Blog
This blog serves as a companion to The World is Ours Radio. Each week's main post goes up Friday morning before the 10 AM broadcast and summarizes and supplements the information and music shared on air!
7/30/21 — Salsa and Son Montuno Selections
After the month long series on Dangdut, I wasn't totally sure what to do this week's episode of The World is Ours on. I was thinking of keeping it regional to South East Asia (and believe me I will return in the future) but I ended up getting some unlikely inspiration when me and my roomate watched the Jon Favreau movie Chef on Monday. Although the movie focuses on the magic of Cuban food as Favreau's character drives across America in a food truck serving Cubanos and Arroz con Pollo, it was the heavily latin soundtrack that really caught our attention. Particularly, the use of Pete Rodriguez's "I Like it Like That" got my roommate excited, and after a few more Cuban Jazz and Boogaloo songs, I decided to do some research on the Cuban Big Band sound for today's hour of music.
A couple Conjuntos
The Cuban Big Band that Pete Rodriguez performed with is called a Conjunto and includes a vocalist, several guitars, several trumpets, a bass, a piano, bongos, maracas, and congas. Conjuntos play various styles of music including Salsa, Son Montuno, Boogaloo, Mambo, and Rumba, but they all have their origin Son Cubano, a popular Cuban style from the early 20th century. Although the exact inception of Son Cubano is disputed, it was likely in part due to huge migration of rural Cubans from the island's mountainous regions to the industrializing urban areas. Folk and dance songs from the rural areas were adapted to more formal Rumba styles and Jazz Ensembles, and the genre became popular in the 1920s with groups like Septeto Habranero and Septeto Nacional.
Son Cubano maintained it's popularity throughout the 20s and 30s, but in the 1940s a new figure, Arsenio Rodríguez, emerged into the Cuban music scene with a full band, modeled after those playing Jazz in the US, the Conjunto. He also created a new genre, called Son Montuno, which consolidated a lot of the elements popular in Latin Jazz today. He made sure the music he made had a strong rhythmic basis, featured the piano extensively, and made sure the vocals and trumpets were in constant interaction. These elements repopularized Cuban music in Cuba, and even made their ways to places like Mexico, Puerto Rico, and New York.
Arsenio Rodríguez
A Salsa Performance
In foreign lands, especially after the Cuban Revolution in the late 50s, Son Montuno diversified into many of the latin genres we are familiar with today. In Mexico, Cuban ex-pats like Benny Moré would develop Mambo, but I'm especially interested in Son Montuno's spread to New York City where it became Salsa and Boogaloo in the 1960s and 1970s. Combined with elements from Rock Music, Mambo, and music from Puerto Rican immigrants from New York, a thriving music scene was created that would eventually spread back to Cuba and even further into South America.
Salsa remained popular throughout the 80s and 90s, when it gained broad appeal and even began to experiment with new technologies like synthesizers and drum machines. It continues to be incorporated into new genres like Timba and Reggaeton, and will forever be great music to jam out to. Enjoy this playlist featuring the fruits of hours of listening to Salsa and Son Montuno music this week!
7/23/21 — Dangdut Koplo: The Present and Future
VCDs
As I end with last week, in the 1990s, Dangdut rose in popularity meteorically, and as a result, began to diversify into several subgenres to represent the full diversity and taste of the Indonesian people. This phenomenon was aided the end of the Suharto regime in 1998. Suharto, despite some liberal reforms during his tenure, kept a tight grip on Indonesian media, and thus a lot of music and film was still censored. After Suharto fell, a new technology called VCDs, which could be easily self produced and replicated, became a dominant force in the Dangdut world, and in the 2000s, the first viral Dangdut stars began to emerge.
The most iconic and notable of these stars has to be Inul Daratista. Originally, Daratista was a performer from East Java, locally known for being a great Dangdut singer as well as for her signature dance, Goyang Ngebor (the drilling dance). She and her Goyang Ngebor, which involves a lot of hip movement, were subsequently filmed on a VCD which quickly found its way across the country to be watched by everyone. Daratista made a huge amount of fans, and to many represented the type of freedom and bodily autonomy that many Indonesian's had not had in recent memory. However to others, particularly conservative muslims, the dance was overtly sexual and should be banned. Even Rhoma Irama chastised Inul Daratista's music and performance as not being pornographic and not true Dangdut.
Inul Daratista
Nonetheless, Inul was only the sign of things to come. Being from a small village in East Java, she was familiar with traditional east Javan dances, many of which are similar to Goyang Ngebor. This regional influence (Daerah in Indonesian), would become a hallmark of Dangdut in the 18 years since Inul debuted, and especially of Dangdut Koplo, which Inul also helped popularize!
