Indonesian Popular Music Recordings - History

History

The roots of Indonesia's history of recorded music practices can be traced to the emergence of nationalism in the early 20th century and the eventual independence of Indonesia from the Dutch in the 1940s. The struggle for a national identity rooted in a synthesis of Eastern and Western perspectives extended into the realm of music, with nationalists suggesting that Indonesia's national music be a form of indigenized Western music, such as kroncong. This sentiment led to the establishment of state-sponsored conservatories and academies of music in both Java and Bali during the 1950s and 1960s, with similar schools established in Sumatra and Sulawesi during the 1970s. In this roughly twenty year period, the Indonesian government also institutionalized the recording of both traditional and popular music throughout the archipelago with its support of P.N. Lokananta, the national recording company of Indonesia, a branch of the government's Department of Information since the late 1950s. "Although scholars have detected a gradual narrowing in the geographic and genre purview of Lokananta's recording and marketing strategies, considering this to be at odds with its status and purpose as a national recording company, the introduction of audiocassette recording technology in the 1960s gave rise to a robust industry of recorded music. In the 1970s, oil wealth and the relatively unrestricted import of cheap tape and recorders led to an extraordinary boom of the Indonesian cassette industry.

Central to the ongoing evolution of Indonesian popular music styles was an inherent tension between dueling aesthetics: gedongan ("refined", "international") and kampungan ("vulgar," "low class," "backward"). During the 1970s, the most prominent supporter of the gedongan style was Guruh Sukarno (born 1953), son of the first president of Indonesia and a musician since his early teens. Long a student of classical Javanese and Sundanese music while at the same time familiar with Western jazz and classics, Guruh set out in 1974 to elevate existing Indonesian-Western pop music and create a kind of neoclassic, syncretic style that would be at once Indonesian and international. Contrasting in many ways with Rhoma Irama and the many other dangdut singers popular during the 1970s, Guruh Sukarno was a member of the elite class and saw Indonesia's culture as pluralistic and inescapably mixed with influences from the West. Nevertheless, the 1970s also witnessed a gap between the rich and poor classes. Awareness of this gap, and sensitivity to the condition of the lower classes were central to the popularity of dangdut and the many genres it influenced.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, recorded Indonesian popular music grew to include, like most popular music elsewhere in the world, the use of at least some Western instruments and Western harmony. It was increasingly disseminated through the mass media, performed by recognized stars, and became essentially a "commercial" genre. In the process of reformation (Reformasi) that was put into motion with the resignation of president Suharto and the fall of his New Order regime in 1998, popular music became a common vehicle of protest, and many songs, cassettes and genres were labeled with the adjective reformasi..