the disturbance were put down to the criminality of . . . ‘people whose bodies are covered with tattoos and who do not own identity cards.’ ” Official response to the Metallica riots depicted a society in which criminality was at once omnipresent and invisible. The response, that is, was not retribution for transgressions of the law, or for the practices of extortion, theft, and violence with which the preman had come to be associated. As did the petrus of the early 1980s, the official response to the Metallica riots criminalized tattoos, as if these were alone responsible for the riots and de20

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struction of property of rich Indonesians. The menacing rioters thus were cast as at once disembodied and, given their allegedly uniform refusal to be officially documented, nebulous and opaque, as if illegible. Apart from reports and analyses of the role of young thrash fans in the Metallica riots, little else has been written of the relationships between state constructions of youth and rock fandom under the New Order. It is nevertheless important to note that although the regime continued to idealize the role of nationalist students, it did not demonize identities inspired by foreign cultural forms, such as rock music. In fact, the New Order more often supported rock music than demonized it. The establishment of the New Order in 1966 gave local fans’ easier access to the products of Western rock bands, for the regime was eager to distinguish itself from that of Soekarno, which had identified rock as “neocolonial” and “imperialist” (Sopiann 2001; Sen and Hill 2000). Under Suharto, far from being demonized, rock received military support, thus sanctioning an early wave of media globalization. In the 1990s, media deregulation allowed mtv Asia and multinational recording labels to play important roles in the dissemination of rock music in Indonesia. In the early 1970s, a similar role was played by a locally owned, Bandung-based magazine, Aktuil, which disseminated information about rock music, helped popularize rock-related aesthetics and practices. Aktuil was established in 1967—the year following the establishment of the New Order regime. As Agus Sopiann (2001: 8) observes, the magazine “was fortunate to receive state sanction.” This sanction did not keep Aktuil from developing irreverent and antiestablishmentarian content under Remy Sylado’s editorship, which began in 1970. In 1969, Sonny Suriaatmadja, then one of two editors, began regularly profi ling aspects of the hippie culture. Sales tripled, and continued to rise when Sylado began contributing a fictional series, written in the “cheeky lit.” (sastra mbeling) style for which he gained notoriety, titled “Orexas”— an abbreviation for organisasi sex bebas (free sex organization). Sopiann also cites other evidence of Indonesian youths’ hunger for products of the youth cultures of the West, which frequently catalyzed local forms of revolt (pemberontakan). He describes, for example, the role of the fi lm Shane in local gang wars. Similarly, Krishna Sen and David Hill (2000: 167) note the Rolling Stones’ profound effect on Indonesian youth culture, and how “the Stones’ influence permeated the youth language m e s s y d e c ay

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(prokem) of the streets. A ‘Jagger’ ( jeger) was a ‘cock of the walk,’ a tough streetfighter [ jagoan, tukang pukul].” Under Sylado’s editorship, sales of Aktuil peaked between 1973 and 1974, contributing significantly to the development of an antiestablishmentarian (but neither outlawed nor officially demonized) New Order rock tradition. It would therefore be wrong to identify rock fandom in Indonesia as historically oppositional, for the New Order regime accommodated foreign, rockrelated identities. James Siegel (1986: 201) asserts that as a result of the New Order regime’s efforts to depoliticize youth, the term remaja (teen) came to replace that of pemuda (youth)—a word that connotes political activity “of the sort the Suharto regime has made difficult.” Rather than political activity, he contends that the notion of selera (taste), which implies “the fluidity of money and market as clothes and music come and go,” lies at the core of remaja identity. He also notes the importance of the concept of desire, reflected in the frequent use by readers of the teen magazine Topchords of the term panasaran (which connotes at once desire, frustration, and curiosity) in their letters to the editors. But the distinction between “apolitical” remaja and “political” pemuda identities is probably false, and it is one I will interrogate in this book. Indeed, the pemuda ideal did not completely disappear from New Order discourse, Siegel’s assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. Heryanto (1996: 10), for example, notes that “the contribution made by students and intellectuals to the birth of the Indonesian nation and its subsequent struggle for recognition is revered across the political spectrum, by groups which in other ways are mutually opposed. It is a central feature of both New Order propaganda and the Buru novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer banned by the regime.” Further, while the desire, fantasies, and indeterminateness Siegel discovered in Topchords may have been features of remaja identity, such ephemerality was not officially celebrated. Throughout the New Order, the patriotic pemuda legacy remained as an official ideal, even if contemporary student activists, whose language of opposition included reference to this ideal, were increasingly demonized in the official discourse. The official pemuda ideal therefore coexisted with emergent remaja identities. Balinese reggae, death metal, and punk musicians rarely used the term remaja. In their lexicons, it was the abg (anak baru gede) who expressed

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such market fluidities. Indeed, ephemerality is inherent in the term abg itself, for anak baru gede means, literally, “newly grown kid,” highlighting the perceived link between naiveté, fickleness, and puberty—a state of transition and liminality. The term abg was usually employed with derision, and I know of no one who adopted it with pride. In 1996, death metal and reggae musicians derided alternapunk fans by labeling them as abg, and hence as naive and eager victims of advertising. Later in the 1990s, the term gaul (lit., sociable) replaced abg as the denotation of Balinese underground musicians’ significant Other. Death metal and punk musicians also employed the term anak gaul with derision, and it also inferred that those it labeled were victims of advertising. This mutual underground/gaul Othering appears more crystallized than the Othering of abg that emerged in my conversations with Balinese musicians in early 1996. The abg was merely an imaginary Other; nobody identified with it, and no group cohered to it. Many, though, aspired to be gaul. Lars Gjelstad conducted research in the central Javanese town of Solo among young men who identified as anak gaul, a term he glosses as follows: In the Indonesian language, anak means child while gaul means to be sociable. An anak gaul is a child skilful in social interaction, but the concept of gaul has also connotations to sexual intercourse. An anak gaul refers first of all to teenagers who are familiar with the most recent trends in . . . music, film, Internet and cellular phones, and who easily socialize with others, including the opposite sex, and who know the language of youth, . . . bahasa gaul. In short, anak gaul is the young person who has money, taste and self-confidence. (Gjelstad 2003: 1)

In depictions by Balinese punk and death metal musicians, the anak gaul may have money, but they possess neither taste nor self-confidence. The musicians cast the anak gaul as exhibitionists who revel in displaying their parents’ wealth. They drive Mercedes Benzes, wear international designer labels, and cultivate distinction by celebrating high-end consumerism. In short, the punk and metal enthusiasts see the anak gaul as well-to-do, gullible fashion victims. In 1997, the Kuta-based punk band Superman Is Dead’s drummer, Jerink, identified the anak gaul, whom he qualified as anak borju (bourgeois), as the punk’s “true enemy.” Jerink was also bourgeois and free to

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drive the Mercedes parked in the garage of his parents’ Twice Pub in Kuta. He chose not to, though, electing instead to display his parents’ wealth in ways that distinguished him from the anak gaul. As I noted in the introduction, over the course of 1997, a responsive and active Balinese punk community grew up around a building owned by Jerink’s parents on Kuta’s main drag, for he had transformed the building into a rehearsal studio and a performance venue. Moreover, he chose to steer far away from malls and designer labels, and his own consumption patterns revealed his friendships with the Australian tourists he had come to know while working in his parents’ cassette store. He solicited their assistance in affecting a personal dress style that included Doc Martens boots, leather pants, and other clothing unavailable in Indonesian stores. Punk and gaul identities rode the wave of media deregulation, which helped to transform dominant images of rock and pop fandom. In 1988, the Indonesian state surrendered its monopoly over television. Between that date and 1995, four new private television stations were established. They were rcti (Rajawali Citra Televisi Indonesia), owned by Bambang Trihatmojo, Suharto’s son; sctv (Surya Citra Televisi), jointly owned by Suharto’s cousin and long-time business associate, Henri Pribadi; tpi (Televisi Pendidikan Indonesia), mostly owned by Suharto’s daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana; anteve, jointly owned by the Bakrie Group and Agung Laksono, the latter closely linked to the ruling party, Golkar; and Indosiar, owned by Liem Sioe Liong, Suharto’s long-standing associate (Sen and Hill 2000). As Sen and Hill note, this list scarcely reflected a liberalized industry, for all licenses were issued to Suharto’s close associates and family members. Primarily, they argue, deregulation was an attempt to woo back those borderdwelling Indonesians who had begun to use parabolic antenna to catch foreign broadcasts, particularly those from Malaysia, whose footprint extended into the western fringes of the Indonesian archipelago: “In Indonesia, private television was not so much a paradigm shift toward a more democratic or even market driven media; it was a policy adjustment to a changing mediascape within the framework of central control of the peripheries” (Sen and Hill 2000: 111–13). As private television stations were established between 1990 and 1995, national advertising expenditure increased sixfold. Further, television’s share of total advertising revenue increased from 8 to 49 percent over the same 24

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period (ibid.: 115–16). Clearly, then, the establishment of private television, funded by advertising, encouraged the idealization of an Indonesian consumerism. In 1981, Suharto had banned advertising on the state-run tvri (Televisi Republik Indonesia) in a bid for support from Islamic groups critical of tvri’s role in a growing consumer culture. Until the end of the 1980s, the ad-free tvri remained the only television station, and in the shadow it cast over the (ostensibly) all-too-blinding light of consumer desire, the ideal Indonesian subject was constituted. By contrast, in the deregulated media environment that has evolved since the early 1990s and in which, at the time of this writing, seven national private television stations now operate, the ideal Indonesian subject is constituted through exposure to images which promote and celebrate consumerism. A second major mediatic change to have important implications for this book took place in 1994, when a decree opened the Indonesian recording industry to direct foreign investment. Prior to this, multinational recording labels had been required to distribute their products through local, Indonesian companies. After 1994, they were permitted to establish branches in Indonesia, develop local repertoires, and directly market and distribute their own Anglo-American acts. In 1996 Warner Music absorbed the local label Hemagita, and by 1997 bmg, Polygram, emi, and Sony all had established Indonesian branches. Not until the turn of the century had these multinationals signed enough local artists and established repertoires to compete with local labels that had resisted absorption. In this later period, transnationalization of the recording industry meant an across-the-board adoption of a royalty system. Previously, musicians had simply sold their master recordings outright to the labels. It also meant an astounding increase in the popularity of local rock bands, and sales of their albums now far outstrip those of Anglo-American bands in Indonesia. In the period with which this book is concerned, however, transnationalization of the recording industry seemed less about recruiting local bands to newly established labels and more about promoting these labels’ Anglo-American repertoires. In an increasingly televisual environment, such promotions were ever more image-centered. In 1995, the Singapore-based mtv Asia was established and aired for six hours daily on anteve. Many of the young Balinese I knew spent two hours of their time after school watching mtv Asia, which allowed multinational labels to m e s s y d e c ay

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advertise their repertoires to an Indonesian audience. During the 1997 financial crisis, which caused considerable reductions in television stations’ advertising revenue and led them to pursue cheap programming eagerly, much air time was available for music video on the various private stations, giving the multinationals an additional vehicle to promote their acts. In 1996, when I went to live in Bali, Green Day and a number of other “alternative” bands—the genre multinational labels had opted to promote in Indonesia as well as elsewhere in Asia—appeared ubiquitous. The coincidence of private, advertising-funded television, including the establishment of the advertising-saturated mtv Asia, and the transnationalization of the recording industry meant that, increasingly, rock music came to be understood as a set of images. Moreover, on television, and particularly on mtv, rock videos interwove with advertisements for other products, such as shoes, soft drinks, chocolate bars, shampoo, and facial scrubs, indicating a rapprochement between “rock” and an emerging and increasingly idealized Indonesian consumerism. The image of rock as a realm of disaffected, underclass, or criminal youth was thus transformed. These various, contrasting images of fandom provide a useful window onto the history of the institutions of “rock” and “youth” in the New Order, to which Balinese musicians cited in this book often refer. Values associated with these institutions, although never stable, began to blur and fragment in the late 1990s as media deregulation policies took effect and the New Order regime began to decline visibly. Some of these blurrings and fragmentations will be explored below, for they aptly foreground forthcoming chapters by implying the uncertainties and anxieties characteristic of the book’s setting, marked by both terror and optimism. By fleshing out some of the respective qualities of discourses concerning pemuda, remaja, abg, anak gaul, and preman, I attempt to depict the New Order’s demise in a way that can best accommodate the ensuing discussion of Balinese reggae, death metal, and punk. Transnational Free-for-All

In 1996, Jakarta hosted its first international rock concerts since the Metallica riots. On 14 January the U.S. acts Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, and Foo Fighters performed alongside the local bands Pas, Nugie, and Netral at the

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Alternatif Pop Festival. The following month, the California punk band Green Day played in the capital. In Bali, the promotional work for the Green Day concert was already audible by the end of 1995. Although they had only played in the capital, and with ticket prices at a prohibitive sixty thousand rupiah,7 Green Day’s music echoed throughout the province. In warungs (roadside stalls) all over the island, groups of arak-drinking boys serenaded passersby with renditions of Green Day’s hit single “When I Come Around.” The chords and lyrics of this track had been included in a special edition of Hai magazine dedicated to Green Day—one of a number of irregularly published HaiKlips. I encountered many a well-thumbed, photocopied version of this HaiKlip lying on the floors of the scattered hangouts (often band members’ bedrooms) of the alternative and punk musicians I met in early 1996. Many of them assured me that it had been for them an important source of information about Green Day and alternative music in general. But people did not always read the HaiKlip or other music magazines so avidly. More frequently, as they hung out waiting for drinking sessions to commence, people would fi ll idle moments leafing distractedly through such publications, which were thoughtfully, albeit haphazardly, provided by the host. I heard it all before So don’t knock down my door I’m a loser and a user so I don’t need no accuser To try to slag me down because I know I’m right So go do what you like Make sure you do it wise You may find out that your self-doubt means nothing was ever there You can’t go forcing something if it’s just not right No time to search the world around ’Cause you know where I’ll be found When I come around When I come around (excerpt from “When I Come Around,” Green Day, Dookie, Reprise Records, 1994)

The Green Day concert and the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival followed a series of exclusive international (Western pop) acts which had come to associ-

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ate concert going with wealth and power, and which Heryanto (1999a) characterizes as conspicuous consumption by a newly affluent class, part of this elite’s “effort to build a new bourgeois hegemony through culturalization.” A central message in the dominant discourse about Indonesia’s economy until the 1980s was that “the rich are anything but us, Indonesians,” and that “we Indonesians are anything but not rich.” The rich were non-Asian, or non-indigenous, non-Muslim and non-rakyat.8 Since the 1990s things have changed. The motto of the day has become “it is cool to be rich.” Significant numbers from the old Indonesian “self ” had improved their economic position. (Heryanto 1999a: 162–63)

Coincidentally, “it is cool to be rich” was also implicit in some media constructions of alternative music fandom. The concerts were not so important in and of themselves as for the mediascapes they produced. At sixty thousand rupiah per ticket, whether attended by three thousand (in the case of the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival) or sixty thousand (in the case of the Green Day show), the concerts were as inaccessible to Jakarta’s poor majority as they were to those living in peripheral provinces such as Bali. Nevertheless, heavy media promotion of the concerts created considerable enthusiasm for alternative music in Bali, and in early 1996, the island was awash with alternative cover bands. Alternative music was promoted by teen publications, such as the (then) only national teen magazine, Hai. Significantly, the majority of Balinese with whom I chatted in early 1996 cited Hai as a primary source of information about alternative music. Popular music scholars agree that, as well as a sound, the term alternative music also connotes a point in the history of rock when styles of music which once stood outside the mainstream became the mainstream. Some writers have linked such popularizations to shifts in the world’s (then) six largest recording companies (Time Warner, cbs, mca, Thorn emi, bmg, and Philips), in which they developed alternative sales strategies in the late 1980s and went on “an unprecedented buying spree, buying indie bands, labels and distributors, using them as cost-effective in-house ‘farm team’ suppliers to the major leagues” (Fairchild 1995: 27). Others such as Tony Kirschner (1994; see also Shevory 1995) argue that, rather than due to industry design aimed at extending control over a peripheral underground or independent band scene,

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the mainstreaming of “heavy” music was the result of an anticonservative backlash among middle-class American youth, as evident in their affinity for “weird, subversive and anti-square” (Kirschner 1994: 83–84) cultural products and mtv’s adoption of a more haphazard, less slick aesthetic in the early 1990s. Both, in Kirschner’s view, are evidence of a general leftward swing away from Reaganite conservatism in the early 1990s. Viewed through the analytical lens that has now come to associate trends in U.S. politics so closely with alternative youth culture, young Indonesians’ enthusiasm for alternative music may appear divorced from context, derivative, rootless. Nevertheless, in Indonesia, alternative music was not exclusively the domain of foreign bands. Around 1994, local major recording labels (as opposed to independently recorded, produced, and distributed underground labels) began signing local bands whose music was subsequently marketed as “alternative.” As in the United States, these groups also spanned a number of styles—Suckerhead played thrash music, Pas hardcore funk, Netral new-wave punk, Rotor industrial, and Jamrud a kind of pop metal. The “alternization” of the Indonesian music industry took place in a context of deregulation of the Indonesian television and recording industries. As I have noted, the state surrendered its monopoly over television in 1988. This allowed for the establishment of anteve, which aired mtv Asia daily. The opening of the Indonesian recording industry to direct foreign investment in 1994 allowed for the purchase of Hemagita by Warner Music International and the subsequent establishment of Sony Indonesia, bmg Indonesia, Polygram Indonesia, and emi Indonesia, all in 1996 (Theodore 1996). But it was not the entry of multinational recording labels into the Indonesian recording industry that caused the emergence of an alternative scene there, for the signing of local “alternative” bands by local major labels preceded the arrival of the multinationals. This suggests that Indonesian alternative bands were not merely derivatives of the U.S.-based alternative trend, or results of a marketing master plan. Moreover, the prior existence of the alternative scene should lead us to consider how factors unique to the local Indonesian context contributed to alternative music’s alleged popularity. Sen and Hill (2000: 180) maintain that alternative music allowed young Indonesians to express their discontent with the status quo. Citing the heavy metal band Boomerang’s advice, on the cover of its album Disharmoni, to

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“enjoy and play it loud, stay crazy ok!,” they argue that alternative music was an “invitation to disorderliness,” a defiant rejection of the regime’s obsession with order. Further, referring to the highly successful Slank as an alternative band, they conclude that disorder was “in” for the younger generation. But Slank’s music is more reminiscent of the blues sound most Indonesian audiences associate with the Rolling Stones than of any style being touted as “alternative.” The record company may have decided to label Slank’s album as alternative, but most of the group’s fans did not see it as such. It would be misleading to compare Slank’s appeal alone to that of the “new hip mainstream” in the United States. Unlike the U.S. groups, Indonesian alternative bands were not what Indonesian audiences were listening to. For example, Krisna, Suckerhead’s vocalist, noted that “Iwan Fals gets one hundred thousand at his concerts. We only get five, if we’re lucky ten thousand.” Further evidence of Indonesian youths’ indifference toward local alternative bands was the fact that the show at which Pas and Netral played attracted only half as many people (3,000) as attended the Green Day concert (6,000), which, as reported by Hai magazine (“Green Day Gila-Gilaan di Jakarta,” 1996, 14), was “far from profitable.” So, if popularity is to be measured by record sales and concert attendances, while Indonesian alternative music may have been “in,” it was certainly not popular, and it would be erroneous to refer to the alternative bands that signed to major labels in 1995 as the voice of a generation. If they expressed defiance and disorderliness, they were no different from Slank and Iwan Fals, and record sales and concert attendance suggested that local audiences preferred the latter. Indonesian alternative bands also seemed peripheral to the Balinese alternative musicians’ experiences of alternity. When I asked these musicians what had inspired them to play alternative music, rather than albums by local alternative bands, they identified music videos and magazine articles about foreign groups. This alerted me to the importance and impact of visual images in the transmission of alternative music to the peripheries of the archipelago, and it suggests that while the recording industry may have been relatively free of censorship and unburdened by state propaganda (Sen and Hill 2000: 184), the music industry, or at least parts of it, was becoming increasingly reliant on more regulated media, such as music video and teen magazines, for marketing. Thus, for example, the nationwide promotion

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of alternative music did not entail nationwide tours. Unlike the Brazilian band Sepultura (arguably the most renowned and most popular death metal group in the world), which played for seven thousand rupiah per ticket in the East Javanese city of Surabaya as well as Jakarta when it toured to Indonesia in 1992, neither Green Day nor the bands that played at the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival performed any regional shows. Similarly, unlike Slank, which toured extensively, and a plethora of Indonesian pop acts, Indonesian alternative bands also rarely conducted regional tours. Between 1996 and 1999, not one of the Indonesian alternative bands I have mentioned performed in Bali, while Slank as well as the pop outfits Gong 2000, Bass Jam, and Dewa 19 all staged a number of performances on the island. Thus most Indonesians did not experience alternative music as participants in a mosh pit where spontaneous expression was sanctioned, but as consumers of a media image. This is significant because television and print media can be more easily regulated by the state than can cassettes, and they are easier to control than live concerts. Furthermore, the amount of airtime and page space devoted to alternative music seemed to outweigh record sales of the genre. In 1996, Hai magazine, which began publishing in 1977, was a ninety-sixpage semiglossy weekly magazine which retailed for thirty-five hundred rupiah.9 It coexisted with other teen publications, such as the tabloids Aneka and Citra, but it was the only one to adopt the semiglossy magazine style format. It was also the only one to target male readers specifically, dubbing itself a magazine for teenage boys (majalah remaja pria). Hai’s advertisements, however, suggest that its readership was not exclusively male, for they promote items including Madonna facial products, Philips hairdryers, Biore Cool Body Foam (“Oke buat . . . cowo-cewe!” [ok . . . for guys and girls!]), and the fashion labels Tira, M2000, Timberland, Favo, Lea, la Gear, and Loris watches. All of these ads used both male and female models. Like those for Rollerblades, g-Shock watches, Converse shoes, Hard Rock Cafe, and Eiger adventure equipment, they suggest that the magazine’s readership was bourgeois and moneyed. These are not people whose purchasing power scarcely extends further than a packet of cigarettes, a bottle of shampoo, a cassette, or a packet of Hexos cough drops. These are people who browse in high-end Jakarta department stores for fashion labels such as Dolce and

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Gabbana. This image of a wealthy readership is furthered by the magazine’s features, which promoted leisure activities normally associated with metropolitan new-rich lifestyles, such as river rafting, rollerblading, drag racing, basketball, moviegoing, and laser gun games. Hai’s readership in fact extended further than this elite. While the magazine appeared to target wealthy metropolitan teens, it was also used selectively by teens in peripheral areas such as Bali who did not subscribe to the consumerism advocated therein, and who photocopied relevant articles and distributed them among their friends. Many Balinese musicians may have consumed Hai’s information about punk music without engaging the magazine’s advertisements. Like its other articles, Hai’s reports on foreign bands were written in slangy language which seamlessly incorporated Green Day, Foo Fighters, Metallica, Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, and East 17 into an intimate bahasa gaul, so that the lives and experiences of these Western musicians seemed little different from those of the Indonesian rapper Iwa k, the members of Jamrud, or the underground band Pure Saturday, or even the students competing in the Hai-sponsored high school band competition. No romanticization of a Western Other, Hai’s mediascape was a kind of global village in which cultural and national barriers appeared nonexistent, and in which Indonesians and non-Indonesians alike participated as equals in a free-forall, transnational youth culture. This sense of the Hai-scape as a participatory free-for-all was enhanced by the magazine’s highly interactive nature. Each edition regularly devoted seven pages to letters from readers, and most features included either random vox pops or profi les of regular middle-class youth leading unglamorous middle-class lives which were similar, no doubt, to those of the magazine’s readers. Hai also regularly profi led university courses, and the activities of students in selected high schools across the country. Each edition devoted twelve pages to locally authored fiction, and alternate editions included two-page columns titled “Kata cewek” (“What the Girls Say”) in which five young women were invited to comment on topical teen culture issues. The Haiscape’s unisex global free-for-all was continued in the magazine’s report on the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival (“Jakarta Alternative Pop Festival,” 1996), which opens with a three-page report presenting shots of

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performers onstage and anonymous moshers in the pit. On the fourth page, readers are invited to become intimate with some of those who attended the event, and with their respective styles. Via vox pops and close-up snaphots, participants inform readers of the various accessories they acquired in preparation for the festival. From this page, an image of alternative fandom emerges in which accessories are throwaway, consumer items are of little value, and body modification is temporary. Q: What did you prepare to attend the festival? A: Everything! Earrings, necklace, chains, hair. To make my hair stand up I put Fox glue on it, . . . then spray painted it. It’s easy to take out. I just have to have a bath, wash my hair, and it comes out straight away. —Andry “Jager” Wijaya (“Pasar Minggu Punk”) I did my hair and got a new shirt. It’s easy to do your hair like this. It was really cheap, too. —Micelle Syara Q: Why have you got so many bangles on? A: Just to be punk, man! Anyway, they were cheap. —Icang Q: How did you do your hair? A: I had it dyed in Singapore with semipermanent color, so that it wouldn’t last too long. Three months at the most. They bleach it first, then color it. It’s really quick! Only one hour . . . and only costs seventy-five Singapore dollars! —George Richard (All quotations from “Jakarta Alternative Pop Festival,” 1996)

Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) describes François Rabelais as unique to his time in his attention to popular sources, and in his illumination of the important social role of laughter and folk humor as practiced at carnivals. Bakhtin contends that “as opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberations from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (3–4). The military’s forceful “antiglobalization” position has prompted some writers to identify the transnational proclivities of young Indonesians during this period as subversive or carnivalesque

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(Pickles 2001). This has been suggested of the role of popular, Western-derived music productions and fandoms in Indonesia, referred to as an inversion of the regime’s obsession with order at the time, and an instance of disorder reminiscent of the Rabelaisian carnivals that Bakhtin describes (Sen and Hill 2000). But in several respects, such comparisons seem premature. First, Hai was not the first magazine to adopt a carefree remaja style. As I have noted, similarly irreverent youth styles appeared earlier, in Topchords and Aktuil magazines, when the regime was more accommodating of practices associated with rock fandom. Just because they happen to appear in the context of a later, less tolerant administration, instances of irreverence in rock music practice should not be automatically read as a critique of state cultural policy. Rather than degrees of oppositionality, what may differentiate Hai from previous publications and writings dedicated to remaja is its depiction of wealth as ordinary and normal. Hai portrays alternative fandom as a celebration of the wealth and freedom that media deregulation policies have afforded a select few, a highly restricted code reserved for whose who can utter “only” and “seventy-five Singapore dollars” in the same breath. Unlike Rabelaisian carnival, it restricts change and liberty to the capacity to consume, and it depicts alternative fandom as the internationally mobile alternative to a low life on the margins. When poverty did exist in Hai, as it did in the magazine’s portrayal of the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival space, it was portrayed as morally demonic. This only becomes clear, however, when Hai’s lens pans back from the vox pops to what lay beyond the venue’s bounds, juxtaposing ideals and menaces, centers and peripheries. Just after the vox pops and close-ups, Hai offers a two-page spread of random crowd shots in which a menacing symbology is attached to peripheral subjects, thus implying the existence of stereotypical moral demons “out there.” For example, among the crowd snaphots is one of a man being led by the scruff of the neck by security guards. The caption informs us that this treatment was due punishment for those who tried to enter without having bought a ticket. Unlike the people profi led briefly in the vox pops, who have names and faces, this man, photographed from behind, has neither. His outfit is reminiscent of those worn by Jatman’s fictional Aryo and his gang in this chapter’s opening epigraph. There are other reasons, too, why the carnival metaphor is a poor fit in

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the landscape of Hai’s Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival. Indeed, the transnational globalism inherent in media images of alternative identities may well have contested the military’s increasingly anti-Western stance during the 1990s, and overturned the traditional demonization of “the rich.” Yet the excessive lifestyles of the extended Suharto family, also widely reported in the media, could also be said to be at odds with the official national identity. To cite one example, the president’s grandson, Arie Sigit, who was widely rumored to be the nation’s prime ecstasy boss, and who frequently appeared in the media grinning smugly and/or partying wildly, puts alternity’s comparatively meek frivolity to shame and highlights the difficulty in discerning the prevailing truth from the carnival. This highlights the complex and messy discursive characteristics of New Order’s demise. At first glance, alternative fans appeared to defy state cultural policy. However, on closer scrutiny, it becomes clear that in the final years of the regime, positions of defiance and complicity were frequently indistinguishable. Below, I provide further evidence of such conflations, evident in reports of a 1996 police operation known as Operasi Kilat Jaya. These reports reveal how, toward the end of Suharto’s reign, formerly robust youth ideal-menace dichotomies began to fray and leak into one another, for they located the preman’s stereotypical criminality in affluent Indonesians’ leisure spaces. Operasi Kilat Jaya One of the major threats which the silent crowd seems to have posed to bourgeois literate observers of all political persuasions lay in its other silences—the possibility that the urban crowd may be illegible as well as ungovernable. D. Hebdige, “Posing Threats, Striking Poses: Youth Surveillance and Display” (1997), 396

At the beginning of this chapter, I discussed how the regime blamed the Metallica riots on tattooed preman, conjured as menacing and illegible underclass criminals. When previous and subsequent anticrime operations, which resulted in the execution of alleged preman identifiable by their tattoos, are taken into account, the official depiction of the Metallica rioters may also be read as an instance of state terror.10 In this it echoes similar depictions of underclass youth in England in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Then also, according to Dick Hebdige, the stereotypical illegibility of the urban crowd served as an instrument of terror. Three years after the Metallica riots, the notion that this menacing underclass might be illegible reemerged in the media’s coverage of a number of very public police operations over the course of 1996. In December 1995, the head of the Jakarta District Police, Dibyo Widodo, responded to Jakarta residents’ dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of rising crime rates (Sofyat et al. 1995: 36; “Melacak” 1996: 60) by announcing that the annual Operation Kilat Jaya would be open to the press, and he invited journalists to cover the operation’s routine raids and arrests. Over the course of 1996, Kilat Jaya became something of a media fanfare, and its mission to nail a multiplicity of to (target operasi [operational targets]) was chronicled in detail by the media. “Operation Kilat Jaya is specific to Jakarta and therefore includes a range of tos,” Widodo told Forum Keadilan in December 1995, noting that, although it was concerned with “any kind of crime or disturbance of the peace[,] . . . preman, illegal substances and ecstasy” would be the operation’s primary targets in 1996 (Sofyat et al. 1995: 37). Media coverage of the operation, particularly relating to use of the socalled devil pill (pil setan), as ecstasy is sometimes called, by the Indonesian glitterati, presented a view of society in which an unlawful underclass was extending its reach, and had entered the night clubs of the Indonesian elite. By late 1995, both the military’s Bakorstanas (Badan Ko-ordinasi Stabilitas Nasional [Coordinating Body for National Stability]) and the police had declared a war on ecstasy. In mid-July 1996 (as the military prepared to raid Megawati Soekarnoputri’s pdi headquarters and subsequently to rid the nation of the activists who regularly aired their views at its “open forum”), the police, perpetually tailed by a media pack, began a series of raids on the capital’s night clubs in search of the devil pill. According to a report in Kompas, one of Indonesia’s major national dailies, rather than assure them that the power holders were on top of the crime problem, the raids entrenched club patrons’ sense of insecurity. This report presented Kilat Jaya as an aff ront to educated, well-occupied Indonesians and located the stereotypical preman in the cultural spaces of an elite. When Operation Kilat Jaya, aimed at arresting preman and confiscating illegal weapons, was launched two years ago, a number of discos and karaoke bars were

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transformed into de facto battlefields. As if these places were nests of crime and sources of all kinds of amoral behavior, security forces in full battle dress raided a number of them in succession. Now, even though the preman problem is yet to be resolved, a new problem has emerged: that of ecstasy. Karaoke clubs and discotheques have once again been targeted. . . . Patrons who only go there to relax and have fun are being treated as suspects. Regardless of their education and occupation, their wallets and pockets have been checked thoroughly. . . . A number of people have expressed that they are at a loss as to where to go now to relax and have fun. “If we go to a disco or a karaoke bar, chances are it could be raided and we would have our faces plastered all over the tv,” they said. (“Ecstasy dalam Kelabu Diskotek” 1996: 5)

The raids on clubs in mid-1996 turned up not only ecstasy but also patrons who were not carrying their identity cards, and who were subsequently arrested. Notably, “a number of teens without identities” (tanpa identitas diri) were discovered in the raids, suggesting that these club-goers were, like the preman officially held responsible for the Metallica riots, illegible (“Laporan Citra Ikut” 1996: 4). Operasi Kilat Jaya provides important context for our study, for it evokes the terror that continued into the 1990s, caused by state incursions into the spaces of wealthy, educated youth. Significantly, from such groups of privileged, university-educated young men also grew an underground music scene, of which Balinese punk and death metal bands became a part in 1997. As state media deregulation policies provided images for the construction of new ideals which helped to fissure official New Order identity discourses, increasing numbers of bourgeois (male) youths came to own their own electric guitars. The nature of rock fandom’s proliferation and reproduction was thus transformed. To be a rock fan it was no longer sufficient to participate in street-side singalongs to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar—one had to be in a band, attend rehearsals in a studio once a week, and occasionally perform at high school or campus band competitions, or underground concerts. It was also in this context of media deregulation, therefore, that an underground music scene began to emerge in the second half of the 1990s.

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Partly due to the few opportunities for commercial success, and in the absence of a small-scale live music scene, underground musicians and fans began to form their own interconnected scenes in cities across Java and Bali. These scenes also had links with a similar underground scene in Malaysia, and they expressed an antiestablishmentarian, antipop politics of authenticity, demonstrated by independent modes of production and consumption, and defiant displays of anticonsumerism in spaces devoted to the consumerist ideals. Underground participants in Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Malang, Surabaya, and Denpasar proclaimed practices of death metal, punk, and black metal, viewed as inherently anticommercial, as measures of artistic integrity, and developed independent modes of cultural production. They organized underground concerts, produced underground ’zines, recorded albums and compilations by underground bands, and gathered ritually on Saturday nights at shopping malls. In spite of participants’ claims to inherent anticommercialism and antiauthoritarianism, however, this underground scene often made unlikely bedfellows. In this regard, underground participants perhaps differed from their student activist compatriots, for their political allegiances were ambiguous and/or inconsistent. Unlike the student activists of the late 1980s who sought to hijack the official pemuda ideal and draw it into their own oppositionalities, the underground participants I will discuss were fickle and playful in their manipulations of prevailing institutions of “rock” and “youth.” It is important, then, to acknowledge the subtleties of all the scenes in question, which are more complex than conventional notions of hybridity and cultural imperialism can accommodate. Both these notions tend to assume the stability of state-society, center-periphery, East-West dichotomies and therefore serve this study poorly. In the context of New Order demise, such dichotomous assumptions were notably disrupted, as also apparent in Bali, where a dominant, regionalist discourse emerged as the province became ever more intertwined with the national capital. This had considerable impact on prevailing conceptions of local identity. Below I describe conceptions of local identity that prevailed in the 1990s as instances of a Balinese “reflexive essentialization” (Picard 1999), amplified by a dispute over land near one of the island’s most important temples, Tanah Lot, just off its southwest coast. The dispute, originally between local farmers and managers of a Jakarta-based company that wanted to build 38

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a resort on their land, was taken up by Denpasar-based elites in 1994 and developed into a (heavily mediated) controversy which both fed off and amplified a nascent regionalism. By the time I went to live in Bali in 1996, opposition to the Bali Nirwana Resort (bnr)—nicknamed Bali Neraka (Hell) Resort by its critics—was subdued, and regionalism was beginning to be expressed in different ways, such as in massive support for Megawati Soekarnoputri as Suharto’s successor. The controversy over the bnr is nonetheless pivotal, for anti-bnr inspired formulations of Balinese identity invoke a long history of reflexive essentialization in various forms. Such essentializations have drawn on colonial and Western anthropological constructions, and Bali’s New Order history is peppered with examples of local people’s selective use of such constructions as a defense against outside incursions on their island—the one of Indonesia’s thirty-two provinces with an overwhelmingly Hindu population. Young Balinese men also played with ideas about the Balinese essence in their efforts to mark out distinct reggae, punk, and death metal territories in Kuta and Denpasar during the 1990s, and an understanding of the formulations that the bnr controversy both revealed and inspired is intrinsic to my subsequent explorations of these youth scenes. Red Denpasar

A violent, conflict-ridden history and contemporary reality contrast the stereotype of Balinese people as peace-loving, graciously welcoming of tourists, and perpetually smiling. As in the first half of the twentieth century, Bali in the late 1990s, when I went to live there, was similarly—or still, perhaps—conflict-ridden. Early in that decade, the island had embarked on its own roller-coaster experience of state deregulation quite distinct from those described above, by which television and recording industries were respectively privatized and globalized. In the late 1980s, another set of policies did away with restrictions on investment in tourism projects and set off land speculations and resort development, resulting in massive increases in land values. After the slow growth of the previous decade (1978–83), Bali’s tourism industry began to boom in the late 1980s.11 This boom resulted in a move away from the initial concept for the development of tourism on Bali and its replacement with a more liberal, less regulative approach. The original plan for Bali, developed in the late 1960s m e s s y d e c ay

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by a French consortium at the request of a young New Order government, limited resort development to Nusa Dua in southern Bali and designated thirteen “stopovers” scattered all over Bali which tourists could visit on day trips or stay at locally run “hostel stays.” The concept, adopted by the local bureaucracy as “cultural tourism,” limited resort development to the island’s southern peninsula and established thirteen stopovers in other districts, allowing them the opportunity to also receive some of tourism’s projected benefits. In 1988, Bali’s third New Order governor, Ida Bagus Oka, issued a decree which significantly departed from that concept. It allowed for resort development in fifteen tourism zones located all over the island, and in 1993 a further decree increased the number of tourism zones to twenty-one. The decrees were not popular, and many understood them as evidence that Ida Bagus Oka was brown-nosing the Suhartos and other Jakarta-based developers. Moreover, in the first half of the 1990s, the governor became embroiled in a controversy surrounding a resort development project, to include a golf course and a luxury hotel, near Tanah Lot. In August 1994, bulldozers began to grade 121 hectares of land adjacent to the temple, one of six at the peak of a hierarchy of temples around the island’s rim. Five years previously, the Bakrie Group had been offered the site in the district of Tabanan by the provincial government. Between that date and 1993, the company smoothly brokered an agreement with the majority of landowners by offering them five million rupiah for one hundred square meters of land, well above the going rate. But Bakrie’s dream “land-freeing” 12 run, frequently a dispute-ridden process in Indonesia, ended when the project dealt its first blow to local landowners in 1993. That July the few farmers who had refused to sell were forced to cease cultivation after the district administration (kabupaten Tabanan) shut off irrigation supplies to the remaining rice fields, arguing that the land had already been rezoned for tourism (1 of the 21 zones included in the 1993 decree). The decision went over the head of the local irrigation society (subak), traditionally recognized as the final authority on irrigation matters. That October the company began grading the land before securing a construction permit or conducting an environmental impact study, contravening legal requirements. Despite local government’s disdain for subak authority in the prepara-

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tions for the resort development, and despite the company’s failure to follow legal procedural requirements for the construction of the resort, it was some time before local farmers’ protests were transformed into a noisy, panBali surge of demonstrations, public statements, and letters to the editor. Readers of the Bali Post, the local daily, were alerted to the plan for the bnr only in late 1993, when Adnyana Manuaba, a professor at the island’s main university, published an article announcing that land clearance at Tanah Lot had begun. The piece by Manuaba, a physiologist, tourism-planning expert, and a prominent critic of government policy (which had led to his firing from the regional planning board) prompted a string of angry letters to the paper opposing the project. Over four weeks in 1994, the Bali Post devoted a column to public comments on the development, which revealed almost unanimous rejection of the plan (M. Cohen 1994). Student protests and public outrage in January 1994 pressured the regional parliament on 21 January to temporarily suspend construction until the religious issues surrounding the project could be resolved. Four days later, Bali’s highest Hindu body, the Parisadha Hindu Dharma Indonesia, widely perceived as a “rubber stamp” for government policy, surprised opponents of the project by siding with them and issuing an unprecedented bhisama, a religious ruling based on interpretations of old religious texts, which declared a twokilometer zone of sanctity around the temple. The bhisama boosted the morale of those opposed to the development, and on 12 February 1994, a series of student demonstrations culminated in a rally of five thousand people—the biggest in Bali’s New Order history—who marched to Jayasabha, a park in front of the governor’s office, to demand that the project be abandoned. When they reached their destination, the crowd was broken up by baton- and bayonet-wielding troops. The ensuing melee resulted in the hospitalization of several demonstrators, and bnr opponents referred to it as the Jayasabha Tragedy. The Tanah Lot case is intriguing, for although its chronology of events in the bnr followed the classic New Order land-dispute pattern (intimidation of local landowners, collaboration of local authorities with developers, disdain for local adat institutions), the mainstream of opposition to the bnr was expressed in ethnoreligious terms and paid scant attention to the injustices suffered by local landowners. The controversy yielded a num-

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ber of scholarly and journalistic reports and prompted local commentators and foreign researchers alike to conclude that, as “mass” tourism replaced its “cultural” predecessor, a new dissenting Balinese identity was emerging—one that threatened national unity (Warren 1994; M. Cohen 1994). But this was not so when I visited Bali for a brief period in early 1995. Where I expected Balinese dissidents defiantly challenging a state cultural policy which stresses unity and rules out “ethnic” protest, and questioning their membership in the nation, I discovered instead that public protest had dampened and despondent opponents expected the resort to open in August. When I lived there in the late 1990s, such local dissent came to be expressed in ways that suggested peoples’ strong interest in participating in national politics. By the 1990s in Bali, Megawati Soekarnoputri’s pdi was fast amassing supporters who cast Suharto as the opposite of his predecessor. More than two decades after his death, Megawati’s father, Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, also became a potent symbol of a panethnic, panreligious, and popular discontent with Suharto’s rule. Well before the next election, in 1998, Megawati had been ousted from the leadership of her party by government intervention. She then established a new, alternative pdi, known as pdi-Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle). In the lead-up to the 1997 election and, following that, to the pdi-Perjuangan congress in Bali in 1998, Denpasar swelled with red, the pdi-Perjuangan’s color. Red flags and banners lined the streets of the provincial capital and riots of red paraphernalia congealed around the balai banjar—the pavilions that serve as public space dedicated to respective hamlets, and which dot the city. Huge banners with Megawati’s profi le, or with the angry and foreboding bull’s head that was the party’s symbol, were borne by red-shirted young men on motorbikes, who rallied regularly in cacophonous celebrations of their respective banjars’ allegiance to Megawati. Support for her was thus noisy and colorful, reminiscent of how Balinese Hindus celebrate death, auspicious dates, and temple ceremonies. Denpasar’s reddening followed a long tradition by the ruling party, Golkar, of asserting its authority by painting curbs, public walls, and electricity poles yellow, its own color of choice. As they became more vocal throughout the 1990s, Balinese pdi-Perjuangan supporters spoke back to

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the so-called Golkarisasi in the same primitive manner. The reddening of Denpasar registered refusal, complaint, muted calls for Suharto’s resignation, and discontent with Jakartanese developers’ role in the island’s tourism boom, as well as desire for democratization, reform, and an end to insidious corruption. In other words, although the anti-bnr movement had lost momentum by the mid-1990s, the formulations of Balineseness that this movement pushed to the surface lived on, both in this very colorful and noisy support for Megawati, and in more scattered, disparate, and obscured fashion, such as the spatial practices integral to the forging of Balinese reggae, punk, and death metal scenes. Like the movement of opposition to the bnr, these spatial practices drew on histories of local peoples’ engagements with tourists and the tourism industry. In the final section of this chapter, I offer a version of this history in order to evoke some of the rather thickly padded ground on which young enthusiasts trod as they journeyed into their respective reggae, punk, and death metal politics of identity. The Peripheral We

The beginnings of the Balinese tourism industry may be traced to the Dutch colonization of the island in 1908. This was achieved after rulers of Badung and Klungkung, along with their followers, chose mass suicide (puputan) over surrender to the invading forces. This apparently shamed the colonial administration into making attempts to preserve Balinese culture and promote tourism (Vickers 1989: 91). After a weekly steamship service was established connecting the north coast of Bali to Java and Sulawesi, tourists began to arrive on Bali in the 1920s. In the 1930s a number of artists and anthropologists resided on the island,13 whom subsequent writers have charged with reinforcing the colonial image of Bali as a kind of precariously placed Garden of Eden (Vickers 1989; Boon 1977). Later, in the 1960s, Soekarno also endeavored to capitalize on this “otherworldly” image and commissioned Bali’s first luxury hotel, the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur. But it was not until the New Order period that tourism really took off. As part of its commitment to development on coming to power in 1966, the New Order government drew up, as one of its initial measures, a series of five-year development plans (Repelitas). Repelita 1, spanning the