Surabaya, an important place in Koplo.
O.M. New Pallapa, a popular Dangdut Koplo band from Surabaya
Gamelans, a traditional Indonesian instrument sometimes featured in Koplo.
The Suling flute
Dangdut Koplo was a style of Dangdut that began in the 90s in Surabaya, and is defined by the mixture of Dangdut and East Javan (or possibly Sunda) drum styles. Koplo is a bit faster than Dangdut, and has a more involved drum pattern than traditional Chalte, but still has the characteristic "dang" and "dut" tones that defines the genre. They also feature regional instruments in a very Dangdut way by including short flute and gamelan solos as part of many songs' arrangements.
The name Koplo refers to a hallucinogenic drug, not that the drug was necessarily popular at Dangdut Koplo events. Rather, the intense drumming and charismatic dancing from performers like Daratista was said to make audience members feel like they're having an out of this world, mind-bending experience.
Sadly, this marks the last blog post and episode about Dangdut. It's been fascinating learning the history of and hearing music from the genre over the last few weeks, and I hope I've been able to share the same feelings with you. Next week I'll be back with some more South Asian music (possibly even Indonesian) but I want to leave you with a few conclusions I made while putting these posts together:
Music and national politics are completely linked in Indonesia -- changes in trade policy, media policies, and fiscal policies all had huge impacts on the direction Dangdut would go in.
Despite how interwoven Dangdut is with the nation, if it weren't for single stars like Rhoma Irama and Inul Daratista, you could argue the genre would have gone in completely different directions
The power of Dangdut is it's ability to absorb influences from other genres without losing it's dangdut essence. I believe a lot of this is fueled by the powerful drumbeat, that I can now recognize after no more than a few seconds as Dangdut. Just as genres like Trap, Disco, and House have made their popularity off a drum pattern in the west, Dangdut gets its power from the Gendang drum. I only hope that more artists from around the world will hear Dangdut and let it influence their own music.
-Majellan.
7/16/21 — The Diversification of Dangdut.
The Popular Dangdut group Orkes Moral: Pengantar Minum Racum and their humorous song Ada Nggak Ada (There is Nothing)
As Rhoma Irama's sound began to catch on nationally, more artists began to realize Dangdut's commercial viability and musical value and started to perform it themselves. This marked the beginning of Dangdut's proliferation into several subgenres. One of these first subgenres was called, fittingly, Pop Dangdut. Pop Dangdut, similar to Pop Melayu, sought to emphasize the Western elements of the sound such as synthesizers and guitars. This subgenre often appealed towards richer Indonesians, familiar with the sounds of the West, yet kept enough Dangdut to feel distinctly Indonesian.
Rhoma Irama (pc: Coconuts)
Pop Dangdut Poster (pc: Discogs)
Another new subgenre of Dangdut was Sweet Dangdut, pioneered by the singer Mansyur S. His blend of Dangdut included taking on a more Arabic, ornamented vocal style while singing up an octave, and using audio effects to make his voice sound softer and out of phase.
Dangdut would only continue to diversify into the 1990s and 2000s. At first the government and elites of Indonesia looked down on Dangdut for its hard to interpret lyrics that often hinted at topics like sex and poverty. Many songs were even censored -- even Rhoma Irama was banned from State TV for publicly supporting an opposition party. However, the tide started to shift in the late 1980s when the government allowed for commercial TV licenses to be chartered.
Mansyur S. (pc: Discogs)
Dangdut TV Logo
Itje Trisniwati
Reynold Panggabean and Camelia Malik of Tarantulla
Since Dangdut was already very popular in Indonesia thanks to stars like Rhoma Irama and Elvy Sukaesih, so it proved to be very profitable in the TV market. Channels like Dangdut TV resembled MTV and a new generation of youth became involved with the music!
Particularly influential in the increased representation of Dangdut was Moerdiono, the secretary of state for Indonesia during the 90s. He viewed Dangdut as being the true music of the Indonesian people and sought to promote it as a cultural export to the rest of the world. This worked in part -- the album Dangdut Kopa became a hit record in Japan, but the Dangdut sound Moerdiono promoted had a very stripped down pop sound that wasn't as possible with Indonesian Dangdut fans.
It wasn't all sunshine for the actual Dangdut performers though. Although their music kept increasing in popularity and selling more copies, most record companies were controlled by one producer, who would often produce fake sales sheets so they could underpay the artists.
