‘Pop Melayu vs. Pop Indonesia: Marketeers, producers and new interpretations of a genre into the 2000s’ in Sonic Modernities in Southeast Asia Leiden: Brill pp. 187- 215

摘要

Kangen Band, as an example of reclaiming of the derisive term kampungan.udIn it, I argue that this reclaiming represents an interesting case ofudgenre manipulation, and consider what this can reveal about howudIndonesian pop genres are constituted, what they ‘are’ and what they ‘do’.udIn so doing, I seek to rework existing scholarship relating to Indonesianudpop genres and modernity, as well as interrogate some broader theories ofudgenre.udIn this essay, I extend the argument that Indonesian pop genres are notudpurely technical categories, they touch on myths of class and nationud(Wallach 2008; Weintraub 2010; Yampolsky 1989. As we shall see, in theudNew Order period, pop music genres reached out to these myths by positioningudthemselves variously vis-à-vis the capital city, Jakarta. Such positioning,udachieved through use of the terms gedongan (a term that strivesudto infer refinement by stressing the non-masses’ central position in theudurban environment) and kampungan (a term that strives to enforce subalterns’udmarginal position in relation to the metropolis, see also the previousudcontribution by Weintraub), continues to haunt the constitution ofudgenre in the post-New Order period, but in novel ways. These novel ways,udI argue, may be seen to result from industrial transformation and newudsystems of knowledge production.