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period from 1969 to 1974, observed that tourism was a major income asset and advised that a model be developed on Bali as a pilot project for similar development all over the archipelago. The Bali Tourism Study, undertaken by the Société Centrale pour l’Equipement Touristique Outre-Mer (sceto), a consortium of French firms, was the first policy document to articulate that Balinese culture needed to be protected from tourism. Perceiving culture to be the island’s main defining feature, the planners set out a strategy to preserve the cultural resources on which the industry was to depend, and proposed limiting resort development to Nusa Dua on the island’s southern peninsula. In 1974 the World Bank, commissioned to oversee the execution of the master plan, reiterated and extended the sceto’s recommendations. Over the course of the 1970s, and in spite of the fact that its authors were foreign policy makers, Balinese administrators claimed this so-called cultural tourism policy as their own (Picard 1990b). Michel Picard has documented in detail cultural tourism’s impact on discourses of Balinese identity. He explores how, by appropriating the policy of cultural tourism, Balinese elites generated a discourse of Balineseness (Kebalian). This highlights the mutual nature of the construction of an image of the Balinese which catered to the demands of cultural tourists, and the way Balinese came to identify themselves among themselves, and terms this “reflexive essentialization.” Adrian Vickers (1989) contends that the central role tourism came to play in discourses of Balinese identity should be seen as a legacy of the island’s recent history. In the 1960s, bitter clashes erupted between supporters of the Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasionalis Indonesia, pni), which espoused preservation of the status quo, and those of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, pki), which called on its supporters to overthrow the caste system. Between 1966 and 1968, an estimated one hundred thousand people, many of them Communist Party members or “sympathizers,” were massacred on Bali, after the pki was suddenly outlawed (Cribb 1990). According to Vickers (1986: 172), by obliterating the pki, its enemies “created an unchallengeable consensus about what Balinese culture should be.” Under this light, “reflexive essentialization” casts a shadow of denial. If outwardly consensual, the definition of identity that emerged in the official

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policy documents that Balinese elites authored in the 1970s may well have been a symptom of terror, and not actual unanimity or consensus. Indeed, if the role of less public/official domains, hyperobedience, carnivalism, or orchestrated ambiguity was not the focus of studies of Balinese identity during the 1970s and 1980s, this reveals scholarly fashion, not the consensual nature of Balinese identity at the time. Carol Warren’s 1993 ethnography, for example, reveals how consensus was deferred, and gives a persuasive role to an indigenous, pluralistic, and collectivist sekehe (autochthonous collective) ideologies in Balinese reworkings of statist impositions. She shows how villages in South Bali are made up of semiautonomous corporate groups which crosscut and intersect one another and, drawing on Clifford Geertz’s (1980) description of this pattern as pluralistic collectivism, develops a case for the importance of sekehe ideology in local meaning-making and mediation of the New Order state. Warren’s observations of Balinese subaltern reconstructions of New Order developmentalism foreground her subsequent interest in authentications of a “low” Balineseness in the regionalism of the 1990s. Such populism may be seen to contrast articulations of Balinese identity that monopolized public discourse in the 1970s and 1980s, in which Bali and the West, but not Bali and Jakarta, had been diametrically opposed. In the 1990s, Jakarta began to assume the West’s former role as the Other which defines the local self, and a “regionalist discourse” began to emerge (Warren 1994, 1995, 1998a, 1998b), which had direct implications for the government’s popular support on the island. Picard (1990a, 1990b, 1996, 1999) and Warren (1994, 1995, 1998a, 1998b) have thus documented different historical aspects of the relationship between the tourism industry and Balinese identity. Picard’s (1999: 16–17) concern is with how “the Balinese, enjoined to exhibit their identity in reference to the outside world’s view of them, have come to search for confirmation of their Kebalian (Balineseness) in the mirror held up to them by tourists.” Warren is similarly concerned with the role of “powerful Others” in the generation of Balinese self-perceptions, but the Other of her work is not tourists and tourism per se but an encroaching metropolis, which provides a center against which Balinese began to define their peripheral, regional nature in the early 1990s. Warren (1995: 385) demonstrates that local

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The Balinese (regionalist) “We” of the 1990s was expressed in cartoons published in the local press, many of which have been reproduced in recent scholarly publications about Bali. The above cartoon, which appeared in the Bali Post on 25 September 1990, depicts an imaginary “Future of Tanah Lot” in which one farmer says to another: “While awaiting the harvest why don’t we practice a little golf?” (Bali Sing Ken Ken: Tourism, Culture and the Environment in Balinese Political Cartoons, catalogue to an exhibition of the same name at Fremantle Arts Centre and Murdoch University, 13–31 July 1994). Figure 1

credit: surya dharma

debates concerning tourism development projects and mediated by the local press reveal an emerging regionalist discourse which dichotomized notions of “center” (the Other) and “periphery” (the We; see, e.g., the characterization in figure 1). There are significant differences between the reflexive essentialization Picard mentions and the peripheral “We” discussed by Warren. The former refers to the emergence of elite discourses of Balinese identity in the 1970s in tandem with the development of tourism. Picard (1990b) and Vickers (1989) agree that this “touristic image” was created by foreign anthropologists and perpetuated in state nostalgia for the glories of former Hindu Javanese kingdoms, said to underpin the modern Indonesian polity, and which Bali

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allegedly resembled. By contrast, as evident in cartoons in the local press, the Balinese “We” of the 1990s was replete with subversive irony and humor, and celebrated the low and the grotesque (Warren 1998). The emergence of a regionalist discourse thus challenged preceding elite discourses and depicted Balineseness no longer as a remnant of a Java-based center of power, but as its antithesis. The reggae, punk, and death metal enthusiasts discussed in this book interacted in several ways with the dominant Balinese regionalist discourse of the 1990s, and I would like to conclude this chapter by foregrounding some of the theoretical implications of these interactions. Warren argues that clear-cut, center-periphery dichotomies in cartoons in the local press distinguish the regionalism of the 1990s from the kinds of subversions that dalangs (traditional puppeteers) effect when they weave political commentary into the narratives of their wayang (shadow puppet) performances. She contends that dalangs’ modes of resisting state power tend to be much more heteroglossic than the cartoonesque depictions of the Jakarta-Bali relationship, which allow little room for multiple interpretations. Warren attributes the rationalization of Balinese mediation and meaning-making to the workings of developmentalism and modernity (Warren 1998a). Warren’s comparison of the dalangs’ heteroglossies with contemporary cartoonesque dichotomies helped encourage my own thoughts toward instances of heteroglossy and processes of rationalization in the scenes with which I was concerned. Indeed, the idea that Balinese reggae, death metal, and punk identity politics also point to developmentalism’s rationalizing tendencies is one of this book’s themes. The death metal and reggae scenes presented in chapters 2 and 3, respectively, show how developmentalist discourses can have a rationalizing influence by imposing a certain politics of space, and hence denying enthusiasts access to the marginal territories in which their ludic, ambiguous, and indeed heteroglossic identity politics had hitherto sprung forth. Such deterritorialization did not, however, prevent youth from later reclaiming marginal spaces and resuming their resistances to regionalism’s dominant essentialism. The distinct dichotomizations that emerged as a dominant Balinese response to perceptions of the center as increasingly imperial therefore stand in stark contrast to a broader context of flux, decay, and regime demise that

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I described earlier in this chapter. Young Balinese reggae, punk, and death metal enthusiasts made use of both these contexts of, on the one hand, regime demise and consequent blurrings of formerly distinct discourses pertaining to youth and, on the other, increasingly dichotomous notions of Balineseness. As shall become clear in the course of this book, sometimes they fell in with dominant Balinese center-periphery dichotomies. At other times, they resisted and subverted such characterizations.

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J

alan Supratman is a wide, meandering thoroughfare that cuts through northeast Denpasar. As the town’s urgent hum subsides, the road begins to slope and bends back on itself in a devil’s elbow. The crook of this corner harbors a simple warung. In haphazardly daubed letters, its western wall announces “phobia.” Filled to the brim with small packets of toothpaste, sachets of shampoo, dusty bottles of sambal (chili sauce), their metal screw tops rusting, plastic bags taut with cloudy coconut oil, cartons of cigarettes, and a large drum fi lled with arak, this warung provides entry to the heart CHAPTER 2 of a family compound which stretches back, like a rabbit warren, from the road and Gesturing Elsewhere houses aunts, uncles, and cousins. During the day, usually in the hot afternoon, young men lope in from the street and congregate in a small, square room behind the warung’s back entrance. The outer walls of this room are crumbling, wet, and moldy, the inner walls blanketed from floor to ceiling with tiny, ant-like graffiti. On the floor are a foam mattress, a broken television set which serves as a bedside table, a dilapidated Polytron tape recorder, and a neatly stacked brick of cassettes—most of them second- or thirdgeneration copies of pirated versions. Here lived Ari (see figure 2), the bassist for Phobia, and around whom one of Denpasar’s main death metal hangouts of the mid-1990s crystallized, for the warung that fronted the compound sold the arak that lubricated these gatherings. Around sundown, young men dressed in ragged jeans and black t-shirts would begin to arrive at the warung on Jalan Supratman to sit on rickety timber benches, smoke, watch the traffic, and chat quietly. Once a substantial group had gathered, somebody would wander into the warung and buy a liter of arak, which was decanted from a large drum into a plastic bag, carried back to the group and decanted again into an old Sprite bottle. A small

Figure 2

Ari Phobia in his room. Credit: Ari Phobia

shot glass would begin doing its rounds, and a battered acoustic guitar would appear and fi ll the air with a mix of songs by Iwan Fals, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Netral, Nirvana, and Green Day. For the most part, the people who gathered here were, like Ari, unemployed university graduates and death metal musicians. Not all of them were Balinese, some were Javanese, such as Sabdo Moelyo, known as Moel, the bassist, vocalist, and principal founder of the death metal band Eternal Madness. Eternal Madness had developed a substantial following at banjar (village)-based shows and was the first death metal band to perform an original repertoire, which referred to Balinese cremation rites and incorporated Balinese gamelan phrases into the guitar intro for their song “Pelebon.” Moel frequently arrived with his girlfriend, Dayu. The couple generated substantial gossip, for she was a Balinese brahmana and the daughter of a diplomat. By dating Moel, she threatened a traditional ban on brahmana women marrying outside their caste, which could be punished by ejection from their extended family. Apart from Dayu who sometimes passed by with Moel, and myself, there were only three other women peripherally involved in this scene, and they did not take part in the drinking. They ran the warung and served the gathering with arak and cigarettes.

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Agus Yanky was an invisible presence at the Phobia hangout. He never appeared there, but he was often derided in others’ stories about Denpasar’s death metal scene. Why this was so will become clear in the final chapter. At this point, Yanky’s absence from the Phobia hangout was significant for it prompted me, in my attempts to reconstruct some kind of death metal history, to venture elsewhere. When I met Yanky, it was on his own turf. My first meeting with him provided a striking contrast to the aesthetic nuances of the Phobia hangout. He did not live in a family compound like the maze that fanned back from Ari’s graffitied room, for he, like Moel, was Javanese. I arrived at his gate and called to him, announcing my arrival. He emerged from an annex and walked toward me wearing a well-pressed black t-shirt, his long hair neatly pulled back. He invited me into his annex where a glass shelf housed a neatly stacked cassette collection and a shining black boom box. It was here, I later discovered, that meetings of the death-thrash association, which both Eternal Madness and Phobia had refused to join (see chapter 6), took place under Yanky’s supervision. The latter invited me to sit on one side of a low coffee table and then left the room to prepare drinks for us both. He returned with a tray, a bottle of cordial, iridescent red, and two gleaming glasses. There were others, too, who helped me piece together the story of the Balinese death-thrash scene’s early days. After I met with him, Yanky advised me to visit Age, who had recently opened a death metal merchandise store which served as a meeting place for musicians who were members of the death-thrash association. I did so, and thereby came into contact with many young active musicians, such as members of Behead and Triple Six, who did not visit the Phobia hangout, and who enriched my account with their stories. The first time I saw a death metal band perform in Bali was at Sunday Hot Music in early February 1996. Riding pillion, I had joined a stream of other motorbikes trickling down from the Sanur bypass toward the beach at Padang Galak, on the island’s southeastern coast. This convoy turned east at the shore, traversed the vast expanse of graded earth that was to become Bali’s first recreation park, and stopped at a grassy flat. At dusk, the crowd at Padang Galak was still sparse, and a single strip of Hondas—Sunday Hot Music’s “back row seats”—lined up several hundred meters back from

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the stage. Clutches of adolescents grouped under the trees and on the flat. Not until darkness did the flow of incoming traffic increase, and the vast empty space between the back row and the stage fi lled with an ever thickening crowd. Spectators sat cross-legged, knee-to-knee on the dusty earth. Together they formed a silent mass, completely focused on the stage to the north, waiting for the darkness and the show’s commencement. When night fell, the players appeared: black robed guitarists with Satanic voices directing a dark headbanging mass of death-thrashers who surged and writhed in the pit. They had emerged individually from the silent crowd and walked briskly to the lip of the stage when the band, Behead, kicked off their set. Backs to the spectators, bent over like a rugby scrum, they surged and receded, and whirled their black manes to vocalist Lolot’s death growl. Unlike the dumbstruck motionlessness that greeted Balinese punk bands, in 1996 death metal performances at Sunday Hot Music were notable for the proactive audience responses they inspired. Certainly, the two genres had roots in distinct places. Balinese punk was spawned by the opening of the Indonesian recording industry to investment by multinational recording labels in 1994, and the subsequent popularization of the U.S.-based alternative scene described in chapter 1. Such promotions were considerably aided by mtv’s extended global reach and the inclusion, in the mid-1990s, of mtv Asia in the daily programming of the commercial station anteve. Fed by a global extreme metal underground, notably absent from mtv, a death metal fandom emerged in Bali as early as 1990. Over the course of the 1990s, the scene went through a series of discursive shifts, but it also maintained elements of consistency. For example, there was an enduring stress on archival knowledge of death metal bands, which enthusiasts fetishized, revealing their desire to hold to certainty and known truth. For this, they looked outward to the global scene, as if into a mirror, eager to fi x onto their true (onstage) selves. Although death metal musicians privileged an “unseen” global underground over present, local repertoires, local texts also served as important indigenizing addenda. Commonly, locals are held to lay claim to dominant cultural forms by hybridizing them, often by melding “traditional” sounds with foreign musical codes (Lakha 1999; Lent 1995). Significantly, however, Balinese death metal musicians did not indigenize the genre in this fashion. 52

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Rather, they nestled into local spaces by gesturing elsewhere, thereby accentuating their marginal status in the local tourism industry. The period covered by this chapter, 1990–94, parallels the emergence of Balinese regionalism.1 It also saw the popularization of reggae, which death metal musicians commonly identified with the tourism industry, at community-based shows. Balinese death-thrash enthusiasts, who also began to form into a scene in the early 1990s, Othered the reggae scene for its perceived associations with tourism. However, death-thrashers’ Othering of reggae enthusiasts ought not to be understood as an objective truth, but rather as an important device facilitating identity formation in the Balinese band scene. In chapter 3, I turn to reggae musicians, whose views were, predictably, quite different from those the death metal musicians present below. 1921 It wasn’t until 1988 that we started to play thrash music. Before that, we played rock. In 1987, a friend from Surabaya told me: “Agus, here is a kind of music that is harder than heavy metal.” We used to think that Iron Maiden or ac/dc was heavy. Then we heard Kreator from Germany and we thought, “Wow, this is all right,” and we played it on the radio and got a good response from listeners. Toward the end of the 1980s Megadeth became available at [the local cassette shop] Istana Musik. Then we decided to play only death metal. We thought it would be a challenge because the music was fairly inaccessible, compared to, say, Metallica, which had had a lot of publicity already. . . . Eternal Madness started covering Unleashed songs, Debtor started covering Bolt Thrower—previously they had been a Sepultura cover band. But all of our bands emerged from the basics of thrash. And when thrash became popular, we felt the need to do something different. Agus Yanky, interview, 6 February 1998

Denpasar’s death metal scene had its roots in a radio program, called 1921 in reference to its twice-weekly slot (7 p.m.–9 p.m. [19:00–21:00], every Saturday and Sunday) and broadcast on a local community radio station, Radio Yudha. Begun in the late 1980s as a heavy metal show, following the developing tastes of its announcer Agus Yanky and many of its listeners, 1921 gradually became dedicated to thrash metal, and following that death metal, before the program discontinued in 1994. As Agus Yanky recalled, when 1921 broadcast songs by thrash metal bands such as Megadeth, Kreator, Slayer, and Metallica, a disparate, Denpasar-based thrash fandom was unearthed. GESTURING ELSEWHERE

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This took place as increasing numbers of enthusiasts responded to the new show by visiting the studio at the time of broadcast, for 1921 did not merely link otherwise disparate listeners in the manner of a cyber chat room, e-mail discussion list, or subscriber-based community radio, it operated as a call to prayer, drawing enthusiasts from family compounds all over Denpasar to a space where they got to know one another by swapping tapes, exchanging information, making self-designed black t-shirts, and taking part in the uniquely Balinese drinking rituals that knit male solidarity. Drinkers would sit cross-legged on the floor and form a circle to ease the passage of a single shot glass which continued from mouth to mouth until the bottle was empty. No imagined community, 1921 was a place where death-thrashers really did come together. They recalled the show as a hangout, a place of interaction and solidarity, giving them a home territory where, in their quests for both intimacy and control, a kind of hybridization took place, for it accommodated the melding of foreign repertoires (death and thrash), which afforded them independence from their parent culture, with the familiar rituals (the imbibing of arak) through which intimacy was forged. The Yudha studio thus served as a kind of nest, where a uniform marginality was hatched. Once they had established the Yudha studio as a home territory, deaththrashers began to stake out public and bodily spaces for displaying their fandom. This embodiment began at the Radio Yudha studios with the making of t-shirts which eventually clothed the death-thrash mob in a uniform blackness. These t-shirts were emblazoned with the names of death metal and thrash bands, unmistakable in their illegibility, and drew attention to enthusiasts’ desire to veil themselves in mystery. The t-shirts served as performative vocabulary, for they were worn as the death-thrashers began to extend out from their Radio Yudha home to stage exhibitions in more public arenas, such as the Kumbasari market and the cassette store Istana Musik, both located in central Denpasar. “Others would be in their trendy get-ups, we’d be different,” recalled Age of the years between 1990 and 1994. “We’d wear all black with holes in our clothes. . . . We didn’t care, we’d come together en masse, ride around in convoys, en masse. Maybe it was a kind of exhibition, to show that we were

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a community.” Indeed, 1921’s Pied Piper–like capacity to pull disparate listeners from their respective homes to a snug, communal territory suggests a common sense of isolation, and it may not be surprising that death-thrash dress style was primarily a validation of difference and marginality. Deaththrashers certainly identified their genre as unpopular and exclusive, and Dek Ben of Triple Six assured me that “death metal has a specialized appeal. We all feel that this music is the kind of music that not everyone can enjoy; only certain people can appreciate it. . . . It is unseen but it is present. It has a vast global network only it’s not popular, and it’s never on tv.” The death-thrashers’ marginality was at once imposed and orchestrated. Unlike the reggae, Top 40, and classic-hits cover bands, many of which had contracts with hotels or tourist bars, thrash and death metal groups had no such career prospects, and they were expressly excluded from tourist venues. For example, in 1992 a regular weekly concert was established for local bands at a newly built amphitheater in the Nusa Dua hotel complex on the island’s southern peninsula. Two groups from the local thrash metal scene, the Slayer cover band Separatis and the Sacred Reich cover band Epilepsy, were invited to play at the inaugural show. Not until their performances, however, did the organizers become aware that they were thrash metal cover bands—both were barred from future events. A further sense of marginality was imposed as a result of death-thrash bands’ reliance on the double pedal, which beats the bass drum in quick succession.2 Because none of the practice studios on the island were equipped with double pedals, the death metal musicians had to supply their own, and the two dozen–odd drummers who played in death metal bands in the early to mid-nineties shared a single double pedal. The scarcity of this equipment enhanced the death metal musicians’ sense of marginality and heightened the need for interaction and exchange. Death-thrashers increasingly fetishized their marginality as the Balinese scene’s access to a global extreme metal underground broadened. This became evident as the scene constantly shed commercialized forms, which they saw as a way of averting recuperation. After the mass enthusiasm generated by the Indonesian concerts of Sepultura and Metallica, Agus Yanky remembered, death metal fans in Bali began to see these groups and their followers as inauthentic.

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We used to think Metallica was heavy; then once it started to get popular and trendy we started looking more to grindcore, black metal, and doom. People who didn’t really know much about the music wouldn’t hang around long. They would get teased, people would say: “I thought you said you were a grindcore fan—what are you wearing a Guns n’ Roses t-shirt for?” . . . Even those who copied the right style of t-shirt but weren’t really committed to the music wouldn’t last either. Someone like you, for instance, would be asked: “What albums you have been listening to?” If you said “Metallica, Megadeth,” that’d be the end of you. . . . This kind of informal screening was good because it meant that we were able to maintain the scene, and it lives on today. (Agus Yanky, interview, 6 February 1998)

But death metal’s orchestrated marginality does not automatically qualify it as an instance of the genre’s indigenization. While death metal enthusiasts were eager to identify the genre as oppositional and marginal, this did not differentiate the Balinese version from the global extreme metal scene. Indeed, and in spite of its territorial bent, the Balinese scene seemed preoccupied with an elsewhere, as became evident in its hierarchies of authenticity, which reached toward this global scene. Sources and Flows

In an essay exploring Sepultura’s career as an example of the maintenance of “the local” within global scenes, Keith Harris (2000: 14) sums up the genesis of the global extreme metal scene. [In the 1980s heavy metal] became one of the most successful popular music genres, dominated by a relatively small number of European and American bands. Under the influence of punk, early 1980s bands such as Venom began to develop more forms of Metal. These forms, including Thrash, Death, Black and Doom Metal, eschewed melody and clear singing in favor of speed, down tuned guitars and growled or screamed vocals. Whilst each style has distinctive features and distinct networks of fans and musicians, they share enough to be frequently referred to by fans and musicians as “Extreme Metal.” The development of the scene was inseparable from these musical developments. Extreme metal began to be circulated through letter writing, tape trading, recordings on small labels and fanzines. From a very early stage “The Underground” . . . was always highly decentralized. Many of its recipients never met anybody from it face to face and it was never

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reliant on local scenes. Moreover, bands from countries outside of the traditional Anglo-American “core” of the recording industry were influential in its development, including places as diverse as Chile, Malaysia and Israel.

Harris’s summation is worth quoting at length, for it provides a broader global context for the emergence of a Balinese death-thrash metal scene. In the first half of the 1990s, the sources supplying the Balinese death-thrash scene with albums were many and varied. Initially, in the late 1980s, the Balinese death-thrash scene was linked to a global underground via Indonesian commercial distributors such as Indosemar Sakti and Suara Sentral Sejati, which distributed albums on the underground labels Nuclear Blast and Earache, respectively. Through these distributors much of the thrash music that supplied the Balinese scene reached Istana Musik and Agus Yanky, who had a contract with Indosemar Sakti to promote its new releases on his show. In the early 1990s, the Denpasar scene became more directly linked to the global extreme metal underground when 1921 attracted the attention of a Surabaya-based death metal merchandiser, Nia, who heard it while holidaying on the island. Nia visited the studio, met Agus Yanky, and offered to share a range of her own material, obtained via mail order from a Malaysiabased distributor, vsp. On her return to Surabaya, Nia began regularly supplying Agus Yanky with pirated albums “from Nuclear Assault and other labels you couldn’t get in Bali” (Agus Yanky, interview, 6 February 1998). Eventually, the Balinese fans solicited the help of a well-financed fellow enthusiast, Dede, in purchasing albums direct from vsp’s catalogue, and making them available for local enthusiasts to copy. All three sources obtained their cassettes from the mail-order catalogues, which linked scenes all over the world to a global underground. The Balinese scene’s musical sources were therefore disparate and diffuse, and indeed not reliant on an Anglo-American core. The global extreme metal underground reached Bali, seemingly via regional and national underground cores in Malaysia and Surabaya. But the flow of death and thrash metal products to Bali was decidedly one-way. The Balinese enthusiasts’ relative inequality was accentuated by a poorly valued rupiah. If not for widespread pirating, most fans would never have been able to afford any of the albums that were circulating the scene in the early 1990s.

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The political implications of metal fans’ demonic status in the official discourses described in chapter 1 also show how globally oriented fandoms engage with local discursive contexts. One of the ways Indonesian people incorporated universal metal symbologies into local discourses became evident in the election campaign of 1992. In that year, supporters of the Indonesian Democracy Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, pdi) claimed the universal metal symbol—fist raised, thumb, forefinger, and pinkie extended in an approximation of devil horns—as a show of support for the party, an illustration of the importance of punning and word play in resistance to and critique of the New Order. In showing support for the pdi, metal’s devil horns were transformed into those of the buffalo: the party’s symbol. The associated battle cry, “Metal!” was meant as shorthand for merah total (totally red)—red being the color that distinguished the pdi from the yellow of the ruling party, Golkar, and the green of the Muslim-aligned United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, ppp). The metal salute—three raised fingers—also signaled the pdi’s order on the ballot. In 1992, the metal salute thus evoked the red buffalo, and not Satanism—a transformation generated by supporters of the pdi who embraced the party’s defiant populism. 3 Many of the available writings on metal fandom’s Anglo-American core describe the genre’s rising popularity in the 1980s as an expression of bluecollar pessimism at the tail end of the fragmentation of a 1960s counterculture (Harrell 1994; Weinstein 1991; see also Epstein and Pratto 1990; Arnett 1995; Walser 1993; and Roccor 2000). In many respects, Balinese deaththrash practices clash with these stock images. Certainly, the defiant pride in a state of dishevelment appears to signal a will to contest capitalist ideals of achievement, progress, success, and self-confidence. However, among the Balinese death-thrashers, notions of individuality, creativity, selfconfidence, positive thinking, success, and progress were more frequently welcomed and embraced than scorned. “It gives us spirit, aspirations. It helps us see that success is achievable,” replied Lolot, the vocalist for Behead, to my queries about how and why he enjoyed death metal. Cak, Eternal Madness’s lead guitarist, praised his band’s bassist and vocalist thus: Moel and I suit one another [cocok]. I like the way he has progressive ideas [pikirannya maju]. He has many ideas for doing new things. Here a lot of people lack self-confidence. . . . I also like seeing new bands develop because it means that

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there is more competition, and that is healthy. Here, people always think of competition in a negative sense, as if being competitive means you have to put everyone else down. . . . Ari, our new drummer, is committed to progress, diligent, has initiative, and is creative. He has the kind of courage needed for self-expression.

Lolot and Cak appear most optimistic about the possibilities for participating in a global youth culture. Indeed, for the majority of death-thrashers cited here, the future seemed relatively bright—most of them were university or high school students whose parents had helped them to buy guitars and approved of their music “hobby.” When I interviewed them in 1996, for example, members of Angel Head, then still in their early teens, told me that “most of us got given guitars by our parents. They’d probably rather we channel our energies into music than spend their money on alcohol or drugs.” But metal was no more the exclusive property of a Indonesian bourgeoisie or “new rich” class. When I met Dede in 1996, he was living in a luxury housing estate in Yogyakarta, and he purchased via mail order many of the cassettes which were subsequently copied, recopied, and circulated on the Balinese scene. However, many of the death metal albums that could be bought from ad hoc roadside stalls in Surabaya had been brought into the country by Javanese migrant workers returning home from Malaysia, where esoteric death and thrash metal titles were more easily accessible. Domestically, this music also fed a working-class fandom. In Bali, for example, Sepultura was very popular among Javanese construction workers on the island, suggesting that workers may have also played a significant role in the transmission of death metal to Bali. Unlike Balinese punk, which was sparked by the concomitant state deregulatory policies and rising cosmopolitanism among “new rich” Indonesian youth, the emergence of a death-thrash fandom was not totally reliant on either government policy or the growth of a metropolitan bourgeoisie. Deena Weinstein (1991) casts the popularization of heavy metal in the United States as a shadowy postscript to the flower generation, but enthusiasm for death-thrash in Bali could never be aptly described thus. By 1968, when American youth were flowing into Haight-Ashbury to celebrate the Summer of Love, an estimated tens of thousands of people had been killed on the island during the 1966–68 holocaust which marked the transition

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from the regime of Sukarno to Suharto’s New Order (Cribb 1990). When a death metal scene emerged in Bali in the early 1990s, this authoritarian, order-obsessed regime had been in power for twenty-five years. The few accounts of the emergence of alternative and underground music scenes in the final years of Indonesia’s New Order regime describe these practices as oppositional. For example, Joanna Pickles (2001: 62) calls Bandung punk collectives “a mirror opposition to the hierarchical, centralized, bureaucratic Indonesian state.” As I shall argue below, the Balinese death-thrashers did not resist in this “mirror image” fashion. In fact, and especially in the early 1990s, they tended to self-consciously obscure any aspect of the practice which may have been construed as “oppositional,” or antithetical to official discourses of identity. Their modes of resistance were much more ambiguous—a fact which rendered them almost irrepressible. Such ambiguity becomes evident in the death-thrashers’ hierarchies of authenticity, which gestured elsewhere. Gesturing Elsewhere

To drinking sessions at the Phobia hangout in 1996, Ari, Moel, Hendra, and Cak would often wear one of their old t-shirts from the Radio Yudha days. These palimpsests—now graying and ragged, their ink flaking and their text scarcely readable—hinted at a bygone era when Sacred Reich, Brutal Truth, and Morbid Angel were all the rage. Clearly, the t-shirts were well loved, for this bygone era was not so long past: perhaps two, three, or four years. As I inquired about the Radio Yudha scene and in my own, private ponderings, I always had to remind myself of how recently it had lived and died, for the enthusiasts recalled its inception as if it were the dawn of time. Indeed, many of the scene’s important and consistent dimensions had been born there. As the death-thrashers busied themselves with ink, cloth, and screens, orchestrating their blackness and marginality, other leveling devices also emerged. For example, in line with the equality conveyed by the death-thrashers’ uniform dress style, tangible resources were relatively equally distributed—album fetishization was scorned, as was that of guitars. According to Moel, ensuring equal distribution of cassettes, and discouraging individuals from amassing personal collections, was one of the main functions of the formal death metal association established in 1994

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(see chapter 6), also called 1921. He told me: “We used to gather at the studio and make t-shirts. . . . then a friend from Malaysia came to visit. In Malaysia, they had a [death metal] organization to maximize access to the information they received. To prevent individual people from amassing personal collections, we also formed a death metal organization.” (30 July 1996) But leveling devices were not the scene’s only consistent feature, for they coexisted with modes of (individual) distinction. Certainly, maintaining a coherent deviance requires exclusion as well as unity, and while tangible resources appear to have been shared, intangible ones became the basis for building a hierarchy by which power and seniority were granted based on virtuosity and archival knowledge. As they shared with me their stories of the old days at Radio Yudha, many people interspliced these accounts with derisive comments about Johnny-come-lately musicians who did not know how to enter the scene. Cak’s complaint is one example. I hate to see people starting new bands just because they want to show off, not because they are particularly interested in music. They want to look tough, cool, and only play death metal because they think it’s trendy. . . . It takes a long time to write a song. It’s not as easy as people think. If they just write their own songs straight off the bat without going through the initial steps, they have no hold on an overriding concept for their music. They’re just playing so that it sounds “brutal”; they have no concept.

At first, it seemed to me paradoxical that a scene predominated by cover bands should grow around hierarchy based on virtuosity. This apparent paradox made more sense once I understood that such a hierarchy had fallen into place just as enthusiasts’ access to a global extreme metal underground broadened in the early 1990s, through the combination of mail order and pirating. The new material inspired the formation of new bands, whose members understood as their initial task the rehearsal and reproduction of this new material. As Agus Yanky recalled, Eternal Madness was established at this time, and kicked off covering songs by Unleashed. The influx of new material also led Debtor, a slightly older band, to cease covering the increasingly popular Sepultura songs and turn to the more esoteric Bolt Thrower. In 1996, both these bands released debut albums, all the songs on which were originals. New bands had been established covering new material that

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had since entered the mail-order/pirating flow. Behead covered Cerebral Fix songs and Angel Head, like many other young death metal bands in 1996, covered Cannibal Corpse. Thus, the predominance of cover bands in the early and mid-1990s was due to their role as a vehicle for skill enhancement and as a rite of passage, for newly formed groups that attempted originals were scorned as upstarts—at least by the musicians who played in cover bands. This hierarchy was veiled by the death-thrashers’ uniform blackness, for seniority was not symbolized by a particular “look.” This is not to deny that t-shirts played a role in determining who was “in” and who was “out” of the death-thrash scene. Guns n’ Roses t-shirts served as sartorial signs of both inauthenticity and the threat of popularization. While Guns n’ Roses t-shirts could not be tolerated—thus revealing the importance of aesthetic uniformity—lack of virtuosity and archival knowledge was forgiven, since the scene operated as a training ground in which beginners, supervised by their elders, could progressively attain authenticity by playing in cover bands. Such authenticity discourses served as scaffolding for newly established bands as they journeyed toward seniority, and determined when they were allowed to start developing an original repertoire. By consenting to and making use of these hierarchies, death-thrashers appeared to engineer a process of localization. But death-thrashers were clearly ambivalent about indigenizing their music. Notably, in 1996, Balinese death metal cover bands shunned Sepultura, whose Roots (1996) album, in which the Brazilian group cooperated with Xavante musicians, sold 1,200,000—a twofold increase in record sales compared to its third (1989) album, Beneath the Remains, which sold 600,000 (Harris 2000: 23). When Roots became available in Bali in late 1996, many local enthusiasts lamented its eclecticism as evidence that Sepultura had sold out to a mainstream “ethnic” fetish. Rather than Sepultura, bands such as Obituary and Cannibal Corpse, whose songs did not refer to any place, remained extremely influential on the Balinese scene into the late 1990s. The possibility that their hierarchies referred primarily to an elsewhere is further affirmed by the musicians’ hesitance to write lyrics in Indonesian or Balinese, reasoning that “it would seem funny to use Indonesian lyrics”

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(Dek Ben; Arwah).4 Unlike famed Indonesian folk singer Iwan Fals’s lyrical celebration of local underclass identities, such as the bus-terminal thug, the crossroads newspaper seller, and the evicted slum dweller, Balinese deaththrash musicians did not write lyrics that referred to locale. For example, Ari Phobia offered me the following examples of his lyrics. When I asked him to what they referred, he said: “I try to explain how I imagine the life which is not like now . . . dominated by suffering, dominated by fear, when the people were dead and the corpses were alive.” When the sun was shining black And the moon hiding on the clouds Sky was bleeding Welcome in the dark age In circle of ceremonial death Bodies shred to pieces Among the sacred violence Fighting over the corpse violence Body rise from the grave Skin falling down from the ground Rotten flesh around Slowly spreading disease “Dark Century,” Ari Phobia Human under the scared Walking in the darkness Never know where Death has been done Screaming pain around Sadness was alive Blood across the line That holy sacrifice Filling in emptiness Forget anything seen Soon become suffocate Living in a forsaken world. “Land of Suffer,” Ari Phobia

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For death-thrash enthusiasts, therefore, authenticity appeared to lay in an absent elsewhere which could only be reached by diligently rehearsing foreign repertoires. In this quest, the present and the locale became secondary concerns, as the authentic self was determined by an absent truth. This quest for authenticity in an elsewhere is different from fetishization of the Other, and it does not conform to the idea, expressed by Indonesia’s first president, among others, that performance of foreign repertoires was a form of masquerade which obscured an authentic, local self. In an Independence Day speech in 1959, Soekarno referred to rock-and-roll as a form of cultural imperialism (cited in Sen and Hill 2000: 166). In spite of vastly changed conditions, similar sentiments can be found in the Othering of death metal by the Balinese reggae musician Gus They. I don’t think it’s really appropriate for Balinese people to be thrash musicians. Thrash enthusiasts are hard people, they might be free but they are too free, that’s what leads them to headbang. . . . They are just blindly following. Apart from not being appropriate for young Balinese, that kind of heavy music has been banned in Bali. After the Metallica riot, heavy music was banned. . . . You can see that when Sepultura performed in Surabaya, there was a riot, and cars were burned. . . . Because thrash music is big on whipping up peoples’ emotions. What’s more, all of them have long hair, so people see that and they get scared that there will be a riot. Thrash music is not appropriate for our culture because it is heavy and promotes violence. We Balinese are peaceful, relaxed.

The Balinese death-thrashers did not agree with Gus They that their fandom was a form of masquerade, at odds with their true Balinese selves. Their own views on the genre’s appeal distinguish death-thrash from alternative music, as portrayed in Indonesian teen media in the mid-1990s. Such media depicted alternative fans as people who described their own dress styles as nyentrik (weird) and expressive of a desire to tampil beda (appear different). By contrast, for Balinese death-thrashers, death metal appealed to their true selves, to their souls (mewakili jiwanya). By gesturing elsewhere in this way, the death-thrashers refrained from associating core values with specific geographies. In chapter 1, I argued that official, New Order discourses conjured the preman as a menacing, illegible force. I also showed how this image was re-

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Kunuck, vocalist for Demonstration Effect, hiding in the light. Credit: Tikus Got Figure 3

inforced and perpetuated in media reports of the Metallica riots and, thereafter, of police anticrime operations in the late 1990s. The specter of illegibility may well serve the rulers as an instrument of terror, but it does not prevent the ruled from mimicking illegibility in the employment of subcultural capital.5 An example of such agency can be seen in the texts (band names) that adorned the Balinese death-thrashers’ t-shirts. Not only were they English words, incomprehensible to most locals, but they were also concealed beneath webs of stylization (see figure 3). More than a secret sign by which death-thrashers identified like-minded enthusiasts, this unreadable text served as a public statement that “herein lies a mystery,” thus giving the practice a form of dread—the Rastafarian form of metaphoric currency so coveted, in Dick Hebdige’s (1988: 35) view, by English punks6 —and exemplifying, par excellence, what he holds to epitomize subcultural practice: “The politics of youth

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culture is a politics of the metaphor: it deals in the currency of signs and is, thus, always ambiguous. . . . Subculture forms up in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance, it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a hiding in the light.” Indeed, even under stage lights, the Balinese death-thrashers hid by covering their faces with their long locks as they sang and played. Death-thrashers’ menacing nature lay not only in impregnability but also in their propensity to blur the distinction between essence and masquerade, Self and Other, hence demonstrating that the construction of moral demons by rulers can provide subcultural capital for subversive performances. Such conflations are evident in the death-thrashers’ gestures toward an elsewhere seen to be expressive of their true selves. Furthermore, the death-thrashers’ ambivalent allusions to identities officially cast as morally demonic—the preman and devil-worshipping cults (aliran sesat)—also were powerful tools for communicating their presence. In spite of their bourgeois status, the death-thrashers seemed intent on invoking the specter of the preman by wearing long locks, as important to the death-thrash uniform as black t-shirts, and stereotypically associated with the preman, as Gus They’s comment above shows.7 However, unlike the preman, they belonged to a provincial bourgeoisie, not an urban underclass, and while they may have mimicked certain Indonesian moral demons, they refrained from the extortion and violence normally associated with the preman. Their appearance as a rabble was betrayed by their ordered hierarchies of authenticity, and the fact that they were beyond state retribution, for the death-thrashers reserved their drinking and brawling for less public territories, such as the “home territory” of the Yudha studio. References to both preman and aliran sesat were therefore stylized and obscured and any explicit association with an illicit underworld quickly denied. Many people were intrigued by us because we would headbang and we had long hair, but we would never brawl. Once the music was over, we would just disperse. . . . Our music may be heavy. Our lyrics may be heavy. The way we dress may be heavy. But we are still a part of our environment. We have to behave in accordance with the system we live under. In the West, people have to drink alcohol in order to appreciate death metal. But we are different in Indonesia. We don’t need alcohol.8 Agus Yanky, 6 February 1998

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Q: How did you come to adopt the name for your band, Triple Six? Dek Ben, vocalist for Triple Six: That is from a song, “Six Six Six.” But . . . after people told us that it was to do with the devil, because we were scared of the [political] implications, we altered it to Triple Sick. Q: But the symbol of your band is still 666 . . . Dek Ben: We were afraid that people would say we were . . . we just picked a name that was easy to remember, we don’t want to make any trouble. Lolot, vocalist for Behead: All death metal enthusiasts are good, well-behaved boys. We never forget to pray. Only our music is a little heavy, but we are not devil worshippers. We only adopt what’s positive from the music, and leave the negative behind. Being in a band provides us with a release for our anger . . . we don’t want to be violent on the street. . . . The police would get us, and we would be put in jail!

While Dek Ben’s band, Triple Six, uses demonic symbols, he disavows their Satanist associations. Similarly, the death-thrashers evinced the preman aesthetic yet denied any links with the preman. In this way, the deaththrashers made good use of illicit symbols, thus challenging the official idealization of young people as patriotic vanguards of development while averting repression. Like the stickers in figure 4, this form of “resistance” can be said to be highly stylized and heavily obscured and attests to the affective and simulated nature of these young men’s protestations. Subtlety may be especially important in authoritarian contexts where the violent repression of overt resistance is a constant threat. State terror itself, however, does not explain the absence of overt resistance among the death metal enthusiasts in Bali. In Indonesia in the 1990s, in spite of the New Order depoliticization policies and military repression, an underground movement of opposition to the Suharto regime flourished. In the realm of popular music, also in the 1990s and in spite of the state’s attempts to silence him by banning him, the extremely popular Indonesian folk singer Iwan Fals’s lyrics were replete with denunciations of the regime’s developmentalist policies and widespread corruption. Some of Fals’s songs served as anthems, sung at rallies organized by the growing underground campusbased opposition movement. Furthermore, at the same time, Bali spawned its own opposition movement, which attended to issues of local urgency and polarized notions of “Bali” and “Jakarta,” center and periphery. GESTURING ELSEWHERE

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Figure 4

Promotional stickers for Javanese and Balinese death metal bands. credit: author’s collection

In this context, the death metal enthusiasts’ characteristic obscurity may be seen as a conscious turning away from these more overt articulations of anti–New Order sentiment, rather than as a result of repression. Indeed, death-thrashers remembered their public performances in the early 1990s as validations of the genre’s “difference.” But from what, precisely, remained a mystery to me for some time. That is, when urged to describe the gatherings at Radio Yudha, Istana Musik, and the Kumbasari market, they seemed only to be able to identify with vague, amorphous terms such as “antitrendy” or “underground”—terms which derived from the global extreme metal scene rather than local contexts. It was not until our conversations turned to enthusiasts’ recollections of the shows at which death-thrash bands performed in the early 1990s that a more sharply focused death-thrash marginality came into view.

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Strategic Antiessentialism Perhaps because in Bali, because of tourism, the kinds of music that get popularized here are happy kinds of music, music like reggae, has an easier passage to Bali [than death metal]. There are many facilities for reggae bands in Kuta, whereas death metal bands are reliant on practice studios to provide a double pedal. Mostly, we have to provide it ourselves. That’s the main problem, there are no facilities for death metal in Bali. Lolot, Behead

We tried to get a gig in a bar. But the people in the bar said that tourists in Kuta don’t like thrash metal because they come for a holiday, they don’t like hard music. Ari Phobia

In the early 1990s, death and thrash metal bands were generally unwelcome in tourist bars and hotels, which were reserved for reggae and Top 40 bands. Consequently, it was infrequent campus shows and, more frequently, local community anniversary celebrations known as bazaar banjar (village bazaars), organized under the auspices of community youth groups known as sekehe teruna teruni (stt), that provided space for the earliest death and thrash metal performances. This too, however, was accorded reluctantly, and musicians recalled that they often had to “go begging” for opportunities to perform and that, even when they got them, they were frequently listed last, so that much of the audience had vacated the hall before the death-thrash bands began their sets. “We were thought of as a kind of litter, garbage,” recalled Age of the early 1990s. “Reggae was the trend. We were thought of as those who made trouble for reggae.” In the early 1990s, a local reggae scene centered on Bruna Bar on Kuta Beach, where local youth mixed freely with domestic and foreign tourists alike. Reggae was a highly sexualized realm which serenaded and celebrated the lifestyles of Balinese “beach boys,” and the abundance of reggae cover bands playing at banjar gigs signaled, to the death-thrash fans, the genre’s collusion with the tourism industry. In the context of these banjarlevel performances, the dominance of reggae and its sexualized dandyism, contrasted with the death-thrashers’ dishevelment and asexuality, for the black, intensely clustered headbanging audiences that performed at these banjar gigs fi lled the empty spaces left when reggae’s slow, laid-back jig and

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multicolored aesthetic receded, as Agus Yanky remembered in a 29 March 1996 interview: We used to get a spot at banjar gigs because it was thought that we could add variety. Usually, it would just be a whole lot of reggae bands playing. We would be presented as some kind of weird attraction. . . . All we long-haired headbangers would be up against the lip of the stage. Only there wouldn’t be any brawls. When the music stopped, we would all sink back into the audience. In the organizers’ view, this was something out of the ordinary.