Moerdiono
Nonetheless, the allure of being a Dangdut artist was still strong, and more and more performers emerged on the scene. Many artists, like Meggy Z, Sheilawati, and Iis Dahlia focused on maintaining the sound of Dangdut from the 1980s, but other artists expanded the sound further, fusing it with other genres and cultures. One movement that began to gain steam was "Dangdut Daerah," the fusion of Dangdut with regional Indonesian musical styles. Other styles include Disco Dangdut, inspired by the western sound, as well as Mandarin Dangdut, a Chinese language version of the genre. Dangdut Daerah in particular would become an extremely important subgenre as Dangdut evolved into the 21st century.
TO BE CONTINUED.
7/9/21 — Dangdut goes National.
Last week, I discussed the history of Indonesia and how the origins of Dangdut mirror the origins of Indonesian nationality, cementing it in history as a uniquely Indonesian genre. I also discussed and played (if you tuned in to the show on KCSB last Friday) music from a genre called Orkes Melayu, which was a proto-Dangdut of sorts and all of the distant elements of the came together. This week I'll be taking you on Orkes Melayu's journey to finally becoming Dangdut, and then I'll talk about Dangdut's rise to popularity and proliferation across the Indonesian archipelago.
The forces that shaped Dangdut began their action almost as soon as WWII ended and Indonesia became an independent state. The first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, understandably had negative feelings towards the west and went so far as to ban imports from Europe and America, right during the foundational years of Rock and Roll. As a result, Indonesians imported music and film from India and Arabia (to which they had geographical and religious ties, respectively).
Indonesian soldiers during WWII
The imports from India and the Middle East had a huge impact on Orkes Melayu and it's stylistic trajectory.
Indian tabla rhythms were adapted to the native Indonesian Gendang drum (the same drum used in Gamelan music) and would end up becoming a defining characteristic in Dangdut. In fact the name of the genre referes to the Dangdut sound made by the drum on the third and fourth beats of each bar.
Melodies from Indian films began to be adopted by Orkes Melayu artists. For example Ellya Khadam's song "Termenung" actually adapts the melody and lyrical content from "Chuup Gaya Koi Re Door se Pukar Ke" by Lata Rajinder, an Indian film actress and singer. However, Khadam and other Indonesians would translate the lyrics from Hindi to Indonesian and would perform in the Orkes Melayu style.
The Indian sound was especially popular in Jakarta, but other cities, like Surabaya on Eastern Java, were equally inspired by Islamic and Arabic music. The composer A. Kadir would add more strings to his Orkes Melayu in order to give it a sound more like the lute ensembles of the Middle East. Songs would often praise Allah or Muhammad and had increased levels of ornamentation, similar to Islamic prayer singing.
Gendang Drum
Champa Kali, the film "Chuup Gaya Joi Re DOor se Pukar Ke" is from
The Gambus, popular in Arabic influenced songs.
Images from the 1965 war between Pakistan and India. pc: The Hindu Times
This was the musical environment that would foster a young performer by the name of Oma Irama. Irama had a great voice and compositional ability, and enough charisma to match his talent. He performed with various Orkes Melayu and Pop Melayu groups in Jarkarta in the 1960s, combining the sounds into what is now known as Dangdut! Some of the key features included:
A driving Chalte based rhythm played on gendang drum, played at a danceable tempo
Harmonies played by Western sounding organs, guitars, and keyboards
Melodies inspired or directly transcribed from Indian films
Solo passages from various Western, Indonesian, Indian, and Arabic instruments (especially Indonesian flutes)
Lyrics in narrative form with lots of ambiguity and wordplay, often touching on themes of poverty, love, lust, and religion.
The Sukarno government would put it's fingers into the trajectory of Orkes Melayu and Dangdut again in the 1960s. During a period of strained relationships with India, in part due to Indonesia's support of the similarly Muslim Pakistan during the India-Pakistani war of the era, Sukarno banned imports of Indian media and cracked down on Indoesian art influenced by India, which incorporated a lot of Orkes Melayu. Thus many artists chose to, ironically, take their sound in a Western direction (with guitars and organs, etc) which would be dubbed Pop Melayu.
During the 1970s, Irama and his collaborators, like Elvy Sukaesih and A. Rafiq, dominated Dangdut and drove up Dangdut's popularity on radio stations, and especially in poorer neighborhoods in urban Indonesia. According to Dangdut Stories by Andrew Weintraub, these neighborhoods (e.g. Planet Senen in Jakarta) would have concerts every night that many of Dangdut's stars would even attend to look for inspiration. However this would only be the start of Dangdut's rise to prominence in Indonesia.
TO BE CONTINUED.
7/2/21 — Dangdut from Indonesia
To start out this season of The World is Ours radio, we're going to spend several weeks exploring the music of Southeast Asia, starting in Indonesia. In the first season (before the creation of the blog) I jumped around the world to a new continent every week, which was a fun way to discover lots of new styles of music, but I think traveling only small distances through one region will be a great way to map relationships between geography and music.
