Modern noise and ethnic accents: Indonesian popular music in the era of reformasi

As commodity, performance, and sonic intervention in social space, popular music is a ubiquitous presence in contemporary Indonesia. This ethnographic study investigates the meanings and uses of three ideologically distinct Indonesian popular music genres: dangdut, pop Indonesia, and underground, in the lives of urban Indonesian youth from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds. The study, the result of over twelve months of intensive fieldwork in record stores, at concerts, in recording studios, and in all manner of public and private spaces where music is performed, consumed, mediated, discussed, and debated, focuses on four key themes: cross-genre hybridity; representations of class; the inclusive interactional dynamics of social life; and the interpenetration of global, national, and local cultural forces in Indonesian musical production. The dissertation concludes that access to globally circulating musics and technologies has neither homogenized nor extinguished local music-making in Indonesia, but rather has provided young Indonesians with a wide range of creative possibilities for exploring their existential condition in a time of political transition and heated contestation over Indonesia\u27s future as a modern multiethnic nation in a globalizing world