Death-thrashers’ recollections of banjar gigs where they shared stages with overwhelmingly popular reggae cover bands shed light on the former’s orchestrated marginality and gestures elsewhere. These recollections echo a broader regionalist discourse which had begun to contest the island’s development direction in the early 1990s in which Balinese cast themselves as authentically “low” in opposition to a Jakartan superculture of greed and kitsch. Similarly, death metal enthusiasts identified themselves as “garbage” and “those who made trouble for reggae,” defining their own authenticities in opposition to the market logic of the tourism industry which, in their view, so constricted reggae bands. In this way, reggae served as the Other which affirmed and shaped the death metal self, for the banjar gigs accommodated a performative dialogue between the two genres. Reggae musicians responded to the death-thrash phenomenon by casting it as dangerously inauthentic, as Gus They’s comment above shows. In the view of death metal musicians, reggae’s Otherness lay in its perceived palatability to tourists. They cast reggae as a form of pretence and opportunism, and their own genre of choice as a channeling of a life force, a spirited expression of the soul which, in their views, conflicted with tourism’s demands. The dialogue that took place between reggae and death metal at these banjar gigs contributes to analyses of the relationship between the tourism industry and Balinese identity, different historical aspects of which have been documented by Michel Picard (1990a, 1990b, 1996, 1999) and Carol Warren (1994, 1995, 1998a, 1998b). As I noted in chapter 1, by the 1990s, portrayals of Balineseness as authentically low, antithetical to the metropolitan superculture, dominated in the local press. Such antithetical identities

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emerged, according to Warren (1998a), in caricatures of Balinese identities regularly published in the local daily Bali Post, which set big capital against the little person, private against communal interests, and cultural pollution against cultural authenticity. Similar associations may be accorded to the way the death metal enthusiasts of the early 1990s, in spite of their hesitance to speak directly and openly about political issues, postured, danced, and dressed in opposition to reggae, its threatening ubiquity, and its acceptance in the tourism industry. By contrast, they were rejected by the tourism industry and coveted their low and marginal status. Death-thrashers’ ambivalent alliance with an emerging regionalist discourse is further suggested by the media attention they later received, beginning around 1995. All of these reports (“Eternal Madness Hadapi Keterbatasan” 1995; “Gianyar Pun” 1995; “Thrash Dipinggirkan” 1995) sympathized with the death-thrashers’ plight to distance themselves from the Metallica troublemakers. In mid-February 1996, for example, the Bali Post ran a feature on death-thrash which validated its appeal by attempting to establish parallels between thrash music and the Balinese gamelan orchestra, and between headbanging and Balinese trance dance (kesurupan) (“Musisi Bali” 1996). This suggests an attempt to essentialize death metal in line with the view that the Bali’s cultural essence was the antithesis of Javanese refinement, the official version of Indonesian high culture. Such essentializing attempts proceeded in spite of the death-thrashers’ antiessentialist gestures elsewhere. It is important to establish that approving reports of death metal in the Bali Post in late 1995 and early 1996 did not diff use nor defuse the death metal scene.9 In fact, such reports seem to have had the reverse effect, as interviewees took pride in their connections with local journalists and reports about their bands that appeared in the local daily.10 Nevertheless, enthusiasts did take exception to the above-mentioned reports’ attempts to reessentialize death metal, and in response to my question of whether headbanging could indeed be considered similar to the Balinese trance dance, Dek Ben unequivocally replied: “That is wrong. We are not entranced when we headbang, merely dancing.” This raises a central point of difference between the broader regionalism and the identity politics of Balinese death-thrash, which rejected the

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essentialization of the Balinese “we” in opposition to Jakarta. In the deaththrashers’ opinions, the ideology of market logic and tourism’s essentializing tendencies were intertwined, and it was such essentialist assumptions which relegated their “hard” and “heavy” sounds to the scrap heap of a tourism-oriented society. Ari Phobia, for example, offered the following view: “There’s a lot of money for traditional Balinese culture. But nobody is willing to put money into what Balinese youth are interested in. People here think that local tradition is what is lucrative. They would rather build a museum than spend money on developing music that is popular among local youth. Maybe they want to preserve the traditional culture and protect it from Western influence.” The convergence of these gestures elsewhere with traces of a regionalist discourse in death-thrash fandom recall “strategic anti-essentialism” (Lipsitz 1994: 62–63), which describes how acts of protest can be disguised as frivolous fetishization of the Other in order to avert repression. Alternatively, in contexts where acts of protest are tolerated, antiessentialism can help illuminate the conditions of oppression experienced by the (essential) self. George Lipsitz offers numerous examples, including the popularization of punk rock among Chicanos from East Los Angeles, where “ ‘punk music projected a disdain for mainstream society that young Chicanos found useful as a vehicle for airing their own grievances” (ibid.: 85). There was no such inherent correlation between death metal’s “message” and the character of Balinese enthusiasts’ marginality. Nor were they necessarily compelled to express their grievances in an obscure and foreign language for fear of reprisal—as mentioned, candid challenges to official and elite discourses were being articulated elsewhere. But their fetishization of marginality, and their evocation of youth identities that were officially demonized, do echo broader discourses of Balineseness, which came to covet the grotesque and the “low” as symbols of Balinese authenticity, defined in opposition to “Jakarta.” Furthermore, as Ari’s comment makes clear, the death-thrashers’ gestures elsewhere illuminated the tourism industry’s very limited capacity to accommodate the needs and aspirations of local youth, and posed, in spectacular fashion, the question of whether tourism was any longer of benefit to them.

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T

CHAPTER 3

Reggae Reggae

he road from Bali’s international airport to the island’s most renowned tourist area, Kuta Beach, leads past a number of establishments claiming affi liation to reggae music and Rastafarianism in large, appropriately colored billboards. A sign outside a t-shirt shop bears the words Rasta Mania bordered in green, yellow, and red, with an African stick figure, the logo of this clothing label. In the window hangs a t-shirt with Bob Marley’s wizened face. His lips pinch a cone-shaped spliff, and he squints behind a veil of airbrushed smoke. A lean-to sign on the sidewalk outside Apache Bar announces “Reggae Bands Nightly.” This barn of coconut wood and thatch nestles Borderzones, behind Wendy’s Ice Cream Parlor and Chi Chi’s Mexican Graveyards Bar. Its timber walls emulate a spaghetti-Western set and are adorned with portraits of Native Americans. Each night, in addition to offering the music of reggae bands, Apache Bar unites young Japanese women with local “guides.” 1 In other coastal resorts around the island, one also finds bars devoted to nightly reggae music. Sanur has Mango Sindhu, where Magic Voice strikes up at nine in the evening, and couples timidly take to the dance floor in a valiant effort to dance off their pizza, chips, and Bintang beer. Legend is a lonely bar in Candi Dasa, a sleepy coastal resort. There young men from all over the rocky precinct of Karangasem come to perform or to dance beneath the bar’s feature Bob Marley mural to techno versions of “Get Up, Stand Up (For Your Rights).” Lovina on the island’s north coast has Malibu, which does a roaring trade every Saturday night when the reggae band from Denpasar is in town. A Balinese reggae scene first emerged in the early 1990s and centered on a beachside bar called Bruna, located in one of the island’s main tourist areas, Kuta. Every Saturday

night, a local Bob Marley and the Wailers cover band, Legend, played there. This event attracted a sizeable local fandom in which reggae was associated with an inclusiveness that, like youth scenes that also centered on Kuta Beach, contested demonization of the West in elite Balinese discourses of identity.2 By 1996, Bruna Bar had lost its license and the reggae scene its core “turf.” This early scene then metamorphosed into a later one, which in 1995 began to center on an annual festival, a “battle of the bands” convened by the Bali Tourism Academy (Sekolah Tinggi Pariwisata, stp). Local reggae groups were invited to compete for prize money and the chance at contracts with renowned live music venues in tourist areas. This chapter pursues questions about reggae’s curious transformation from a genre associated with Rastafarianism, a form of resistance to colonial exploitation devised by Kingston slum dwellers, to a style that appeared to revel in and understand itself by looking to the tourist gaze as into a mirror. Certainly, the global marketing of Marley’s music had transformed itself prior to its arrival in Bali. Nevertheless, as Balinese punks later demonstrated, it was possible for local youth to excorporate recuperated global styles and use them to revise New Order official and elite Balinese discourses of identity. 3 This prompts the question of why Balinese reggae musicians did not undertake similar appropriations. The fact that, in the 1990s, alternate, nonofficial articulations of Balineseness were reempowered in the local press only reinforces the urgency of this question, which I pursue in reverse, as it were—not through participant observation, for in 1996, when I began to research for this chapter, the scene was already dying. Prompted by the death-thrashers’ derision of the local reggae scene, I attempted something of an excavation. This chapter is based on conversations with reggae musicians and fans in which I urged them to both recollect an earlier, Bruna-based scene and characterize the later, festival-oriented scene of the mid-1990s. My Beautiful Kuta

Sunday Hot Music (shm) was also the first place I saw a reggae band play, in February 1996. When the death metal act Behead finished its set, the Sanur-based reggae band Adi Thumb took its place. As if repelled by this

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group’s tasseled rayon shirts and bright colors, a black-robed headbanging mass quickly and quietly backed away from the stage or just went home. Adi Thumb’s vocalist, Goes Toet, thrust a peace sign into the air above his head and shouted a cheery Rasta “Jah!” Several weeks after witnessing Adi Thumb’s performances at shm, I made my way to the offices of Crapt Entertainment, the company responsible for staging shm, which was housed in a disused peanut packing plant in the back streets of Denpasar. There Crapt’s owner, Rahmat Hariyanto, allowed me to leaf through his fi les of bands that had performed at shm, and explained to me why he had established the concert series, as well as his plans for its future. In 1992, a year after Hariyanto established Crapt Entertainment as a sound rental business, Bali’s music scene went into a lull. While Hariyanto attributed this to waning sponsorship,4 local musicians’ reminiscences suggest that it was the authorities’ phobia of rock riots following the Metallica Incident, and not the lack of sponsorship per se, that decreased the frequency of shows beginning in 1993. In Bali, the impact of the Metallica riot was the withdrawal of public, nonexclusive shows, such as those staged on campus or in civic buildings and capable of attracting large audiences. Between the Metallica Incident in 1993 and the launching of shm as a biweekly event in 1996, death metal and thrash bands had only three occasions to perform at public events.5 The reggae scene, meanwhile, flourished, and a reggae festival was staged in 1995, 1996, and 1997 by the Nusa Dua Tourism Academy. Hariyanto’s fi les for the reggae bands that had performed at shm were extensive, for these bands hired Crapt as an agent to seek regular gigs at tourist venues, which many of them obtained. But in 1996 Balinese thrash metal and punk bands could not draw on such resources. Tourist venues simply refused to hire them. When I spoke with him in April of that year, Jerink, the drummer for the punk band Superman Is Dead, explained to me that “if we want to play in a bar, we have to have a repertoire of about forty songs, provided by the employers, and they’re bound to be songs we’re not into, ’cause there’s no punk bar in Bali yet.” That the event continued through 1996 is likely due to Hariyanto’s altruism, for he confessed to having idealistic hopes for fledgling bands. Recognizing that the local band scene appeared to be caught in a bind between,

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on the one hand, a tourism-oriented circuit that demanded classic hits and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ songs and, on the other, a recording industry based in Jakarta that had shown little interest in the budding Balinese scene, Hariyanto pledged to use shm as a way to encourage local bands to compose more original material. In July 1996, bands performing at shm were required to fi ll 75 percent of their sets with original compositions, which Crapt recorded, with a view to compiling an album and later conducting a promotional tour of Java. Neither project was realized, but Hariyanto’s altruism was clearly sincere, for shm was no profitable venture. Balinese reggae focused exclusively on Bob Marley and the Wailers’ songs and images of Marley himself. In Bali, one rarely saw images of any other reggae artist, nor heard their music, and enthusiasm for reggae in Bali may be described as part of a global Marley fandom.6 Moreover, in spite of the parallel between Babylon and Jakarta clearly suggested in the budding regionalist discourse, reggae’s anticolonial message appeared to have little resonance among Balinese enthusiasts. When I arrived in Bali in 1996, reggae, far from expressing the prevailing regionalism, was being played to assure tourists of Bali’s inherent peace. Subsequent to my first glimpse of it, other encounters with Balinese reggae appeared to affirm its place as a commodity of the tourism industry, similar to instances of reggae’s routinization described elsewhere.7 In interviews I conducted at the beginning of that year, reggae musicians were most optimistic about their futures in cover bands playing tourism bars. Gus They’s comments typify the attitude of many of his contemporaries. It’s easy to find a job in a bar if you are a reggae band, because tourists really like reggae. That’s why, from 1994, we decided that Fatamorgana would be a reggae band. We play in hotels because it is really hard to record in Bali; there are no studios or people who are expert at promoting a band. That’s why we are better off playing in hotels. We seek a name for our band on the [festival] stage, then hope that on the basis of our performance at the festival the hotels will offer us gigs.

When I met him in 1996, Gus They was twenty and studying English literature at Warmadewa University in Denpasar. He invited me to meet him in the food court at Nu Dewata Ayu, a new and rather glitzy mall in central Denpasar, still in the final stages of construction. It struck me as incongru-

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ous that a reggae artist would frequent such a place, and when I arrived at our agreed meeting point, I was surprised by Gus They’s dress style, which was nothing like the colorful, flowing, and carefree aesthetic of the musicians I had seen performed at shm several days earlier. His shoulder-length hair was slicked back, and he wore a crisply ironed shirt and smart shoes, not thongs. Notably, he introduced himself by his full name: Ida Bagus Gede Dharma Putra. He may have meant this to gently show me his highcaste brahmana status, but I understood it then as indicating that he saw the meeting as formal. My attempts to introduce informality into the conversation failed, and I could not help but notice that he kept his designer sunglasses on throughout. But many of his statements echoed sentiments expressed by other reggae musicians with whom I subsequently chatted in more informal and relaxed surroundings. For example, when viewed alongside some of his other comments, as well as those by other reggae musicians with whom I spoke, Gus They’s apparent opportunism appears as a kind of ethnicity in construction in which his assumptions about an inherently peaceful and relaxing Balineseness become intertwined and conflated with tourists’ expectations of a Third World holiday destination. When I asked Gus They why managers of tourist bars favored reggae bands, he identified the beach and reggae as aspects of the free, inclusive realms to which holiday makers gravitated: “Reggae is nice to sway to, to accompany the tourists as they get drunk, or partially drunk, because reggae music glides and takes flight. In addition to having a political message, Bob Marley also invites us to sway with the music. Sway and enjoy his dope. Reggae serenades the tourists in Bali, accompanies them while they get drunk. That’s why most tourists like reggae.” There he paused, and I urged him to share more of his thoughts about why reggae accompanied tourists’ holidays so well. “Reggae is free,” he said. “Basically freedom, freedom to hang out, freedom to look for a lover, freedom to play, we have no ties with any vested interests, we are free—that is reggae. In Denpasar or in Bali, there is no freedom. In Kuta you can get freedom.” Gus They invited me to note down lyrics he had written, “Kutaku Indah” (“My Beautiful Kuta”), for which he had not yet written music. “Kutaku Indah” underscores his idealization of Kuta Beach and reggae, and his

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association of the latter with a touristic experience of Bali, for when I asked him what inspired him to write the lyrics, he replied that “we usually go and hang out at Kuta to get away from all our worries, and watch the sunset. The Kuta sunset is famous, right?” Walking on the white sand at dusk Relieves my tired heart Around me, the spray of the waves Enticing me to daydream From behind the clouds A ray of light calms my soul Will all this continue to be Will my beautiful Kuta be preserved My beautiful Kuta, even your sunset smiles My beautiful Kuta will I see you again

Similar associations, between reggae and the beach, emerge in the comments of other musicians I met. Rudi, who sang with the first reggae band to be formed in Bali, and who was central to the establishment of Bruna as a reggae venue, recalled that “Bruna had potential because it was by the beach, had a tropical feeling like in Jamaica, so we painted it red, yellow, and green, and people understood that there was reggae there.” The story told by Agung Joni was similar: “My friend Wayan went to Jamaica, to the Caribbean, and found out that there was reggae everywhere there. He thought it was strange that there was no reggae in Bali, even though it’s a tropical place, too. That’s good for the reggae music business.” Bobby, vocalist for the Marley cover band Soul Rebel, which in 1998 had a contract to play twice a week at All Stars Cafe in Kuta, told me that “reggae is big here and not in Jakarta. That’s because Bali is close to the beach [sic], and reggae is associated with the beach, relaxation, the beach [pantai, santai, pantai].” But in the mid-1990s enthusiasm for Bob Marley also began to surface beyond the spaces tourists frequented, particularly in the banjar-based sekehe teruna-teruni (stt; youth groups), where young men began to form Marley and the Wailers’ cover bands. When we spoke, Gus They saw reggae’s popularity among members of the stt as evidence that Balinese youth was continuing their culture’s inherent peacefulness. Moreover, he contrasted both reggae and this equanimity with thrash music, which he deemed “not 78

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appropriate for Bali because it is heavy and promotes violence. We Balinese are peaceful, relaxed.” Other reggae musicians expressed similar views. Members of Soul Rebel told me that “we like listening to reggae because it is relaxed, peaceful,” and Goes Amin, the keyboardist with the young Sanurbased group Adi Thumb, which I had first seen perform at shm, explained that “reggae is always associated with the beach, and the lyrics often refer to peace, which fits in well with Bali being a peace-loving island.” Viewed in the context of his earlier comments, Gus They’s remark seemed to validate an alternative Balineseness, as well as a populism which reified the low and hence contested elite identity constructions. But his insistence on Balinese peacefulness seemed inconsistent with this reading. I asked him about this, suggesting that such portrayals clashed with the island’s rather violent history. What about the common idea that Bob Marley’s popularity among Balinese youth reflected local populism, specifically the growing discontent with Jakarta’s role in the island’s tourism economy? Gus They hinted at affirming this link, but he shied away from specific associations: “I am proud of Bob Marley because he used his music as a way of liberating Jamaican society. . . . If you look at Bali there has been political conflict. But conflict in Bali and conflict in Jamaica are different. That’s why we only play Bob Marley’s songs, we give life to his music, but that doesn’t mean we talk about politics in Bali. We don’t dare challenge the government, because we are the little people.” Marley as Folk Hero

On many fronts, expressions of reggaeness in Bali suggest links between Bob Marley fandom and the populist regionalism that, as I discussed in chapter 2, was raging in the letters to the editor of the local daily and later, as we saw in chapter 1, on the streets of Denpasar in the lead up to both the general election and the 1998 national congress in Sanur of the pdi-Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle). For example, Bob Marley’s face, in addition to being a common feature in tourist bars, could also be seen in public spaces in Denpasar, which attracts few tourists. Along with those of Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, Megawati Soekarnoputri, and Indonesian folk singer Iwan Fals, Bob Marley’s face is among those most commonly stuck to the back windows of bemos (public minibuses). Stalls lining the outside wall of the Sanglah marketplace specialize in stickers and reggae borderzones

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posters. Here Apache chiefs are absent, as Iwan Fals, Megawati Soekarnoputri, and Soekarno are in Kuta. In chapter 2, I described the noisy, angry, colorful rallies at which support for Megawati Soekarnoputri and her pdi-Perjuangan was announced and celebrated in Denpasar’s streets prior to the party congress in Sanur in 1998. Such affairs certainly defied the assurances by Gus They and other reggae musicians that Balinese people are inherently peaceful and relaxed. Marley’s place alongside Soekarno at Denpasar’s Sanglah market thus reveals a telling, if not explicit, association of them with an anticolonial and inclusive revolutionary spirit. Indeed, many of the same musicians who assured me of the vital link between Balinese people’s relaxed and peaceful tendencies and reggae’s popularity intimated, at other points in our conversations, that Balinese Bob Marley fandom resonated with other political struggles. The reggae musicians I interviewed were consistent in their very amorphous characterizations of Balinese Bob Marley fandom, which often seemed to embrace the tourist gaze, yet at the same time to flow, albeit more tentatively, toward a Balinese regionalism and reformasi movement which protested the rapid loss of Balinese land to Jakartanese investors. However, like Gus They, these musicians only hinted at this connection, never cementing it. Some days after my meeting with Gus They at the Nu Dewata Ayu, I spoke with Agung Joni, who had been a member of the jury for the reggae festival the previous year and who sang in a reggae band called Sunshine, which had a regular weekly gig at Bruna. He did not ask to meet me at the mall as Gus They had done, but he invited me instead to his house in Sanur, which was nestled by trees from the broad and busy bypass that stretches north–south between the airport on the island’s southern peninsula and Denpasar’s east. When I arrived he ushered me into an annex which housed some furniture as well as several amps and guitars, and he gestured for me to sit on a dilapidated and dusty bench upholstered in brown vinyl. Unlike the strikingly neat Gus They, twenty-three-year-old Gung Joni wore a grubby pair of jeans and long, stiff dreadlocks. He used the dreads to embrace a certain marginality, for although he had completed his studies in English literature at Warmadewa University, where Gus They also studied, he was forbidden from graduating until he cut the dreads off. Moreover,

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despite his triwangsa, specifically ksatria, status, Gung Joni appeared proud of the fact that in local readings, his dreads identified him with healers from a commoner (jaba—lit. “outsider”) caste, who also wore their hair dreaded and who, he pointedly asserted, “are different from the Brahman priests!” In Bali dreadlocks are a gift from God. Usually, those Balinese people who wear their hair dreaded have a clean mind. They are given the task of making a ceremony, like a . . . like a priest. Not a Brahman priest, but like a dukun, a healer. In Bali, if your hair is tightly dreaded, it means that your heart is also tight—like in Jamaica. In Jamaica they call it bush doctor. Similar culture, ya. . . . Many old people in Bali wear dreads. And these people may think that if my hair is dreaded, I am like them too, that I’ve just completed a healing ceremony.

Although he favored the “new ragamuffin/rap” style of vocal performance, Agung Joni confessed that Bob Marley was his favorite reggae artist. When I asked him what about Marley most touched him, he could scarcely contain his excitement: I like him because he is a genius. In singin.’ If I hear Bob Marley it is like I am reading the Bible. Because Bob Marley makes music; it is the message within the music and the music within the message. He brutalizes people with music. . . . before when he made his music was still the time of apartheid. Reggae became known in America as rock steady. The Americans did not know that it was reggae. If they knew that it was black music they would cut it. . . . But with music Bob Marley spoke a message which people could hear. About love, about God, and the need for a united humanity. Sometimes people like to proclaim their national identity, but Rastafarians are one race, one blood, one love. This is what I like about reggae.

However, when I encouraged him to contextualize Bob Marley’s message in a Balinese sociopolitics, he, like Gus They, was hesitant: “I think that there are no longer any social problems in Bali. Because there is equality here, and I am content to live in Bali, and proud to be Balinese. I can do anything I want here. If I want to smoke, I can buy cigarettes at the warung; it’s easy to get around to wherever you want to go: you only need five hundred rupiah and you can jump on a bemo.” These early conversations led me to some preliminary conclusions about the rationalized dimensions of Balinese reggae practice. Indeed, the fact

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that by 1996 the Balinese reggae scene included a contest, organized by the island’s Tourism Academy and sponsored by “big capital” tourism ventures such as Hackett Bungee Jump, Waterbom Park, and Bali Hai cruises, suggests a rationalization by which reggae’s value became reduced to a market logic, as does reggae musicians’ view of their music’s exchange value in the tourism industry’s labor market. Further, consensus among enthusiasts that playing Marley covers was about the beach, relaxation, and getting a regular hotel gig suggests that in Bali, reggae-related symbols had been invested with new meanings in the global tourism industry. Relying on Jamaica’s renown as a tourist destination and on preexisting stereotypical depictions of “nonwhiteness” in the Balinese tourism industry, “rasta” symbolized beachside destinations, hedonism, abandon, and a Jah Jah Binks kind of innocence, as it did in other beachside tourist destinations in the global South. Reggae’s commodification by the Balinese tourism industry appears akin to characterizations of routinized reggae practices elsewhere. But Balinese reggae practices are far more complex and contradictory than routinization suggests. It would certainly be misleading, for example, to cast Balinese reggae musicians as victims of capitalism and development, for it could be argued that reggae’s commercialization empowered them to pursue careers as reggae musicians, which freed them from other more mundane options, such as unemployment, civil service, hospitality. Moreover, Bob Marley’s image and music resonated in different Balinese contexts in a variety of ways that suggested an earlier, more marginal, and since deterritorialized scene based at Kuta, the fate of which demonstrates developmentalism’s capacity to disperse marginal solidarities by infringing on the spaces in which they gel. As such, the fate of this earlier scene foretold that of the Balinese death metal and punk scenes which subsequently emerged in the wake of the tourism boom. The Bruna Borderzone

The Balinese reggae scene can be traced to the coming together of a Balibased, Javanese Rastafarian and reggae musician, Rudi, and a man from Jamaica called Sam. In the late 1980s, Rudi went to live in England with his English wife and their child. He frequently busked at Camden Market, play-

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ing Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan songs, often using guitar and harmonica in the Dylan style. His hair was dreaded, not because he was a Rastafarian (a faith he had not yet adopted), but because, he claimed, cutting his hair gave him a headache. The dreads nevertheless brought him into contact with a local Rastafarian scene. Soon, he recalls, he adopted the Rastafarian lifestyle and beliefs: One day a guy with really long dreads went by. A Jamaican guy. He said, “Hey, dreadlocks, natty dread.” Then he said, “You follow me. What are you doing busking here? Follow me.” He took me to a place where there were all these Rastafarian people drumming and chanting. It was full of smoke; everybody was smoking. After that, I never played rock and roll again. . . . I entered the Rastafarian religion. I used to really like eating steak and sate, and I gave up all that and became vegetarian.

Rudi was not forthcoming on whether he saw reggae as linking him to other, similarly oppressed “people of color,” such as the English Rastafarians and Sam, so his encounters do not necessarily affirm the contention that reggae’s internationalization gave marginalized people an expressive vehicle, as P. O’Gormon (1997) contends. But Rudi’s recollections do attest to the disparate roots of the Balinese reggae scene. Reggae’s passage to Bali, that is, can be traced not only to the global tourism industry in which Bob Marley’s image and music came to be associated with tropical, beachside destinations but also to more interpersonal encounters between Indonesians, Jamaicans, and other Rastafarian communities abroad. Notably, Rudi stressed the coincidental nature of how his friendship with the English Rastafarians was sparked. Such coincidences, important in the establishment of a Balinese reggae scene, suggest that the global dissemination of Rastafarian and reggae-related symbols may not always be as purposeful as much of the literature on the internationalization of reggae suggests. By the time I met Rudi in 1998, the strength of his piety had waned, but his dreadlocks remained. One thick pipe of matted hair arced rigidly under his chin, framing papery skin, stretched taut across a delicate jaw. He told me that “after returning from England, around 1989, I met up with Sam and we formed a reggae band together, called Jamasyah. There was no reggae at Bruna Bar at that time, and it was very quiet. We injected some life into

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it. We took over the place once a week, as well as the catering. We printed tickets and did our own promotions.” Jamasyah’s success in drawing increasing numbers of people to the bar was corroborated by other musicians, but interviewees more commonly referred to the establishment of the Legend band and its regular gig at Bruna, which began after Jamasyah dissolved, as the catalyst that solidified the local reggae scene. Notably, musicians remembered the reggae scene of the early 1990s as an authentic core which held sway over musicians from the metropolis. In this way, Bruna was remembered as a site of pilgrimage, with nationwide resonance. Rudi recalled how “many musicians who visited here to check out the scene returned to Jakarta and began to write songs in Indonesian, but with a reggae beat.” Cahyadi, a session musician and a senior of the tourism bar circuit, and Gus Martin, the Bali Post’s music reporter were both more explicit about Bruna’s influence over the productions of Jakarta rock bands. Both referred to the time members of the hugely successful Jakarta-based rock band Slank spent at Bruna and the deep impression it left on them. “Many Jakartanese musicians looked for inspiration here. [The members of] Slank, for example, were heavily influenced by their experiences in Bali. They became interested in reggae music,” said Cahyadi, while Gus Martin noted in a 3 May 1998 interview that “Bruna influenced bands from Jakarta, like Slank who, after visiting Bali, began to insert reggae riffs into their songs.” Indeed, the lyrics of the Slank track that Cahyadi, Gus Martin, and Rudi referred to, “Bali Bagus,” from the album Kampungan, shed light on this center-periphery relationship: Thank you, my Bali, for your culture and your nature Thank you for your beautiful girls And the strength of your Balinese arak Watching the sunset at the beach takes away my weariness Bathing in the sea eases my stress Watching your girls dance is a sight for sore eyes The night air of Kuta takes away my anger For a moment I forget the confl icts of my ego Living in Jakarta, full of rules Where saying or wearing what you want is forbidden Where people whisper and gossip if I hang out with whomever I please.

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The depiction of Kuta Beach in this song is similar to that of Gus They’s “My Beautiful Kuta.” But unlike the latter, the Slank track does not warn of the loss of paradise; it merely celebrates the beach as an innocent, unregulated realm—a welcome contrast to the highly regulated metropolitan home. To the members of Slank, Bali was the beach, a place of hedonism, and they experienced it as tourists. Far from protesting the Jakartanese experience of Bali, local reggae enthusiasts embraced it. That local reggae enthusiasts took pride in the influence of their beach culture on the Jakarta rock scene supports Balinese authorities’ contention that tourism “reinforced the sense of cultural identity and pride of the people of Bali” (Picard 1990a: 43), as well as Michel Picard’s own arguments, based on such statements, for the influence of a tourist-generated image of Balinese identity over Balinese self-perceptions. But local elites were unlikely to cite the influence of the Bruna reggae scene over Jakarta-based rock bands as an instance of cultural preservation thanks to tourism; the Bruna scene has little place in elite discourses on authentic Balineseness, which rarely celebrate arak drinking as a favorable aspect of Balinese masculinity. Indeed, the way enthusiasts recalled the Bruna scene is reminiscent of the qualities Gus They assigned to Kuta and reggae alike. They suggested that the bar was a kind of free zone, where behavior could be cut loose from the demands of cultural preservation. In contrast to the dominant local discourses of identity, which sought to uphold Balineseness as unique, reggae enthusiasts pinned the authenticity of the Bruna scene to a cosmopolitan inclusiveness and the dissolution of racial and socioeconomic divisions. There the experience of marginality or Otherness was heightened by the liberal use of ganja. Bruna was an easygoing place. Anyone was welcome there. —Agung Alit There were all sorts at Bruna: beach boys, fishermen, and even millionaires. —Gus Martin (1998 interview) Japanese, Americans, Australians, black people—everybody came together there; that was the good thing about the Bruna reggae club. —Rudi You could smoke joints freely at Bruna; that’s why so many people went there. —Soul Rebel

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These reggae enthusiasts and musicians did not appear to be concerned, as were the Balinese academics who in 1975 published the report on tourism’s impact on local youth cited in chapter 1, that their “standard of decency [was] getting very low” (Universitas Udayana and Francillon 1975: 745). Some recent discussions of Balinese identity intimate that the singularity of public/official discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, far from representing consent, papered over more critical and innovative formulations. Carol Warren (1998a), for example, cites Bali as a prime instance of the kind of cultural borderzone in which “invented” dichotomies, such as past/present, East/West, and traditional/modern converge, giving rise to ambiguous and ambivalent meanings. As such, she argues, these cultural borderzones become important sites for identity construction and revision. In a similar vein, adopting Michel Foucault’s (1986) term heterotopia, Kevin Hetherington (1997: 107–8) has argued that marginal space assumes “social centrality” in the formation and performance of expressive identities. Like Warren’s borderzones, Hetherington’s margins “are not things pushed to the edge, they can also be in-between spaces, spaces of traffic, right at the center of things.” Bruna Bar was one such margin. Above, I differentiated between two different local conceptions of Bob Marley. In beachside tourist destinations across the world, he stood for hedonism, peace, and relaxation, and indeed Balinese enthusiasts uniformly subscribed to this view of him. In certain Balinese contexts, however, to the very same enthusiasts, far from being a hedonist, Marley, like Iwan Fals, Mbak Mega, and Soekarno, represented justice and courage, someone who stood up for the “little people.” As tourists flocked to hear reggae bands play, and locals reveled in the nascent reggae scene, different readings of reggae-related symbols converged at Bruna Bar. Furthermore, the bar’s location by the beach appeared to blur the distinction between exteriority and interiority, which was also aided by the fact that, until 1995, entry was free. In short, as the interview subjects cited above indicated, anyone and everyone (except for Balinese women, who were absent from these scenes, too) ebbed and flowed through Bruna’s doors, and as local and tourist understandings of “reggaeness” converged, so did other, parallel dichotomies, including East/West, center/periphery, and rich/poor. In this way, Bruna harbored experiences of Marley fandom suggestive of local critical responses

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to New Order developmentalism, and of a global space on the fringes of local elite constructions of Balinese identity. Nevertheless, marginal spaces can also be erased by developmentalist notions of progress. William F. Lewis (1994) implies as much in his discussion of how spontaneity and trickery among the Jamaican Rastafarians were obliterated by a market logic. He draws attention to how Rastafarians sought to profit from reggae’s international popularity, and improve their image in elite discourses of Jamaican identity, which came to accept the Rastafarians as authentic Jamaicans. Rasta symbols and products were thus incorporated into a local tourist trade, at least partly controlled by Rastafarians themselves. Far from viewing this as evidence of Rastafarians’ empowerment, Lewis argues that their involvement in tourism signaled the erasure of the Rastafarians’ characteristic trickery and its replacement with modernity’s trademark rationality: “What all this indicates is that their reasoning has truly descended to rationality and that they have lost their sense of existential absurdity. For them, the outrageous has become impossible. They have turned Rasta ethos toward a rational economic productivity, strengthening class division and the mystification of the state” (291). The fate of the Bruna reggae scene also illustrates the danger of overestimating locals’ capacity to draw global media products into their own, self-determined identity practices. As will become clear in the account below, what happened to the Balinese reggae scene is evidence of the power of state discourses, including state-generated discourses of tourism development, to obliterate such heteroglossies by physically transforming local landscapes. It thus shows the very tenuous position of the ambivalent spatial discourses that harbor identity reenvisions and revises. The Reggae Graveyard

Although Kuta was included as a designated tourism zone in the first development plan for Bali, the beach’s development has lacked control and direction (Picard 1996). Compared to the sanitized, manicured order of Nusa Dua, Kuta is positively haphazard. In the 1970s locals established smallscale ventures which accommodated foreign surfers who favored the area’s local flavor over Nusa Dua’s resorts (see Neely 1998). Enthusiasts’ accounts of changes in the reggae scene suggest that until the 1990s Kuta provided

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young Balinese men with a space on the fringes of local society, a margin or borderzone where liminal behavior was permitted. After the investment boom, Kuta was transformed from a place where local men could mix freely with foreign tourists to a playground for tourists from Jakarta, one from which young local men were largely excluded. Over the course of 1995, the Bruna scene declined. This was probably less due to the institution of a ten-thousand-rupiah door charge—which Frit, the former vocalist with Legend, maintained was not applied to local regulars—than the construction of a paved esplanade which forced Bruna back from the shore. Frit maintained that the latter was more important in reducing Bruna’s accessibility to a broad variety of people, hence attesting to the importance of the beach as a borderzone which blurred distinctions between interiority and exteriority and helped maintain Bruna’s heterotopic qualities. If enthusiasts recalled with pride the Bruna scene’s influence over Jakartan rock bands, by the mid-1990s they were lamenting the Jakartanization of Kuta and the concomitant obliteration of its marginal reggae scene, now ordered by “Big Capital” commercial interests: Reggae has been commercialized. Many good musicians play in reggae bands, but there is no place for them, so they just play covers in the commercial sector. Bruna offered a place which was not commercial, because anyone could go there. Market demands are now withering away reggae musicians’ idealism. —Frit Nowadays, we are flooded with Jakartan culture. Jakartan people now determine our culture of leisure. —Ngurah Karyadi Bruna was a far cry from the Hard Rock Cafe of today. It catered more to the lower classes. At Bruna locals and Westerners came together. Bruna catered more to the lower classes than does Hard Rock Cafe. This is in line with the way in which people perceived the Rastafarian movement; that it was for the people. —Made Arthana [In comparison to Bruna], Hard Rock is too high class. Lower-class people can’t go there. —Bobby, vocalist for Soul Rebel

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Kuta had been transformed from the place it was in the late 1980s, when Sam and Rudi’s reggae parties had spawned a local fandom, into a kind of supercultural wonderland, replete with malls, plazas, multinational brandname clothing stores, and fast-food chains. Local night life also came to be dominated by international chains such as Hard Rock Cafe and Studebakers, and local youth were marginalized by the widespread introduction of cover charges. Notably, reggae enthusiasts who had been part of the earlier Bruna-based scene understood the closure of Bruna in 1996 in the context of the marginalization of local entrepreneurs and other local interests by the investment interests of the Suhartos and their associates, who were heavily involved in the “booming” Balinese tourism industry (Aditjondro 1995). Indeed, it was rumored that the five long-standing nightclubs that closed in 1996 were shut down to make way for Jakartan competitors, and in October 1996, the governor of the province decreed that only five-star hotels would be allowed to operate discotheques, in the interests of community order and safety (“Di Bali” 1996; “Tiga” 1996; “Diskotek” 1996; “Buntut” 1996; “Setelah” 1996). By this time the Balinese reggae scene had become an annual festival in which bands competed for contracts in tourist bars, competitions organized by the Nusa Dua–based Tourism Academy and sponsored by Waterbom Park, Hacket Bungee Jump, a Nusa Dua hotel, and Bali Hai day cruises. The fate of the Balinese reggae scene attests, therefore, to the danger of overestimating reggae’s polysemic capacities. Balinese reggae fans retained ambiguous and marginal dimensions as long as enthusiasts could come together in a space approximating heterotopia, or borderzones. After the demise of the Bruna scene, playing reggae became unequivocally associated with an exchange value on the tourism industry’s labor market. This exchange value depended on musicians’ compliance with the industry’s demands (such as playing covers according to employers’ stipulations) and in this way contrasted with an emerging regionalist discourse in which Balineseness was becoming aligned with increasing opposition to the industry’s new development direction. Nevertheless, those who aspired to or secured jobs on that market associated that exchange value with certain “essentially Balinese” qualities, such as peace and relaxation, hence generating a new kind of reggae authenticity, which musicians highlighted by Othering “vioreggae borderzones

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lent, un-Balinese” thrash music. Other enthusiasts, cited above, lamented reggae’s “commercialization,” thus contesting this new authenticity. Nonetheless, by the late 1990s, after the demise of the Bruna scene, reggae practice in Bali appears to have been notably recontextualized. The role of the annual reggae “festival” in the rationalization of a marginal Balinese reggae scene recalls how, in the late 1990s, lomba (competitions) became a common mode by which the New Order state attempted to impose social order, as evident in realms other than the music scene. Warren, for example, refers to the “New Ordering” of space in Bali by way of cleanliness competitions. In particular, she discusses the fate of the Ubud graveyard when subjected to one such “tidy town” lomba, much to locals’ chagrin, and cites this as an example of the impact of a “monologic” modernity on a “heteroglossic magic-real cultural domain.” She describes an informal conversation between herself, an Ubud-based bureaucrat (Gusti Ngurah), and a painter (Ida Bagus Made): As an illustration Gusti Ngurah was making about the great debates on globalization and modernity which currently raged, he pointed across the path and waving his finger with a mocking gesture said: “Look, can you believe it! Now we even have ‘lomba kuburan’ [graveyard competitions]. Look at the result!” Suddenly the blank uninterested expression on Ida Bagus Made’s face was replaced with a fiery one and he joined in with a derisory tirade mixing anger and laughter. . . . [The] gesture was too much for both of them. It was no longer “natural” (alam), like a “hotel,” it had lost its aesthetic (kurang seni) and its magical enchantment (angker). (Warren 1998a: 100)

In certain respects, the fate of Bruna’s borderzone was similar to that of the Ubud graveyard. For example, if Ubud locals critiqued the development of their graveyard, now seen as “no longer ‘natural,’” many reggae enthusiasts also lamented the loss of Bruna’s cosmopolitan, inclusive space. Further, if local Ubud bureaucrats successfully tamed the town’s “wild” areas with concrete and walls, the reggae scene was similarly ordered. Beneath the auspices of the Tourism Academy, the bands competed for contracts with bars where they were to labor as tourists’ entertainers.

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I

CHAPTER 4

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n chapter 1 I discussed the context of media deregulation, in which media images became increasingly important in the dissemination of music, and poor and peripheral young people were distanced from rock performances, which became the exclusive domain of a new rich class of youth. This was particularly evident in the case of alternative music. Unlike the Brazilian band Sepultura, which played for seven thousand rupiah per ticket in the East Javanese city of Surabaya as well as in Jakarta when they toured to Indonesia in 1992, neither Green Day nor the bands that played at the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival performed any regional shows at all. Similarly, unlike many Indonesian rock and pop bands, Indonesian Beginnings alternative groups also rarely conducted regional tours. The deregulation of television extended the reach of media images of alternative music, which portrayed the genre as a practice exclusive to a new rich class of youth, firmly rooted in the metropolis. But if the imagery generated by the Indonesian alternative music campaign may be implicated in attempts by a new rich class to associate rock music fandom with consumerism and hedonism, it did not necessarily engender such values. Media images played a central role in the transmission of alternative music to Bali, where the genre helped inspire the early development of the Balinese punk scene. This chapter examines how that scene began, as Balinese reggae, death metal, and punk enthusiasts negotiated their identities around images of alternative music that they saw on television and read about in magazines. This highlights the importance of visual dimensions in how punk was consumed. As I mentioned in the introduction, “music” connotes imagery as well as sound, and both were equally important to the identity practices that gelled around young Balinese men’s engagements with reggae, punk, and death metal.

