'Surrender':Dangdut and the Spectacle of Consumption in 1980s Indonesia

Andrew Weintraub, University of Pittsburgh

Dangdut-named onomatopoeically for the music's characteristic drum sounds "dang" followed by "dut" - is arguably Indonesia's most popular music, heard blaring out of speakers in stores, restaurants, and all forms of public transportation. In the 1980s, a large number of song lyrics expressed emotional pain and suffering (derita; sengsara), stemming from heartache, poverty, and dashed hopes. In conjunction with these emotionally gut-wrenching texts, dangdut became the music for dance and pleasure in the increasing urban spaces of nightclubs, bars, and discos. For some commentators it seemed untenable that audiences would want to be reminded about social material realities and their own suffering within a performance context of pleasure, humor, and fun. In this presentation, I emphasize the commercial nature of the music, which relied on producing an excess of possible meanings for consumers. As I will show, the binary relationship of pain released or countered by pleasure does not adequately explain popular music production and consumption in this case. Only by placing music sound, text, and performance in its commercial context, can we understand the production of culture (and the culture of production) in this period of Indonesian history.

Andrew Weintraub is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches courses in ethnomusicology, music of Indonesia, and popular music. He is the author of Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java (Ohio University Press, 2004) and co-editor of Music and Cultural Rights (Illinois, forthcoming). He is currently writing a book about the history of Dangdut.

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