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"Timely and engaging, "Making Scenes" is a wonderful and needed contribution to scholarship on Bali, to debates over the relationship between Birmingham School cultural studies and the work of area studies, and to the transnational study of popular music." -- Laurie J. Sears, editor of "Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects"

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MAKING SCENES

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

NOTE ON SPELLING, NAMES......................................IXACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................XIINTRODUCTION.................................................11. MESSY DECAY...............................................152. GESTURING ELSEWHERE.......................................493. REGGAE BORDERZONES, REGGAE GRAVEYARDS.....................734. PUNK'S BEGINNINGS.........................................915. GROUNDING PUNK............................................1136. METAL BLOSSOMS............................................145CONCLUSION...................................................177NOTES........................................................187GLOSSARY.....................................................199REFERENCES...................................................205INDEX........................................................217

Chapter One

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 scruffy 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 molly-coddled 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 film. 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

In 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 rupiah 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 a ligned 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 lower-class 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 consumerist 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.

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 diffuse, insidious and messy than familiar labels capture" (Heryanto 1999b: 148). 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...