When I arrived in Bali in early 1996, the island’s soundscape was awash with Green Day. Having rehearsed the chords and lyrics published in a Haiklip dedicated to Green Day, groups of arak-drinking young men all over Denpasar rendered acoustic versions of the hit track on Green Day’s album Dookie. But alternative music’s appeal in Bali ran deeper than drunken singalongs, and from around 1994 many local teenage boys were meeting in threes and fours, in bedrooms and studios, to organize as alternative bands. Between April and June 1996, I talked at length with members of the Nirvana cover bands Obligasi and Utero, and the punk bands Triple Punk, rip, and Superman Is Dead (sid). Due to the frequent conflation of the alternative, grunge, and punk genres by those inside and outside the alternative/punk scene in early 1996, I refer to this moment in Balinese punk as alternapunk. The term is my own formulation, not one used by the musicians, and is meant to imply that local youths’ enthusiasm for alternative music formed the crucible of a punk subculture that later developed in Bali. Indeed, all of the five alternapunk bands whose members’ comments are cited below participated in the stylistic and organizational development of punk as an underground movement beginning in 1997. In early 1996, the Phobia hangout had conveniently provided me with a death metal core from which I pivoted in my initial explorations of this scene and its history. The alternapunks had no such core, and the members of the bands cited here had only met one another in passing, for they hung out in separate places—usually the living room, porch, shed, or bedroom of a band member’s house. Some time after my first, separate visits to these hangouts, it occurred to me to revisit all of the sites in a single day and refresh my sense of the scene’s scattered nature. I found myself circling the city, then cutting across its diameter, in my attempts to achieve this. Starting at rip’s hangout on the porch of the guitarist Ade’s house in the north of the city, I traveled down Denpasar’s eastern fringe to Sanur’s muddy and still densely treed back blocks, where I had to carefully direct my scooter over unsealed, narrow tracks to reach the house where Triple Punk members gathered in Yande’s bedroom. I then headed back into the heart of Denpasar where members of Obligasi hung out at Warmadewa University’s for-rent practice studio, and then further west, I penetrated the cracked and buckled laneway that led to the crowded, ramshackle urban scene of Utero’s

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hangout. Finally, I traveled another twenty minutes south along the busy road that links the city with the airport and Kuta, where members of sid hung out in the bedroom of their drummer, Jerink. Poppies II is a winding, potholed lane, lined with a jumble of shops: minimarts, Internet cafes, restaurants, and street-side stalls selling souvenir t-shirts and cloth bags which, hung from awnings, swing and flutter in the breeze. This lane provides access to Kuta’s beachfront esplanade from the main drag, Jalan Raya Kuta, and channels tourists from there, as well as from the tiny lanes that lead from it to losmens (homestays) and hotels. It accommodates an endless trickle of people and cars negotiating the muddy puddles as they move to and from the beach. It is jammed with traffic every Saturday night and completely flooded every rainy season. In 1996, Poppies II was also notorious as a place to score hard substances in small amounts from street-side dealers. In April 1996, I too negotiated those muddy puddles, for I had an appointment with the members of Superman Is Dead—Bobby, Eka, and Jerink—who regularly hung out at Twice Pub, owned by Jerink’s parents. Twice Pub was a standard bar/restaurant: rickety bamboo furniture, pink serviettes that always seems too small and too waxy, tiny plastic bottles of abc sambal and kecap, oozing and crusty, pizza, pancakes, jaffles (toasted sandwiches), and lukewarm juice. The band members hung out on the first floor, practicing in the room where Jerink kept his drum set and had set up a home studio (see figure 5). sid’s relationship with Kuta has been an enduring facet of a Balinese punk scene which continues to claw its way toward ever shifting fringes and margins. As will become clear in this chapter, the band, particularly its drummer, Jerink, played an important role in the generation of an alternapunk identity which began to head for these margins in early 1996. The band began the journey rather timidly, oscillating between a carefree hedonism and sporadic, provocative confrontations. Unlike the Twice Pub where the band members met, sid was distinctive. Bobby, Eka, and Jerink insisted that they wanted to make careers of playing rock and roll. This distinguished them from most other alternapunk bands of the period, whose members saw playing punk rock as a hobby. Indeed, aside from Sunday Hot Music (shm), where they played for no pay, there

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Bobby and Eka of Superman Is Dead rehearsing. Credit: Figure 5

Emma Baulch

were few opportunities for alternapunk groups to perform in Bali, for tourist bars only employed Top 40 or reggae cover bands. Therefore, as was the case with the death metal and reggae musicians cited in previous chapters, I first saw these alternapunk musicians play at shm, at the time Bali’s only regular, pangenre gig. It had been held over four consecutive Sundays in the month of May (the four shows held annually were thus dubbed a “Month of Sundays” [originally in English]) in 1994 and 1995 but, due to increasing numbers of bands applying for selection, the series went to twice a month in 1996. It featured six bands per show, three of which were “senior” 1 groups invited by the organizers and three of which were selected from the twiceweekly auditions. Any one show thus included a combination of classic rock, pop, reggae, heavy metal, death metal/grindcore/thrash (frequently

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conflated in the Bali Post’s reports), and alternative/punk (similarly conflated). But even the advent of the annual Month of Sundays in 1994 and 1995 contributed significantly to the island’s performance calendar, giving death/thrash metal and punk bands the kind of performance space they had been denied due to official restriction of rock performances after the Metallica riots. Yet the musicians I interviewed in early 1996 remembered this as a gigless period, a quiet time, a lull. For them, the Month of Sundays could not keep pace with the quickly rising number of bands, an increase observed by many of the people I interviewed about the local music scene in early 1996. There was also a common perception that the band boom was characterized by enthusiasm for alternative music, and specifically for Green Day. The lineup at the eight shms that took place in 1996 does not support this view. In fact, no alternative bands performed until the fourth show on 17 March (at which sid and Utero played), and following that only four alternative bands (1920, Lithium, Obligasi, and Triple Punk) performed until the final show for 1996 on 19 May. Nor do the alternative bands that performed at shm suggest an overwhelming passion for Green Day. Certainly, when sid performed for the first time on 17 March, they covered two Green Day songs. However, they completed their four-song set with two originals. At the same show Utero played two Nirvana covers and one original. Of the four other bands to perform, only one (1920) covered Green Day, while Triple Punk covered Rancid, and Lithium and Obligasi both covered Nirvana. But this chapter does not aim to pursue an objective truth, and the exaggerations I have mentioned only reinforce the validity of remembering as a practice of identity.2 The perception that Green Day cover bands dominated the scene, although falsely premised, was nevertheless politically significant, for Green Day was symbolic of a metropolitan superculture which musicians experienced primarily as a mediascape (specifically a television one). Nonalternapunks perceived this mediascape as uncompromisingly foreign—both antithetical and threatening to the preexisting and authentic youth culture of which they were a part. Their Othering of alternapunk paralleled a broader regionalist discourse, for as Balinese youths were playing and listening to alternative music—a genre much more closely and unequivocally aligned with “Jakarta” than the death metal and reggae genres

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with which it coexisted—public discourses of Balineseness were shifting vis-à-vis the increasing demonization of the metropolis. However, the young Balinese I interviewed in early 1996 did not share their views on such issues. They found the discursive context most relevant to their lifestyles to be that of the local band scene, a kind of petri dish of various musical genres mutually defined through processes of self-definition and Othering. Othering Alternapunk Here the people tend to go for whatever is the new trend, whatever is the latest thing, they go for it. At the moment it’s alternative. Green Day covers. . . . After the Green Day concert, everyone plays Green Day. Dek Ben, vocalist and bass, Triple Six

Unfortunately, many of the newly emerged groups here are just photocopies. They’re not brave enough to write their own songs or to perform unique aspects of their own culture. We death metal musicians started our careers by developing instrumental skills, then by reaching into our local culture. That’s what a lot of these new groups haven’t done. They’re so proud of playing Green Day covers. What is it, they lack selfconfidence or what? So many bands are still playing covers. Agus Yanky, 29 March 1996

Now many of those who started playing reggae have decided that reggae is not for them. Now they play alternative music. Out comes Green Day now. All the bands in Bali play Green Day. High school kids, all play Green Day. University bands, Green Day. They don’t want to focus on one genre. So fickle! We’re just staying focused on reggae. Gus They

When I first began chatting with Denpasar-based musicians in early 1996, I was both comforted (for here was a pattern) and intrigued to find that, in defending their choice of music, death metal and reggae musicians frequently contrasted the individuality of their style with alternative music’s popularity. They seemed to find it difficult to speak of their own musical practices without referring to this monolithic Other, alternative music, and in its shadow they proudly stood. Four years later, when I scrutinized transcripts of these interviews, I was reminded of how alternapunk had represented the rootless pollutant against which death metal and reggae enthusiasts defined their authenticity. I also noticed further patterns, namely, that this Othering caricatured alternapunk musicians, relying on dichotomies and sets of associations of the sort expressed in the epigraphs to this section. 96

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I will identify and interpret some of these sets of associations below, but allow me first to note the similarities between the Othering of alternapunk and the regionalist sentiment that began to emerge in the early 1990s. These similarities also became clearer to me when I returned to the transcripts in 2000, by which time I was able to access a range of published works on Bali’s experience of globalization, a common feature of which is cartoons. Rubinstein and Connor 1999, Vickers 1996, and Picard 1999 all use such images by Balinese artists, and Warren 1998a finds the caricatures to be part of a local critical discourse that contested official formulations of development and progress. One of the most frequently reproduced images, by Balinese cartoonist Surya Dharma, depicts progress as an hourglass which transforms flooded rice terraces into a concrete jungle. Had the artist been Agus Lempog (a professional guitarist who regularly gigged at tourist bars), guitars, amps, and drum kits may well have appeared in place of Surya Dharma’s skyscrapers. Agus Lempog reasoned that the increase in the number of bands was due to the fact that “musical instruments are easier to come by now. Look in Jimbaran, for example. People sell their land and if they’ve got teenage kids they buy musical instruments. For the kids it’s a form of prestige and it gives them a hobby.” The veracity of Agus Lempog’s claim, which links a burgeoning local band scene and the increasing numbers of young Balinese men acquiring electric guitars and drum sets and setting up mini studios in their homes to the sudden affluence of those who sold their land to developers during the tourism boom of the early 1990s, remains tenuous. It was not always reflected in the alternapunk scene that I encountered in early 1996. Of the bands cited here, two (rip and sid) had access to in-house studios and topbrand instruments. The Nirvana cover band Obligasi, however, not only did not have access to a home studio, they had to rent their instruments from the university they attended, where a studio was also available for rehearsals. Triple Punk and Utero had their own instruments but pooled their resources to rent practice space. But Lempog’s views do turn our attention to two of Balinese regionalism’s core concerns, land ownership and territoriality, which were frequent themes for Balinese cartoonists throughout the 1990s. Their caricatures ironically superimpose symbols of indigenous life (live pigs, Hindu shrines, bare-chested men dressed in sarong and the Balinese udeng headdress) onto Punk’s Beginnings

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those of the metropole’s local presence (golf courses, the concrete jungle, television). The comic value of these superimpositions lies in the unlikelihood of such a coexistence. A dichotomy is thus achieved. Carol Warren (1998a) discusses the role of cartoons in popularizing dichotomous notions of Balinese culture in the context of a mass reflection on Balinese identity, prompted by the tourism boom which began in the late 1980s. She observes that caricatures of Balinese identities regularly published in the Bali Post set big capital against the little person, private against communal interests, and cultural pollution against cultural authenticity. The Othering of alternapunk echoed this regionalist caricaturing, for similar sets of associations also emerge in the epigraphs above, in which reggae and death metal musicians associate compliance, naiveté, lack of creativity, and vulnerability with the alternapunk scene. Further, Green Day, television, and Jakarta were equally implicated in the perceived cultural gray-out of the local band scene. 3 However, these identity politics were not articulated in public debates mediated by the local press, as were the critiques of resort developments (Warren 1994, 1995, 1998a, 1998b). Rather, they were performed as a theater in and around the contested space of the shopping mall. Malls mushroomed all over Indonesia in the 1990s, considerably transforming urban landscapes across the archipelago. Frequently, malls accommodated subcultural practices. Nevertheless, in Bali, malls were mostly portrayed as symbols of an encroaching metropolitan superculture—a kind of neocolonialism in action which threatened to obliterate the agrarian values and local livelihoods supported by the traditional marketplace. For example, in a spate of articles that appeared in the local press in 1995–96 decrying the chaotic and imposed nature of Denpasar’s development, the shopping mall was strongly implicated (“Mejeng” 1996; “Pasar” 1996; “Menjadikan” 1996; “Jumlah” 1995). Balinese journalist Wayan Suardika (1999: 8) lamented the rapid transformation of Denpasar’s urban landscape: Shopping malls are but one example of how the rearrangement of Denpasar’s physical landscape has precipitated the emergence of a new, urban culture. The housing estate boom has had similar cultural consequences. This is not to say that the original Balinese residents want to ditch the banjar [village] for a modern, urban lifestyle, for the housing estate boom is largely a result of in-migration. The Balinese remain attached to their banjar, but as more and more housing estates pop

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up, Denpasar is looking increasingly urban. . . . Instead of [in] village-like communities, an increasing proportion of the city’s residents now live in the bourgeois suburbia of housing estates. Moreover, most of the housing estates are built on the city’s periphery, turning what were once predominantly rural communities into satellite cities, complete with mini-markets, billiard halls and even hotels. Here, routines that used to be dictated by planting and harvest now centre on commuting and nine to five.

Death metal musicians Othered alternapunk by remaining conspicuously absent from the mall, as merchandiser Age remembered: “We always used to hang around at the Kumbasari market. Not at the mall, we feel uncomfortable and unwelcome there. . . . We feel embarrassed hanging around there. We liked to hang around the slums and squalor.” In explaining why they chose not to display themselves at the mall, death metal musicians such as Ari, the bassist for the death metal band Phobia, reconjured the caricature of the alternapunk musicians as a rich, compliant teenybopper. We don’t like hanging round in the shopping mall like established people. . . . We like to stay in the house or on the street, hanging around drinking. . . . The life like that [ngeceng] is just for the rich people, and if we were rich I don’t think we would do that. We would do something more concrete than ngeceng [a term referring to how young men and women interacted in a mall space, through exhibitionary practices and exchanged gazes], or hanging around in the shopping mall having some food there and always talking about what car you have and whether you’ve got a mobile phone.

The death metal musicians’ accounts of the mall exemplify what Rob Shields (1991) has referred to as “place myths.” Such myths can be intimated in absentia as well as performed in presentia: Shields (1992: 188) contends that “absence is never a pure absence but rather the impression of a ‘presence that has gone’ and thus bears the ‘trace’ of signs.” He coins the term truant proximity, which accords an equal importance to absence and presence in the constitution of the discursive aspect of a given space. Indeed, the death metal musicians’ contempt for and absence from the mall only made it appear more looming, enhancing its presence. Ironically, in justifying their orchestrated absence from the mall, death metal musicians (unwittingly) used the language of cultural imperialism

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theorists to denounce alternapunks’ perceived homogenizing tendencies, thus providing a most spectacular instance of hybridization.4 They referred to death metal, a foreign code, in expressing a localism which resisted an encroaching metropolitan superculture represented, in their view, by alternapunk. The irony is compounded by the fact that the death-thrashers had begun forging their scene in the early 1990s by orchestrating their alienness and gesturing elsewhere, as I discussed in chapter 2. Several years later, death metal identity seemed transformed. In brushing up against alternapunk, it became, in enthusiasts’ definitions, a paragon of localness. One explanation for this apparent inconsistency may be that it highlights the frayed complexities of identity discourses, which are not distinct from but rest on other identity discourses with which they coexist. At first I thought that death metal’s apparent metamorphosis attested to the very amoebic, ephemeral nature of identifications attached to the scenes I was studying. Like chameleons, they may change hue as they move onto different surfaces. But on reflection, I realized that unlike chameleons, death metal musicians and fans do not disappear into their surroundings. On the contrary, they distinguish themselves from every surface they touch, and in this way their true form comes into view. In the early 1990s they had Othered the reggae scene they encountered at banjar gigs for its perceived market logic. In 1996, through their conspicuous absence from the mall, they Othered the alternapunks’ metropolitan aspirations. If the death metal musicians demonized the metropolis, the alternapunks idealized it; if the death metal musicians were conspicuously absent from the shopping mall, the alternapunks were un-self-consciously present there. In the following sections, I consider the broader significance of Balinese alternapunks’ associations with the mall, the center, and the metropolis, as a dominant regionalist discourse reified the peripheral and the low. Dual Existence

Photographs of the Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival published in Hai magazine portray alternative fandom as a convivial style. The fans depicted in Hai sport brilliantly colored hair, cheap jewelry, and swimming goggles. They are photographed grinning awkwardly, brimming with enthusiasm, and reveling in the celebratory atmosphere of the mosh pit, where childlike

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bodies are tossed skyward, limbs flailing, their fall cushioned by a sea of upturned palms. The performance of Balinese alternapunk at Sunday Hot Music in early 1996 was a stark contrast to these images. At shm, when Superman Is Dead and Utero performed in March, and Triple Punk and Obligasi did so in May, they sparked none of the celebratory and aggressive energy suggested by Hai’s alternative imagery. Rather, fans and friends remained firmly and solemnly planted, cross-legged, and in their silence and motionlessness rendered the performance similar to one on a television show. Nor was the festival’s convivial style repeated at shm. While some of the performers followed Green Day’s Billy Joe in donning a slip, or shirt sleeves and a fat novelty tie, the audience formed a straight mass of jeans and t-shirts. Thus, in spite of the fact that two members of Superman Is Dead, Jerink and Bobby, had attended the Green Day concert in Jakarta and excitedly recounted the abundance of jackboots, chains, and mohawks there, the Balinese scene remained untextured by the true grit that had peppered the Green Day show. Stylistic blandness was also a feature of the alternapunks’ performances in the shopping mall—a space with which alternapunk had become stereotypically associated. In 1996, the alternapunks’ hangout of choice was Nu Dewata Ayu (nda). Unlike Matahari and Siwa Plaza, the other two malls in Denpasar at the time, nda had no food courts and thus no space where alternapunks could gather legally and interact spontaneously, as they might have done at Matahari. While they could gather in booths at Matahari’s kfc or Swensen’s without being compelled to consume, they were asked to move on from the McDonald’s adjacent to nda, which was reserved for conspicuous consumption. When the alternapunks entered the mall they were therefore channeled directly to Timezone, where verbal interaction was minimalized and the attention focused on objects of consumption. When they gathered at nda, it was the alternapunks who appeared to be consumed. This was first brought to my attention when, after I first interviewed them in April 1996, sid members invited me to join them on an afternoon out at nda. I accepted eagerly, expecting to join other musicians and enthusiasts there and to sit around chatting. Instead, I was led up the escalator to a corner of the unused top floor, and to a scene reminiscent of my own teenagehood,

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where bleeping and roaring video games obliterated any possibility of conversation, and where I was left alone to feign interest as the boys engaged with their screens. Due to its associations with consumerism, which is perceived to have feminine connotations, the mall gave young Balinese women a space to experiment with modern identities without fear of being categorized as cewek nakal, as they would have been had they undertaken such experimentations on the street. Nevertheless, the way Superman Is Dead members used mall space, and my unease and feeling of marginalization when I followed them there, shows that some spaces in the mall were reserved for exclusively masculine practices. Superman Is Dead headed straight for the games parlor without pausing to savor the experience of ngeceng. This suggests sid’s eagerness to establish their punk practices in the mall as exclusively masculine, in contrast to the mall’s overwhelmingly feminized symbolic dimensions. In its performative aspect, therefore, alternapunk identity appeared to be in line with the naive and compliant stereotype that had been cast. This seems at odds with the increasingly aggressive and oppositional punk underground movement that developed in Bali in 1997–98. The stereotype of the alternapunk musicians as naive and compliant also clashes with the sense of alternative musicians that I gained from conversations with them. They seemed to me responsive, creative people with sharp senses of irony. They peppered our conversations with insightful, tongue-in-cheek quips on their respective social realities. To cite one example, in response to my comment that members of rip must be all high academic achievers since they all attended High School No. 1 (sma1), the group’s vocalist, Pipit, joked that corruption had helped them gain entry to this most prestigious public high school: “Nah, we’re all stupid here, like most kids at sma1. . . . [we] got in through the back door.” It is similarly difficult to reconcile Balinese alternapunk audiences’ apparent blandness with the active and eager will to know that drove Bobby and Jerink to travel all the way to Jakarta to witness Green Day firsthand, and with the inspiration and creativity they showed on their return, when they began writing their own lyrics and arranging their own songs. But in early 1996 this transgressive spirit and these insightful quips were clumsily integrated into the performances of alternapunk, both at the mall

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and at shows. For example, enthusiasts attributed oppositional and ludic qualities to their genre of choice, referring to grunge as “playing freely, more expressive . . . spirited . . . energetic” (Made, vocalist with Utero), and characterizing punk similarly: “The concept of punk is freedom of appreciation. Free! Yell whatever. . . . Punk is antiestablishmentarian. . . . We are fed up with everything, actually. The crux of it is that we want to be different. Whatever the mainstream likes, we hate it” (Jerink, drummer of Superman Is Dead, 10 April 1996). These comments, particularly Superman Is Dead’s call to “yell whatever” suggest that an aspiration to some kind of liberation, release, or antiestablishmentarianism was inherent in the practice of alternapunk. Yet when, seeking to understand the local implications of this antiestablishmentarianism, I asked the musicians how their desire for freedom connected with their own lives, they were quick to deny any link. Jerink felt the need to clarify that “our antiestablishmentarianism is not a lifestyle [sic]. We want to have a good life . . . only to be antiestablishment in our music.” Kadek, guitarist with Obligasi, said that “it’s hard to be carefree [like Kurt Cobain] here.5 . . . You can’t really in Bali ’cause our lives are ordered by tradition. It’s not that we want to be released and let go. We still believe in God. We have to choose the right moment: if we’re hanging around with our friends, it’s ok to let go. But if there’s a ceremony we have to forget all that. . . . we have to be flexible.” Whenever I urged the musicians to explain how they grounded these aspirations in the reality of their everyday lives, the musicians proved impossible to pin down, referring me not to a specifically local frame of reference or mode of noncompliance but, rather, back to the alternative mediascape itself. Indeed one aspect of their stereotypical image with which the alternapunk musicians concurred was the role of media imagery in inspiring them to form alternative bands. That is, while they acknowledged the role of shm in offering them a performance space, like those observers who identified television, video, and cassettes as the source of enthusiasm for Green Day and alternative music in general, alternapunk musicians saw the atheatrical process of media consumption as the motivating force behind their choice of genre. But the role alternapunk musicians attributed to the media in inspiring them to embark on careers as musicians prompts questions about how they

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related to these images. In their answers, alternapunk musicians expressed a number of common themes and some curious subversive readings. One of these themes is the idea that the media images issued from a core (“Jakarta” or “Java”) which contained not only the heart of the nation’s music industry but also certain ideal values perceived as the essence of alternative fandom, as Pipit, vocalist with rip, noted: “In my opinion [alternative music attained popularity in Bali] from the tv and the radio, and promotion in music magazines . . . it comes from Jakarta. Whatever is big there comes here eventually. If alternative music is big in Jakarta, then it’s bound to creep like a vine [merambat] to Bali. . . . Since the Green Day concert, alternative music started creeping like a vine to Bali.” By locating alternity’s cultural center at the heart of the music industry in the national metropolis, interviewees constructed Bali as peripheral to the scene, as a fringe where alternity’s core values were significantly diluted. That is, their idealization of the metropolis served as a counterpoint for their characterizations of Balinese youth. Specifically, the alternative musicians I interviewed lamented the unresponsive (loyo) consumption of media images by local youth, which in their opinion ran counter to the ideals of spontaneity and disorderliness contained at alternity’s metropolitan core. Jakarta thus featured highly in the alternapunks’ self-definitions, just as it did for reggae and death metal musicians. Notably different, however, was how these two groups related to the metropole. While the nonalternapunks identified Jakarta as the source of cultural pollution, the members of bands such as Triple Punk associated it with authenticity. One unfortunate aspect among Balinese youth is the way that when a band performs, the only people who show their appreciation are the friends and relative of the band. And when another band comes on, those people all sit down again and the next band’s friends and relatives get up. In Jakarta everybody gets up to headbang or to mosh, regardless of whether they know or are related to the band performing. In Java, it’s tied to whether a person likes the music. In Bali, appreciation is still about demonstrating loyalty to a particular group. If it’s not their friends up on stage, they won’t get up to headbang (Bagong, bassist with Triple Punk).

My own sense is that, in such critical characterizations of local youth, alternative musicians sought to distance themselves from the “fashion victim”

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stereotype with which alternative music had become associated. Alternapunk musicians also identified themselves in opposition to death metal and reggae, respectively. They associated reggae with the spaces of the tourism industry, a realm in which artistic freedoms were restricted. The Balinese alternapunks thus shied away from performing in tourist bars, similar to the manner in which death metal musicians absented themselves from the shopping mall. Said sid’s Jerink in a 10 April 1996 interview: “We wanted to play in a pub, but no one offered us any work. . . . Because we play punk music and only punk music, pubs and bars won’t accept us. Here, reggae’s all the rage.” In contrast to death metal musicians, whom they cast as primarily concerned with virtuosity, order, frustration, angst, melody, and exclusivity, the members of Superman Is Dead (6 July 1997), like other alternapunks, reified disorder, egalitarianism, release, grunge, lack of control, and openness. Eka, bassist: Metal is more ordered, more artistic [than punk]. . . . In punk music every instrument has an equal role. That’s why we only have a three-piece group, so that we can maintain that balance . . . Q: Is there a punk organization, like death metal’s 1921? Jerink, drummer: No, what for? There’s no need for one. We like hanging round with whatever kind of musicians. We’re not into stating boundaries between the genres, that would seem to promote exclusivity. We don’t want to make a group that makes it hard for others to come in. It’s better to have a broad community.

Triple Punk’s bassist Bagong similarly noted that “it’s easier to organize a punk band not like those thrash bands which need four or five members, and it’s hard to organize a time when everyone can make it to a practice. Thrash music is about death, oppression, skulls, frustration, black magic. Punk is more out of control [urakan], grungy [slengean], carefree [cuwek], relaxed.” For Utero’s vocalist Made, “Grunge refers to freedom . . . unlike death metal, which is melodic. The death metal rhythm is quite different from grunge which, musically speaking, is about release, freedom. Death metal has a strong rhythm and melody. Grunge is not very melodic.” In this way, the alternapunks turned away from prescribed notions of localness which had hitherto been embraced in different ways by both the

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death metal musicians, in their truant proximity to the mall, and reggae musicians, who attributed their success on the tourist bar circuit to reggae’s coincidence with a peaceful, coastal Balinese essence. The clarity and consensus among alternapunks in how they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the metropolis, reggae, death metal, and the stereotypical “fashion victim” image of alternity suggests that they were (self-)consciously engaged in a practice of negotiating identity, thus defying their stereotyped reputation in the local band scene as naive and vulnerable. This reading forces us to reappraise the musicians’ hesitation to link alternity’s core values with what it meant to them to be Balinese, interpreted above as an example of the alternapunks’ passivity. In the present context, this hesitation becomes evidence of the fact that the young men who played in punk and grunge bands understood their lives as a dual existence made up of moments experienced in, on the one hand, the restricted, tradition-ordered realm of indigeneity and, on the other, the release, freedom, and antiestablishmentarianism made possible when they played their music. The nuances and inconsistencies of alternapunk practice are perhaps more satisfactorily expressed in this interpretation than in my initial conclusions about the alternapunks’ compliance and passivity. Not until I reviewed my notes and interview transcripts in 2000 did I realize that it was not only the reggae and death metal musicians’ image that had urged me toward these earlier, more primitive characterizations, but also that of alternapunk musicians themselves. The alternapunks derided the scene of which they were a part but from which they distanced themselves. By their words and actions, they defied alternapunk’s stereotyped compliance. I had first come to the view that the alternapunks’ “true” identity accorded with their stereotype on the basis of Balinese fans’ responses to alternapunk performances, which contrasted with those of fans in Jakarta and elsewhere in Java. Similarly, my opinion that fans had used nda mall space to consent (I believed) to metropolitan consumerism was also based on comparisons with how I had seen Java-based punks move about their malls. That transgression was possible even in the strictly coded space of the mall became evident to me when I witnessed how punks in Bandung and Malang used their shopping malls as ritual meeting points. In Bandung, punks confronted Bandung Indah Plaza by bringing their soiled, weighty clothing and brightly colored, lethally sharp hair—their aesthetic violence—to the plaza’s 106

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smooth, white frippery. In Malang, members of the underground community gathered en masse on the margins of mall space, where they formed a shocking and unsettling crowd, threateningly mysterious for they seemed at once preoccupied (exchanging merchandise) and to be stating something of urgency to the “normal” world. But the Balinese scene was more scattered and disparate than those on Java, and it may not be surprising that alternapunks’ resistances and transgressions at nda were more sporadic and less awesome than those of their Java-based compatriots. Such resistance may be seen in the status sid drummer Jerink enjoyed as a kind of nda “don”: by the time I went there with him in April 1996, he was constantly being greeted by passersby as “Superman,” for he had come to be recognized as the embodiment of the band (an honor traditionally reserved for lead vocalists) after sid’s first show at shm. There, Jerink was visibly drunk and ended sid’s set by falling off his stool, tumbling before his drum set, and kicking in the bass drum, which belonged to Crapt Entertainment. Jerink later explained that he was angry at Crapt for stipulating that, as a punk band, they should wear black on stage— confusing the punk aesthetic with that of death metal. Crapt management responded by barring sid from several shows thereafter, but Jerink’s behavior seemed to earn him great respect from nda-goers. When he destroyed Crapt’s bass drum, Jerink performed transgression in a way other alternapunks had only seen on television, and he demonstrated to those who had only experienced it as a passive experience (a seemingly compliant listening to and reconstitution of the music with which the market had supplied them) that the freedom to which they so aspired could be actively pursued. While other interviewees characterized alternative music as urakan (out of control), apa adanya (whatever), slengean (grungy), cuwek (carefree), or santai (relaxed), Jerink offered a more confrontational, oppositional definition of punk. In his words, punk was “antiestablishment,” “against the grain,” and “anticommercial.” The culture that developed around him suggested a will, on the part of alternapunks, to take part in the evolution of such confrontation. Tacit Dimensions

I introduced this chapter as a discussion of how Balinese youth negotiated their identities around media images of alternity. Many writers have used Punk’s Beginnings

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the term negotiation to imply agency in the consumption of media texts. Similarly, I have attempted to demonstrate in the course of this chapter that the Balinese alternapunks were not passive consumers. They used the continued salience of center-periphery dynamics and the demonization of the metropolis in dominant local discourses of Balineseness by idealizing Jakarta as a core of disorder, thus at once defying the prevailing regionalism and inverting official notions of the capital as the epitome of order. Their use of mall space to contest such grand narratives may be seen as an instance of “utopics”—a term coined by Louis Marin (quoted in Hetherington 1998b: 333) to describe “the translation of ideas about a good society into spatial practice [that] can be described as a cultural performance of moral orderings through spatial practice. This cultural performance takes place in a hiatus, a space of uncertainty which . . . draw[s] on Derrida’s notion of différance, whereby the meanings of texts are seen not to be fi xed but endlessly deferred.” According to Kevin Hetherington, différance is also present in the text of the English countryside, which for New Age travelers represents freedom, authenticity, mystery, spirituality, and nomadism (1998b: 333). These travelers, he contends, practice a rural authenticity which conjures images of the countryside that contrast the tranquil, picturesque depictions in dominant discourses of the bucolic. For the Balinese alternapunks, unlike the New Age travelers, authenticity centered on urban, specifically metropolitan, spaces. These “utopics of metropolitan authenticity” further muddy the already uncertain and contested meanings of the alternative mediascape, and they highlight the fact that this text was positively riddled with différance. For example, the dominant portrayal of alternative identities in Indonesian teen publications reified consumerism and hedonism as ideal qualities of a celebrated new-rich status. Death metal musicians rejected this ideal. In their view, it threatened the authentic and local rock subcultures with cultural gray-out, and this suspicion grounded their contempt of the alternapunks. The alternapunks also contested dominant representations of alternative identities. If the national media portrayed alternity as a peaceful realm of privilege and a sanctuary of new-rich metropolitan lifestyles, Balinese alternapunks identified Jakarta as a core of disorder. In this way, while New Age travelers redefined dominant notions of rural authenticity,

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the Balinese alternapunks subverted hegemonic representations of Jakarta as the center of a national cultural order. This différance also manifested locally in the space and form of the shopping mall. The différance-ridden dimensions of the Balinese shopping mall may be better understood in the light of Shields’s (1992: 188) description: “For Derrida, presence itself depends on the constant interplay of presence and absence, or what he calls différance. Meaning thus always remains irreducible to the immediacy of a given present.” Since the advent of tourism, and probably before, the massive presence of tourists, implying the concomitant presence of an elsewhere, has shaped dualities of exclusion and inclusion in discourses of Balinese identity. But in contemporary discourses of identity, as the tourist becomes increasingly familiar and syncretized into the mundane and banal rational orderings of everyday life, a new kind of foreigner is gaining importance in local ideas about what constitutes an insider. The stranger of the 1990s symbolized a metropolitan new-rich lifestyle, as evident in the Balinese media constructions I cited above, which present malls as the embodiment of Otherness. The increasing ubiquity of shopping malls on local land meant that foreign metropolitanness was at once present and absent in a hyperspace, confusing parallel dualities of presence/ absence, interiority/exteriority, and inclusion/exclusion. For example, death metal musicians performed localness (presence) via a truant proximity (selfimposed exclusion/exteriority) from the mall, while the alternapunks practiced truancy from localness by ritually appearing there. This is not just an optimistic interpretation of a “style which is conservative . . . taken over intact from the dominant culture”—as Stanley Cohen (1997: 155) puts it in attacking theorists of the Birmingham School.6 I maintain that hanging discursive contexts forbid cultural forms from remaining intact when they cross cultural boundaries, such as the one separating “Jakarta” from “Bali.” I am not suggesting that the Balinese alternapunks were inherently subversive or oppositional. Like those of death metal and reggae, alternapunk practices were neither wholly conservative nor wholly radical: they contained elements of both consent and refusal. One very useful contribution by the Birmingham School of youth studies has been to locate subcultural style in relation to “three broader cultural structures—the ‘parent’ culture, the dominant culture and mass culture”

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(Gelder 1997: 83), thus drawing attention to the fragmented and multileveled nature of “the establishment.” That fierce competition takes place among these structures has been nowhere clearer, perhaps, than in 1990s Bali, where an encroaching metropolitan consumer culture was met with a regionalist discourse, and parallel dualisms of establishment/counterculture, domination/resistance, and conservative/radical were notably confused. In many ways, the regionalist discourse which urged youth to model preservationist ideals was more restrictive and conservative than the metropolitan mass culture, as the alternapunk musicians cited above imply. The dilemma thus posed recalls Dick Hebdige’s (1979: 62-63) description of the choices that faced English punks. Rather than repertoires indigenous to their white, working-class parent culture, they chose punk—“a white translation of black ethnicity.” While rupture and dislocation may be more commonly associated with postwar subcultures, case studies of the consumption of Western cultural products by non-Western audiences have acknowledged that foreign repertoires can be practiced as oppositional discourses and help liberate people from repressive local regimes. There is a tendency to view dislocation in non-Western contexts as progressive only in as far as it is “oppositional”—a notion frequently measured against official (state) discourses. Alternapunk, however, is deceptive and slippery, refusing to be pinned to conventional notions of opposition and hybridization, which tend to privilege indigenization, symbolized by certain language use, spatial play, or embodied styles over instances of rupture. Thus, in spite of its centrality to a broad spectrum of subcultural theory, the notion of dislocation is rarely applied to peripheral areas such as Bali, as if the national metropolis were incapable of delivering cultural forms which can also liberate people from local regimes particular to the periphery, and as if the periphery were in essence oppressed and the metropole by nature oppressive. Arjun Appadurai is one of the few scholars of globalization to have explored the general transformative potential of cultural dislocation. He does not refer to opposition, theorizing instead that the global modern is characterized by the transformation of the imagination from “the faculty of the gifted intellectual” into the property of collectives (Appadurai 1996: 7). Due to the global dissemination of mass mediation, people now collectively

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imagine existences that differ from the social realities in which they live. Thus the electronic media’s impact on the imagination serves not just as an escape but as a staging ground for action. Indeed, when one views alternapunk both retrospectively, as the crucible of an “underground punk” style that subsequently developed, and contextually, amid the various discourses of identity that existed in Bali in early 1996, the alternapunks’ imaginings do appear as such a staging ground. Against death metal enthusiasts’ utopics of local authenticity, performed via their conspicuous absences from the mall, the alternapunks’ orientation toward the différance-ridden shopping mall and their idealization of Jakarta, imagined as a “core of disorder,” make their scene appear to be an engineered state of exile, for to these young men it seemed impossible to reconcile their urge for spontaneous self-expression with their ideas of how they were supposed to behave as Balinese.

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W

hen Crapt Entertainment opened the selection process for its original Sunday Hot Music in 1997, it was flooded with applications from high school punk bands. But in place of the Green Day cover bands of the previous year, the majority of punk groups were covering the Ramones, Bad Religion, and nofx. When Superman Is Dead (sid) first played at shm in February 1996, it was largely ignored by audiences expecting well-rehearsed reggae or Top 40, but when it headlined the final show in the series in July 1997, the majority of fans had come expressly to revel in sid’s set at the end of the night.1 This was evident CHAPTER 5 from the abundance of punk uniforms: black t-shirts (most of which featured the punk slogan “Punk Grounding Punk Not Dead” [sic], the anarchy symbol, or allegiance to nofx or Rancid), motorcycle helmets, oversized key chains, and padlock pendants, as well as from the crowd’s roar in response to a microphone test as the band was setting up. When sid finally began to play, the seated mass rose and formed a vast pit, as fans spiralled to the psychedelic, swirling guitar intro to “Scrawl,” the first track from sid’s recently released debut album, Case 15. Over the course of 1996–99, Balinese punk was transformed. In 1996, the budding scene was nurtured by the media’s heavy promotion of the U.S. punk band Green Day’s February 1996 concert in Jakarta. By 1999, after a series of metamorphoses including the one described above, Balinese punks had laid claim to a number of public spaces around Denpasar where they displayed their distinctive dress style: mohawks, leather jackets, chains, spikes, and jackboots. In Indonesia, this style was known as punk chaos or punk anarki. Underground shows at which such punk anarki bands performed took place several times a month, several local punk groups produced albums and distributed them through local underground

networks, and fans developed their own aggressive version of the dance style known as the pogo.2 These transformations cannot simply be attributed to the maturing of the punk scene and the emergence of new generations. True, it was constantly acquiring new adherents. But a number of punks cited in this study remained on the scene from 1996 to 1999. Many started out in Green Day cover bands, but when the scene began to move away from the alternapunk style, they became the new style. By 1998, many musicians, such as members of both Suckerfinger and Criminal Assholes, who had formerly been in Green Day cover bands, were playing punk chaos. Thus, the changing styles discussed in this study reflect not a generational switch but growth and change in individual “biographies.” It can be argued that they reflect an evolving punk scene rather than the eclipsing of one scene by “the next big thing.” Below I argue for the importance of the scene’s territorial grounding in prefacing changes in the punks’ dance and dress styles—from alternapunk through punk moderen and punk anarki—from 1996 to 1999. Beneath the punks’ increasingly shocking dress styles lay less visible dimensions, such as their scenes’ relations with dominant capitalist, Balinese, and official state discourses of identity. Curiously, as punk style appeared to signal increasing aggression and confrontation, the ways participants interacted with these discourses became increasingly complex: cooperative and syncretic. The coexistence of this aggressive performance style with syncretic and accommodative facets should not be understood as a paradox. Rather, it highlights the important contingencies of dress and performance styles, access to permits to stage performances, and control over hangouts. By 1999 the Balinese punks preferred a number of devolved, dispersed, yet interconnected punk communities over a central hangout. They developed participatory modes of organizing shows and, by introducing an idealized chaos to the shopping mall, contested a dominant metropolitan, consumerist ideal. These three elements—devolved hangouts, participatory modes of cultural production, and the evolution of a confrontational performance style—functioned as mutually constitutive (albeit unfi xed) cornerstones which defined the local scene and shaped its development.

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Punk Moderen

The “punk uniform” in evidence at shm in mid-1997—padlocks, chains, motorbike helmets, and mock mohawks—may be read as the faint impression left by Bandung punk band Total Riot when it performed at an event dubbed Total Uyut in Denpasar in December 1996. But unlike shm, Total Uyut included a lengthy lineup of local and Java-based underground bands and was the first time any such band performed in Bali. Total Riot was long remembered for the impression it made on Balinese punk style. Members of Criminal Assholes assured me that “that was how we started. After seeing Total Riot at gor [Gedung Olah Raya; sports hall]. That was what inspired us to play punk anarki. We saw how chaotic, how anarchistic their music was, and we got excited. We like music like that. Chaotic music.” When they entered sports hall to perform, Total Riot cleared a swathe of awe-fi lled silence through the clutter of chatter. Total Riot’s severe (real) mohawks and soiled, weighty clothing contrasted the cropped hair and nofuss style of Bali’s Green Day–era alternapunks. Rather than unpredictably chaotic cutups, Bandung’s punk anarki was more uniform, reserving spikes as the style’s main object of improvisation. Unlike that of the English punks, this style did not effect subversive associations by way of bricolage (Hebdige 1979) but conveyed heaviness, hardness, and sharpness. The embodiment of punk at shm in 1997 was barely as heavy as the style displayed by Total Riot at Total Uyut. In my photographs of them, the Bandung punks are always scowling. With hefty screws sewn into their jackets, an abundance of metal spikes, and severe mohawks, they made their bodies lethal and sharp. The Balinese punks of 1997 preferred cheesy grins and plastic cones on their motorbike helmets—style known locally as punk moderen. This contrast may seem natural, since Total Riot came from the heart of the underground scene, Bandung. When I attended Bandung Underground II in July 1996 (see figure 6), I experienced the punk pogo danced to Total Riot’s set at a basketball stadium packed with bodies jostling, thrashing, groping, and hitting out. To experience punk there was to be part of the push and shove, to take anonymous blows with grace, and to be constantly on edge and on guard for the pogo’s threatened violence. Bandung punks’ feigned violence and pointed aesthetic contrasted with

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Figure 6

Young men, sporting mohawks, queue for Bandung Underground II, July 1996.

credit: emma baulch

the neater and less ragged Balinese punk in 1997. The Balinese punks did not have the numbers to fi ll a basketball court. At shm in 1997 they were able to perform their newfound mobility without colliding with each other at all. The was no threat of violence, and the Balinese pogo seemed more playful than the snarling Bandung version. The Balinese punks favored music that was widely available, such as that of nofx, Bad Religion, and the Ramones, while the Bandung punks played a style that could only be accessed through underground networks. These differences tempt us to read the Balinese version as less “oppositional.” But this interpretation would be too hasty, for Balinese punk styles did not bear a direct relation to punk politics in other places. Observers of North American punk scenes have asserted that “hardcore,” “neolite,” and “queerpunk” styles mark certain positions in the dynamics of punk’s opposition and recuperation in the United States (Goldthorpe 1992; Fuchs 1998). But similar dress styles had quite different meanings in Bali. For example, in Bali the “hardcore” style approximated punk anarki or punk chaos and “neolite” punk moderen. Bad Religion fandom underwent a similar transformation, and the popularity of the band in Bali in 1997 does not automatically suggest that local punks were inspired by the bands’ leftist 116

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calls to arms and activist identity. Rather, Balinese punks understood Bad Religion’s cynical anthem “Do What You Want” (from its 1995 album All Ages) as a celebration of spontaneity. Do what you want But don’t do it around me Idleness and dissipation breed apathy I sit on my ass all goddamn day A misanthropic anthropoid with nothing to Say what you must, do all you can Break all the fucking rules and Go to Hell with Superman and Die like a champion, yeah hey!

In comparison to the Bandung punks, Balinese punk in 1997 was overwhelmingly lighthearted, which begs the question as to why, in 1997, mock mohawks and commercially available punk bands were considered valid expressions of Balinese punk identity, while in the following year, they were not. In chapter 4, I described the sid hangout in Jerink’s bedroom at the Twice Pub on Poppies II, which I first visited in April 1996. At the end of that year, Jerink moved around the corner, and by the time the band headed the bill at shm in July, he lived alone on the third and top floor of a building where his parents owned a cd and cassette shop, on the corner of Kuta’s frantic main drag and the notorious Poppies Lane. The ground floor of this building housed the store, whose clientele was drawn from the throngs of tourists who passed by every day. This move greatly expanded the space available to Jerink in developing his punk-related activities and identity. At Twice Pub, he had only his bedroom as a hangout, and he lived there under the supervision of his aunt and uncle, who managed the business. At the cassette store around the corner, he could move about two floors with relative freedom and use these spaces as he wished. Notably, following Jerink’s move, sid members ceased to identify their band as alternative and began to characterize themselves as part of an underground music scene with its roots in Java. As this chapter will make clear, Balinese punks’ self-definitions and practices over the course of 1997–99 reveal that their underground was not a closed and neatly bounded Grounding Punk

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subculture in which participants sought sanctuary from institutions of autochthony, the state, and capitalism. Rather, it was a broadening interface between Balinese punk, on the one hand, and these established identity discourses, on the other. This interface was very porous, and punks frequently consented to logics of capitalism and the state. But, as sid’s drummer Jerink (6 July 1997) observed, it was from this broadening, porous interface that an increasingly confrontational and aggressive punk performance style grew. We’re an underground band! Actually, when we first set up the band we didn’t really know about the underground. We just wanted to form a band, and we didn’t want to play saccharine love songs—that was our first aim, so we chose punk. . . . and it so happened that when we first set up the band we just played the kind of punk music you could buy at shops, and that was Green Day at the time. But after a while, we got more and more information, and we got to know the difference between commercial and underground music. We’re more suited to the underground. . . . When we staged the gig in Tabanan, we were hoping to attract only those who were true fans of underground music.

In early 1996, Balinese alternapunks had idealized a “disorderly” metropolis and lamented the relative inauthenticity of their own peripheral scene. In October 1996, sid attempted to correct this relative inauthenticity by establishing its own booking agency, Independent Productions, creating a performance space, Independent Studio, and staging the island’s first show devoted exclusively to underground bands, Pesta Musik Underground (Underground Music Fest). This was the first time punk did not have to share a stage with Top 40 or reggae groups—bands that, due to their popularity on the tourist bar circuit, had come to epitomize commercial success in Bali. The absence of these commercial genres from Pesta Musik Underground is thus significant for a punk band’s orchestration of that absence, independent of the profit-oriented enterprises traditionally responsible for staging concerts. This exclusively underground show, however, did not shelter the organizers from the establishment but rather brought state bureaucratic procedures and, in the case of subsequent, commercially sponsored underground shows, 3 market forces, more squarely into the punks’ sights. In October 1996 sid became the first punk band ever to apply for, and secure, a police permit to stage a show.

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On the second floor of the building where he lived, Jerink set up his own drum kit and an amp. Not long after Pesta Musik Underground, he began renting this Independent Studio to local punk groups for rehearsals. The studio was enormously popular among local punk bands who had been barred from practicing elsewhere, as members of Criminal Assholes recalled: “Because we play hard music many of the commercial studios barred us from practicing there; they feared we might damage their equipment, especially after we damaged some of Crapt’s equipment when we played at shm in 1997. For some time, Independent Studio was the only studio we could rent.” This rehearsal studio doubled as a gig venue, for the removal of the wall left only the studs dividing it from the spacious landing and balcony beyond, and a regular punk jam was held there every Saturday night. For most of the young punks who ritually rode their motorbikes there from Denpasar, Kuta must have felt like foreign turf. By gravitating toward this alien space, the moderen punks chose to flee, rather than immediately confront, their parent culture, for Jerink’s setup was a far cry from the family compounds and domestic realities in which the vast majority of them lived. In this way, the punk jam on which their scene centered exemplified “deracination” to the extreme, and it served as a kind of cozy corner in which the embodiment of punk moderen could be rehearsed. At the same time, such rehearsals reclaimed a part of Kuta where local youths could enjoy a night life of their own making. In 1996 death metal and alternapunk musicians alike complained of the lack of opportunities for them to play their songs in the tourist bars, and reggae musicians lamented the loss of Bruna Bar at Kuta Beach, a relaxed, affordable place where locals could comfortably hang out on a Saturday night. By 1997 there seemed to be no space in Kuta’s night life for locals, at least for those of meager means, partly due to the entry of the Hard Rock Cafe, Studebakers, and similar chains favored by Jakartanese visitors, where a cover was charged. But the loud, angry noises tumbling from Independent Studio’s secondfloor balcony drowned out the Top 40 and classic hits soundscapes issuing from Studebakers across the road, attracting many bule (Western) patrons, who frequently picked up their drink and crossed the street to join in the mosh. The punk jam thus provided a countercultural spectacle by staging a musical challenge to the expansion of metropolitan consumerism, symbol-

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ized by Studebakers clientele and its pop soundscape, and seen as responsible for the marginalization of a Kuta-based local youth culture. In the absence of other gigs in Denpasar, these jams inspired the formation of the generation of punk bands that flooded shm’s 1997 Month of Sundays. It was also at Independent Studio that a punk dance style was developed and performed in the landing, which functioned as a de facto mosh pit (figure 7). This dance style, the pogo, also performed by enthusiasts at shm in 1997, remained constant in the coming years. This pogo was not the bounce of English ska fans. Balinese pogoers—heads down, elbows out— darted back and forth, or round and round if space allowed, in a dance style that became increasingly violent with time. The crystallization of the pogo as a punk identity marker set the punks apart from the headbangers, who were seen to reify order, as Jerink and Bobby of sid noted (6 July 1997). Jerink: Those headbangers, they’re more ordered than us; that I confess: they are more ordered. They have schedules and everything. Schedules of when to headbang. Bobby: If it’s this kind of a song, they have to form a circle. Jerink: If it’s that kind of a song, they have to form a star. . . . punk fans are more spontaneous.

