Music / Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020. 227 pp. (Coloured photos, illustrations.) US$24.94, paper. ISBN 978-0-8195-7963-8.
Genre Publics offers an engaging exploration of Indonesian popular music and culture, advancing scholarly discussions of publics, class, consumer citizenship, local-global orientations, impacts of technology, and on one hand, shifts from authoritarian New Order times (1966–1998) into post-authoritarian times (post-1998), and continuities or senses of continuities on the other. The author Emma Baulch explores these issues through the Indonesian “local music boom,” an increase in sales of Indonesian pop at the end of the twentieth century that overtook sales of Western popular music and was accompanied by an increased presence of Indonesian pop music and musicians in the public sphere, including advertisements, television, festivals, and competitions (1). Her extensive research spanning 2004 to 2017, including fieldwork in Jakarta and Denpasar, informs her insightful analysis of the cultural formation of middle- and lower-classness through popular music, its circulation and its consumption—analysis that is attentive to gender and, in chapter 7, ethnicity (181). She draws on interviews with musicians, fans, and producers to analyze a variety of cultural products including song lyrics, letters in magazines, YouTube comments, album art, and artist images.
Conceiving of “genre publics” as “virtual social entities arising from the twinning of particular mediating technologies with particular kinds of address,” she argues that it is the relationship between popular music and its circulation that produces senses of class (5). Central to her study is thus the circulation of popular music through various channels and technologies, such as recordings, television, print media, social media, fan groups, cell phone ringback tones, and t-shirts on mobile bodies riding motorbikes. Consumption through these channels establishes spaces in, by, and through which people imagine affinity with others, communicate with others, and feel a sense of classed belonging (4–5).
Using an inviting narrative style to examine the production of various genre publics, Baulch develops and supports her argument through an introduction, seven chapters comprising three parts, and a conclusion. Part 1, “Technological Paradigms,” contextualizes the local music boom and class formations. Centering the role played by the circulation of the pop music magazine Aktuil (1967–1984) in the origins and growth of the Indonesian middle class in the 1970s in chapter 1, “Establishing Class,” she analyzes ways the magazine addressed readers and thereby empowered them through representations of “the female runaway and the young man with a rock sensibility” (27–28). The senses of identity and agency the magazine fostered for its readers established a foundation for rock consumers to be politically active during the late New Order era in the 1990s and in post-authoritarian times (48–49; 172).
Critical to the image of the young man with a rock sensibility, Baulch underscores, is the legacy of the Indonesian pemuda figure: the young male revolutionary active during anti-colonial nationalist movements of the 1920s to the 1940s. In chapter 2, “Consumer Citizenship,” Baulch shows that the pemuda figure has permeated mainstream pop production since the 1980s, due to television’s expansion, the resultant increased visibility of all-male rock bands such as Slank, and the blurring of pop and rock as genres (172). The New Order’s emphasis on economic development imbued the rock-musician-as-pemuda figure with “neoliberal values such as flexibility, mobility, and individuality,” setting the stage for consumer citizenship in post-authoritarian times (53).
Recognizing the contestation of dominant middle-class ideals in post-authoritarian consumer citizenship, Baulch investigates pop Melayu music and the positioning of upward mobility for lower-class people through the representation and consumption of this genre in chapter 3, “Hinge Occupants” (69). One of Genre Public’s themes is the tension between lower-class and middle-class subjectivities, which are often constructed in relation to each other. Baulch frames this tension as “a village-metropolis (kampungan–gedongan) dichotomy,” in which the village/kampungan calls forth lower-classness while the metropolis/gedongan evokes middle-classness (3).
Part 2, “Gedongan,” focuses on the production and representation of middle-classness in the early twenty-first century (22). Chapter 4, “Becoming Indonesia,” considers MTV Indonesia’s 2004 VJ Hunt, images of female pop soloist Krisdayanti, and images of the punk band Superman Is Dead, arguing that the ideal citizen as pemuda of the past “who symbolized nationalism and collective action” was replaced by “a new self-determined ‘I’” (107). Chapter 5, “Spinning Pasts,” analyzes the representation of the rock band God Bless in the pop music industry to explore how the New Order is remembered—including ways that obscure the violence of its birth, its authoritarian nature, and rupture between authoritarian and post-authoritarian times—suggesting middle-class senses of continuities between the two eras (111, 125–126).
Baulch deepens her exploration of lower-class cultural formation in Part 3, “Kampungan.” In chapter 6, “Television’s Children,” she examines the flow of music through informal and unregulated channels, focusing on the circulation of music by the pop Melayu band Kangen Band (discussed in chapter 3) and the activity of Kangen Band’s fan club; she reinforces the importance fans place upon the upward mobility narrative in the band’s music and career trajectory (130). Chapter 7, “Provincial Cosmopolitanism,” spotlights the career and fandom of Nanoe Biroe, a Balinese singer who articulates an unabashed lower-class Balineseness that is at once rooted in local and global sensibilities. The book’s conclusion insightfully brings together its main arguments, themes, and contributions.
Genre Publics succeeds in its goals to demonstrate the critical role popular music in Indonesia has played in the formation of class as the country has moved from authoritarian to post-authoritarian times, and will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, including Southeast Asian studies, anthropology, media studies, and music. The book’s comfortable length makes it feasible to assign in undergraduate or graduate courses, and individual chapters also stand well on their own. Baulch gives readers much to ponder in this work, and I look forward to revisiting her ideas and analyses in my own research and teaching.
Christina Sunardi
University of Washington, Seattle