These early 1997 punk jam sessions were heavy with anticipation as sid prepared to record its first album. After a year of songwriting, the group was ready to go into the studio at the beginning of 1997, but it was hindered by both the scarcity of recording studios and the absence on the island of sound engineers familiar with underground music. A first recording of the album at Kuta’s Symphony Studio was not released because the band was not happy with the result. Wanting to challenge public perceptions of punk music as infantile and simplistic ( Jerink lamented that “a lot of people reckon that anyone can write a punk song, and that’s one of the main preconceptions we try and challenge in our music”), sid members became all the more perfectionist about their art. Eventually, the band turned to Jimmy Sila’a, whose Denpasar-based, eight-track recording studio, Midi Quest, specialized in Balinese pop. In this, sid followed the lead of the death metal outfit Eternal Madness, which several weeks before had finished recording Offerings to Rangda, the first underground album to come out of Bali, at Midi Quest. There, sid put over a year’s work down in two seven-hour shifts. 120

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Between the suspension of shm in mid-1996 and its recommencing in mid-1997, sid had thus staged the island’s first underground concert, established an exclusive punk area which nurtured the development of a more distinct and active punk style, and produced the first punk album to come out of Bali. In comparison to the alternapunk scene of the previous year, then, punk moderen represented a considerable extension of control by scene participants over the processes of cultural production. As I have noted, the alternapunk scene had no home territory where intimacies could be forged and no distinctive dress style by which a group solidarity could be displayed. Further, the shows at which they performed were run by commercial enterprises, which stipulated auditions, regulated set lengths, and sometimes even dress styles. By 1997 punks had a home territory that also gave them opportunities to perform and to rehearse a distinctive dance and dress style, and a punk band had independently produced its own album and staged an exclusively underground show. However, if the punk jam may be characterized as a countercultural spectacle, this does not imply that punk moderen was inherently countercultural in all of its dimensions. As I suggest at the outset of this chapter, sid’s underground practices and self-definitions did not express a closed and determined oppositionality. They paved a more exploratory path which differed from Java-based punk’s vehement Othering of major labels and the mass media. This Othering was evident in the reply of Didit, vocalist for the Malangbased band No Man’s Land whether the members were going to try to secure a major label contract with their newly produced demo: We think of it as an album, not a demo. . . . We are in no way interested in major labels. If you sign with a major, then you’re not punk any more. Major labels are fucking shit. Q: What do you mean, “fucking shit”? That’s all those things that have nothing to do with punk but are constantly being linked to punk music. For example, punk bands who sign to major labels, or who do interviews with the mass media. Punks already have their own media, we don’t need to suck up to the establishment.

sid members, however, were less vehement in their refusal and were much more active in their engagement with “the establishment” than many of the Grounding Punk

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Figure 7

Pogoing at Kuta’s punk jam. credit: emma baulch

Java-based underground punk groups such as No Man’s Land. Certainly, members of sid did also articulate a certain oppositionality. When I interviewed them in 1996, they defined punk as cuwek (carefree), apa adanya (whatever), and antimapan (antiestablishmentarian). By 1997 they identified themselves as underground and antisosial (antisocial) and announced their motto as “Punk is not about looking cool.” When I asked the meaning of their band’s name, sid’s drummer Jerink answered, “It means no more Mr. Cool Guy. . . . , nobody perfect [sic], heroes suck” and claimed that “the driving concept of [sid’s debut] album is ‘Punk is not about looking cool’ ” (interview, 6 July 1997). In songs on this album, sid sometimes expressed anger and disgust at the Suharto regime and at others apathy, frustration with the insidious effects of consumerism and wealth, and rejection of “the mainstream” in a manner that recalled a sticker popular during the punk moderen era, and displayed prominently on many a mudguard, which declared, “I don’t care about your f*&#$!g system!” If I can’t have you That’s all right Because I’ll dump you anyway I’ve got no love, motherfucker. (“This Is Unlove”)

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Old World is full of sickness You can see it everywhere Melting stuff covers us There is nothing we can do. (“Old World”) Declaration made the equalition And modernation with all the effectation4 But the question is can we handle it In this condition where justice have a price Do you wonder why the rich always win And the little people get poorer and die? But most of all do we really care

’Cause I think there’s nothing we can do. (“Fuck the World”) Good citizen, we say you suck Make a stand, piss ’em off The old government will fall down And a brand new day will come And here we are, just going to sleep. (“Dramatic Country”)

Nevertheless, sid pioneered a somewhat conciliatory relationship with the mass media and major recording labels. For example, they identified nofx, one of the biggest-selling punk bands in the United States, as an “underground” band due to its amelodic, hoarse vocals, and sid subsequently switched from a Green Day vocal style to one modeled on nofx. In addition to giving frequent interviews to the island’s mainstream press, sid members also stated their willingness to sign to a major label—“as long as [the label] didn’t insist on changing our music” (interview, 6 July 1997). sid also defied traditional expressions of punk authenticity which, according to Dave Laing (1985: 14), presented a “challenge to the orthodoxy of artistic excellence.” They described their debut album as an attempt to challenge punk music’s stereotyped image as infantile and simplistic. This is antithetical to the punk stereotype of the “one-chord wonder,” and reinverts “punk” by valorizing established benchmarks of musicality, such as virtuosity, harmony, and slick mixing: “We want to prove society wrong in judging our music as simplistic, joke-music. A lot of people think that if you only know three chords you can play punk music. We want to prove them wrong. That’s why we made a serious album” (interview, 6 July 1997). Grounding Punk

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sid’s definition of “the underground” demonstrates the band’s desire to recuperate integrity from a commercial realm of pop which, in the members’ view, values profit over art. However, as I have noted, this resistance did not manifest in an opposition toward major labels or the mainstream press, as it did with many Java-based punk bands. Indeed, the unlikelihood of a Balinese punk moderen band ever being signed to one of the major Jakarta labels made opposing them irrelevant. That punk moderen addressed local realities implicates agency. Nevertheless, during the punk moderen era, this agency was far from evenly distributed among enthusiasts. As well as being pivotal to the continued presence of the punk jam as a home territory, sid’s role in the punk moderen scene also influenced the kinds of interactions that took place there. For example, the enthusiasm and optimism which infused the punk jam’s countercultural spectacle and drove the explorations of style that it sheltered were sparked by anticipation of sid’s debut album, which itself was made possible by the band’s eagerness to negotiate the interface between their antipop punk ideals and “mainstream” commercial culture. As of 1997, however, no other punks followed sid’s lead in staging a performance or recording an album, and the cultural reproduction of punk remained controlled by a select few. In 1997, therefore, the interface between “punks” and the “establishment” they allegedly opposed was narrow. In other words, much of punk’s early development was afforded by Jerink’s unique position, rather than by collaborative and participatory efforts. It was not until the following year, as the community of sid fans dissolved and scattered, that a less uniform punk dress style emerged. The stylistic shift from punk moderen to punk chaos/anarki was predicated on a territorial shift that both opened the scene to more devolved modes of cultural production and broadened the interface between “punk” and “the establishment.” Punk Anarki When we say anarki we are talking about our performance antics. Our movement. Our stage. Agus, bassist for Suckerfinger

The lead singer of Total Riot, Linggo, returned to Bali in September 1997, when Crapt Entertainment invited the Bandung-based underground punk

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band Turtle Junior and the Jakarta-based thrash band Suckerhead to stage a show, supported by local bands sid and Eternal Madness. Linggo joined Turtle Junior as backup vocalist. Both Turtle Junior and Total Riot performed the chaos aesthetic and musical style. In late 1996, the impact of Total Riot’s performance in Bali was scarcely visible. After Turtle Junior’s performance at Show and Show in late 1997, however, Balinese punk style again metamorphosed. Turtle Junior’s dress style differed markedly from that of sid. The former band’s lead vocalist, Yoni, had a full head of brilliant green hair and wore a broad and glinting studded belt around his waist. Both he and Linggo performed doubled over, elbows extended so that the mic sat perpendicular to their lips, and screamed hoarse vocals. In this way, Turtle Junior performed a pain and urgency which inspired a frenzy onstage and off. As the pit flooded with bodies, a scuffle broke out on one corner of the stage, and among the mass of fans the threat of violence became palpable. Although the onstage pogoing that took place during Turtle Junior’s set was the norm at underground concerts in Java, it was unprecedented in Bali. Coincident with sid’s efforts to conform to established benchmarks of musical quality, virtuosity, and harmony, Balinese punks had continued to value performances that followed the traditional formula by which slick mixing and focused lighting—which illuminated the performers onstage and relegated the chaotic audience to the darkness of the pit—were seen to enhance the sensation of performance. Turtle Junior’s performance introduced a new notion of the punk spectacle to Bali, in which a sense of chaos and threatened violence were key. Their show brought the chaos of the mosh to the stage and demonstrated a communal euphoria deriving from the dissolution of the separation between performers and fans. The impact of this event on the Balinese punk scene became evident the following month, when Total Uyut II was staged. Like the first Total Uyut, the second annual event was organized by Sabdo Moelyo’s em Productions, and its lineup included both local and Java-based bands. But the dress style had changed, as the motorbike helmets worn by fans at sid’s August set almost disappeared. The lineup of punk bands at Total Uyut displayed more experimental and individualistic styles. At Total Uyut II, among punk musicians and fans alike, mohawks were in abundance, as were spikes, tops

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in various colors now advertising the hardcore wheel, the Union Jack, and the Confederate stars and bars, as well as spiked belts and ankle-length boots. Here again, punks attempted to level the distinction between pit and stage by bringing feigned brawls to the stage. The growing enthusiasm for punk anarki could be seen in the increasing numbers of such bands that formed in 1998. The punk scene’s dependence on sid had diminished significantly. This was evidenced by the declining role of sid fandom in punk practice, and it was performed at Total Uyut II, where, in contrast to the euphoric response to sid at shm in August, the band’s performance failed to inspire a single pogoer. Most of the punk anarki groups that dominated the performance circuit in 1998 covered The Exploited or Total Chaos, which set them apart from the punk moderen generation of nofx, the Ramones, and Bad Religion cover bands. Moreover, nofx, Bad Religion, and the Ramones albums could be purchased at commercial outlets in shopping malls, but Total Chaos and The Exploited albums had to be obtained from underground networks, which extended in two directions. First, beginning in late 1997, Balinese punks became increasingly linked with the Java-based underground scene, and would frequently ask acquaintances traveling to Bandung to buy albums produced independently by Bandung bands and foreign albums un-available commercially in Indonesia. Second, while peripheral to the national underground scene, Balinese punks were nevertheless at the forefront of an international interface thanks to cruise ships’ employment of young Balinese men. Cruise-ship workers gave Balinese punks yet another source for coveted albums unreleased in Indonesia. Lunatic Merchandise’s Lolot, for example, obtained cassettes “from a friend, who works on a cruise boat,” and Suckerfinger got their Total Chaos cassettes in a similar manner. It is important not to overestimate the role of Bandung punk in the emergence of punk anarki in Bali. Bandung’s punk anarki had been performed in Bali in late 1996, but it had failed to inspire the same stylistic transformations as it did in late 1997 (see figure 8). Preexisting conditions in the Balinese scene were as important as Turtle Junior’s performance in prompting these changes, which were paralleled by the scene’s shifting spatialization. These links between territory, dress and performance styles, and modes of

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Figure 8

Punk anarki dress style, Bali 1997. credit: tikus got

cultural production became evident in three ways. First, the enthusiasm for Total Chaos and The Exploited revealed that Balinese punks were beginning to favor the kinds of punk music only available through underground networks. Second, as anarki dress and performance styles developed at shows, punks became more willing to perform punk identities in public spaces devoted to the consumerist ideal. Third, as punks increasingly emphasized audience participation in the performance of chaos, territorially speaking, the scene began to devolve and scatter. In 1998 the Balinese punk scene moved toward forming smaller punk communities based near their respective family compounds in Denpasar and away from the central hangout in Kuta’s “foreign” space. Chaos in the Shopping Mall [Underground] people should hang out wherever they want; they shouldn’t have to be tied to any kind of genre-based politics. We often go to Grindcorner [the death metal headquarters in Denpasar]. There’s no need for fanaticism in the underground community. We’re friends with Donny, too. He has a death metal band. Musicians should

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respect one another. . . . I would like to hear that the punks are brawling with the anak gaul . . . because that’s their true enemy. Jerink, drummer, Superman Is Dead, 6 July 1997

In mid-1997, following the launch of their debut album, I interviewed sid a second time. It was a Saturday night and, as the punk jam proceeded on the floor below, we sat cross-legged on the terrace outside Jerink’s bedroom, straining to hear each other over the din. In addition to sid’s three members—Jerink, Bobby, and Eka—I was joined by Kori, their manager at the time, as well as by Yonas and Pokpok, both students at Udayana University in Denpasar and my coeditors at the underground ’zine Tikus Got ([lit. “Gutter Rat”] of which more below). It was on that night that I heard the term anak gaul for the first time. As early as 1997, then, Jerink had expressed the need for punk opposition to anak gaul, but it was not until mid-1998 that anak gaul and satpam (satuan pengamanan, security guards) began to feature consistently in interviewees’ self definitions. In enthusiasts’ accounts, the anak punk and the anak gaul playfully provoked one another in public spaces. Stickers were an important part of the underground scene in 1997 and 1998. During their performances, musicians often attempted to draw the audience to the lip of the stage by strewing stickers that advertised their bands. As the pieces of plastic adhesive fluttered in midair, young enthusiasts clamored. The following day, the stickers would surely join others on fans’ motorbikes and on the back windshields of their cars. In this way, motorbikes became extensions of the body, clothed in stickers proclaiming the owners’ musical allegiances—their subcultural identities. Significantly, when I interviewed them in 1998 and 1999, respectively, and asked how they saw themselves vis-à-vis the anak gaul, members of Suckerfinger and Djihad referred to an “antigaul” sticker that was beginning to appear around Denpasar. Roy, vocalist of Djihad, confessed that “it’s true, we don’t really like [the anak gaul]. . . . They’re different. . . . we’re different! . . . There was once a sticker: a ‘g’ crossed out—antigaul—have you seen it?” Members of Suckerfinger also saw the sticker as emblematic of a larger conflict: Agus, bassist for Suckerfinger: I don’t think the local community [in Yang Batu] welcomes the establishment of Lunatic [Merchandise] as a punk hangout. 128

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Once, when we were sitting out the front [of the store], some local kids went past and threw firecrackers at us. We weren’t even doing anything! Just sitting down. Q: Perhaps they felt threatened? A: That’s it! Q: Did they know that you are punks? A: They knew, they know we are punk. They never even stopped. Just went straight past yelling, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” [Bangsat! Bangsat!]. They were dressed like anak gaul. We don’t care, we’re not pretentious. . . . the anak gaul are intent on exhibiting their parents’ wealth. We’re different. Q: Do the anak gaul know of the existence of a punk community? A: They know. Q: And they hate you, too? A: Of course they hate us! We hate each other. Q: Every time they go past they yell obscenities? A: Because once someone made an antigaul [“g” crossed out] sticker. Q: Who made it? A: I don’t know. Q: Someone close to Suckerfinger? A: No. Maybe [somebody close to another Balinese punk anarki band] Jerky Suck.

Allow me to return briefly to the alternapunk scene from which Suckerfinger had grown, for the group began as a Green Day cover band during that era. It was therefore among those stereotyped by the death metal and reggae musicians cited in chapter 4 as naïve and vulnerable, and as exhibitionists from well-to-do families. By 1997 the punks who had been thus characterized proceeded similarly to stereotype the anak gaul, from whom they clearly differentiated themselves by way of dress style. Gaul and punk converged, however, in the mall, where both groups ritually hung out. But in this regard, too, punk anarki differed from its alternapunk predecessor. In 1998, when punks went to the mall, it was not to consume and be consumed, as did the alternapunks. Rather, they presented themselves in mall space in order to disrupt it.

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Gaul-punk mutual provocation was, for the most part, curiously nonviolent. Brawls between anak gaul and anak punk were rumored to have taken place in Yogya, Malang, Bandung, and Jakarta, but Balinese punks seemed to prefer disruptions that used imagery and noise over physical encounters. Agus, bassist for Suckerfinger, for example, recounted how, at the Ramayana mall, “all the punks are under suspicion” because they “like to make a lot of noise . . . take a ghetto blaster up to Timezone and play punk music, just to liven things up.” Notably, these performances of punk anarki at malls in Bali differed from ones in Malang, East Java. When I visited Malang in May 1997, I joined local punks and other underground communities in a ritual gathering outside Mitra Plaza, in the center of the city. There sheer force of numbers allowed the underground to perform an alternative to the consumerist ideal by simply gathering en masse along the footpath opposite the plaza. At shows in Bali, punks did not have the numbers to repeat the push and shove I had experienced at Bandung Underground II. Instead, they feigned brawls to enhance the spectacularity of their performances. Similarly, the relatively few Balinese punks were unable to reproduce the shock of the ritual underground gathering in Malang. Instead, the Balinese punks sought to enter the mall and engage in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the satpam. The mall thus became a frontline at which the punks provoked the satpam. Unlike their relations with the anak gaul, these games were not always free of violence, as members of Suckerfinger acknowledged. Q: Do you often go to Siwa Plaza? Agus: All the time. We’re brutal there! We confront the satpam. Q: Do you go there on a particular day? A: Every day. Q: Any particular time of day? A: It varies. But whatever the time, we always drink before we go there. Q: Aren’t you barred from going there? A: Yeah, we’re barred, but we don’t care. Q: Do you wear mohawks there? A: Sometimes. We used to always wear mohawks there. Especially Saturday night. Saturday night’s different.

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Q: Different how? A: We just don’t care [Cuwek aja]. Q: What do you mean? That the satpams are more liberal on a Saturday night? A: How to say it . . . wah! If our parents see . . . Oh my god! Q: Do they know you dress up to go to Siwa? A: Some do, some don’t. . . . It’s hard. What must they think? That we’re crazy, probably. They support our music activities, though. Q: They are supportive of your wearing a mohawk onstage, but not on the street? A: Well, it’s ok if you drive a car, but you can’t wear a motorbike helmet over your mohawk. We never used dare to wear a mohawk to the mall. Q: Why? A: We’d get bashed up by a soldier [at this point, sudden frenzied and loud chatter makes it impossible to make out the words]. . . . Every time someone went there with a mohawk, they’d be followed by satpams. One friend was bashed up by undercover cops. Q: Where? A: In Ramayana. Now we rarely go there. Q: Why would you be under suspicion? A: All the punks are under suspicion there. The problem is that they go there in large numbers and hang around. Q: The mall authorities complained? A: Yeah. Q: Was there a problem with crime? A: No, we’re not criminals! It’s just that we like to make a lot of noise. We’d take a ghetto blaster up to Timezone and play punk music, just to liven things up.

This raises another point of difference with the underground’s mall presence in Malang. In spite of their numbers, Malang’s Saturday night ritual gathering on the footpath opposite Mitra Plaza was relatively silent. If you crossed the street to the entrance of the plaza, the hum of undergrounders’ chatting was barely audible. There seemed to be no attempt to irritate the

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mall establishment and patrons with sound—this show of force was purely visual. In Bali, where a similar shock aesthetic was not possible, punks amplified their presence in the mall with noise. This differs from the alternapunks’ use of the mall space in 1996 and demonstrates the malleable nature of social spatialization. In 1996, the mall’s appeal lay in its constitution as Other in a predominant, regionalist discourse. Seeking temporary respite from dominant notions of Balineseness, Balinese alternapunks idealized the mall by associating it with values essential to their genre. In 1998, they also used the mall’s Otherness, no longer as a sanctuary of authenticity but to contrast, illuminate, and define their punk anarki selves. In this regard, the Balinese punks’ performances in Denpasar’s shopping malls in 1998–99 were firm displays of “oppositionality” which relied on dichotomous notions of the commercial and counterculture. But there were similarities, too, in the uses of the mall space. In chapter 4, I described sid members’ eagerness to circumscribe the games parlor at Nu Dewata Ayu within their punk realm as evidence of their need to stake out exclusively masculine territories in the mall and, by extension, to establish punk as a practice of modern masculinity. The punk anarki enthusiasts’ use of mall space in 1998 also delineated the moment of their intervention as a masculine moment which punctuated, aggressively, the mall’s more feminine time/spaces. Their use of mall space, that is, distinguished them from the anak gaul and their penchant for ngeceng (flirtatious display), and thereby closed the punks off from such male-female interaction. In spite of its performance of opposition to anak gaul and satpams, the punk anarki scene remained elusive, its attraction to obscurity becoming evident in a number of ways. First, the punks of 1998 insisted on the purely symbolic nature of their chaos and anarki. Roy, vocalist with Djihad, for example, asserted that “we apply anarchy to the stage, not directly,” and Criminal Assholes stated that “we’re not brave enough. . . . We just want to fit what we can into the existing way of life. It’s only when we are on stage that we are anarchistic.” Second, Balinese punks’ firm intention to elude definition was affirmed by their hesitations about declaring political allegiances in their lyrics, which challenges me to defy a tradition of lyrics analysis in scholarly ac-

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counts of punk (e.g., Laing 1985; Davies 1996; S. Cohen 1991). This is not to suggest that the lyrics of Balinese punk bands were apolitical, in the manner of the Los Angeles hardcore scene that Jeff Goldthorpe (1992: 42) describes, which had “absolutely no interest in politics or reform movements,” “lacked a political vocabulary,” and was “anti-everything, often lashing out indiscriminately.” As evident in the lyrics I cited above, excerpted from its album Case 15, sid did not lack a political vocabulary. Nor did punk chaos lyrics, as suggested by song titles such as “Smash the Police” (Criminal Assholes) and “Confrontational Behavior” (Emocore Revolver). But the apparent anger toward police in anarki lyrics did not signal the punks’ willingness to engage in antigovernment activism: they did not participate, after all, in events celebrating the imminent demise of the New Order regime. Moreover, while Balinese punks infrequently penned lyrics in Indonesian, most of their originals were in English. These words simply “fi lled in” as “noise” after the other parts of the song had been arranged, remaining incomprehensible not only to most audiences but also to most band members. For example, when I asked about the themes of punk chaos lyrics, Agus of Suckerfinger referred me to their vocalist, who “understands English because he studies at the tourism academy.” 5 This elusiveness sets the Balinese punks apart from those based in Java, who embraced the literal form of the ’zine, in which they denounced major labels and trendy people. Ironically, the Indonesian media seemed mostly interested in the underground for the short, dramatic quotes of musicians proclaiming their opposition to mass culture. In 1997 in Bali, a number of journalists and students of popular culture had become intrigued with the counterculture whose strength was becoming evident in the increasing number of underground shows staged on the island. By the end of that year, a group of university students had published an issue of an underground ’zine, Tikus Got, in which local punk and death metal bands were featured. As a student of cultural studies who had visited Java and met with underground musicians there on a number of occasions, I was one of those who sought quotable proclamations of antiestablishmentarianism from Balinese punks. To this end, I joined the editorial team of Tikus Got, whose cover warned: “Do not read if you are F#*! normal person” (see figures 9a and 9b). Yonas, an anthropology student at the Udayana University who was also

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writing a thesis about Bali’s underground music scene, was Tikus Got’s principal founder. Unlike editors of any other Indonesian underground ’zine, he favored phonetic spellings of English words such as “underground” (andergron) and “fucking shit” ( faking sit), which he saw as capturing their hybrid dimensions. He also adhered to a policy of killing pieces on bands if they had been written up in the “mainstream” press. While stickers proclaiming “Fuck trendy,” “Fuck the system,” and the like were popular among local punks, Tikus Got was not, and sales of the magazine in Java far outstripped sales in Bali. The unpopularity of Tikus Got suggests Balinese punks’ proclivity for eluding definition. This was also evident in a debate about the meaning of the underground that took place on Radio Casanova and was reported in the Bali Post. After Casanova devoted two weekly shows to the debate, and the Bali Post ran two articles reporting that no definition could be agreed on, sid’s Jerink expressed the feeling of many musicians that “the underground need not be defined” (Syahreza 1997b). A third way punk’s capacity for elusion became clear was in the changing nature of my interviews between 1996 and 1999. If in 1996 and 1997 respondents provided relatively logical and rational answers to my inquiries, the interviews I conducted in 1998 were disjointed exchanges to say the least. As evident in the excerpt from my interview with Suckerfinger cited above, many of my questions were left unanswered, or were “subverted” with puns, thus constantly frustrating my attempts to impose some order on the interaction. Increasingly, my demands for solid, defined answers went unmet, and the interviews collapsed into absurd, tangential chats which were perhaps more telling of punk anarki identity for their cacophonous, dissonant, and arrhythmic qualities than for any quotable information they contained. In this way, punk anarki differs from Laing’s (1985: 13, 15) discussion of English punk, in which he cites the pivotal role of “vitriolic” and “hardline” fanzines in the punk scene’s emergence in the early 1970s as exemplifying punks’ use of shock effect to combat a mainstream “leisure apparatus.” Balinese punks’ definitions of anarki blur leisure and shock, for the punks’ insistence on anarki’s purely parodic significance was betrayed by their chaotic and anarchic performances in the local shopping malls. Rather than rallying behind “opposition” or “confrontation,” the punks came together in participatory modes of cultural production. The central134

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Figures 9a and 9b

Front covers of both issues of Tikus Got.

ity of participatory modes to the punk anarki scene was manifest in a performance style for, as described, at shows punk anarki musicians sought to eradicate the gap between performers and fans in order to augment their experiences of “chaos and anarchy.” The importance of participation was also evident in the scene’s territorialization. That is, as musicians encouraged their audiences to close the gap between stage and pit, beyond the performance, punks displayed a preference for devolved yet interconnected punk subscenes. Anarki referred to more than simply a style of music, dress, and modes of performance on the mall. It also implied particular styles of performance at concerts, which necessitated audience participation. Thus, as the abundance of black t-shirts and motorbike-helmet mohawks decreased, and as real mohawks and more varied and individualistic styles appeared, and as the gap between stage and pit closed, dance and dress styles became as key to the performance as the music itself. In this way, Balinese punks began to signal their interest in participatory and collaborative modes of cultural production—an interest affirmed and furthered in the systems of performance organization they later devised. Devolving Territory, Collective Organizing We must dress in accordance with the music we play. . . . if we play chaos we have to dress chaotically. . . . The dress style has to go with the music. . . . punk chaos accessories are a leather jacket, safety pins, spikes, a spiked belt, three-quarter length jeans tucked into boots. . . . Everything comes alive. The vocals come alive. The main thing is so that every element in the performance is alive, the atmosphere is alive, so that the audience really wants to pogo, so that they get off their asses and get in the pit, rather than just sitting there motionless. . . . We want to cultivate a fan base that is really into chaos, so that there is some kind of action every time we perform. Movement. If there’s no movement in the pit, what’s the point of us jumping around on stage? I may as well not bother to perform at all. Jaya, vocalist with Criminal Assholes

The venue needs to be really full, and the audience really pumped, in order for a show to go off. If the audience was just still and quiet, so we would be, too, onstage. We wouldn’t be able to perform like we usually do. Roy, vocalist with Djihad

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Like punk moderen, punk anarki had its roots in a shifting territorialization. In 1998, three spaces emerged in Denpasar as significant punk hangouts. Moel established Underdog State, which combined a rehearsal studio exclusively for underground bands, a merchandise outlet, and a cafe, attracting death metal and punk groups alike. Lolot, who had left the Obituary cover band Behead in late 1996 for the hardcore band Knucklehead Nation, established Lunatic Merchandise on the busy Jl Waturenggong in Yang Batu. This became the hangout for bands such as Djihad and Commercial Suicide. Chaos Merchandise opened on the similarly busy Jalan Gunung Agung. Among others the ska band Storing, and the punk chaos bands Runamuck and Suckerfinger frequented this space. These places, referred to by local punks as “Underdog,” “Lunatic,” and “Chaos,” respectively, served as points for the dissemination of information about forthcoming shows and the production of compilation albums. They also increased the number of Balinese punks in contact with the international mail-order market and the Bandung underground, from whence much of the merchandise they sold derived. The emergence of Lunatic, Chaos, and Underdog was significant for two reasons. First, they nurtured an active and participatory underground economy. These were no idle hangouts, but places of activity, where merchandise (stickers, t-shirts, cassettes, independently produced Indonesian underground albums, as well as albums by foreign bands—on both major and independent labels—which could not be procured at local commercial outlets) was ordered and sold, performances were organized, and ideas for compilation albums were developed. Thus, the increasing aggression and harshness of punk anarki style did not signal the scene’s movement toward a hard-line oppositional stance in which the scene became increasingly enclosed and exclusive but a broadening negotiation between the punk’s “antiestablishmentarianism” and established forces of capitalism. This broadening interface was nurtured by the new, Denpasar-based territories around which the punk anarki scene centered, and was evident in the increasingly participatory way in which punk cultural products were made. For example, if punk moderen emerged in eager anticipation of sid’s debut album in mid-1997, during the punk anarki period, no band put out an entire album, but many participated in the production of several compila-

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tion albums, which bore the name of the various punk merchandise outlets and showcased a variety of local groups. In mid-1998 Underdog Records released the eleven-track Underdog Society, a compilation featuring originals by local punk, hardcore, death metal, and black metal groups. In April 1999 Lunatic Records released 100% Attitude: A Definitive Guide to Rock ’n’ Roll Radio Stars, which featured twelve tracks by local punk and hardcore bands. Further, interviews with punk musicians in 1998 and 1999 reveal not only that chaos and anarki were key to their performances, but also that the more participatory and collaborative the way a show was organized, the more likely they were to attain such states. I got some insight into the significance of participation in the performance of punk when I attended Chaos Day, which took place in the Lilha Buana stadium at the Denpasar sports complex. Until April 1999 the usual way to stage an underground concert was to establish an enterprise, commonly bureaucratic in nature (consisting of a treasurer, secretary, and director), advertise for bands to begin auditioning, then establish a technical committee and begin soliciting members from successful bands to assist with staging the show. Usually, officeholders were responsible for negotiating with the state and the market for permits, security, and sponsorship. Musicians were neither paid nor expected to contribute to the cost of the event. The enterprises were responsible for raising capital and were expected to cover any losses incurred. Technical committee members were charged with setting up the stage, hiring sound equipment, documenting the event, and so on. This bureaucratic hierarchy was partly broken down when seventeen punk, hardcore, and ska bands came together to organize the first underground show to take place without commercial sponsorship. The funds to stage Chaos Day, which took place on 17 April 1999, derived from contributions from each band performing at the show. When groups returned to their respective hangouts thereafter, many of them remembered it as the most energetic and exciting performance to date. Such sentiments, often expressed by musicians in interviews about the show, are exemplified by Roy of Djihad’s account of Chaos Day, in which he relates his own participation and cooperation with other musicians in organizing the performance to the audience’s participation in their set, and both of these to attaining a satisfactory level of aggression and chaos in the performance of punk. He reported that Chaos Day was “great” because it 138

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proved to those people who believed the punk underground had splintered that in fact it had not splintered at all. . . . Now they can see for themselves that we come together to stage a show, it’s a great success. If we were all enemies, how could we cooperate? Maybe we have different views and outlooks. . . . the Lunatic people hang out here [at Lunatic], the Chaos people hang out at Chaos, others at Underdog. It doesn’t mean we are all enemies. It could be that we just gravitate to where our friends are, the people we already know. We visit other punk communities, they visit us here. . . . [in the past] most of those who have invited us to perform at gigs have been know-it-alls. . . . Just because we want to play at that gig doesn’t mean we want to be ordered around. At Chaos Day, we put on our own show, so we could make our own rules, that was the good thing. There were so many people there, and they all had lots of energy. The whole audience was really supportive of all the bands.

The role of collective modes of organizing in attaining chaos and anarki highlights the orchestrated nature of these events, recalling both Victor Turner’s (1983) characterization of the Rio carnaval and the way Kevin Hetherington (1997) theorizes heterotopia. Hetherington adopts this Foucauldian term to describe the spatiality of social ordering in the context of modernity, and he distinguishes it from Turner’s liminoid space: While the idea of a liminoid space resists a functionalist interpretation, Turner, like Bakhtin and much of the recent geography of marginal spaces that draws upon their work, leaves himself open to the criticism of assuming that in play and in the invented rituals of the liminoid transgressor, there is no process or structure of ordering. This is not to suggest that social ordering is determined by functional prerequisites; however, it is necessary to see the process of transgression as also a process of ordering, even if the type of order it is hoping to achieve remains uncertain and contingent in form. (34)

But in his analysis of the Rio carnaval (1983) Turner does recognize the role of ordering processes at liminal events which produce momentary chaos, and he notes the importance of samba schools in achieving the climactic, out-of-the-ordinary experience of the carnaval itself. Observing how “the spontaneity and freedom . . . of Carnaval can only reach their uninhibited height in the four great days before Lent . . . if there has been a full year of organizing, plotting, and planning behind the scenes and a set of rules to

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channel the extravagant tide of song, dance, and generalized Eros” (112) he theorizes that it takes a great amount of order to produce a “sweet disorder,” a great deal of structuring to create a sacred play-space and time for antistructure. If “flowing”— communitas is shared flow—denotes the holistic sensation when we act with total involvement, when action and awareness are one (one ceases to flow if one becomes aware that one is doing it), then, just as a river needs a bed and banks to flow, so do people need framing and structural rules to do their kind of flowing. (118)

Turner’s acknowledgment of the role of ordering forces in the nonrational sphere of the carnaval thus exemplifies Hetherington’s heterotopia, as does the Chaos Day concert in Bali, where orchestrated “chaos” emerged from collective ways of organizing—alternate modes of ordering. Unlike the Melbourne street or feral punk groups (see Lentini 2002), the Balinese punks did not associate chaos and anarki with communitarianism. It is therefore ironic that the orchestration of anarki at shows required modes of organization that were distinctly anarchic for their devolved, participatory nature. A second point of significance of the Denpasar-based territories was their role in supporting the accommodation of punkness within “Balineseness.” The emergence of punk home territories within the banjars (villages) and near the family compounds of which the punks were part brought punk into the realm of their everyday, both for the punks themselves and for other Denpasar residents to whom the practice’s existence was now more clearly exhibited. The way punk was accommodated within the domestic everyday is evident in the (begrudging) acceptance of mohawks and other elements of punk anarki style in local contexts. Members of Criminal Assholes, for example, elicited surprise but not scorn when they wore their punk gear to a banjar meeting, and the band’s vocalist, Jaya, claimed that in spite of his parents’ disapproval, he “went on with wearing his mohawk at home anyway.” He further recalled how he absented himself from preparations for his wedding in order to audition for a gig: They don’t agree, but I just went on with [wearing my mohawk at home] anyway. I often dip out of things that I have a family responsibility to attend. Once, it was the day before my wedding. Everyone at home was rushing around preparing for the wedding. But I had to attend an audition. Everyone was looking for the groom at

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home. I was in the studio. I put my shoes and stuff in a bag and went over the back wall. I do have principles! Even if I was getting married, I still attended the audition. I didn’t care so much about the wedding. It’s easy to organize a wedding.

While punk anarki style was contested in the domestic setting, it was not demonized there as it was in both the shopping center and, in some instances, the mass media. Furthermore, “local tradition” was not a target of the punks’ ire—a point clearly and constantly articulated in 1996–99 by various punks, who differentiated between their genre and preexisting local repertoires. If we are to understand the evolution of Balinese punk as a shifting spatialization, then a rapprochement becomes clear between, on the one hand, punkness, initially perceived as inherently metropolitan and issuing from “the center,” and, on the other, a Balinese domestic everyday. By 1998 punk home territories were no longer relegated to the Other space of the mall or Kuta but located in or near family compounds. But at the same time, the punks resisted incorporation into a dominant discourse of Balineseness. Rather, they sought to establish links to a pan-Indonesian underground scene and forced their “parent” Balinese culture to accommodate them without their having to incorporate linguistic or stylistic elements of “Balineseness” into their art, hence defying dominant notions of Balinese culture’s inherent syncretism. The Meaning of Style

Dick Hebdige (1979) argued that subcultures inevitably head toward recuperation as media images “freeze” spectacular style and preclude further bricolage. Since then, a number of writers have taken issue with the idea that subcultures, particularly punk, necessarily tread a path from savagery to civility (Fuchs 1998; Goldthorpe 1992) and have asserted the importance of acknowledging the unpredictability of subcultural flux (G. Clarke 1990). The shifting nature of Balinese punk exemplifies such flux and emphasizes the urgency of considering that youth not only act as subcultural bricoleurs, presenting deviance via a semantic disordering, but also that they can excorporate recuperated styles, such as Green Day’s punk. In spite of their genesis from media images of alternative identities which portrayed the genre as exclusive to a new rich class of youth, Balinese punks successfully adopted particular elements of that style and made them both useful and meaningful to

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local youth. Far from becoming frozen, therefore, media images of alternative identities inspired some Balinese young people to associate their musical practices with a metropolitan core of disorder, and the images prompted them to dislocate from dominant discourses of Balineseness, perceived as more restrictive. As the alternapunks practiced a utopics of the metropolis, they became stereotyped by other local musicians as victims of a metropolitan superculture. However, in chapter 4, I argued that the practice of alternapunk should not be expected to conform to its prevailing stereotype. Rather than as victims, the alternapunks ought to be viewed as “innovators,” even if the “disorder” to which they aspired was not embodied in dress and performance style until the following year. In their innovations, the alternapunks did not effect semantic disordering of a homogeneous, consumer culture but identified with certain elements of a dominant consumer culture which celebrated heterogeneity, for Indonesian media images of alternative identities valorized the possibilities for bricolage inherent in a new rich status. It took some time for a distinctive Balinese punk scene to emerge. Thus, rather than moving toward diff usion and defusion, Balinese punk style became increasingly coherent with time. In this chapter I have argued for the interconnectedness of style, space, cultural production, and intervals of spectacular release. My insistence on the importance of contextualizing dress style spatially contests both Hebdige’s (1979) contention that dress style alone can be revealing of subcultural identity and Stanford Lyman and Marvin Scott’s (1989) assertion that people manipulate their bodies when other territories they control are encroached on. They contend that “exercising freedom over body territory provides a more fruitful approach to those for whom public territories are denied and home territories difficult or impossible to maintain” (32), but my study suggests the reverse: that control over space empowers people to manipulate their bodies. This hints at the very porous nature of the boundary dividing “the body” from its wider spatial context and underscores the importance of contextuality. The Balinese punk scene bore distinct dress and dance styles as soon as enthusiasts gained access to a “home territory” at Kuta, an evolution paralleled by punks’ increasing control over other cultural resources, including performances and album production. Punks celebrated this increasing con142

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trol by expressing their enthusiasm for Superman Is Dead. As well as organizing the island’s first-ever underground show, and being the first band to produce an album independently, sid played an integral and key role in providing the space where the punk jam occurred. The emergence of a punk chaos style can also be linked to the domestication of the scene, and to increasingly devolved control over cultural production. These parallel processes allowed the scene to retain countercultural authenticity even as a rapprochement took place between moments of “Balineseness” and ones of “punkness.” Punks’ countercultural exhibitions in the late 1990s were primarily ludic and nonrational, yet they also were rooted in a broader context of punks’ extended control over cultural production. This is evident in the great deal of planning devoted to organizing Chaos Day, which exemplifies Turner’s communitas—disorderly intervals providing moments of reflection in which society is reconstituted. Moreover, Balinese punk’s nonrational, affective strategies and proclivity for elusion identifies it as a novel facet of a broader regionalist discourse which contested the metropolis’s increasing ubiquity in the local cultural landscape. In the context of Balinese discourses of identity, Balinese punk’s novelty lay primarily in its straddling of ethnic and provincial boundaries through its strengthening allegiances to a pan-Indonesian underground scene. The Balinese punk scene’s increasingly devolved, consensual, and participatory modes of cultural production accord with the stress on participation and democracy in the sekehe ideology that Carol Warren (1993: 277) describes as an authentic local referent, as I detailed in chapter 1. It is important, however, not to overstate the importance of such local referents in an analysis of Balinese punk. Although domesticated, Balinese punks did not revert to indigenous forms of social organization, by forming sekehe for example. Over the course of 1998–99, in spite of their increasing devolution, and identification with certain banjars scattered across Denpasar, at least until mid-1999, there was no such thing as a sekehe punk. Indeed, unlike the voluntary sekehe Warren (1993: 11) describes, for which “it is rare . . . to recruit members across banjar lines,” punk solidarities transgressed not only banjar, but also provincial/ethnic and genre-related boundaries, as Balinese punk and death metal scenes alike extended their links to the Javabased centers of a pan-Indonesian underground scene and resisted local essentialist reactions to Jakartanisasi. Grounding Punk

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CHAPTER 6

Metal

n chapter 2 I described how in the early 1990s a coherent Balinese death-thrash identity and scene came to be formed in local territories. The musicians’ performances of “foreignness” were set in a broader discursive context in which locals’ perceptions of what constituted Balinese identity had come to be determined by the demands of “cultural tourism,” the legacy of which lay in fears of tourism’s culturally imperialist bent and its propensity to Westernize local youth. At the same time, following the 1993 Metallica riots, official identity discourses aligned rock fandom with menacing preman (underclass gangsters), whom the Balinese death-thrashers mimicked. These broader contexts gave death-thrash “foreignness” Blossoms and their mimicry of the preman a political efficacy. Following the Metallica riots, the Balinese death-thrash scene lost control of those territories in which a coherent identity had been molded in the early 1990s. The scene became a bureaucratic realm in which death-thrash identity complied with an official youth ideal. By early 1996, however, when I arrived in Bali, this bureaucratic cohesion was beginning to break apart. At that time, in response to local youths’ enthusiasm for forming Green Day cover bands, death metal musicians Othered local alternapunk fans, identifying them as naive fashion victims. This was expressed in orchestrated absences from the shopping mall and revealed the death-thrashers territorial regrouping— now in the shadows of a metropolitan, consumerist ideal. In this final chapter, I explore a third shift in the death metal scene, as metal enthusiasts came to identify as part of a national underground scene in which they converged with punks, whom they hitherto so vehemently derided. This Balinese underground emerged as monolithic mainstreams, such as music television and major recording labels, which had formerly authenticated death metal’s

alterity, increasingly accommodated a pan-Indonesian underground scene. At the same time, so did the state, and by the late 1990s it was no longer difficult to obtain permits for rock shows, as it had been in the period immediately following the Metallica riots. This blurred the dividing line between “underground” and “commercial” culture. We will explore how, in this context, Balinese metal enthusiasts retained control over their scene, resisting concert promoters who increasingly looked to the underground music scene as a source of profit. As I argued in chapter 5, Balinese punks localized their genre of choice by devolving from a central hangout to develop roots in a number of home territories scattered across Denpasar. I also argued that this devolution enabled them to cohere around a countercultural, antigaul (anti-rich kid) alterity which was spectacularly performed by way of spontaneous interventions in mall space. As we will see, in the late 1990s, the Balinese metal scene also developed devolved home territories in and near the banjars (villages) from which respective participants hailed. This also led to a devolution of power in the scene as smaller, scattered, and more intimate groups began to gain skills in concert organizing. The final section of this chapter turns to the metal enthusiasts’ increasingly devolved links to local territories in ensuring the practice’s local relevance, and focuses on the role of black-metal bands’ feigned transgressions in ensuring the maintenance of a coherent marginality. I begin, though, with a brief discussion of what happened in the Balinese death-thrash scene immediately following the Metallica riots. Bureaucratic Order There needs to be a positive body which can contain, channel, and direct in a responsible way the potential of the youth. . . . We also want to correct the negative perceptions of society at large toward rock/metal, thrash, and death metal/grindcore. . . . [The organization] 1921 is a body for those young people whose character is extreme, and it channels them in a healthy and positive way, keeping in mind their essence as the generation of the future. Agus Yanky, 6 February 1998

In 1993, under the banner of 1921, a number of death-thrash bands teamed up with the local promoter Liberty Entertainment to stage the island’s first concert reserved exclusively for thrash and death metal bands. Only days before the show was scheduled to take place, riots occurred outside 146

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a Metallica concert in Jakarta, and official fear of a repeat “thrash riot” in Bali caused the provincial police to revoke the permit they had issued for the event. Subsequently, interviewees recall, the once-monthly bazaar banjars suddenly ceased. Thus, in contrast to the early 1990s, when Balinese deaththrash bands had enjoyed access to the monthly bazaar banjars described in chapter 1, performance opportunities between the Metallica riots and mid-1995 were extremely limited.1 As I mentioned in chapter 3, the scarcity of gigs and waning sponsorship led Rahmat Hariyanto, the head of the equipment rental company Crapt Entertainment, to establish Sunday Hot Music (shm), which first took place in mid-1994 and was repeated in mid1995. Also in mid-1995, Liberty Entertainment established an annual band parade. Between 1993 and the beginning of 1996, these three events and three other concerts that took place at the Lumintang, Gerokgak, and Sading banjar halls provided the only opportunities for death and thrash bands to perform. Not until mid-1995 did death-thrash bands begin to gain entry into shm.2 Deprived of regular performance opportunities for almost two years, the Balinese death-thrash scene was dealt a further blow in late 1994, when Radio Yudha scrapped the program 1921 (which had spawned the organization of the same name), allegedly due to lack of sponsorship. After receiving news that his show was to be axed, Agus Yanky wrote a twenty-five-page letter to the radio’s management requesting the radio station’s formal endorsement of the establishment of 1921, the organization. This document hints at the organization’s compliance with an official ideal in a number of ways. Unlike the many underground ’zines—ragged celebrations of chaos and collage—that emerged in Java and Bali in the late 1990s, aesthetically speaking, Yanky’s neatly arranged text is sandwiched between the letterhead (kop) and official stamp (stempel) that were at the top and bottom of each of the twenty-five pages, which detail the organization’s history, its aims and objectives, rules and regulations, prohibitions, and conditions of membership. Linguistically speaking, the letter resounds with the kind of “formal perfection” that Virginia Hooker (1996) attributes to Suharto’s presidential speeches. Again, unlike the ’zines’ mélange of everyday spoken language and antiauthoritarian underground slang—including a wealth of English phrases such as “Commercial suck,” “Underground will never die,” and M e ta l B l o s s o m s

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“We are totally pure and sick”—Agus Yanky’s letter refrains from the use of English in line with state attempts to enforce a normative, correct form of the Indonesian language (Heryanto 1996), and it is cloaked in expressions of thanks to various authorities and institutions, including Radio Yudha, Indosemar Sakti, Liberty Entertainment, and the cassette store Istana Musik. Death-thrash enthusiasts of the early 1990s had mimicked moral demons in the employment of subcultural capital, but Agus Yanky’s letter takes pains to distance the practice from the menacing preman, and to align death metal with an official ideal of youth as the vanguard of development. In contrast to the disheveled aesthetic, the “noise” and the “dread” which in previous years had been performed in public territories of the market and the cassette store, the letter sought to challenge metal’s stereotypical associations with disorder and destruction, which had been reinforced by official responses to the Metallica riots. Agus Yanky protested “extreme measures such as the use of rock music as a scapegoat” and proclaimed the need for an official death-thrash organization which could oversee young enthusiasts’ psychological well-being and help them maintain “positive” lives. Once denied the home territory of the Radio Yudha studio, the deaththrash gatherings became more formalized. Instead of drinking sessions during the broadcast, enthusiasts now came together in the lounge of Agus Yanky’s parents’ house for meetings at which the moral implications of headbanging were discussed, bands were selected to perform at shows of which Agus Yanky had been informed, and minutes were taken. As such, 1921 had ceased to be a tempat nongkrong (hangout)—a home territory in which solidarity had become embodied—and became, instead a wadah (body, institution), simultaneously deterritorialized and documented, for Agus Yanky proposed a hierarchical membership structure and listed a set of questions which prospective members had to answer correctly in order to qualify for entry. One of the roles that 1921, the organization, came to play was to ensure that the few death metal performances that occurred in this period were completed by a headbanging mass, for enthusiasts would travel to shows together, where they would wait for senior members to gesture to them to gather at the lip of the stage, so they could prepare to headbang. Thus, when Eternal Madness struck up at shm on 4 February 1996, scores of head-

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bangers rushed to the stage and began whirling their black manes. But when Phobia, whose members were alone among Balinese death thrashers in refusing to join 1921, played at the same concert a month later, not a single headbanger emerged. Thus while the death-thrashers’ response to their genre generally contrasted the motionlessness of alternapunk audiences, it was not—unlike the punk pogo that emerged in the following year—a celebration of spontaneity. Rather, headbanging had become a show of staunch loyalty and allegiance mobilized by a bureaucratic order. “At the first Sunday Hot Music,” recalled Moel of the death metal band Eternal Madness, “Phobia was due to perform, but none of 1921’s death metal member bands were due to play. So a 1921 meeting was called, and everyone was called on to consider the question of whether members should headbang in response to Phobia’s performance or not” (interview, 2 February 1998). But 1921’s bureaucratization should not be seen as an instance of direct subjugation due to state terror. In early 1993, local death thrashers in fact protested the official banning of their first all-metal concert. Interviewees recalled the banjar gigs of the early 1990s as pitting them against reggae and tourism, but the recollections of the period immediately following the 1993 Metallica riots seemed to make the authorities clearer targets of their ire. 3 When we found out that the permit had been revoked we all went to the local parliament, but it wasn’t a demonstration. We all went on our motorbikes, en masse, to the local parliament, where we met with representatives to ask them how it could it be that our permit was issued then revoked by the police. We asked them to help us. We asked the mayor, too. . . . We were tailed by intelligence. They thought we were strange, out of the ordinary. That we could cause a riot. . . . Actually, we didn’t really mean to ask for help from the legislators. We meant to ask them whether it was possible for the decision [to revoke the permit] to be reversed. (Moel, interview, 2 February 1998) After Metallica made a riot in Jakarta there was a vacuum in the local music scene; gigs weren’t allowed. That went on for a long time. No permits were given out. It was so hard to get a permit. Any kind of rock music wasn’t allowed. (Dek Ben) Before, the government banned live music events because they believed they prompted riots, or sometimes even because they believed that such events would have a negative, Westernizing influence on the youth. In their view, youth should

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preserve traditional culture. That’s why they don’t legalize live music. (Ari, bassist for Phobia)

Moreover, 1921 the organization was not formed until 1994, following the scrapping of the radio show, which had been aired for eighteen months after the Metallica riots. However, if it did not subjugate by terror, the official response to the Metallica riots progressively denied the Balinese death-thrash scene the spaces where death-thrash solidarity had become embedded in the early 1990s. With fewer shows taking place due to the post-Metallica official ban on rock concerts, and with the scrapping of the radio show, the Balinese death-thrash scene lost access to the public arena in which deaththrash solidarity had been performed and reinforced. The death-thrash scene’s subsequent bureaucratization reveals not the operation of terror but the links between the spatialization of identity practices in hangouts and the nature of identity performance, and it highlights the state’s ability to eradicate instances of liminality by restricting access to spaces in which it hitherto had been enacted. Such bureaucratization nonetheless helped the death-thrashers gain access to shm around 1995. In subsequent years, death metal musicians remembered 1921’s strict bureaucratic nature with scorn and derision. But at the time its organizational structure appeared suited to a scene stripped of its spatial resources. Specifically, interviewees appreciated the organization’s role in making accessible commercial, pangenre concerts such as the Liberty Band Parade and shm. At the same time, the organizers of these shows, unsure of how to rate the quality of death metal bands in auditions, solicited 1921’s assistance. In this way, Agus Yanky played a negotiating role for which member musicians were grateful. We are very grateful to Crapt for giving death metal bands the opportunity to perform. Hopefully, this will continue in years to come. If it weren’t for 1921, we wouldn’t have this opportunity, because 1921 allows us to speak about our music as an organization. They also help us out if we have any difficulty. . . . we consider ourselves lucky to be part of the organization because it brings the rich and poor together. It means that those who don’t have some kind of equipment can get access to it through other members of the organization. (Lolot, vocalist for Behead) We need a body/organization [wadah] because we feel that our music is oppressed. It’s not so easy for us to be accepted by gig organizers. If we are part of an 150

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organization we can prove that our music is not going to make a riot, because that’s the reason they always give for not letting us perform—that our music is heavy and therefore we will provoke a riot. But we’ve always been good, and there’s never been any trouble. That’s why we are united under an organization because we feel that we are small, and if small people unite it makes them strong. If we were divided it would be impossible to get a gig. (Dek Ben of Triple Six)

Also beginning in mid-1995, death metal musicians began to receive significant media attention, most of which sympathized with the death-thrashers’ distancing themselves from the riotous Metallica troublemakers. Preparing to host a concert by one of the country’s top pop bands, Dewa 19, campusbased organizers placed an advertisement in the local paper calling on local bands, except death metal and dangdut (a genre of Indonesian popular music) groups, to audition to be the show’s opening act. In a report in the Bali Post (10 December 1995), the spokesperson for the organizing committee, Winanto Nugroho, reasoned that such restrictions were imposed because “the organizers [were] not willing to take risks which could have fatal consequences.” The same Bali Post article also reported Moel’s accusation that certain genres of music were being discriminated against, as well as his defense of death-thrash, in which he noted that “Sunday Hot Music hosted thrash bands for four weeks in a row and there were no riots.” shm and Liberty Band Parade—the two commercial concert series which served as catalysts for the subsequent band boom in mid-1995—were as accommodating of death metal as the local media. As I have noted, when shm held its second annual Month of Sundays in 1995, a number of 1921member bands performed. When the Liberty Band Parade was held on 5 and 6 August, Debtor, Behead, Misty, and Triple Six, all 1921 members, performed, and a panel of judges awarded Misty second place. Also in August 1995, at Moel’s urging, the University of Udayana invited the Jakartabased thrash band Suckerhead to perform in Bali, and Eternal Madness was their opening act. In spite of a Bali Post profi le of Eternal Madness (3 December 1995), which used the example of the Dewa 19 show as evidence that death metal was informally banned from the island’s commercial stages, beginning in mid-1995, death-thrash bands began to find more and more opportunities to perform. In addition to the Suckerhead concert, shm’s Month of Sundays

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and the Liberty Band Parade, a branch of the Forum for the Communality and Unity of Children of Civil Servants (Forum Kekeluargaan Persatuan Putra-Putri Pegawai Negeri), based in the subdistrict of Gianyar, staged a pangenre show dubbed Gianyar Teens’ Glittering Stage Action [sic] (Pentas Aksi Gebyar Remaja Gianyar) at which Phobia, Eternal Madness, and Debtor played. The concert was written up in the Bali Post in an article titled “Even Gianyar Subjected to Trash [sic] ‘Assault’ ” (31 December 1995) and in which the author gushed: “Eternal Madness, which had several weeks previously been banned from performing as Dewa 19’s support band, deserved to be considered one of the star performers on this night. It is rare to see local bands put on such a show.” The following year, when shm went biweekly, thrash and death metal bands were always included in the Bali Post’s regular write-ups of the series. In mid-February, the newspaper ran a feature on death-thrash which sought to validate its appeal through parallels between thrash music and the Balinese gamelan, and between headbanging and traditional trance dance (14 February 1996). The article’s title, “Musisi Bali Memang Suka yang Keras Keras” (“Balinese Musicians Have a Penchant for Hard Sounds”), cited a comment by Yudana, a musicologist attached to the Denpasar School of Arts (Sekolah Seni Rupa Indonesia, ssri), who observed that Balinese artists, both traditional and modern, seem to be drawn toward hard and heavy sounds. Further, the article stated that thrash performances were not about rioting and that thrash musicians were “idealistic” and “deep thinkers.” 4 Thus, while it was common for Java-based punks to Other the media in the manner described in chapter 4, approving reports in the Bali Post in late 1995 and early 1996 did not spell the “subcultural kiss of death” for the practice (Thornton 1995: 9). In fact, the articles seemed to have the reverse effect, as enthusiasts took pride in their connections with local journalists and newspaper stories about their bands. Agus Yanky praised the Bali Post’s music reporter, Gus Martin, for his “help in getting death metal bands a spot on shm’s 1995 lineup. That’s what brought our scene from obscurity into prominence” (interview, 29 March 1996). Others, including Ari Phobia, Moel, and Dek Ben, clipped newspaper write-ups on death metal and kept them in photo albums with photographs of their bands’ performances.

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Devolution, Pluralism Actually we are a death metal band. Not a thrash band, but a death metal or grindcore band. Dek Ben

Beginning in early 1996, a number of shifts took place in the Balinese death-thrash scene. The increasing frequency of concerts on the island had inspired a “second generation” of death metal bands, whose members protested the media’s conflation of death and thrash genres.5 In the territorial void of 1993–95, many thrash bands had dissolved, and by early 1996 thrash bands were no longer part of the scene. A second shift took place in which, after 1996, many musicians became critical of the legacy of 1921, the organization, for its perceived restrictive nature, and they began to shed their bureaucratic shell. This first became evident in April, when, independently of Agus Yanky and his organization, Age established Grindcorner, a merchandise outlet located in the heart of the capital, and the new generation of death metal bands began to gather there, thus restoring a “hangout” (tempat nongkrong) to the local scene. Later Moel (2 February 1998) complained that 1921, the organization, was too much like school; Cak derided its formal nature; and Gede Gobler, vocalist with the black metal band Arwah, did not consider the organization favorably in recalling their origins: “We all met up at a warung on Jalan A. Yani [a main thoroughfare], where we used to drink. I’ve never been a member of 1921. . . . Never. In my view, 1921 is too restrictive. Every time you get home from a gig you have to have a meeting. They tell you who’s allowed to play, who has to play. I can’t do that. I want to be free.” In chapter 5, I argued that participants’ control over performance space and the existence of distinct punk hangouts served as mutually reinforcing facets around which solidarity cohered. This solidarity was expressed in public through distinct dance and dress styles. Similar correlations between the increasing numbers of participants who gained skills in concert organizing and the flourishing of hangouts can be found in the metal scene. In chapter 3, I described how I crisscrossed Denpasar in an attempt to map the alternapunk scene. In visiting these second-generation metal bands, I again found myself traveling to the four corners of the city, for over the course

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of the late 1990s, subsequent to Age’s establishment of Grindcorner, the metal scene’s home territories also flourished. By 1998 the banjars in Sading (in the northern, outlying region of the city), on Sesetan (the city’s main north–south thoroughfare), and in Sanur (on the east coast) contained the city’s most significant metal hangouts. This meant that people could come together of their own accord, and as part of an everyday routine, in contrast to their only being able to gather at Agus Yanky’s parents’ house to attend structured 1921 meetings in the 1994–96 period. No longer were enthusiasts dependent on Agus Yanky’s mediation to gain access to shows, and these groups frequently organized their own banjar-level metal or underground performances. Bands now always auditioned for gigs on their own, not as representatives of 1921. These scattered hangouts were more like the devolved, interconnected punk anarki centers than those of earlier alternapunk bands, which had no links to one another. The establishment of Moel and Dayu’s Underdog State was influential in linking them, and also in helping metal enthusiasts to reconcile their roots in banjar-based hangouts with their desire to identify as part of a pangenre underground music scene. In 1997 Moel and Dayu leased a house in the back streets behind Jalan Supratman, not far from Ari Phobia’s warung mentioned in chapter 2. They turned one of the rooms into a rehearsal studio and the garage into a merchandise outlet. They constructed a pergola at the front of the house under which they placed bamboo chairs and tables, turning this terrace into a cafe. Bands were drawn to Underdog State by the practice studio, and musicians began to hang out at the cafe while awaiting their time slots, or they used it as a place to wind down afterward. Underdog State hence provided metal and punk musicians with a common hangout. There I met members of the punk anarki band Criminal Assholes and those of the black-metal bands Arwah and Ritual Crypt. These musicians frequented their separate, local hangouts on a daily basis. But they were certain to turn up at least once a week at Underdog State, where Moel established a Saturday-night jam session for underground bands. The pangenre solidarity among underground enthusiasts in evidence at Underdog State was more concretely expressed when Moel produced at his studio a Balinese underground compilation album, Underdog Society, which included, among others, original tracks by the punk anarki

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bands Total Idiot and Criminal Assholes and the black-metal bands Annymissme and Blood Maggot. In the late 1990s, then, in spite of their distinct roots, the Balinese punk and metal scenes came to share an underground identity that they also understood to be pan-Indonesian. This shift can be partly attributed to a liberalizing political climate in the lead-up to Suharto’s resignation. Although Suharto did not step down until May 1998, by 1996 permits for rock concerts were clearly more readily issued. This enabled amateur musicians and youth groups in Bali and Java alike to stage underground concerts. A third shift can be seen in the changing nature of shows at which musicians now performed. In the late 1990s in Indonesia, while the newly established multinational recording labels continued to sign local “alternative” bands and promote their products on music television, they scarcely occupied the Indonesian concert scene. This scene was almost entirely inhabited by underground concert organizers and accommodated a band boom among young male high school and university students. Fed by a globalized media, this underground scene nevertheless rejected the consumerist and hedonist “new rich” ideal promoted on music television, and it was critical of the signing of local extreme metal and punk bands by the newly established Indonesian branches of multinational recording labels. Such anticommercial idealism was vehemently maintained by participants’ public performances in shopping malls, which confronted the consumerist ideal, and their fostering of networks through which merchandise, ’zines, and selffunded recordings were distributed. That underground shows dominated the Indonesian concert scene suggests that although the state may have issued permits for rock concerts more liberally in the late 1990s, commercial concert enterprises and major international promoters were loath to take risks in an uncertain political climate. Thus the big rock festivals that became so common in the West in the 1990s, and which provided fans with many opportunities to see world-famous bands play live, were never a part of the Indonesian concert scene. This meant that the underground bands had few reasons to engage with commercial promoters, and that they therefore retained a high degree of selfcontainment and self-sufficiency. This became clear when I attended my first underground show in July

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1996 in the scene’s Indonesian heart: Bandung, West Java. I arrived by bus on a Saturday night, and the following morning made my way to the sports hall in the leafy inner city where the concert, Bandung Underground II, was to be held. As early as 10:00 a.m., a mass of black had gathered outside the stadium to prepare for this marathon celebration. By 11:00 a.m., this crowd of about four thousand people had been sucked into the stadium, and the atmosphere was pregnant with anticipation. When the Malang-based death metal band Rotten Corpse began to play, the pit came to life, and black manes began to fly. The pangenre nature of the event meant a constant ebb and flow in and out of the pit. When Rotten Corpse finished, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, and Brutal Truth t-shirts exited, as did long hair. Turtle Junior started setting up on stage, and the t-shirts were replaced by severe mohawks and leather jackets with hefty screws sewn into the shoulders, worn by people who had come for big, messy sounds, four-chord garage-like phrases, and simple riffs to jump up and down to. And when the mohawks in their turn ebbed, painted faces flowed in, as the black-metal band Sacrilegious introduced its set with a gut-echoing, fuzzy bass and atonal exclamations. Bandung Underground II showcased twenty-one bands—including hardcore, punk, grindcore, thrash, death, and black metal—and was put together by the official youth organization of the suburban district of Margayu. It was the city’s second underground concert in two years, and the organizing committee, mostly university students, had pooled time, labor, and money to get the festival off the ground. Those eager to be part of the committee had to donate funds—between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand rupiah, for while corporate sponsorship was sought to cover the printing of tickets and promotional flyers, all other costs came from the committee’s kitty. These other costs, which amounted to 6 million rupiah, included sound and equipment, venue rental, hiring security, and paying police for a permit to hold the show. Prior to 1996, Balinese death-thrash musicians had not been well acquainted with the Java-based scene, and it was not until Total Uyut I was staged in October 1996 that initial steps were taken to forging links with bands based in Java. Attending Bandung Underground II inspired Moel to stage a similar festival in Bali. On his return from Bandung, he announced

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an audition date for local bands, wrote to a number of Java-based underground bands to invite them to perform at the event, and pawned his motorcycle to pay for the musicians’ transportation and accommodations. This was unprecedented, for most underground concerts on Java did not cover musicians’ travel. All of those invited were therefore eager to attend. Around twenty people, including me, Yonas, and Pokpok, with whom I later collaborated on the underground ’zine Tikus Got, volunteered for the Total Uyut organizing committee. Most of the volunteers were musicians who were excited about the prospect of Bali’s hosting an underground event. Some were especially eager to learn more about concert organizing. Unlike those who had staged Bandung Underground II, the volunteers did not contribute funds for Total Uyut, which was paid for solely by Moel and Dayu’s em Productions. In the weeks leading up to Total Uyut, volunteers came together in Moel’s bedroom, where we organized or, rather, were organized, in preparation for the event. There were those responsible for constructing and decorating the stage (according to Moel’s specifications), those who were to design the promotional flyer (also in line with Moel’s guidelines), and those who were to take care of ticketing, sound, “documentation” (taking photos), and seeking corporate sponsorship. There were also those who took part in selecting the bands, which auditioned for the event at a nearby rehearsal studio. I was allotted the task of helping Dayu lobby the vice governor, apparently known to her father, to gain a police permit for the concert. This “lobbying” entailed a number of lengthy waits outside the vice governor’s high front gate while one of his servants went to fetch him, only to emerge and inform us that the vice governor was not yet available. Total Uyut, which took place on 20 October 1996 in the Denpasar sports hall (see figure 10), provided local enthusiasts with their first taste of punk chaos and black metal music, dress, and performance, which, in ensuing years, came to be practiced with great enthusiasm and spirit by a number of Balinese musicians. In chapter 5, I discussed the role of the punk chaos band Total Riot’s performance at this show in inspiring local punks to adopt the punk chaos style. To those Balinese youths who went on to form black-metal bands, the performance at the same show by the Bandung-based black-metal group Sacrilegious was similarly impressive. In my interviews with Balinese black-metal musicians in the late 1990s, they often referred

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Figure 10

Headbanging at Total Uyut I, Denpasar. credit: emma baulch

to Sacrilegious’s set as the catalyst for their coming together as black-metal bands, and they commonly recalled the point at which the hand of the vocalist Agus mysteriously elongated. Subsequent to the advent of Total Uyut I, in Bali, over a thirty-month period between October 1996 and April 1999, at least twenty exclusively underground concerts took place, some of which were held in public buildings such as the Denpasar sports complex, and others of which were staged in banjars with strong metal followings. This does not include those which may have escaped my notice, nor does it include pangenre shows such as Sunday Hot Music, which reconvened as a Month of Sundays in 1997–98, or the Udayana University Engineering Faculty’s annual Granat—both of which were dominated by punk and death metal bands. It also contrasts a similar thirty-month period between April 1993, when the Metallica riots took place, and January 1996, when shm began as a biweekly show, when there were only five concerts at which death metal bands performed, all of which were pangenre in nature, thus compelling death metal to play “troublemaker” in opposition to the better received genre of reggae. Previously, death metal musicians had constructed their authenticity in opposition to the perceived opportunism of musicians playing reggae (in the early 1990s) and alternapunk (in the mid-1990s). But by the late 1990s, through their 158

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participation in the underground, death metal musicians came to recognize many authenticities in which a number of subgeneric choices were considered valid.6 One example of these shows’ uniting of the distinct underground genres beneath a single, countercultural umbrella was the island’s first underground concert, Pesta Musik Underground, staged on 5 October 1996 by Superman Is Dead (sid)’s Independent Productions. Pesta Musik Underground featured punk (sid), death metal (Misty), hardcore punk (Knucklehead Nation), and grunge (Brother Roots), and pioneered the idea that death metal and punk shared a common underground identity. However, Total Uyut I furthered this idea by implying that death metal and punk were united by their common enemy, for similar to a promotional flyer which had announced Bandung Underground II as “It’s all pure underground, not for trendy ears!,” Total Uyut’s flyer also proclaimed (in English): “It’s pure underground, not for trendy people!” Subsequently, terms such as “Fuck the Trend!” and “Fuck the System!” also became part of the language commonly used by metal musicians, if not in everyday parlance, then on cassette covers, promotional flyers, as (growled) onstage banter, or on the stickers that adorned their mudguards. Not only did the shows at which Balinese metal bands performed in the late 1990s contain stylized interaction among underground genres and subgenres, they also served as realms in which interprovincial relations were furthered, drawing the Balinese death metal scene into a national concert circuit and bringing it more closely into line with the prevailing “underground” discourse of alterity. At the same time, subgenres flourished on the metal scene, and the ebb and flow I had witnessed at Bandung Underground II also began to take place at shows in Bali. Similarly, in the Balinese metal scene in the late 1990s, if thrash metal had been shed, the subgenres of brutal, grind, blasphemical, pure, and etnik had been acquired, their inclusion yet another symbol of Balinese enthusiasts’ interest in participating in a Javabased scene that followed the global extreme metal underground in classifying its subcategories. These subgenres were not territorially separate, and the above-mentioned hangouts at Sanur, Sesetan, and Sading contained a mix of death metal, black metal, and grindcore musicians. They remained, however, exclusively masculine realms. Of these subgenres, black metal was especially significant for its contested M e ta l B l o s s o m s

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presence at underground concerts in the late 1990s. A considerable portion of my research during the underground “boom” of the late 1990s consisted of chatting with black-metal musicians and watching them perform. One of these bands, Arwah, had been written up in the newspaper after they performed an onstage sacrifice at a concert in late 1997 that was part of the election campaign for Golkar—then the ruling party. Eager to hear their views on the event, and having bumped into their vocalist, Gede Gobler, at Underdog State, I arranged to visit them at their regular hangout—a roadside bengkel (motorcycle repair shop) in the northern part of the city. When I referred to Arwah as a black-metal band, Gede Gobler intimated the importance of the above subgeneric categories in his correction: “Actually, we are not totally black metal. Those who don’t know assume that we are black metal, but we actually subscribe to Blasphemical Balinese Black Death Metal. . . . Our lyrics are about the devil and death, but we believe God exists, and we denounce God.” In the late 1990s, public expressions of allegiance to the underground appeared more sporadic than the well-rehearsed orchestrations of marginality that predominated in the early 1990s, as I described in chapter 1. One day in late 1998, I visited Ari, the bassist for Phobia. Not a wordless space remained on his bedroom wall. His door, though, was absent of graffiti, except for the word “u-n-d-e-r-g-r-u-o-n-d” [sic], which, he claimed, his nephew had scratched into the balsa wood using a fork borrowed from his mother’s cutlery drawer. In the late 1990s, the underground also often exclaimed its presence in other, even more public, graffiti, dedicated to various underground bands or the “underground” itself, and scrawled across public walls bordering the city’s main thoroughfares. If between 1993 and late 1995 the death metal scene had sheltered itself beneath a bureaucratic framework, by the time local teenage boys were scratching into the balsa wood of their bedroom doors, death metal had come out of its shell. This first became evident in April 1996 when Age established Grindcorner. It is also paradoxical that the incorporation of the Balinese death metal scene into a national underground scene was characterized by increasing reference to symbols of Balinese identity, as the cover bands that had formed in the early 1990s began to perform original repertoires. This is exemplified by the style Eternal Madness developed beginning in the mid-

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1990s, dubbed etnik lunatik death metal when they released their debut album Offerings to Rangda in 1997,7 the cover of which depicts the band’s three members in front of a Balinese Hindu temple. Similar Balinese themes emerged in a performance by Arwah at Gebyar Golkar, where the vocalist wore a striped, long-sleeved top reminiscent of theatrical renditions of the Rangda, and the Balinese metal scene’s ’zine was titled Kaliyuga (Age of Doom) referring to the Balinese belief in the cyclical nature of prosperity and chaos. The cover of Kaliyuga’s first edition depicted men in traditional costume stabbing themselves with keris (curved daggers), in a ritual trance dance in a Hindu temple. Also in 1997–99 there was an increasing tendency among Balinese enthusiasts to adopt Indonesian names for their bands, among them Arwah (Soul), Belasungkawa (Condolence), Raja Iblis (Devil King), and Mayyat (Corpse), thus distinguishing the genre from the first generation of deaththrash bands, whose names were always English words. At the same time, a number of black-metal bands, and death metal bands tending to blasphemy, were formed. Such bands were distinctive for their onstage ritual sacrifices, which were reminiscent, in the view of local black-metal musicians, of similar Balinese Hindu caru sacrifices—in aesthetic if not in essence. Caru, a system of sacrifices meant to appease the forces of destruction, is conducted at blessing and cleansing rituals. Balinese black-metal musicians’ sacrificial rituals were meant to celebrate destruction, as Yande, vocalist with the black-metal band Ritual Crypt, observed: You can see Balinese influences in our music, in our songs. You can also see them in the nature of our ritual sacrifice, because we sacrifice chickens. In Bali, if people want to sacrifice something, it will always be a chicken. In Java, they tend to use goats. Balinese people have the ritual sacrifice where they kill a chicken in order to appease the evil, unseen forces. But when we do it, we don’t mean to appease the evil forces but to celebrate them.

Keith Harris (2000: 20) describes black metal as evidence of the increasing focus on cultural origin and place in an extreme metal scene previously global and diff use: As the 1990s progressed this situation gradually changed. The hegemony of death metal within the Extreme Metal scene became eroded with the development of

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Doom and Black Metal. Moreover, it became more common to produce music that attended to place, cultural origin and nationhood. An important factor in this was the rise of Black Metal in 1992, in which Scandinavian bands constructed powerful myths of nationhood from ideals of pagan, Viking, anti-Christian ancestry. Some of these bands incorporated “folk” instruments and styles into their music and drew on Western classical music in order to construct a more “authentic” sound.

But Harris’s contention that the flourishing of subgenres in the extreme metal scene paralleled enthusiasts’ desire to associate the extreme metal practices with their perceived cultural origins does not ring true for the Balinese metal scene. That is, if musicians began to incorporate symbols of Balineseness into their performances in the late 1990s, they did not address place as in the didactic manner of the folk tradition, for instance. Rather, this attention to locale can be seen as part of their quest to identify with national and global trends. For example, although their performances frequently alluded to the Rangda, and they described their ritual sacrifices as inverted caru, black-metal musicians continued to sing in English, not Indonesian or Balinese. Like local punks, they reasoned that Indonesian lyrics would be too incongruous with metal. The black-metal vocalists’ high-pitched shrieks also rendered these English lyrics unintelligible, if clearly audible. Further, as I have noted, in the late 1990s, when a number of subgenres flourished in the broader metal scene, new black-metal bands adopted Indonesian but not Balinese names, hence supporting the argument that the emergence of an “underground” in Bali revealed local youths’ will to identify with an alternative scene that was both generically plural and pan-Indonesian. Certainly, composing and performing songs in English was a significant measure of anti–major label idealism and authenticity in the Indonesian underground scene, for major labels deemed songs in Indonesian more marketable.8 Even in Eternal Madness’s etnik lunatik style, the traditional Balinese melodies in the group’s music and the Balinese Hindu imagery on its album cover appear as expendable embellishments and intellectual addenda to a preexisting universal death metal repertoire. For example, Cak Wisnu’s melodies, which were supposed to be reminiscent of the tones of an angklung (bamboo xylophone), were arranged at the latter stages of the songwriting process to ensure that they would accommodate Moel’s lyrics. In spite of the album title’s Balinese inflections, the songs on Offerings to Rangda seem to

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articulate universal themes rather than a local reality. Indeed, the term etnik expresses an abstracted localness and does not reflect death metal’s capacity to key in to experiences unique to young Balinese Hindus. Unlike terms such as Hindu, Bali, or Hindu Bali, which have great emotional appeal, the word etnik has no local resonance. Hypertransgression

In late November 1997 the Jakarta-based rock band Tato staged a concert in Bali. Two underground bands, the death metal group Eternal Madness and a newly established punk anarki band, Total Idiot, were signed as opening acts, for underground music was at its height of popularity. But rather than drawing underground fans in the throngs promoters had hoped for, the billing provoked criticism from a number of prominent underground figures, which was reported in a two-article series run in the Bali Post on successive Sundays (Syahreza 1997a; 1997b) and debated on the local Radio Casanova (4 November 1997). In the view of sid drummer Jerink, “underground bands that make their performances contingent on a certain fee can no longer be considered underground. They are what you call money grubbing” (Eternal Madness allegedly requested Rp700,000 for its performance at the Tato show). Further, somewhat ironically given his role in pioneering death metal’s compliance with an official ideal between 1993 and 1996, Agus Yanky said in an interview with me that “the underground should use guerrilla tactics, not join with trendy business.” For his part, Moel offered the following defense: “When we appear in front of society at large, that is only one strategy of poisoning society with our antiestablishmentarianism. Whether it’s good or bad is for the society to decide. The stage is but one channel for expression. . . . By appearing on the stages of major labels, we mean to stir up/confuse proestablishment views. This is an attempt at deconstruction aimed at the establishment” (quoted in Syahreza 1997b: 5). In chapter 5, I argued that the inconclusive nature of this debate is evidence of Balinese punks’ proclivity for elusion. In the light of the underground’s imminent commercialization, however, the fact that Eternal Madness’s performance at the Tato show provoked such ire among fellow underground participants suggests the latter’s desire to retain control over

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such performances, now that authorities were issuing concert permits more liberally. Moel’s defense is valid enough, although not particularly sustainable considering that the audience at the Tato concert responded to Eternal Madness’s performance with derisive guffaws. Eternal Madness’s failure to “poison society” at the Tato show may have been partly due to the absence of a headbanging mass, for the band’s traditional supporters did not attend. This considerably defused their performance, and highlights the necessity of audience participation to the spectacle of death metal performance. Moreover, the importance of audience participation hints in turn at why it was so important for underground concerts to remain accessible to most underground enthusiasts, the majority of whom could not afford the ten-thousand-rupiah tickets for such events. Notably, shortly after Jerink’s comment about “money grubbing” ran in the Bali Post, Superman Is Dead publicly apologized to its fans for the band’s involvement in a commercial concert earlier in the year, dubbed Show and Show (see chap. 5). The members of sid were sorry to have played at an event that most of their fans could not afford to attend (“Tampil” 1997). This contestation nonetheless sheds light on the instability in the underground’s understanding of its relationships with corporate sponsors and concert promoters. This instability came to the surface in the late 1990s, when a number of reports on the underground, black metal, and punk were published in the teen magazine Hai. These reports accommodate the underground’s cultural products within a gaul ideal, itself sometimes infused with official discourses of identity which located “Indonesianness” as “the West’s” adversary. For example, a March 1997 article in Hai profi led Bandungand Jakarta-based black-metal bands in which they sought to reassure critics who might consider them too extreme: As high school students, Impish members have not always received the blessing of the parents and other people in their social world. But everything is going along fine, now that they have made assurances that their band is simply a way of expressing their love for black-metal music, and that they are not going to take things too far as many overseas groups have done. (Impish, in Indra 1997: 11) We play this music because we like the music, not because of any philosophical reason. We don’t want to be involved in any kind of behavior which is not in accordance with our culture. (Disgusting Gods, ibid.: 11)

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In [the black-metal organization] Black Mass we aim to extend our social networks and strengthen solidarity among us. We are against alcohol and drugs. If any of our number started getting stoned, we would kick them out. (Hellgods, ibid.: 7)

The Hai report concluded by asserting the ascendancy of a liberal cosmopolitanism which was inclusive of practices such as black metal (within certain limitations). It was strongly reminiscent of the conclusion of a Hai article on punk the previous year (“Anak Punk” 1996). This punk piece opened with the question, “Are local punks mere fashion victims?” The answer was yes: “Here in Indonesia, punk is not about being marginalized by modernization, as it is in the West. Here, punk is yet to become an entire lifestyle. It’s only about following a trend. Punk is most probably about not wanting to be left out. . . . In other words, punk is nothing to worry about. Like other temporary trends, it is merely a resting place, and will soon be replaced by the next ‘latest thing’ to come along.” Hai later deemed that black metal, too, would soon be “replaced by the next trend. In spite of how wild these musicians look, they are not dangerous. Many of them are even high school and university students, who can only play music after school or after lectures” (Indra 1997: 9). In Hai’s depiction, black metal fit snugly under the rubric of gaul culture, with its interest in market fluidities and penchant for ephemeral styles. Indeed, a rapprochement between gaul and the underground also manifested in the Balinese scene, which, by November 1997, favored pricey high-top sneakers and imported “long sleeves” as symbols of authenticity—far cries from the bolong-bolong (ragged), self-styled, home-screened black t-shirts and thongs or sandals that were features of the style in the early 1990s, as I detailed in chapter 2. Further, a fetishization of glossy, sharply focused, arresting, and titillating imagery and styles, akin to those in advertisements for Coca-Cola, Sprite, mobile phones, and other such products aimed at a youth market, was also sometimes evident in promotional flyers for underground concerts in Java. Also, the word cafe, which has cosmopolitan nuances, was now often favored over warung in naming death metal hangouts. Underdog State, for example, contained a cafe, and a Jakarta-based death metal scene centered on the Harley-Davidson cafe. The contested inclusion of black-metal bands’ ritual sacrifices at underground events tempered the underground’s increasing tendency to use such

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symbols of gaulness. Before expanding on this point, I should elaborate on some of black and death metal’s aesthetic differences. In their stage performances, death metal musicians displayed a penchant for anonymity and uniformity, while those of black metal were melodramatic. Death metal musicians covered their faces with their hair, refrained from stage banter, and shuffled off stage at the end of their sets, while black-metal musicians’ eyes bulged, they wore spiked leather sleeves, improvised with face paint and bondage wear, disemboweled live rabbits with their teeth, and performed with a powerful air of possession (see figure 11). It may not be surprising that in contrast to images appearing in Hai, which seem to identify underground scenes as variants of gaul culture, other media reports demonized them. In April 1997 the cover of a national news weekly, Adil, featured a young man’s face painted black and white in the black-metal style (see figure 12). The words “The Rise of SatanWorshiping Groups” (Bangkitnya Kelompok Pemuja Setan) ran across the top. The story warned readers of the danger these groups posed: [Black-metal enthusiasts] turn all religious teachings on their head. They orient themselves toward hell instead of heaven. They worship the devil instead of God, as evident in the following lyrics: “We must enjoy hell / No one else left can hide / Kill yourself with holy knife / If you want to go there / Don’t worry about religion / Take out your fucking God / Keep your eyes forever / By the paradise.” 9 Such is their fatwa which, in their followers’ eyes, can enable them to change themselves into the devil, grow horns and long nails, to conduct their rituals from stage to stage. (“Bisingnya” 1997: 5)

Although they were not primarily concerned with invoking cultural origin and place, the rituals of Balinese black-metal bands were nevertheless politically and ideologically significant. This first became evident in the lead up to the country’s 1997 general election, when the ruling party, Golkar, had solicited a substantial lineup of famous and popular artists, who were evidently well rewarded for agreeing to appear on Golkar stages, known as Gebyar Golkar. One such Gebyar Golkar was sponsored on 21 April 1997 by the Puri (house of ksatria caste) Paguyungan, in Paguyungan banjar. Organizer Anak Agung Ngurah Gde Widiana invited local bands to perform in an effort to prove that “modern art forms are also accepted in puri circles. It shows that the puri is not just here to accept and support art forms of a 166

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Figure 11 Black metal style, Denpasar, 1998. credit:

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traditional nature” (quoted in “Menyeramkan” 1997). The event included a pangenre lineup, but it was dominated by punk and metal. One of the “modern art forms” accepted by Puri Paguyungan was the performance of Gede Gobler, Arwah’s scepter-wielding vocalist, who blackened his eyes and lips and whitened his cheeks in the universal black-metal style and donned a bricolage of universal metal and traditional Balinese performance wear. Beneath his black t-shirt dedicated to (English black-metal band) Cradle of Filth, which depicted a reclining naked woman using a crucifi x to masturbate, the vocalist wore a striped shirt reminiscent of that worn by the mythological Rangda. The show also included an onstage sacrifice reported in the local daily Nusa Tenggara, in an article titled “Terrifying Blood-Drinking Rite Colors Music Parade” (“Menyeramkan” 1997): “The concert held at the weekend and sponsored by the Puri Paguyungan branch of Golkar was truly terrifying. Some performers transgressed the limits of M e ta l B l o s s o m s

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Figure 12

Black metal style, Denpasar, 1998. credit: tikus got

what is considered acceptable [kelewatan batas] when they sacrificed a rabbit onstage and drank its blood” (quoted ibid.). Arwah’s ritual sacrifice at Puri Paguyungan’s Gebyar Golkar came at the end of a week in which the Adil report on black metal appeared. In this light, Arwah’s performance at the Golkar concert would appear to suggest that such stories certify transgression. The black-metal musicians’ invocations of the devil, their inverted crosses, and their ritual sacrifices, certainly challenged Pancasila’s stipulation that belief in God was integral to the national identity. This would seem to make Arwah’s performance a regionalist challenge to a nationalist metanarrative. Indeed, although the band members described their onstage ritual sacrifices as inverted caru, I did not learn of any Balinese youth who renounced his Balinese Hindu affi liation in order to become a black-metal musician, and the rituals should not be understood as expressions of local youths’ abhorrence for their ethnoreligious identity. Nor were they reconstructions of nationhood—a quality Harris (2000: 20) attributes to black-metal spectacles. This, however, rendered them no less politically salient in their playful and “dreadful” invocations of the devil. The devil is a powerful symbol in Indonesia, and devil-worshipping cults (aliran sesat) were frequently invoked in media and official constructions of moral panic.

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Again, this performance provoked contestation within the scene. At the exclusively metal series of concerts known as Komplikasi, which began on 22 June 1997 in the municipal sports complex in central Denpasar and continued through 1998, onstage rituals were banned by the organizers, one of whom was Agus Yanky, who said that to copy black metal as it is practiced in Java, burning Bibles, etc., . . . is to go too far. Sure, those kids are only high school kids, . . . but they are not selective [sic] about whether they need to burn a Bible, or not. What does it mean to burn a Bible? . . . Actually, that is considered sara.10 Our views on Bible burning are different from those of people over there [in the West], where under liberalism people are free to do what they want. . . . In our view, there are guidelines. That is why we won’t accept [black-metal onstage sacrifices]. We have spoken about this with all of the musicians who have been part of the Komplikasi gigs. . . . Anything to do with religion is banned. (Agus Yanky, 6 February 1998)

This followed similar bans in Bandung in 1996. For example, a month before Bandung Underground II, two prominent Bandung-based black-metal bands, Sacrilegious and Zalnabur, had been called in by the local military for questioning over the use of Satanic symbols at a previous underground event. A Catholic priest who had attended the event to watch his nephew perform had reported both bands to the authorities. This led Bandung Underground II’s organizing committee to publicly disown black metal’s use of Satanic symbols, identifying it as sara. One of the organizers of Bandung Underground II, Romy Isnandar, said, “We can’t allow those stage antics which smack of sara. We only want what’s positive.” But Yayat, the vocalist for the Bandung-based grindcore band Jasad, attacked the censoring of black-metal rituals. “Our new songs refer to what we feel about censorship,” he said, referring to those on the group’s debut album, C’est la vie. “Like what happened with Sacrilegious. That’s part of their art. . . . but the organizers didn’t want it. We want society to accept our music for what it is. Our music is this.” Fans responded with resistant solidarity, especially at Bandung Underground II. There, such contestations became dramatic when black-metal bands, minus their sacrificial rites, received the most enthusiastic audience response. The vast numbers of audience members dressed in black-metal

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style suggested that the genre enjoyed the greatest number of fans. Nor did the Komplikasi bans keep concert organizers from using provocative language: a concert held in Sading banjar in June 1998, dubbed Keramat (supernatural/sacred) was described on the promotional flyer as “a music parade which is intentionally being staged in the place of ghosts [wong samar, gamang dan memedi].” The black-metal bands Arwah, Belasungkawa, Raja Iblis, Ritual Crypt, and Mayyat were listed under the category “those concerned with the devil” (yang berurusan dengan setan). Keramat took place in a fallow rice field in front of the local cemetery, and no locals prevented the black-metal musicians from performing onstage sacrifices. Such rituals seemed to offend only the sensibilities of state ideology, not those of the local religion, making quite a mockery of the sara rationale. The tolerance of banjar-level performances of black-metal rituals contrasted the public outcry when the U.S.-based rock band Saigon Kick fi lmed a music video in a Balinese temple (Gelebet 1996), where they allegedly climbed willy-nilly over shrines. It also contrasted similar protests against a television advertisement for mobile phones, which depicted a Balinese dancer whose performance was distracted by the ringing of her mobile phone, stored in the folds of her costume. And yet no such uproar met Eternal Madness’s references to Rangda and Barong, its album cover depicting Balinese temple architecture, or the supposedly blasphemous rituals of local black-metal bands. Indeed, in Bali at least, black metal’s transgressions were purely symbolic. While crosses were frequently burned, they did not signal rampant Satanism. Balinese enthusiasts tended not to renounce their Balinese Hindu affi liations in order to become black-metal musicians. Nor did black-metal musicians appear interested in guerrilla-like strategies to invade the spaces of the establishment, such as the Golkar show at Puri Paguyungan. This unlikely Golkar-black-metal coupling was more coincidental, and Arwah members’ recollections of the event are telling of how performing and its spectacular dimensions were not a means to an end but ends in themselves. Answering my question of what Arwah’s performance at the Golkar concert “meant,” Gede Gobler said, “We were invited to apply to perform there. Coincidentally, I know one of the members of the concert organizing committee. It was just that we were really happy to perform [haus pada pang-

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gung, lit., stage thirsty]. At that time, it was really hard to get permits to stage gigs in the lead up to the election. So we applied.” In an article on the effects of and responses to New Order authoritarianism, Ariel Heryanto (1999b: 147) argues that hyperobedience, not resistance, was “central to the enduring responses of powerless Indonesians before the decisive protests in 1998.” Hyperobedience “free[d] up the potential for play, improvisation and amusement within the very limits set by officialdom” (Achille Mbembe, quoted ibid., 163). The banning of blackmetal rituals at Komplikasi must be seen as an instance of hyperobedience, for shows staged in civic buildings, such as the Lilha Buana, required police permits, while those that were part of a bazaar banjar did not. Moreover, those responsible for the ban did not contest the enthusiastic celebration of black-metal rituals at well-attended banjar concerts and in promotional flyers for these shows. In addition to freeing up other, less public spaces for play and improvisation, the ban gave the metal scene an illicit edge and significantly heightened the drama at concerts where the rituals were allowed. At Total Uyut I, I began to gain an inkling of the role of “the illicit” in orchestrating such heightened drama. Due to the ban on Sacrilegious’s ritual sacrifice at Bandung Underground II, the group’s performance at Total Uyut was eagerly anticipated by the Balinese audience, who then witnessed the vocalist Agus’s aforementioned shape-shifting feat and were inspired to form their own black-metal bands. Sacrilegious’s inspiring performance at Total Uyut I was similar, then, to the role Total Chaos’s and Turtle Junior’s shows had played in the Balinese punk anarki scene, as I described in chapter 5. These spectacular concerts provoked senses of “extraordinariness” among audiences and helped build moments among them of communitas and release. Metal and punk musicians alike understood these shared moments as key to the projects on which they subsequently embarked: forming bands. That these more rational projects—in which the roles of bassist, guitarist, vocalist, drummer, and so on—were fairly scripted and prescribed, reminds us that underground scenes were not all pure bacchanal. Within them people attended rehearsals, applied to perform at shows, and auditioned. These and other projects were nevertheless all part of musicians’ work of orchestrating moments of bacchanal, of evoking communitas. These moments helped reproduce the

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scene by inspiring more people to form more bands. In the black-metal scene, staging symbols of “the illicit,” which hinted at politically taboo issues such as rioting and Satanism, appeared to be a prerequisite which, to borrow Victor Turner’s (1997: 54) evocative term, “presaged” bacchanal and communitas. If the bans exemplify hyperobedience, then the offensive symbols themselves may similarly be cast as cunningly feigned instances of “hypertransgression” which were not necessarily meant to dismantle a dominant discourse but rather to be tools with which to orchestrate these moments of release. In chapter 5 I described how, in punks’ views, participatory and anarchic modes of concert organizing helped build moments of anarki at shows. Metal enthusiasts of the late 1990s did not mention similar participatory modes. It is notable, though, that they seemed freer to stage “the [blackmetal] illicit” in locally based banjar concerts than they were at those staged in civic buildings in central Denpasar, where police permits were required. In this way, devolved, small-scale modes of concert organizing were key to the performance of the black metal bacchanal. Similar to the punk anarki scene, then, the need for such small-scale, local shows tempered the increasing role of concert promoters (such as Liberty Entertainment and Crapt Entertainment) in staging the “underground.” Mastering Cultural Production

At a number of points throughout this book, I have cited similarities between Hebdige’s characterizations of subculture and the scenes under study. There are, nevertheless, significant distinctions between the Birmingham School approach and my approach here. I stress subcultural style as an expression of alternative communality, which is territorially based and dependent on interaction and intimacy. Further, to avoid depicting subcultures as oppositional responses to domination, I have also tried to highlight how within subcultures, dominant discourses can be taken up in order to authenticate a certain marginality. It would be useful at this point to consider Simon Frith’s (1996: 14) critique of Birmingham School analyses. He contests this highly politicized approach in which “the importance of popular culture is . . . rooted in its ideological effects” and “other ways of valuing a song or fi lm or story by ref-

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erence to beauty, craft or spectacle are notable for their absence.” Both the inconclusive nature of the debate about the underground and the Othering of black-metal rituals by underground concert organizers serve as evidence that the metal scene cohered around neither political consensus nor rational engagements, which observers may find instructive in their struggles to grasp subcultural meaning. In this regard, Balinese punk and metal scenes echo the Rio carnaval, which Turner (1983: 104) characterizes as “society in its subjunctive mood. . . . Its mood of feeling, willing and desiring, its mood of fantasising, its playful mood; not its indicative mood, where it tries to apply reason to human action and systematize the relationship between ends and means in industry and bureaucracy.” There were elements of subjunctivity in the Balinese metal scene, too. For example, by coming together with local punks to form a Balinese underground scene, enthusiasts revealed their desire to identify with a panIndonesian scene. In a context in which a Balinese regionalism upheld the importance of cultural preservation, metal enthusiasts’ gestures away from the locale, toward Java, can be seen as intensely defiant. Yet metal bands were well received on the local level and scarcely demonized in the Balinese media. This in spite of the fact that in the late 1990s the Balinese metal scene did contain illicit elements. As I argued above, paradoxically, contestations within the scene about allowing black-metal bands’ onstage ritual sacrifices at concerts accentuated the latter’s illicit nature, thus reinforcing such shows as realms of communitas. To attribute meaning beyond a “politics of excitement” (Frith 1996: 14) to the Balinese underground performances would be to imply that their symbologies are embedded in an underlying sociocultural formation. But the nature of the Balinese metal scene’s development supports Martin Stokes’s (1994) argument that music does not just dramatize an underlying social structure: “it is important that music and dance . . . are not just seen as static symbolic objects which have to be understood in a context, but are themselves a patterned context in which other things happen.” Moreover, he says, music and dance are instances of social performance—practices “in which meanings are generated, manipulated and even ironized within certain limitations” (4, 5). Balinese black-metal bands’ onstage rituals were indeed heavy with irony.

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But they were also rooted in Balinese and Indonesian discursive formations. For example, broader Indonesian and Balinese contexts gave force to black metal’s illicit nature. First, in their Othering of black metal’s onstage sacrifices, underground concert organizers referred to the official version of the Indonesian identity, antithetical to “the West,” and a state discourse on national integrity (sara). Second, the Balinese parent culture’s apparent lack of young people’s enthusiasm for music with Satanist overtones allowed these bands to perform at community-level shows, largely controlled by metal enthusiasts. Villagers thus appeared unfazed by cross burnings and ritual sacrifices in their local cemeteries. When coupled with the bans, such as those at Komplikasi, on black-metal onstage sacrifices, the scope afforded to metal bands at banjar shows can be seen to have tempered the tendency toward the underground’s commercialization. The bans amplified the authenticity of banjar-level concerts where black-metal bands were allowed free expression. The bans also encouraged a devolved participation in concert organizing among enthusiasts who, due to their greatly increased numbers, now enjoyed more control of the banjarbased youth groups (sekehe teruna teruni, stt) than they had in the early 1990s, when they were outnumbered by reggae fans. Metal fans’ proclivity for ironizing dominant discourses, while playful, can therefore be read as attempts to resist recuperation by supercultural and central forces, and reveal Balinese youths’ increasing mastery of processes of cultural production. The confluence of contestation and communitas in the Balinese metal scene of the late 1990s recalls Frank E. Manning’s (1983) characterization of celebration, an important arena for identity revision and reformulation. This, in turn suggests a certain maturing, for the Balinese metal scene now contained both censorious and “transgressive” elements, thus averting, at once, state repression and commercial recuperation. But the point of such paradox seemed to be, not attacking the establishment(s) but to providing the drama which would catalyze identity formation. Indeed, a number of examples cited throughout this book have highlighted the importance of contrast and paradox to performative piquancy, and to the constitution of selves and Others. For example, at banjar shows in the early 1990s, death metal musicians clarified their Otherness from reggae, and their performances came to fi ll the spaces left by the dominant genre’s overwhelming

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presence at these concerts. Moderen punks’ experiments with innovative and countercultural punk style began in their newly established home territory in the heart of Kuta, now a capital of gloss and glitz, dominated by the symbols of the metropolitan superculture. Punk anarki adherents constructed their authenticity in opposition to gaul culture by way of spectacular interventions in the predominantly gaul space of the shopping mall. In this way, like the metal enthusiasts’ responses to reggae in the early 1990s, Balinese punk anarki in the late 1990s revised and reformulated a broader Balinese regionalism. But the Balinese metal enthusiasts’ role in broader Balinese identity politics in the late 1990s seems much less clear. Although metal fans shied away from the “frontline” of the mall, their increasing identification with the etnik subgenre cannot necessarily be read as an instance of indigenization, for etnik was a term derived from the global metal underground. Nevertheless, in the late 1990s, modes of cultural production in the metal scene were, like those of the punk anarki scene, rooted in a devolved territorialization, by which the reproduction of metal fandom became embedded in youth politics at the level of the banjar. Thus, in the late 1990s, Balinese metal enthusiasts enjoyed increasing access to and control over political resources such as the stt. The ways metal enthusiasts used the stt in the late 1990s contrasted their previous self-identification as “troublemakers” for reggae bands which dominated banjar shows organized by the stt in the early 1990s. As such, and notwithstanding cynics’ characterizations of the stt as tools of the government’s depoliticization strategies, Balinese metal enthusiasts were significantly empowered by their use of these groups to expand and enrich cultural expression at the banjar level. Such empowerment is not only evident in the extent of participants’ control over the organizing and staging of concerts. It can also be seen in the ways they utilized such control. In a previous chapter, I have described how metal enthusiasts lined up against the dominant and monolithic “mainstreams” responsible, in their view, for either marginalizing them or imposing order on them. Against such impositions, enthusiasts often reified their alleged inherent alterity. In contrast to these reactive modes of identification, by the late 1990s, the revision and reproduction of a Balinese metal identity was more visibly contestatory. A monolithic mainstream remained important to the way

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enthusiasts articulated their metal identities. Two Denpasar-based death metal enthusiasts, Ari Fre-on and Dodha, introduced (in English) the first issue of their ’zine Kaliyuga (1998) thus: “Commercial is suck!!! [sic]. . . . The underground expresses a lifestyle, and hates anything related to commercialism, trendy people, blind followers and pretenders.” 11 But they no longer so obsessively cultivated their status as uniformly marginal to a commercial realm. The dissolution of Balinese metal’s uniformity became evident in two ways. First, as we saw in chapter 4, until 1996, enthusiasts lashed out at anything that did not resemble death metal. By the late 1990s, however, they cohabited a broader underground scene with abundant identities whose validity they recognized. Second, contestations were now taking place within the scene concerning the metal identity. These contestations ought to be viewed as a process of alternate ordering and not as one of fragmentation, for they accentuated black metal’s illicit nature and, as such, fed enthusiasts’ experiences of communitas at shows where onstage rituals were performed.

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I

began this book by asking what was Balinese about the Balinese reggae, punk, and death metal scenes of the 1990s. The far-reaching implications of this apparently straightforward question have been key to discussions of the New Order regime’s final years. They also have impelled studies of contemporary Balinese culture by showing that “localness” may be revived when people reject autochthonous modes of communality. Such rejections produce cultural schisms and allow alternative solidarities to develop. It is important to refrain from dichotomous assumptions about the nature of political domination in New Order Indonesia, particularly in Conclusion light of recent studies such as Carol Warren’s (1993), which reveals the important political role of Balinese “subaltern reconstructions” of the national ideology, Pancasila, and Ariel Heryanto’s (1999b) accounts of how Indonesian people often only symbolically registered compliance with the New Order regime, thus practicing hyperobedience. If domination inevitably inspires perpetual resistance, hyperobedience implies that dominant discourses give people the very tools they need to subvert that domination. In hyperobedience, domination and resistance to it merge, confusing the traditional resistance/domination dialectic. The conflation of these two dichotomous notions has been compounded in this book’s focus on the New Order’s final years, in which discursive flux and contestation have underscored the importance of problematizing the notion of Balineseness and rendered the seemingly simple question with which my research began profoundly complex. Acknowledging such complexity is indeed elemental to any approach which views cultural identity as a process of perpetual negotiation and revision, and as a power struggle which implicates discourses of the global, the national,

and the local. Although established, these are by no means distinct categories, and in this book I have tried to draw attention to how Balinese youth reworked Balineseness by straddling and melding the global, national, and local, thus blurring the distinctions between them. Such indeterminacies have forced my critical use of terms such as hybridity, oppositionality, and resistance. By highlighting the discursive complexities that can cloud attempts to identify cultural practices as either “deracinated” or “localized,” these cases significantly dilute the importance of arguments for either homogenizing or hybridizing effects of globalization, and therefore reveal the limitations and polarities of current debates on the cultural impact of globalization. Indeed, it is now well established that the notion of global cultural homogenization is a fantasy, for diverse discursive contexts will always forbid cultural forms from remaining intact when they cross cultural boundaries. Although foreign/local dialectics were increasingly conflated in the period we have studied here, it is nonetheless possible to qualify instances of the localization of reggae, death metal, and punk by considering participants’ access to and control over local territories and, in turn, their control over other resources of cultural production. In all of the scenes we have examined, localization was achieved by drawing global texts into territories over which they had control. Enthusiasts’ innovative interpretations of such texts were thus discursively and spatially situated, often expressed sartorially and rooted in communal home territories, where “deviant” groups fi xed utopian practices to a locale by way of “social spatialisation” (Shields 1989). That is, the punk, death metal, and reggae identity practices, conveniently, although sometimes deceptively, referred to as “scenes,” may more accurately be described as collections of scenic fragments, for genre-determined identities were constituted by tenuously connected instances of social spatialization. The fragmented nature of these identity practices precluded any possibility of consensual opposition, resistance, or subversion, making them rather like Rob Shields’s social spatialization—“mediated outcomes reflecting real power relations . . . thus full of contradictions, reversals and accommodations” (ibid.: 147). In this way, they harbored discursive clashes between the market and the state, the center and the periphery, the rulers and the ruled, among others. Neither inherently resistant nor oppositional, therefore, they were nonetheless inevitably political. 178

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The political implications of the respective, fragmented spatializations of Balinese death metal, reggae, and punk become evident when we consider space as central to the social totality and to the way society functions. Henri Lefebvre (1971), for example, argues that hegemony is spatialized when the power relations implicated in the construction of space are obscured. Spatialized acts of resistance are therefore effective and empowering because they both reveal the contingency of such power relations and transform subjectivities. At different points, punk, reggae, and death metal enthusiasts revealed the power relations inherent to the construction of space by resorting to performative strategies that highlighted the contradictions of the capitalist modernities subsuming their worlds—contradictions between the freedoms that developmentalism and its successor, consumerism, promised and the obstacles to realizing such freedom that most young Indonesians faced. In his discussions of underground bandrooms in Hong Kong, Eric Ma (2002: 138) contends that “in order to maintain an alternative pool of identity energy and to prevent it from being dissipated into the exterior, underground space sets up hard spatial and emotive barriers between the inside and the outside. Dissipation will defeat the very first utopian and transgressive impulse of producing a distinctly different underground space.” But the nature of the Balinese underground’s development does not support this statement. It is true that punk and metal scenes emerged out of spatial ruptures from the Balinese “parent culture.” But subsequently, participants’ increasingly strong affiliations with a pan-Indonesian underground identity were paralleled by the withering of spatial and conceptual boundaries, dichotomies, and borders at the local level. First, underground identities came to be practiced and maintained in domestic spaces in the late 1990s, thus diluting previously held distinctions between punkness and metalness, on the one hand, and Balineseness, on the other. Second, punk and metal scenes converged in a pan-Indonesian underground scene, which included Java-based musicians of various ethnicities, and which also entailed the flourishing of many Balinese metal authenticities. Indeed, I have argued that punk, metal, and reggae became locally salient in Bali by way of territorialization, which forced revisions of established identity discourses by producing new discourses of space. But contrary to Ma’s contention, the underground’s countercultural (antigaul) coherence was not undermined by the scene’s territorial devolution and scattering. The Balinese Conclusion

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underground’s countercultural coherence was achieved and maintained not through spatial boundedness and territorial isolation (implying oppositionality and alienation) but through parody and play. Sometimes parody and ludism were displayed in spontaneous, spectacularly antigaul interventions in mall space. At other times, they became evident in différance-ridden, symbolically ambiguous experiences of communitas at performances. What emerges from this study is a picture of youths’ progressive empowerment in their engagements with global media products and in the context of New Order demise. This process of empowerment entailed, first, a rapprochement between death metal and punk subcultures and banjar communities; second, participants’ increasing control over resources of cultural production; third, the increasingly participatory ways such control was enacted in interconnected yet devolved and domesticated subscenes; and fourth, the maintenance of translocal subcultural solidarities through increasingly spectacular, spontaneous, and ludic displays which parodied— yet neither resisted nor opposed—dominant discourses of identity. Such parodies, that is, inspired translocal subcultural cohesion because of the former’s very deferred, ambiguous dimensions. Uncertainty is often said to be a central feature of modernity (Berman 1983; Shields 1992), as ludism and play are to postmodern, consumer societies (Hetherington 1997: 31). But in my study, the stress on ambiguity and play is not only meant as evidence of a Balinese modernity or postmodernity, or of an increasingly consumer-oriented society. The ubiquity of différance in the identity practices we have considered reveals, rather, a specifically Indonesian context. First, the period we have examined is one of political transition during which the New Order gradually declined. Its demise became evident as traditionally dominant discourses of identity began to be challenged by consumerist ideals, blurring the distinction between notions of domination and resistance. Further, due to the often lethal nature of New Order repression, nonofficial identities were often subtly intimated rather than transparently articulated. People’s adeptness at eluding and reading between the lines can thus be seen as partly a legacy of the New Order. This book’s depiction of youths’ progressive empowerment in the context of New Order demise is not meant as an argument for the critical, creative potential of the individual. Throughout this book, I have repeatedly

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stressed the importance of interaction, intimacy, and group solidarity to participants’ innovative readings of the global media and their subsequent renegotiations of predominant discourses of identity. However, although I have emphasized the importance of group solidarity to the development of coherent Balinese punk, reggae, and death metal scenes, I have made few attempts to show similarities between the scenes I have studied and other autochthonous modes of communality. Rather than as historically continuous, Balinese punk, reggae, and death metal scenes’ localization ought to be viewed as a process of participants’ extending control over resources of cultural production. These resources not only include the body (dress style), concert, and album production, but also the spaces in which punk, death metal, and reggae solidarities were forged, as were dominant discourses of identity, elements of which participants parodied. As was strikingly evident in late-1990s punk and metal scenes, enthusiasts played with taboos, pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules that such dominant discourses imply. In arguing for Balinese youths’ progressive empowerment, and against the notion that their enthusiasm for punk and metal in the late 1990s reveals their “deracination,” I therefore propose a theory of rupture, and not one of continuity. Rupture is key to Dick Hebdige’s (1979) theory that English punk was a commentary on working-class youths’ alienation. In Hebdige’s view, however, spectacularly alien subcultural aesthetics are fated to recuperation by sensation-hungry media that trivialize and tame the former’s shocking and unsettling dimensions. But Balinese punk and metal scenes’ ruptures from “Balineseness” did not set them on a path to commercial recuperation. Although domesticated, both scenes upheld their initial marginality through parody and ludic performance. In this way, unlike the modern images of Balineseness which Warren (1998a) analyzes, these scenes resisted a rational state developmentalism and retained carnival aesthetics, reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian images. Their parodic displays produced a hiatus, which prevented punk and metal performers and fans from being identified either as hedonistic and naive consumers of the global media or as menacing subversives. This hiatus may be more effective than transgression because the musicians and fans avoided reprimand by operating between the cracks of legal certainty.

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In-betweenness has indeed been central to my argument that youth cultures can contribute to revisions of local identity discourses. Just as parody operates between transgression and compliance, the marginal spaces occupied by the young people I have studied were heterotopic, like those Kevin Hetherington (1997) describes—spaces in which established dualisms converged and broke down—and not spaces of resistance or oppositionality. In this way, the practices described in this book resonate with arguments pursued by Turnerian-inspired writers, including Hetherington (1997, 1998a, 1998b) on identity performativity and Manning (1983) on cultural performance. Victor Turner offers liminality as an alternative conceptual tool to opposition, resistance, or transgression, and it more accurately describes the cases we have considered here.1 This notion of liminality has subsequently been taken up by scholars of alternative cultures (Hetherington 1998a, 1998b; Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1997) to describe countercultural practices,2 and the term’s evocation of a betwixt-and-between state and the place of the liminoid in society’s “tacit dimensions” also aptly describes the discursive indeterminacy, orchestrated ambiguity, and proclivity that characterize the people in this book. These in-between spaces accommodated well the determination of these musicians and fans not to identify with local, essentialist discourses of cultural preservation in their obscure critiques of an increasingly idealized consumerism and associated hedonistic practices. Nor did they completely identify with such consumerism and hedonism in their critiques of local discourses of autochthony. Rather, they ironized both—a process that requires a certain “outsideness” for the revision and reflection that such ironization necessarily implies. As such, all the practices under study fit Martin Stokes’s (1994: 4) definition of “social performance”: The idea that music symbolizes social boundaries might seem an obvious enough starting point for an anthropological approach to music. Ethnomusicologists, with anthropologists, have however become less interested in the structuralist proposition that performance simply reflects “underlying” cultural patterns and social structures. . . . Social performance, following writers such as Bourdieu . . . and de Certeau . . . , is instead seen as a practice in which meanings are generated, manipulated and even ironized, within certain limitations.

In addition to highlighting the central role of marginalia in the reconsti182

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tution of society, Turner has provided insights into the role of performance in the production of culture. He stresses the centrality of ludism and communitas in cultural performances which secure social cohesion and provide moments of reflection, and he offers a more straightforward sketch than Stokes of what he refers to as “cultural performance,” and of its social utility. Cultural performances “are more than entertainment, more than didactic or persuasive formulations, and more than cathartic indulgences. They are occasions in which as a culture or society, we reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatize our collective myths and history, present ourselves with alternatives, and eventually change in some ways while remaining the same in others” (Turner, Babcock, and Myerhoff 1994: 1). Once we begin to see social or cultural performance in this way, it becomes clear that schisms and ruptures do not necessarily connote “deracination.” The Balinese underground scene, for example, forged a path toward domestication which unleashed participants’ capacities for irony and play with established discourses, including new idealizations of consumerism and older ones of autochthony. Rather than as a clean break, then, a “schism” may be understood as a form of liminality and in-between-ness which enables revisions of the mundane orienting dualisms inherent to dominant discourses of identity. Such revisions are best accommodated by heterotopic, ambivalent spatialities, for they give rise to the extraordinary experiences of communality that can enable reflexive modes. The idea that identity formation is a performative process is also borne out by the scenes presented in this book, each of which were firmly spatialized. That is, we have found strong links between particular genre-related identity practices and particular territories. First, distinct dress styles emerged from home and from interactional territories over which enthusiasts had control and in which they forged group solidarity. Second, there were strong correlations between the nature of enthusiasts’ control over home territories and the extent of their control over other aspects of cultural production. As we saw in chapters 5 and 6, the establishment of punk and death metal home territories in late 1996 was paralleled by enthusiasts’ increasing control over the process of organizing shows, which in turn inspired musicians to produce their own albums. Furthermore, as control over home territories devolved, self-produced albums and independently organized concerts proliferated. As the Balinese punk and death metal scenes expanded Conclusion

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territorially, therefore, increasing numbers of enthusiasts were inspired to experiment with the use of material cultural resources, such as concerts and albums. This reflects a certain level of community empowerment, as youth forged innovative paths for cultural expression from preexisting cultural resources. A third consequence of this territorial expansion was participants’ increasing adeptness at orchestrating moments of communitas by ironizing dominant discourses of identity. In this way, solidarity was not only based on control of home territories, concert and album production, and merchandise exchange, it also was maintained through frequent reference to illicit symbols—crucial to inspiring enthusiasts to form bands. This suggests important correlations between control over territory and the ability to orchestrate moments of communitas. As permits became more easily accessible, control over shows devolved and proliferated, as did control over home territories or everyday “hangouts,” which frequently doubled as outlets for underground merchandise, such as cassettes, stickers, t-shirts, and ’zines. Both these territories accommodated moments of communitas. In everyday hangouts, such moments were sparked by drinking sessions. At concerts, they took the form of the euphoria of the mosh. But drinking sessions had long been a feature of Balinese (male) youth culture. The shifting dynamics of control over shows therefore more accurately indicate degrees of empowerment among the youth I studied in a context of political transition. In the early to mid-1990s, order was imposed on the punk and metal scenes from without—by concert promoters, banjar youth groups, and campus organizing committees, who were not part of their scene. Against such impositions, enthusiasts often reified their alleged inherent alterity. This can be seen in how death metal enthusiasts played the “troublemaker” in opposition to reggae’s overwhelming popularity at shows organized by community youth groups in the early 1990s. It can also be seen in how the punks of 1996 differentiated themselves from both reggae and death metal—the genres which joined them in the island’s only pangenre concert series, Sunday Hot Music. Both cases show how punk and death metal first defined themselves in terms of Otherness in the face of a perceived “mainstream.” These shows thus were stages where punk and metal musicians and performers could pit themselves against this mainstream Other.

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As an underground scene began to emerge around 1997, these musicians began to secure their own permits and, inspired by an emerging underground scene in Java, staged their own underground shows, which featured exclusively punk, grunge, and metal bands. In this way, certain underground musicians acted as patrons who were responsible for securing permits, auditioning bands, and securing sponsorship for concerts that gave underground bands increasing opportunities to perform. In this instance, the role of the show in punk and metal scenes had changed. It now threw up symbols which were often illicit, and which inspired enthusiasts to commune in out-of-the-ordinary, as if sacred, moments in the mosh pit. This “sacredness” was experienced in the frame of an event ordered no longer by Others but by underground patrons. For underground participants, by 1997, the show was a celebration of the We. Contestations among this We began to emerge as control over shows devolved and punk and metal home territories proliferated. By 1999, the mass of underground participants began to take a more active role in concert organizing than before, when control over this process was assigned to certain senior patrons. In April, a number of punk bands based in newly emerged, Denpasar-based punk “home territories” came together to stage their own event, devising a collective mode of organizing with no commercial sponsorship, no auditions, and none of the limits on performance that had hitherto regulated underground shows. Similarly proliferating pockets of metal fandom, each rooted in separate home territories, also began to wrest control over the organization of performances from previous patrons. These metal shows often led to contestations of black-metal bands’ onstage ritual sacrifices. As such, the concerts provided key moments of communitas, oscillating between chaos and order, license and regulation, the illicit and the prescribed, no longer imposed from without but orchestrated by participants themselves.

Conclusion

185

NOTES

Introduction 1. Jalan Raya Kuta is the main street that runs north–south through Kuta, Bali’s most visited tourist destination, located on the western coast of the island’s southern peninsula. 2. The pdi was one of two legal political parties, the other of which was the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, ppp), which presented itself as “Muslim aligned.” These two parties had been formed in 1972, when the government introduced legislation that reduced the number of officially recognized political parties to two. Existing, nationalist-aligned parties, including Soekarno’s own Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasionalis Indonesia, pni) came together under the aegis of the pdi, and those identified with “Islam” fell under the ppp. The ruling group, Golkar, was officially referred to as a functional group, not a party, thereby eliding its political interests. 3. This was only the second time anybody had run against Suharto in a presidential election. In 1992, Berar Fathia stood as a pdi candidate. 4. The book engages literature on popular music scenes, which is fraught with a tension between, on the one hand, the notion that scenes imply heritage and local identity and, on the other, more recent efforts to reconceptualize scenes as part of a global, mobile culture (S. Cohen 1999: 242–43). In his argument for the latter defi nition, Will Straw (1991: 369) critiques rock sociology’s ethnomusicological insistence on linking authenticity with geographical rootedness. Alternatively, Mark Olson (1998: 271) criticizes Straw for his inattention to the effectivity of

scenes and how solidarity is secured and maintained within them. If Straw’s essay argues for the need to free the defi nition of scenes from essentialist notions of local authenticity, Olson attempts to reground the scenic in the concretely spatial and proposes that the term radical territorialization aptly characterizes the ways novel music scenes effect cultural change. 5. An interest in subcultural dress styles—specifically, in how to read them—has been central to writings by both “Birmingham School” (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, cccs) subculture theorists and their critics. Basing their theories on ethnographies of English working-class subcultures (mods, skinheads, and punks) conducted in the 1970s, Birmingham School theorists held that style could be read as a text and that, as such, it revealed the subcultures’ “secret identities.” In their various guises, these subcultures were believed to either symbolically express (Hebdige 1979) or magically resolve contradictions inherent in the working-class “parent” culture, contradictions “between traditional working class puritanism and the new hedonism of consumption.” (P. Cohen 1997: 94). These “solutions” were seen as necessarily symbolic or magical, because the subcultures failed to “confront the real material bases for subordination” (S. Cohen 1997: 155). 6. Although I use the terms enthusiasts, musicians, and participants interchangeably throughout the book, my field research primarily consisted of interviews with elite members of the scenes under study. In selecting interviewees, I favored active musicians, event organizers, and community leaders (people who initiated and nurtured punk, metal, and reggae subscenes by controlling the spaces in which they were enacted)—over fans who neither played in bands nor accessed important spaces. Transcripts of recorded interviews with these elites—people who constructed punk, reggae, and metal discourses by maintaining the territories which yielded them—provide the central textual evidence for the arguments I pursue. The interviews and the dates they were conducted are listed in the reference section. Quotations from informants who were interviewed on more than one occasion include a date in their attribution. Many quotations drawn from interviews in which all members of a band participated are simply attributed to the group. 7. For example, Denny Sihoting notes the extraordinary number of people attending a concert given by Balinese punk band Superman Is Dead in Medan. The event was free, but he also attributes the group’s capacity to pull in such a large crowd to its fame (since signing with Sony in 2003), which, he intimates, has broadened its fan base to include people who “don’t really understand music,” such as teenyboppers and “be-perfumed girls” (www.supermanisdead.net). 8. Heroin use became pandemic among young people across Bali and Java in the late 1990s. Many of the young men who gathered in the Matahari basement used heroin, and some people used the basement to deal.

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Notes To Introduction

1. Messy Decay 1. This was ten times the minimum daily wage for factory workers in the Jakarta region at the time (Thompson 1993). 2. In an essay tracing the development of military ideology during the New Order period, Jun Honna notes how following the end of the Cold War, critics of Suharto began to refer to “globalization” and the triumph of liberal democracy in their demands for keterbukaan, or “regime opening.” He describes globalisasi (globalization) as “a concept originally popularized by the media and democratic movements in their attempts to question the legitimacy of the military’s control of politics and expand democratic space in the country’s political discourse.” He also describes how military ideologues in the early 1990s responded to such criticisms with xenophobic statements that cast “globalization” as politically suspect (Honna 1999: 86). Edward Aspinall, however, points out that keterbukaan was also promoted in the early 1990s by senior military officers who called for Suharto to resign. By 1994 Suharto began to make moves to deprive this group of power, and by 1996 the army leadership was entirely in the hands of Suharto loyalists (Aspinall 2005: 37, 179). These years marked a return to heavy-handed silencing of critics, contrasting the official endorsement of keterbukaan. 3. This chapter is a farsighted view of regime demise as consistent with that of Balinese punk, reggae, and death metal enthusiasts who were ignorant of the more intricate intraregime and opposition politics implicated. For a thorough discussion of this politics, see Aspinall 2005. 4. In his discussion of Pemuda Pancasila, Loren Ryter points to the premans’ perceived links to this nationalist youth group and draws attention to the latter’s suspected involvement, beginning in the early 1980s, in intimidating prodemocracy activists critical of the regime. Nevertheless, the Pemuda Pancasila publicly disavowed the preman. Notably, Ryter (1998: 46–47) argues that, coupled with its rise to prominence toward the end of the New Order, the group’s ambiguous relationship with criminality reveals a peculiarly late–Suharto era logic, namely, the need to “transform a revolutionary nationalism of pemuda (youth) of the postindependence period into a nationalism expressed through loyalty to the (personalized) state itself, without, however, sacrificing the semangat (spirit) bestowed upon pemuda.” He shows how, toward the end of the New Order period, the pemuda ideal intermeshed with the figure of the preman, thus pursuing an argument that supports my own for the discursive messiness of this period. 5. The background of the military’s storming of the pdi-p is briefly described on p. 4 of this book. 6. See [email protected], 30 May 1993. 7. This was more than ten times the official minimum daily wage (Rp5200) for factory workers in the Jakarta region at the time (Hadiz 1997: 168).

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189

8. Rakyat—the people. 9. By 1998, following the dramatic fall of the rupiah, the magazine had been downsized to 80 pages, and its price had increased to Rp5,500 per copy. 10. Due to the criminalization and repression of tattoos during the petrus campaign in the early 1980s, many people attempted to remove their tattoos in nonorthodox ways (Bourchier 1990), shockingly revealing the extent of state control over people’s bodies. 11. Between 1989 and 1991 the value of 100 square meters in Denpasar rose from Rp500,000 to Rp12,000,000 (McCarthy 1984). Between the mid-1980s and 1993, visitor arrivals jumped from 360,415 to 885,516 (Bali Government Tourism Office 1993). The number of transport companies registered in Bali in the same period increased from 35 to 83, travel agencies from 68 to 166, and the number of licensed guides from 753 to 2,398 (ibid.). The hotel industry’s percentage contribution to regional income in the same period increased from 19.42 percent to 25.57 percent, and the industry as a whole experienced a 22.85 percent average growth rate (compared to 8.18 percent for the agricultural sector). Provincial government statistics claim a 100 percent increase in per capita income between 1988 (Rp812,293.7 per annum) and 1993 (Rp1,627,937.39 per annum). 12. In official, New Order language, the process of converting private, smallholder land for state or commercial use was referred to as land freeing (pembebasan tanah). 13. In 1936, anthropologist Margaret Mead began research on Bali, which included cooperation with her husband, psychiatrist Gregory Bateson, as well as ethnographic fi lmmaker Jane Belo and her husband, musicologist Colin McPhee, German painter Walter Spies, Beryl de Zoete, and Katharine Mershon.

2. Gesturing Elsewhere 1. This chapter focuses on the early development of Bali’s death metal scene in the period between 1990 and 1994, when it included both death and thrash metal bands, and when enthusiasts referred to themselves as death-thrashers—a label they shed when thrash bands vacated the scene around 1995–96. I did not go to live in Bali until 1996, and my accounts of the early years of this death-thrash scene are based on interviewees’ recollections rather than firsthand experience. In writing this chapter, I gleaned information from interviews conducted with a number of people, most significantly Ari, Cak, Hendra, Moel, Age, and Agus Yanky, with whom I conducted in-depth interviews about the history of the scene. Details of their involvement in the scene, as well as dates when the interviews were conducted, are listed in the references. 2. Jack Harrell (1994: 93) describes the double pedal thus: “Speed is typical of many Anthrax, Napalm Death and early Metallica and Megadeth songs as well. Speed is often emphasized by the drummers’ use of double bass drums which supply

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Notes To chapter 2

the ‘backbone’ to the beat. Operated by pedals played with both feet in rapid succession, the double bass drums create a ‘machine gun’ rhythm that corresponds to the overall tone of the music.” 3. On the orchestrated nature of the 1992 elections, see Stanley 1992, which argues that Golkar’s victory in no way reflected the will of the people. Max Lane (1992: 7) reports on the popular appeal of the pdi’s campaign in the 1992 elections which, in his view, provided evidence of mass contempt for New Order rule: “According to Kompas newspaper there were two million pdi supporters on the streets [of Jakarta] on the last day of the campaign. Reports over the phone to Inside Indonesia on that day all reported a huge pdi turn out, with some sources saying it was impossible to get their car out of the driveway onto the streets. The young pdi supporters were reportedly shouting ‘golkar is corrupt!’ over and over again.” 4. This was not particular to Bali but uniformly the case all over Indonesia. Harris (2000) notes that Sepultura’s early work, composed when the group’s members were living in Brazil, was also always in English. 5. Indeed, the centrality of elusion and illegibility to subcultural capital emerges as a theme in different studies of marginal identities. Kevin Hetherington (1998b: 333) writes of New Age travelers’ “utopics,” described as “the translation of ideas about the good society into spatial practice . . . [which] draws on Derrida’s notion of différance whereby the meanings of texts are seen not to be fi xed but endlessly deferred.” Similarly, in Dick Hebdige’s work on subcultural style, tensions emerge between his much-critiqued denotative and demystifying urges, and his assertions that subversive spectacularity is based on the deferment of meaning. One can fi nd this argument in his examinations of the link between deep-rooted social anxieties and the politics of marginal groups’ spectacularity in his writings on Rastafarian styles in Jamaica (Hebdige 1973) and subcultural styles in England (Hebdige 1974, 1979, 1988). In The Style of the Mods, Hebdige (1973: 5) cites Dave Laing’s description of how “the mods . . . looked alright, but there was something in the way they moved that the adults couldn’t quite make out,” and in Hiding in the Light (1988) he reiterates this view (see quotation earlier in this chapter). 6. Hebdige (1979: 64) refers to dread as “an enviable commodity. It was the means with which to menace, the elaborate freemasonry through which was sustained and communicated on the street . . . was awesome and forbidding, suggesting as it did an impregnable solidarity.” 7. The link between preman and rock fandom predated the Metallica riots. As Sen and Hill (2000: 167) note, this association was already inherent in the term jeger/ jager/jagger, by which Mick Jagger’s name was appropriated as a synonym for preman. 8. That this conformity was feigned is suggested by the importance of drinking sessions to gatherings of death metal enthusiasts.

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191

9. Sarah Thornton (1995: 6) argues that such approving media reports spell the “subcultural kiss of death,” and Hebdige (1979: 92) has contended that media attention ends “with the simultaneous diff usion and defusion of the subcultural style.” 10. Agus Yanky, for example, praised the Bali Post’s music reporter, Gus Martin, for his “help in getting death metal bands a spot on shm’s 1995 lineup. That’s what brought our scene from obscurity into prominence.” Other interviewees, including Ari Phobia, Moel, and Dek Ben, clipped newspaper write-ups on deaththrash and kept them in photo albums along with photographs of their respective bands’ performances.

3. Reggae Borderzones 1. Japady Wolf (1993: 16) describes the young men who make a living by befriending single female tourists thus: “In the tourist haven of Bali, and now in the neighboring island of Lombok, you can find amongst the male youth a subculture whose peripheral yet lasting fl irtation with the West has left them with a taste for drugs, alcohol and one night/one month relationships with tourist girls. They’re called variously ‘bad boys,’ ‘Kuta cowboys,’ ‘gigolos’ (by other people) or ‘guides’ (their own term).” 2. Aside from Pam Nilan’s (1996) analysis of Denpasar-based youth media, Wiyata Mandala, and Lynette Parker’s (1992) study of Balinese primary school curricula, there is a dearth of academic studies on Balinese youth culture during the New Order period. My knowledge of local youth scenes around Kuta Beach derives mainly from interviews cited later in this chapter, conversation with locals, disparate journalistic accounts such as Wolf (1993) and Peter Neely (1998), as well as my own investigations for regular profi les of Balinese surfers and the Balinese surf scene, published as part of a regular feature on the Balinese surfi ng scene in Bali Echo over the course of 1998–99 (Baulch 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1998e, 1999). 3. Excorporation describes the process by which “the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant culture” (John Fiske, quoted in Lentini 1999: 42). 4. Hariyanto reported that “from the mid-eighties, the local band scene began to center on campus gigs and was dominated by rock music. But by the early 1990s, sponsorship began to wane and the frequency of gigs dropped off.” 5. These occasions were the Suckerhead concert in mid-1994, for which Eternal Madness performed as the opening act, and shm’s Month of Sundays in 1994 and 1995. 6. Originally, reggae music did not have firm political allegiances, and it was only after Bob Marley’s Wailers sung of Rastafari philosophy in their music that large numbers of Jamaican musicians converted to Rastafarianism and reggae became the primary medium for expressing their beliefs. Later, in 1972, the Wailers signed

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Notes To chapter 3

with Island Records, a London-based label owned by a (white) Jamaican, Chris Blackwell. Between that date and Marley’s death in 1981, the Wailers produced ten albums with Island, all of which went gold (Fergusson 1997). Marley’s success was politically significant in several respects. It elevated the role of Jamaican music in the context of an international music industry dominated by musicians from First World countries. By articulating Rastafarian concerns—concerns of poor people, black people, slum-dwellers, and colonized people—and bringing them to world attention, Marley’s music operated as an expressive vehicle for marginalized and underclass people everywhere (O’Gormon 1997). A number of other writers have drawn attention to how the Wailers’ international success, mediated by Blackwell, transformed understandings of Jamaican reggae (Regis 1994, 1998; King 1998; Cushman 1991). 7. Thomas Cushman (1991: 17) notes that voice-overs inflected with a heavy Jamaican accent and distinctly reggae jingles became common in American beer advertisements, one of which offered a chance to win prizes ranging from a Jamaica vacation to “a varied assortment of cultural kitsch emblazoned with Rastafarian themes.” Setting out to explore how a revolutionary, anticapitalist code ended up as part of an advertisement for American beer, Cushman concludes that “the appropriation of reggae represents a particular case of a more general process of what Russell Berman refers to as the ‘routinization of charismatic modernism’ in which charismatic challenges to modernity from the realm of culture are increasingly diff used” (38). Reggae’s presence in the Balinese tourism industry may inspire similar inquiries.

4. Punk’s Beginnings 1. Bands considered “senior” by shm organizers were those with experience in bars, as well as those which had performed, and been successfully received, at a minimum of two major shows. 2. As Sarah Thornton (1997: 208) observes in writing of English club culture, “the social logic of subcultural capital reveals itself most clearly by what it dislikes and by what it most emphatically is not.” In the same article, she reflects on clubbers who lament the perceived commodification of their “underground” culture: “Whether these ‘mainstreams’ reflect empirical social groups or not, they exhibit the burlesque exaggerations of an imagined Other. . . . to quote Bourdieu . . . ‘nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies’ ” (204). 3. Alan Lomax, cited in Mitchell 1996: 50, depicts the cultural imperialism hypothesis as “an assumption that the predominantly one-way flow of cultural products from the west to the rest threatens to produce a cultural grey-out.” 4. In his critical study of the diverse uses of the term cultural imperialism, John Tomlinson points out that any reference to a “cultural imperialism thesis” deceptively intimates coherence and unity. He argues that, due to the various ways in

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193

which it is used, the term cultural imperialism is better described as a discourse, and he identifies four ways of talking about cultural imperialism: cultural imperialism as media imperialism, cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality, cultural imperialism as the critique of global capitalism, and cultural imperialism as the critique of modernity (Tomlinson 1991: 20–28). I acknowledge his objections to use of the term cultural imperialism thesis. Nevertheless, I also recognize that “the ci thesis” remains as an important trope among its critics, who favor a view of the global order as a (random, disjunctive, disorganized, and fragmented) chaos rather than the view of world order offered by the dependency theory model, in which powerful metropolitan centers in the Third World are seen as responsible for mediating a Western cultural domination of their peripheral and powerless citizens. Among such theorists, use of the term globalization implies fragmentation, hybridization, and diversification, not homogenization (Tomlinson 1991; Appadurai 1996; Gilroy 1997). 5. Referring to the angst-ridden Kurt Cobain as “carefree” (cuwek) seems incongruent. However, my sense is that the Balinese punks viewed Cobain’s suicide as affirming his disregard (perhaps a more apt translation of cuwek) for materialism and rock glory. 6. In a critical essay, Cohen (1997: 153–54) reviews and remarks sarcastically on these theorists’ tendency to always interpret youth styles as instances of opposition and resistance, and to dismiss instances of conservative styles that support the dissemination of the dominant commercial culture, “because—as we all know—style is a bricolage of inconsistencies and anyway, things are not what they seem so the apparent conservative meaning hides just the opposite.”

5. Grounding Punk 1. When Sunday Hot Music began in 1994, it consisted of four events on four successive Sundays in the middle of the year, and was thus dubbed a “Month of Sundays.” This format was followed in 1995, but in 1996, due to increasing numbers of bands applying to audition, Crapt Entertainment decided to hold the event every second Sunday, which it did until July, when the series ended, ostensibly due to the decreasing quality of bands applying for selection. When the event recommenced in 1997, it returned to its initial “Month of Sundays” format. 2. Dave Laing (1985: 90) cites Ron Watts, then owner of London’s 100 Club, who credits Sid Vicious with inventing the pogo: during an early Sex Pistols gig at the 100 Club and before he joined the band, “Sid Vicious started jumping up and down on the spot with excitement, bashing into people. And this was the first recorded incident of pogoing in the U.K.” Laing describes the pogo as “most like the action caused by jumping on a pogo stick, a craze in children’s toys of some years prior to punk.” He cites Robert Christgau’s assertion that, more than any

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Notes To chapter 5

preceding dance style associated with rock music, the pogo expressed the “exuberant competitiveness” and “aggressive fun” inherent in rock-and-roll (ibid.: 9). The Balinese pogo also included frequent mock duels in the mosh, but it was more akin to the slam-dancing of L.A.-based hardcore bands than the bounce of English ska fans. Jeff Goldthorpe (1992: 40) cites Goldstein’s description of the slam dance as “dozens of fans hurtling across the flow like kamikaze pilots taking aim on an aircraft carrier. Other audience members dance in a loose circle around the action, either taking a spill themselves or throwing the most avid celebrants into the fray.” 3. Pesta Musik Underground was not commercially sponsored: Jerink’s parents had provided the capital to stage the event. 4. What is meant here appears to be: The declaration (of independence) gave us equality / and modernization with all its effects. 5. Similarly, in her study of Liverpudlian bands, Sara Cohen (1991: 177) observes that “band members who didn’t contribute toward lyrical composition often didn’t know the lyrics or were unaware of their meaning.”

6. Metal Blossoms 1. The Lumintang and Sading banjars are in northern outlying regions of Denpasar. Gerokgak is located in the subdistrict of Tabanan, on the southwest of the island. 2. Musicians complained of the dearth of performance opportunities for death metal performers during this period. Dek Ben of Triple Six recalled that “after Metallica made a riot in Jakarta, there was a vacuum in the local music scene. . . . Now it’s starting up again, only after Sunday Hot Music in 1995, the campuses are starting to organize gigs. It used to be impossible to get permits.” Agus Yanky believed that “shm has done the local death-thrash scene a great service. Beginning last year we have had a contract with them. We get paid and as it turns out, we cooperate well with them, as well as with the press. Gus Martin [a local rock journalist] did us a great service when we performed at shm in 1995. It lifted us from being invisible to being a prominent force.” 3. Balinese death-thrashers also noted that the supply of death and thrash metal titles through Indonesian distributors began to dry up following the Metallica riots, and they also blamed this on state censorship. The opening of the Indonesian recording industry to foreign investment, and stricter controls on piracy, may also have had a hand in this, for although Indonesia signed the International Copyright Agreement in 1988, the ratification does not appear to have taken effect until the mid-1990s. As late as 1996, Kompas reported that over the 1995–96 period, three men had been tried separately for cassette piracy, sentenced to between three and six years in jail and fi ned up to Rp20 million. The report explained that this exemplified the more extreme measures being taken by

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authorities to ensure the lawful enactment of a 1987 copyright regulation, and it cited Djajat Sudrajat, the head of the bpphc (Badan Penanggulangan Pelanggaran Hak Cipta) of Asiri (Asosiasi Industri Rekaman Indonesia), the department of the Indonesian Copyright Association responsible for copyright infringements, who commented that “to date copyright infringements have only been punished in a cursory way” (hanya dijatuhi hukuman percobaan). Certainly, this seems to have had an effect on pricing. Between 1995 and 1997, coinciding with the enactment of stricter controls on piracy, the price of cassettes increased from Rp2,500 to between Rp7,500 and Rp10,000. Agus Yanky recalled how in the early 1990s the albums he obtained as part of his promotion deal with Indosemar Sakti were being sold for “two, two and a half thousand rupiah” (Agus Yanky, interview, 6 February 1998)—a price which suggests that they were not being distributed under license, and that the sudden dearth of such titles in the mid-1990s may have been due to the enactment of such antipiracy legislation. 4. As I noted in chapter 1, death-thrashers contested this instance of essentialization. 5. This “second generation,” as Age, Yanky, and Moel referred to them in separate interviews, included the death metal bands Misty, Triple Six, and Angel Head, which formed between late 1995 and early 1996. 6. This became evident in the different responses to the “defection” of Lolot, vocalist for the Obituary cover band Behead, from death metal to punk. When I interviewed him in 1996, Agus Yanky lamented Lolot’s departure from Behead to establish a Ramones cover band as a sellout. By the late 1990s, however, death metal musicians described the move as valid, deeming Lolot “a punk at heart.” 7. Etnik for the inclusion of traditional Balinese melodies and lunatik for its lyrical exploration of insanity. Rangda personifies destruction in the Balinese mythology and frequently features in Balinese dramatic dances. 8. Also in the late-1990s, however, when Irvan, the vocalist for renowned industrial band Rotor, which supported Metallica in 1993 and were signed to wea, pioneered the production of original songs by Indonesian underground bands (Metalklinik) in 1997, he also requested that these songs, which included an original by the Balinese band Eternal Madness, be in Indonesian. In spite of this Balinese underground musicians received the album warmly and were enthusiastic about many of the compositions it included. 9. Adil published both the original English lyrics and a translation of them. The lyrics are unattributed. 10. sara stands for suku (ethnicity), agama (religion), ras (race), and antar-golongan (lit., “between social groups”). Part of an official (New Order) discourse, sara connoted potential for racially or ethnically based confl ict. By labeling events or activities as sara, the state could identify them as seditious, for the threats posed to national unity.

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11. Kaliyuga translates as “Age of Doom” and refers to the Balinese Hindu belief in History’s clocklike, cyclical (not linear) dimensions. History thus revolves from an age of prosperity to one of doom and back again.

Conclusion 1. Turner (1957) coined the term liminality in his study of rites of passage among the Ndembu people of Zambia, later broadening it to discuss the way societies are reconstituted through moments of reflection. Thus he describes “liminaries” as “betwixt and between established states of politico-jural structure. They evade ordinary cognitive classification, too, for they are neither this-nor-that, here-northere, one-thing-nor-the-other” (Turner 1997: 37). He also distinguished liminal from liminoid practices, which occur in posttribal societies: “[While] liminal phenomena are integrated into the total social process . . . liminoid phenomena develop most characteristically outside the central economic and political processes, along their margins, on their interfaces, in their ‘tacit dimensions’ ” (ibid.: 44). 2. Hetherington (1998a: 102–3) theorizes that identity practices are forms of social drama which are liminal in nature and effect alternate or utopian modes of social ordering in celebratory communitas, or carnivals: “In the context of expressive identities . . . we need to see this process of identity formation as a performative process that has a distinct spatiality. In certain spaces and networks of expression . . . these identities are established through liminoid practices which embody carnivalesque modes of ordering. . . . Liminal or liminoid practices, such as social dramas and rituals such as rites of passage generally, take place in spaces that are symbolically ambivalent. These spaces are similar to what Foucault has called heterotopia; they are spaces defi ned in relation to other spaces in which an alternative social ordering emerges.”

Notes To conclusion

197

GLO SSA RY

abri

Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (Indonesian Armed Forces)

adat

custom

aliran sesat

devil worshipping cult

alternapunk

(my term) style of punk fandom practiced in Bali in 1996, largely inspired by the California punk band Green Day

anak gaul

trendy kids

Angel Head

Balinese death metal band, formed in 1996

Annymissme

Balinese black metal band of the late 1990s

Anthrax

New York City–based thrash metal band which released its first full-length album in 1984

arak

palm wine

Arwah

Balinese black metal band

Bad Religion

punk rock band formed in California in 1980, often credited with leading a punk rock revival in that decade

Bakor stanas

Badan Koordinasi Stabilitas Nasional (Coordinating Body for National Stability—a military intelligence body)

bale banjar

community hall

banjar

hamlet

bazaar banjar

banjar fundraising events

Behead

Balinese death metal band that formed in 1996 and performed at Sunday Hot Music in that year

Belasungkawa

Balinese black metal band

black metal

subgenre of extreme metal which started in the early 1980s in Norway and is often associated with Anti-Christianity

Blood Maggot

Balinese black metal band

bnr

Bakrie Nirwana Resort (a controversial resort development near Tanah Lot temple, Bali)

Bolt Thrower

English death metal band formed in 1986

Brother Roots

Balinese grunge band

Brutal Truth

New York City–based deathgrind band that formed in 1990 and disbanded in 1999

Cannibal Corpse

death metal band from New York that is one of the longest lasting and best-known groups in the death metal scene

caru

ritual sacrifice

Commercial Suicide

Balinese punk band, active in the punk chaos scene in the late 1990s

Criminal Assholes

Balinese punk band, active in the punk chaos scene in the late 1990s

dalang

puppet master

dangdut

genre of music widely popular in Indonesia. Features a strong drumbeat. The name dangdut is onomatopoeic.

death metal

extreme metal subgenre that evolved out of thrash metal during the early 1980s and features downtuned rhythm guitar and fast percussion

desa

village

Djihad

Balinese punk band of the late 1990s active in the Balinese punk chaos scene

doom metal

slow, heavy, and pessimistic form of heavy metal that emerged in the mid-1980s

Epilepsy

Balinese thrash metal band that formed in the early 1990s and disbanded in 1995

200

GLOSSARY

Eternal Madness

Balinese death metal band established in the early 1990s

The Exploited

Scottish punk rock band formed in 1980 and generally associated with the second wave of U.K. punk rock

Fatamorgana

Balinese reggae band that often competed in reggae festivals and performed at Sunday Hot Music in the mid-1990s

gamelan

Balinese percussion orchestra

gaul

lit., to associate/to socialize; participants in this book use gaul to refer to a culture of compliant consumerism

golkar

Golongan Karya (ruling political grouping of the New Order period)

gor

(Gedung Olah Raga) sports complex

Green Day

California punk band which formed in the late 1980s and gained enormous popularity worldwide in the 1990s

grindcore

extreme metal subgenre which combines hardcore punk and thrash metal but is more commonly associated with death metal

grunge

genre of alternative rock that developed in Seattle and became commercially successful on a global scale in the late 1980s and early 1990s

Guns n’ Roses

U.S. hard rock band that gained fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s

Jamasyah

Balinese reggae band that formed in the late 1980s and often performed at Bruna Bar

Jasad

Bandung death metal band that performed at Bandung Underground II in 1996

kesurupan

entranced

Knucklehead Nation

Balinese hardcore punk band that formed in late 1996

Legend

Balinese reggae group that formed in the early 1990s and was the house band at Bruna Bar in Kuta

Mayyat

Balinese black metal band

Megadeth

U.S. speed/heavy/thrash metal band that formed in 1983, disbanded in 2002, and reformed in 2004 GLOSSARY

201

Metallica

U.S. heavy metal band, formed in October 1981

Metalpura

Balinese thrash band that performed at Sunday Hot Music in 1996

Misty

Balinese death metal band that formed in 1997

Napalm Death

U.K. grindcore band formed in 1982

Nirvana

Seattle-based grunge/alternative rock band which was enormously successful on a global scale in the early 1990s

No Man’s Land

Malang punk band of the late 1990s

nongkrong

to hang out

Obligasi

Balinese grunge band that performed Nirvana covers at Sunday Hot Music in the late 1990s

The Offspring

California punk band formed in 1984 which gained a very significant worldwide following in the late 1990s; popular among Balinese alternapunks in 1995–99

pdi

Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (Indonesian Democracy Party—one of two legal parties during the New Order period)

pdi-p

Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan (Indonesian Democracy Party of Struggle—an extralegal party established by Megawati Soekarnoputri in 1996)

petrus

penembakan misterius (popular term for the summary executions of alleged criminals in the mid1980s)

Phobia

Balinese death/thrash band, formed in the early 1990s

pki

(Partai Komunis Indonesia) Indonesian Communist Party

pni

(Partai Nasionalis Indonesia) Indonesian Nationalist Party

ppp

Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (United Development Party—one of two legal parties during the New Order period)

preman

thugs/gangsters/toughs

punk anarki

name for Balinese punk movement that emerged around 1998

202

GLOSSARY

punk chaos

name for Balinese punk movement that emerged around 1998

punk moderen

style of punk that gained popularity in Bali in 1997

Raja Iblis

Balinese black metal band

Ramones

New York City–based rock band which formed in 1974 and disbanded in 1996, widely considered to be the first punk rock group

Rancid

U.S. punk band formed in the 1990s in California

Ritual Crypt

Balinese black metal band

Runamuck

Balinese punk band, active in the punk chaos scene in the late 1990s

Sacred Reich

U.S. thrash metal band formed in the 1980s

Sacrilegious

Bandung black metal band, performed in Bali in 1996

sara

suku (ethnicity), agama (religion), ras (race), antar golongan (lit. among social groupings); refers to issues that the New Order regime identified as politically taboo due to their divisive nature; people who cast their political demands in religious, ethnic, or racial terms were frequently demonized as traitors

satpam

satuan pengamanan (literally, security unit. A satpam is a security guard)

sekehe

banjar-based voluntary associations

sekehe teruna-teruni (stt)

banjar-based youth groups

Sepultura

Brazilian thrash metal band

Soul Rebel

Balinese reggae band that was established in the late-1990s and performed regularly at All Stars Cafe in Kuta

Suckerfinger

Balinese punk band of the late 1990s, active in the Balinese punk chaos scene

Suckerhead

Jakarta thrash band, performed in Bali in 1994

Superman Is Dead

Balinese punk band established in 1995; pioneered an independent punk scene in Bali

tempat nongkrong

hangout (n.)

thrash metal

extreme metal subgenre characterized by high speed and aggression

GLOSSARY

203

Total Chaos

California punk band formed in the late 1980s that espoused a left/progressive political punk; its music and dress style (but not its politics) were popular among participants in the Balinese punk anarki scene in the late 1990s

Total Riot

Bandung punk band, performed in Bali in 1996

Triple Six

Balinese death metal band, established mid-1990s

Turtle Junior

Bandung punk band, performed in Bali in 1997

Unleashed

Swedish death metal band formed in 1989

Utero

Balinese grunge band of the mid-1990s

Venom

English black-/speed metal band formed in late 1978

wadah

body, institution

warung

roadside stall

wayang kulit

shadow puppet theater

204

GLOSSARY

R EF ER E NC E S

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Albums Bad Religion, All Ages, Epitaph, 1995. Debtor, Crime Conspiracy, dc Productions, 1997. Jamrud, Nekad, Logiss, 1995. Jasad, C’est la vie, Palapa, 1996. Metalklinik: Album Kompilasi Underground Indonesia, 1997. Metalklinik II: Kompilasi Underground Indonesia, Musika, 1998. Nugie, Bumi, Aquarius, 1995. 100% Attitude, Lunatic, 1999. Pure Saturday, Pure Saturday, Bacott, 1996. Rotor, Eleven Keys, Hemagita, 1994. ———, New Blood, wea, 1995. Sacrilegious, Lucifer’s Name Be Prayed, Palapa, 1996. Sepultura, Beneath the Remains, Roadrunner, 1989. ———, Arise, Roadrunner, 1991. ———, Chaos AD, Roadrunner, 1993. ———, Roots, Roadrunner, 1996. Slank, Kampungan, Proyek q, 1988. Sonic Torment, Haatzai Artikelen, Revogram, 1996. Suckerhead, The Head Sucker, Aquarius, 1995. ———, Manic Depressive, Aquarius, 1996. Superman Is Dead, Case 15, Independent Productions, 1997. Turtle Junior, Die My Girls, Hijau, 1997. ———, This Is F . . . System, 41 Records, 1998.

Interviews Age, death metal merchandiser, 4 February 1998. Dempasar. Agung Alit and Ngurah Karyadi, former patrons of Bruna reggae bar, 25 June 1998. Dempasar. Agung Joni, vocalist for reggae band Sunshine, member of reggae festival jury. 12 March 1996. Sanur. Agus, vocalist for Bandung-based black metal band Sacrilegeous, 21 July 1996. Bandung. Agus Lempog, “senior” professional rock musician who regularly gigged at local tourist bars, 13 April 1996. Dempasar.

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213

Agus Yanky, broadcaster and head of death metal organization, 1921, 29 March 1996 and 6 February 1998. Dempasar. Angel Head, death metal band, 26 April 1996. Dempasar. Ari, bassist for death metal band Phobia, 13 June 1996. Dempasar. Arwah and Ritual Crypt, death metal bands, 11 June 1998. Dempasar. Behead, death metal band, 21 April 1996. Dempasar. Cahyadi, session guitarist with Legend and Jamasyah, 8 July 1998. Dempasar. Cak, guitarist with Eternal Madness, 20 March 1998. Dempasar. Criminal Assholes, punk band, 21 June 1998. Dempasar. Deadly Ground, Bandung-based hardcore band, 21 June 1996. Dempasar. Degung Santikarma, telephone interview, 6 May 2002. Dek Ben, vocalist for Triple Six, 1 March 1996. Dempasar. Djihad, punk band, 1 May 1999. Dempasar. Frit, vocalist with reggae band Legend, 3 July 1998. Dempasar. Gregor, Radio Casanova announcer, 3 April 1996. Dempasar. Gus Martin, rock reporter for Bali Post, 26 March 1996 and 3 May 1998. Dempasar. Gus They, vocalist for reggae band Fatamorgana, 10 June 1996. Dempasar. Lolot, vocalist for death metal band Behead, owner of Lunatic Merchandise, 1 May 1999. Dempasar. Made Arthana, owner of reggae merchandise shop, 4 October 1998. Sanur. Micko, Radio gmr announcer, Bandung, 22 July 1996. Bandung. Moel (Sabdo Moelyo), vocalist and bassist for death metal band Eternal Madness and Hendra, vocalist for thrash cover band Epilepsy, 30 July 1996 and 2 February 1998. Dempasar. No Man’s Land, Malang-based punk band, 4 May 1997. Malang. Obligasi, punk band, 27 May 1996. Dempasar. Rahmat Hariyanto, manager of Crapt Entertainment, 4 April 1996. Dempasar. Rest in Peace (rip), punk band, 31 May 1996. Dempasar. Romy Isnandar, member of the organizing committee for Bandung Underground II, 21 July 1996. Bandung. Rudi, ex-vocalist with Bali’s first reggae band, Jamasyah, 15 June 1998. Kuta. Soul Rebel, reggae band, 16 July 1998. Kuta. Storing, ska band, 20 April 1999. Dempasar. Suckerfinger, punk band, 23 October 1998. Dempasar. Suckerhead, Jakarta-based death metal band, 23 November 1996. Jakarta. Superman Is Dead (sid), punk band, 10 April 1996 and 6 July 1997. Kuta. Total Riot, Bandung-based punk band, 21 July 1996. Bandung. Triple Punk, punk band, 29 May 1996. Sanur. Turtle Junior, Bandung-based punk band, 29 September 1997. Dempasar. Utero, punk band, 1 May 1996. Dempasar. Wayan Ferry, vocalist in Metallica cover band Metalpura, 17 July 1996. Kuta. Yayat, vocalist for Bandung-based death metal band, 21 July 1996. Bandung. 214

REFERENCES

Web Sites and E-mail Lists [email protected] www.pantau.or.id www.supermanisdead.net

’Zines Brainwashed (Jakarta)

No. 1, September 1996 No. 2, October 1996 No. 3, December 1996 Check Sound (Yogyakarta)

No. 1, December 1995 No. 2, March 1996 Death Vomit newsletter

December 1997 EN.EF.A (Yogyakarta)

No. 1, November 1996 No. 2, February 1997 No. 4, July 1997 Full of Pain Underground Bulletin (Bekasi) Kaliyuga (Bali)

No. 1 Human Waste (Yogyakarta) Megaton (Yogyakarta)

No. 1, June 1996 No. 2 Mindblast (Malang)

Vol. 1, July 1996 Revograms (Bandung)

No. 4, July 1997 Rottenatomy (Jember)

No. 01, August 1997 Scattered Brain Society (Semarang) Submissive Riot—Non-profit Anarcho Newsletter (Bandung)

No. 1, June 1998 REFERENCES

215

No. 2, July 1998 No. 4, September 1998 No. 5, October 1998 No. 7, December 1998 No. 8, January 1999 Tikus Got (Denpasar)

No. 1, 1997 No. 2, 1998

216

REFERENCES

I NDEX

abg, 22, 26 abri, 18 ac/dc, 53 Adi Thumb, 74 Adil, 166, 197 n.9 Advertising, 5, 24, 26, 170 Age, 54, 99, 153, 160, 196 n.5 Agung Alit, 85, 88 Agung Joni, 78, 80 Agus Sacrilegious, 158 Agus Yanky, 51, 53, 56, 57, 61, 66, 70, 96, 146–69, 190 n.1, 192 n.10, 195 n.2, 196 nn.3, 5 Aktuil, 21, 34 All Stars Cafe, 78–79 Alternapunk: Balinese punk and, 12; concerts, 12, 16; fandom, 142; globalization of, 28–29; in Indonesia, 28, 60, 155; musicians, 30; vis-à-vis images of punk, reggae, and death metal, 91. See also Punk Ambiguity, 45, 180, 182 Ambivalence, 183

Anak baru gede. See abg Anarchy symbol, 113. See also Punk Aneka magazine, 31 Angel Head, 59, 62, 196 n.5 Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia. See abri Annymissme, 155 anteve, 24, 29, 52 Anthrax, 191 n.2 Anti-establishmentarianism, 106, 137, 163 Apache Bar, 73 Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 110, 194 n.5 Arak, 8, 27, 49, 54, 84, 92, 184 Ari Phobia, 49, 60, 63, 69, 72, 99, 150, 152, 154, 160, 190 n.1, 192 n.10 Arwah, 63, 153, 154, 160, 161, 167–68, 170 asiri, 196 n.3 Authenticity, 55, 60, 64, 104, 132, 175, 179; of death metal, 145, 159; of deaththrash, 62–64, 71; of metal, 162; of punk, 118, 123, 143; of punk and metal, 108; of reggae, 83, 89

Authoritarianism, 17 Autochthony, 177, 181–83 Babylon, 76 Badan Koordinasi Stabilitas Nasional. See Bakorstanas Bad Religion, 1, 113, 116–17, 126 Bakorstanas, 36 Bakrie Group, 24, 40 Balinese-ness, 47, 177, 181; dominant discourses of, 142; reggae, punk, and death metal and, 2, 12, 177; regionalism and, 2; vis-à-vis punk, 141–43 Bali Post, 71, 84, 95, 98, 134, 151–52, 163, 192 n.10 Bambang Trihatmodjo, 24 Bandung, 38, 106; in Indonesian underground scene, 126; punk, 127; punk dress and performance style, 115–17; punk-gaul rivalry and, 130; Turtle Junior and, 125; underground scene, 115 Bandung Underground II, 130–31, 156– 59, 169–71 Barong, 170 Bass Jam, 31 Bazaar banjar, 69, 147; black metal presence and, 171 Beastie Boys, 26, 32 Behead, 51, 62, 69, 74, 137, 150, 151, 196 n.6 Belasungkawa, 161, 170 Birmingham School, 109, 188 n.5 Black metal, 156–65, 185; bands, 156; at Bandung Underground II, 171; contested presence at gigs, 169; depictions of, in Hai, 164; dress style of, 166–67; at golkar concert, 167–68; performances of, 174; performance style of, 164–66; transgression and, 170–72 Blasphemy, 161 Blood Maggot, 155 218

index

bmg, 25, 28, 29, 39, 40, 43 Bob Dylan, 83 Bob Marley and the Wailers, 193 n.6; covers of, 74; cover bands and, 76 Bolt Thrower, 53, 61 Boomerang, 29 Borderzones, 73, 82, 86, 88, 90 Bourgeoisie, 23, 188 n.5; alternative fandom and, 16; death metal fandom and, 59; identity and, 6, 9; provincial, 66; underground and, 38 Bourgeois youth, 37 Bricolage, 115, 141–42, 167–68 Brother Roots, 159 Bruna bar, 69, 73–74, 81, 83–84, 88, 119 Brutal Truth, 60, 156 Budi Utomo, 18 Cahyadi, 84 Cak Wisnu, 58, 60, 61, 153, 162 Candi Dasa, 73 Cannibal Corpse, 62, 156 Capitalism, 8; vis-à-vis punk, 118, 137 Caribbean, 78–79 Carnaval, 33–35, 139–40, 172, 181 Caru, 161–62, 167–68 cbs, 28 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 188 n.5 Cerebral Fix, 62 Cewek matre, 11 Cewek nakal, 11, 102 Chaos, 115; the hangout, 125, 137, 139 Chaos Day, 138, 140, 143 Chaos Merchandise, 137 Cheeky Lit. See Sastra mbeling Chris Blackwell, 193 n.6 Citra magazine, 31 Cobain, Kurt, 103, 194 n.6 Colonialism, 76 Commercial Suicide, 137 Commodification, 194 n.2

Communitas, 140, 143, 172, 174, 176, 180, 183, 184, 185, 197 n.2 Concerts, 55, 70, 115; Balinese underground, 118; banjar-based, 149; black metal presence at, 170, 185; death metal, 148, 155; death metal bands and, 154; metal, 147; organizing of, 136, 46, 157, 175; permits for, 146; punk, 136, 138, 153; rock, 16; underground, 2, 125, 155–59, 184 Consumerism, 5–6, 9, 16, 24, 25, 38, 91, 101, 106, 110, 142, 145, 155, 179, 180, 182, 183, 188 n.5 Copyright, 196 n.3 Cradle of Filth, 167–68 Crapt Entertainment, 74, 107, 113, 119, 125, 147, 150, 194 n.1 Criminal Assholes, 114, 115, 119, 132, 133, 137, 140, 154 Criminality, 20 Cruise ships, 127 Cultural imperialism, 38, 64, 145, 194 n.5 Cultural performance, 183 Cultural preservation, 172, 182 Cultural Tourism, 40, 42, 44, 145

alternapunk, 100, 158; vis-à-vis alternative fandom, 91; vis-à-vis Jakarta, 7; vis-à-vis reggae, 159; vis-à-vis tourism, 53 Death-thrash: 53, 54, 149; dress style of, 64–71; identity of, 145; performance style, 64–71; scenes, 145; vis-à-vis punk, 158; vis-à-vis reggae, 158 Debtor, 53, 61, 151 Deicide, 156 Dek Ben, 51, 63, 96, 149, 150–53, 195 n.21 Denpasar, 2, 8, 10, 38, 119; elites, 38; malls and, 98; punk territories and, 113, 127, 137, 140, 146, 153; reggae in, 73; support for pdi-p in, 42 Deracination, 178, 181, 183 Deregulation: of investment in tourism, 39; of media, 39 Developmentalism, 7, 45, 47, 67, 82, 87, 148, 179, 181 Dewa, 19, 31, 151 Différance, 108, 111, 180 Discourses: of Balinese-ness, 2, 12, 47; of center–periphery, 18; dominant, 4–5, 114; fluctuating, 4–5; of identity, 7–9, 17, 74, 180–84; of masculinity, 8; of rock, 17; of state, 7, 87, 110; of youth, 4–5, 7, 12, 47 Dance style: punk, 115, 142; punk chaos/ Disgusting Gods, 164 anarki, 136; reggae, 69–70. See also Djihad, 128, 132, 137, 139, 176 Headbanging; Pogo Death metal: authenticity, 162; concerts, Doom metal, 56 Double pedal, 55, 69, 191 n.2 147–48, 154–55; dress style, 1, 4, 156, 166, 181; hangouts, 153–54; hedonism Dread, 65, 148, 192 n.6 Dreadlocks, 83 and, 108; hierarchy and, 61–62; jams Dress style, 178, 181, 183; of black metal, and, 8; localization of, 177; Malaysia 157, 165–67; of death metal, 156–57, and, 57; marginality, 160; masculinity 166; of death-thrash, 64–75; in Indoand, 159; regionalism and, 2, 12, 177; nesian underground scene, 1, 4; shopping malls and, 1, 100; solidarpunk, 114–17, 141–42, 156–57; punk ity, 150, 181; space, 54, 177; Surabaya chaos/anarki, 127, 136; punk moderen, and, 57; territory, 54, 146–48, 150, 121; reggae, 69–70, 75 154, 177; underground movement Drugs: and musicianship, 59 and, 2; virtuosity, 61–62; vis-à-vis index

219

Ecstasy, 35–36 emi, 25, 29 em Productions, 125, 157 Emocore Revolver, 133 Empowerment, 180, 184 Epilepsy, 55 Essentialism, 182 Essentialization, 196 n.4; tourism and, 72 Eternal Madness, 50, 53, 56, 59, 61, 120, 125, 148, 151, 160, 162–63, 170, 193 n.5, 197 n.8 Exploited, The, 126 Fashion victim, 23, 104, 106, 142, 145, 165 Fatamorgana, 76 Foo Fighters, 26, 32 Gaul, 18, 146, 166, 175, 179; anak, 23, 26, 127–28, 129, 130–31, 132; bahasa, 23, 32; vis-à-vis black metal, 165; vis-à-vis underground, 164, 179 Gede Gobler, 160, 170 Gigolos, 192 n.1 Globalization, 17, 110, 178, 189 n.2, 194 n.5; of Indonesian recording industry, 5; of media, 5, 7, 21, 155 Goes Amin, 79 golkar, 4, 24, 42, 58, 187 n.2, 191 n.3; concert, 160–61, 166–68, 170 Green Day, 8, 26, 27, 30, 32, 50, 91, 96, 103, 113–15, 118, 123, 141, 145; cover bands, 95 Grindcore, 56, 146, 153, 159; bands, 156 Guns n’ Roses, 56, 62 Haight Ashbury, 59 Hai magazine, 17, 27, 30, 31, 34, 100, 101, 164–66, 190 n.9 Hangouts: death metal, 148, 150, 153–54,

220

index

160; punk, 114, 184; Underdog State, 165 Hardcore bands, 156 Hard Rock Cafe, 1, 89, 119 Headbanging, 52, 64, 66, 70, 71, 75, 104, 120, 148, 152, 164 Hebdige, 110 Hedonism, 5–6, 16, 91, 155, 182 Hellgods, 165 Hemagita, 25, 29 Heroin, 188 n.8 Heryanto, 17, 22, 28, 148, 171, 177 Heteroglossy, 47, 87, 90 Heterotopia, 86, 88, 139, 182, 183, 197 n.2 Hetherington, 86, 108, 139–40, 180, 182, 191 n.5 Hybridity, 7, 38, 178 Hybridization, 6, 52, 54, 110, 178, 194 n.5 Hyperobedience, 45, 171, 177 Hypertransgression, 163, 172 Ida Bagus Oka, 40 Identity cards, 20, 37 Impish, 164 Independent Productions, 118, 122 Independent Studio, 119, 120 Indigenization, 6, 52, 56 Indosemar Sakti, 56, 148 Indosiar, 24 Irony, 13, 47, 173–74, 182, 184 Island Records, 193 n.6 Istana Music, 53, 54, 57, 68, 148 Iwan Fals, 8, 30, 50, 63, 67, 79, 86 Jakarta, 38, 70; alternapunk and, 95; Balinese punk and, 104, 108; Balinese regionalism and, 2, 18; manifestations of, in Bali, 119; punk-gaul rivalry and, 130; reggae, punk, and death metal identity politics and, 7; Sepultura

concert in, 91; Suckerhead and, 125; vis-à-vis Balinese reggae scene, 84 Jakarta Alternative Pop Festival, 17, 31, 34, 91, 100–101 Jakartanization, 11, 88 Jamaica, 78–79, 82, 87, 193 n.7 Jamasyah, 83 Jamrud, 29, 32 Jams: punk, 1, 119, 121, 124, 127, 143; streetside, 8; at Underdog State, 154 Java: punk and, 104; underground scene in, 121 Jeger, 22, 192 n.7 Jerink, 23, 75, 93, 101, 105, 117, 119, 120, 124, 128, 134, 163, 164, 195 n.3 Kaliyuga ’zine, 161, 176, 197 n.12 Kebalian, 44, 45 Knucklehead Nation, 137, 159 Kompas, 36, 191 n.3 Komplikasi, 169, 170, 174 Kreator, 53 Kumbasari market, 54, 68, 99 Kuta, 1, 23, 69, 73, 74, 93, 187 n.1, 192 n.2; Balinese tourism industry and, 87; cowboys, 192 n.1; punk in, 117; punk territories and, 117, 119, 127, 141–42, 175; reggae and, 77; studios in, 120; vis-à-vis death/thrash, 69 Lebak Bulus stadium, 15 Legend, 74 Liberty Band Parade, 150, 152 Liberty Entertainment, 146–48 Liem Sioe Liong, 24 Lilha Buana stadium, 138 Liminality, 23, 139, 150, 182–83, 197 nn.1–2 Localization, 13, 178; of punk, reggae, and death metal, 177 Lolot, 51, 52, 58, 67, 69, 137, 196 n.6

Lovina, 73 Ludism, 180–83 Lumintang, 147 Lunatic Merchandise, 127, 137 Lunatic Records, 138 Made Arthana, 88 Magic Voice, 73 Major recording labels, 2, 121–23, 145, 155, 162 Malang, 38, 106, 121, 130–31, 156; punkgaul rivalry and, 130 Malaysia, 24, 38, 61; as hub of death metal fandom, 57 Marginality, 13, 54, 56, 175, 177, 181, 182, 184; of death-thrash, 68, 71, 160; of punk, 93, 165 Martin, Gus, 84, 85, 152, 192 n.10, 195 n.2 Masculinity, 8–9, 10; in alternapunk practice, 102; Balinese reggae scene and, 85; death metal and, 159 Masquerade, 64–66 Mass Tourism, 42 Mayyat, 161, 170 mca, 28 Medan, 188 n.7 Media: attention to death-thrash, 71; deregulation, 5, 17, 24, 37, 91; global, 87; print, 6 Megadeth, 53, 56, 191 n.2 Megawati Soekarnoputri, 3, 4, 20, 36, 39, 42, 43, 79, 86, 189–90 n.5 Mejeng. See Ngeceng Merchandise, 137, 155, 184; outlets, 1 Metal, global genres of, 56 Metalklinik, 196 n.8 Metallica, 13, 32, 55, 71, 191 n.2, 196 n.8; concert, 13–15; riot, 15, 20, 26, 35, 64, 75, 95, 145–51, 158, 192 n.7, 195 n.2, 196 n.3

index

221

Metropolis, 95, 98, 106, 109, 110, 141, 142, 143, 145; reggae, punk, and death metal identity politics and, 7; vis-à-vis Balinese punk, 118 Misty, 151, 159, 196 n.5 Mobile phones, 99 Mods, 188 n.5 Moel, 50, 59, 60, 125, 137, 149, 150, 152–53, 156, 157, 162, 163, 190 n.1, 192 n.10, 196 n.5 Mohawks, 1, 101, 113, 115, 117, 126, 131, 136, 140, 156 Morbid Angel, 60 Moshing, 104, 119, 184, 185 Mosh pit, 31, 100, 136 mtv Asia, 25, 29, 52 Music television, 2, 145, 155 Music video, 30 Napalm Death, 191 n.2 nda, 11, 57, 76, 80, 101, 106, 132 Nepotism and Suharto, 19 Netral, 26, 29, 30, 50 New Order, 3, 7, 30; authoritarianism of, 171; demise of, 12, 17, 177, 180, 189 n.3; domination and, 177; fall of, 17; hegemony of, 155; identity discourses of, 64, 74; legitimacy and, 7; lomba and, 90; reformasi and, 7; rock and, 22; tourism development and, 40, 43; youth and rock and, 21 Ngeceng, 10, 11, 102, 132 Ngurah Karyadi, 85, 88 1921, 53, 95, 146–60 Nirvana, 50; cover bands, 91; covers of, 95 nkk, 19 nofx, 113, 116, 123, 126 No Man’s Land, 121 Normalisasi Kehidupan Kampus (nkk), 19

222

index

Nu Dewata Ayu. See nda Nugie, 26 Nusa Dua, 40, 54, 87; development planning and, 44 Nusa Tenggara, 167–68 Obituary, 62, 137, 196 n.6 Obligasi, 91, 95, 97, 101, 103 Operasi Kilat Jaya, 17, 35 Operasi Pemberantas Kejahatan (opk), 20 Orexas, 21 Parisadha Hindu Dharma, 41 Parody, 180–82 Partai Demokrasi Indonesia. See pdi Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan. See pdi-p Partai Komunis Indonesia (pki), 44 Partai Nasionalis Indonesia. See pni Partai Persatuan dan Pembangunan. See ppp Pas, 26, 29, 30 Patriotism, 5–6, 19 pdi, 3, 36, 42, 58, 187 n.2, 187 n.3, 191 n.3 pdi-p, 4, 42, 80, 189 n.5 Pemuda, 16, 18, 22, 26, 189 n.4; antiSoekarno, 19 Pemuda Pancasila, 189 n.4 Performance style: among Bandung punks, 115, 117; black metal, 157, 164, 166; death-thrash, 64–71; punk, 114; punk chaos/anarki, 127, 136, 138, 157; in underground scene, 161, 173 Pesta Musik Undergound, 118, 159, 195 n.3 Petrus, 20, 190 n.10 Philips, 28 Phobia, 49, 51, 60, 91, 149, 152 Picard, 18, 44, 45, 70, 84, 87, 97, 145, 194 n.3

Piracy, 61, 62, 196 n.3 pki, 44 Place myths, 99 pni, 4, 44, 187 n.2 Pogo, 114–16, 120, 195 n.2 Polygram, 25, 29 ppp, 4, 58, 187 n.2 Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 22 Preman, 16, 18, 20, 26, 35, 36, 64, 66, 145, 148, 192 n.7 Prokem, 22 Punk: alterna-, 93–110, 114–19, 129, 132, 142, 145, 149; alternative music and, 12, 91; authenticity and, 118; chaos/anarki, 113–15, 124–43, 154, 157; concerts, 138; consumerism and, 101; dance style of, 142, 181; dress style of, 4, 115, 121, 136, 142, 156–57; English, 188 n.5; hardcore in la, 116, 133, 195 n.2; jams, 8, 119, 121, 143; in Java, 124, 152; in Kuta, 1, 119; localization, 177; marginality, 93; metropolis and, 118; moderen, 114–37; perceived origins of, 104; performance style, 115, 181; queer, 116; regionalism and, 2, 97, 141–43, 177; in Sanur, 92; shopping malls and, 99–100; solidarity and, 153; space of, 177; territory of, 97, 113, 119, 121–42, 146, 175, 177; underground movement and, 92, 111, 117; views of mass media, 123; views of Suharto, 122; virtuosity, 120, 136; vis-à-vis death metal, 100, 158; vis-àvis gaul, 129–30; vis-à-vis Jakarta, 7; vis-à-vis reggae, 129 Puputan, 43 Pure Saturday, 32 Rabelais, 33–34, 181 Radical territorialization, 4–5, 188 n.4 Radio Casanova, 134, 163

Radio Yudha, 53, 54, 61, 66, 68, 147, 148 Ragmuffi n, 81 Rahmat Hariyanto, 75, 147, 193 n.4 Raja Iblis, 161, 170 Rakyat, 190 n.8 Ramayana, 131 Ramones, 113, 116, 126, 196 n.6 Rancid, 113; covers of, 95 Rangda, 161–62, 167–68, 170 Rap, 81 Rastafarianism, 73–75, 82, 87, 191 n.5, 193 n.6 rcti, 24 Recording industry, 25, 52, 196 n.3 Recuperation, 9, 181 Red Hot Chili Peppers, 50 Reflexive essentalization, 18, 38–39, 44–45 Reformasi, 7, 80 Reggae: authenticity of, 83, 89; commodification of, 82; dance style of, 69–70, 75; in Denpasar, 73; dress style of, 4, 69–70, 75; festivals, 74–75; jams, 8; in Kuta Beach, 73, 77, 119; live music venues, 106; localization of, 177; performance style, 69–70; rationalization of, 87, 197 n.7; regionalism and, 2, 177; in Sanur, 74, 80; solidarity and, 181; space of, 177; in tourist bars, 54, 69, 119; at Sunday Hot Music, 2; territory of, 82, 177; vis-à-vis death metal, 69, 158; vis-àvis Jakarta, 7, 84; vis-à-vis punk, 129 Regionalism, 2, 12, 18, 38, 45, 57, 53, 71–72, 108, 132, 142, 167–68, 172, 175 Remaja, 18, 22, 26, 34 Remy Sylado, 21 rip, 91, 97, 102 Ritual Crypt, 154, 161, 170 Ritual sacrifice, 174 Rock videos, 26

index

223

Sid Vicious, 195 n.2 Siti Hardiyanta Rukmana, 24 Ska, English, 120 Skinheads, 188 n.5 Slank, 30–31, 84 Slayer, 53, 55 Social performance, 132, 173, 178, 182 Soekarno, 3, 60, 80, 187 n.2; rock and, 21 Soeryadi, 4 Solo, youth in, 23 Sonic Youth, 26, 32 Sonny Suriaatmadja, 21 Sabdo Moelyo. See Moel Sony, 25 Sacred Reich, 55, 60 Sony Music Entertainment Indonesia, 29 Sacrilegious, 156–58, 169, 171 Soul Rebel, 78–79, 85, 88 Sading, 147; black metal and, 170; death Space, 4–5, 110, 178–79; death metal, metal and, 154, 159 54; discourses of, 4–5; public, in Saigon Kick, 170 Denpasar, 8 Sanglah market, 79 Stickers, 2, 128, 137 Sanur, 51, 73, 74; death metal and, 154, stp, 74, 75, 89, 90, 133 159; punk and, 91; reggae and, 80 Strategic anti-essentialism, 72 sara, 169–70, 174, 197 n.10 stt. See Sekehe: Teruna Teruni Sastra mbeling, 21 Students, 17, 19, 38, 165 Satanism, 58, 66, 161, 166–68, 172, 174 Style. See Dance style; Dress style; Scenes, 178–80, 187 n.4 Performance style sctv, 24 Suara Sentral Sejati, 57 Sekehe, 143; ideology, 45; Teruna Subculture, 65, 98, 109, 128, 180, 191 Teruni, 174–75, 197 n.11 n.5, 192 n.9, 193 n.2 Sekolah Tinggi Pariwisata. See stp Subversion, 109, 181 Sen and Hill, 21, 24, 29, 30, 64, 192 n.7 Suckerfi nger, 114, 124, 127, 128, 129, 133, Separatis, 55 134, 137 Sepultura, 31, 53, 55–56, 59–62, 64, 91, Suckerhead, 29, 30, 125, 151, 193 n.5 191 n.4 Suharto, 3, 60, 187 n.3; advertising on Sesetan and death metal, 154, 159 tvri and, 25; categories of youth Sex Pistols, 195 n.2 and, 22; critics of, 189 n.2; discontent Shields, 99, 109, 178, 180, 194 n.7 with, 42; excess and, 35; fall of, 43; Shopping malls, 108, 132, 141, 145–46, Ida Bagus Oka and, 40; investment 155, 175; death metal and, 99; Denin tourism and, 89; mediatic changes pasar and, 98; feminization and, 9; and, 5; opposition to, 67; punks’ view Matahari, 10, 101; Mitra Plaza, 130–31; of, 122; reformasi and, 7; resignation nda, 11; Ramayana, 131; Siwa Plaza, of, 155; succession and, 3–4, 39 101, 130–31 Sumpah Pemuda, 18 sid. See Superman is Dead Rock, 16, 26, 38; Bandung and, 21; concerts, 18; fandom of, 21; images of, 26; New Order and, 21–22; Soekarno and, 21 Rolling Stones, 21, 83 Rotor, 29, 196 n.8 Rotten Corpse, 156 Royalties, 25 Rudi Jamasyah, 78, 82, 85 Runamuck, 137

224

index

Sunday Hot Music, 2, 51, 74–75, 93–95, 101, 103, 113, 116, 119, 120, 126, 147– 58, 184, 192 n.10, 193 n.1, 193 n.5, 194 n.1, 195 n.2 Superculture, 12, 89, 95, 98–99, 142, 174–75 Superman is Dead, 1, 23, 75, 91, 93, 95–97, 101–5, 113, 117–28, 132–43, 159–64, 188 n.7 Surabaya, 38; as hub of death metal fandom, 57; Sepultura concert in, 64, 91 Tabanan, 118 Tanah Lot, 38, 40–41 Tato, 163 Tattoos, 16, 20, 190 n.9 Television, 54; deregulation of, 91; music and, 5; private, 5, 24, 26; punk and, 104 Televisi Pendidikan Indonesia (tpi), 24 Televisi Republik Indonesia (tvri), 25 Territory, 4–5, 139, 141, 178–79, 183–85, 188 n.4; of alternapunk, 12; Balinese underground and, 12; of death metal, 54, 154; of death metal, reggae, and punk, 47; of death-thrash, 145, 148, 150; of metal, 146, 158; of punk, 97, 113, 121, 124, 127, 136, 142, 146, 175; of reggae, 82 Terror, 18, 35, 37 They, Gus, 64, 70, 78–79, 80, 84, 96 Thorn emi, 28 Thrash metal, 15, 53, 64, 69; bands, 156; fandom, 20–21 Tikus Got, 128, 133–34, 157 Time Warner, 28 Timezone, 101, 130–31 Topchords, 22, 34 Total Chaos, 126 Total Idiot, 155, 163 Total Riot, 115, 125, 157, 171 Total Uyut, 115, 125–26, 156–59, 171

Tourism, 1, 24, 39, 76; Balinese regionalism, and, 2, 12, 45; bars and, 2; death metal and, 53; dualities of exclusion/ inclusion in Bali and, 109; global industry of, 83; reggae and, 119 tpi, 24 Transgression, 13, 146, 170, 174, 179, 182 Triple Punk, 91, 95, 97, 101, 104 Triple Six, 151, 67, 196 n.5 Truant proximity, 109 t-shirts, 54, 137, 156, 165, 167, 184 Turner, Victor, 139–40, 143, 172, 182–83 Turtle Junior, 125, 127, 156, 171 tvri, 25 Twice Pub, 24, 93, 117 Udayana University, 128, 133, 151, 158 Underdog Records, 138 Underdog Society, 138 Underdog State, 137–9, 154, 160, 165 Underground: albums, 137; in Bali, 2, 143, 145, 162, 183; Balinese punk and, 117; bands, 163; black metal and, 160; bourgeoisie and, 38; clubbers in England, 194 n.2; concerts, 2, 38, 118, 121, 138, 143, 155–56, 158–59, 164–65, 172, 174, 185; definitions of, 123; in Denpasar, 160; depictions of, in Hai, 164; discourse of, 159; distribution of albums within, 113; extreme metal and, 52, 56; fans of, 163, 185; genres of, 159, 176, 179; global, 5, 52, 62, 116, 175; hangouts, 127; identity, 13, 155, 159; in Indonesia, 1, 60, 145, 155, 179; in Java, 2, 121, 126; lifestyle, 176; music, 120, 132; networks, 126; punk and, 91, 111; recuperation and, 172; reformasi in Bali and, 8; space, 179; vis-à-vis profit motives, 146 Universitas Udayana. See Udayana University Unleashed, 53, 61 index

225

Utero, 91, 95, 97, 101, 103 Utopics, 108, 111, 142, 178, 179, 191 n.5 Videoclips, 30 Virtuosity: death metal, 61–62; punk, 120 vsp, 57 Warner Music, 25, 29 Warren, Carol, 45, 47, 70, 86, 90, 97–98, 143, 177, 181 Wiyata Mandala, 192 n.2

226

index

Yayat Jasad, 169 Yogyakarta, 38, 59; punk-gaul rivalry and, 130 Yonas, 134, 157 Youth, 26, 38, 47; in Bali, 13, 177; culture in Bali, 184; empowerment of, 180; official ideals, 18–19 Youth Oath (Sumpah Pemuda), 18 Zalnabur, 169 ’Zines, 2, 38, 133, 136, 147, 155, 157

Emma Baulch is a senior research associate at Queensland University of Technology.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baulch, Emma, 1968– Making scenes : reggae, punk, and death metal in 1990s Bali / Emma Baulch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4095-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-8223-4115-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Youth—Indonesia—Bali (Province)—Social life and customs. 2. Reggae music—Social aspects—Indonesia—Bali Island. 3. Punk music—Social aspects— Indonesia—Bali Island. 4. Death metal (Music)—Social aspects—Indonesia— Bali Island. 5. Subculture—Indonesia—Bali Island. 6. Group identity— Indonesia—Bali Island. 7. Bali Island (Indonesia)—Social life and customs—20th century. i. Title. hq799.i52b38 2007 306.4⬘8426095986209049—dc22 2007026686