I chose to start the season in Southeast Asia for a few reasons. It is one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse areas of the world and has had sustained contact with East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe for centuries, so it has huge variety of great musical styles with fascinating backstories. However, the biggest reason I set my sights on Southeast Asia was my own lack of knowledge about the area. Since the mission of The World is Ours is to celebrate the peoples of Earth through the music they make, I want to take this opportunity to become more familiar with Southeast Asia and showcase the cultures of the region.
This week specifically, we'll be looking at a genre of Indonesian music called Dangdut. Although a quick youtube search for the genre will return videos stylized similarly to J-Pop with a sound similar to Bollywood Pop, Dangdut has a decently long and complex history that is, in many ways, a point of contention in the present day genre. To understand Dangdut, let's start with a general history of Indonesia and its cultural influences.
The slopes of Mt. Toba on the north side of Sumatra
The mosque at Aceh on the northern tup of Sumatra
A market on the southern side of Sumatra.
An Abridged History of Indonesia.
Although humans have inhabited the Indonesian archipelago for over a million years, researchers only have recorded histories from the common era, which reveal a collection of societies that were in constant trade with the lands around them. For seemingly the whole history of the island chain, it has been a center of commerce, doing business with China and India, later Arabia and the east coast of Africa, and lastly with Europe (before that turned into colonization). This level of commercial activity makes sense geographically -- to get between China and any land west of Indonesia, a trader would have to pass very close to one of the Indonesian islands, so it became logical place to stop en route. Famously, Indonesia is also home to a diverse selection of crops, including spices, which made trading on the island all the more enticing.
As a result of the trading activities, Indonesia has always been a cultural and religious melting pot. The archipelago was already diverse at the onset of it with most of the ancestors of most ethnic groups today forming distinct pockets of civilization. By the common era, missionaries from India began to arrive and spread Hinduism across the islands, which had a lasting impact on many different peoples. The Melayu people of Sumatra and the Malay peninsula adapted their language to Sanskrit characters (Old Melayu) and Hinduism became an effective empire building tool as local rulers could align themselves with Gods (particularly Shiva) to gain prestige. At one point, the Hindu Majapahit Empire (1293-1527) controlled most of modern day Indonesia and dominated trade in the region.
Indonesia was similarly affected by Buddhism, which came from India during the same time period. Buddhist travelers from as far as China would come to cities like Palembang (in South Sumatra) and large Buddhists empires were even created like the Srivijaya Empire (653-1377) which controlled much of the archipelago before the Majapahit. However, it's important to view these religious influences not as homogenizing forces, but as sources of cultural and technical knowledge that pre-existing societies used to evolve and further differentiate themselves.
A statue of the Hindu deity Shiva at the Ubuk complex on the famed island Bali.
Due to Indonesia's trade connectivities, Muslim traders had likely been going to Indonesia since shortly after the birth of the religion, but by the 13th century, many Muslim kingdoms had begun to emerge in order to attract the wealthy merchants coming from the Arab world. Learning about this part of the history conjured images of Sinbad's voyage and other tales from 1001 Arabian Nights in which Indonesia was presented as the most far off and fantastical of Islamic lands. Presently, over 85% of the country is Muslim and, although much of the country is still very much influenced by traditional, Hindu, and Buddhists thought, Islam still figures prominently in modern Indonesian culture and in Dangdut itself. For example, Islam brought new forms of music like the Gambus orchestra (a type of lute) as well as Qasidah (a traditional form of Islamic music) that would be extremely influential in Indonesian musical development.
Drawing of a dutch fort at Batavia (present day Jakarta)
The next chapter of Indonesian history would come with European expansion and colonization, formally starting with the Portuguese capture of the Malacca Sultanate in 1511. Malacca was the most strategic chokepoint for trade in the islands so soon after it fell into European hands, the Dutch, Portuguese, and British came to dominate the markets there. Although less interested in integration with Indonesian populations, the Europeans still brought new cultural and musical ideas to the islands like string orchestras and latin script.
These cultural contacts during the premodern history of Indonesia are important to Dangdut because they established connections between Indonesia and those cultures that are continually mined for new artistic ideas.
Although European commerce was able to coexist with Asian and Middle Eastern commerce for some time, Europeans began to make more and more political intrusions and, by the 19th century, Indonesia was completely under Dutch control and native Indonesians had little hope of social mobility. The Dutch oppression generated many feelings of European resentment and Indonesian nationalism amongst the Indonesian people, and in the 20th century, nationalist movements began to form. No Indonesian liberation would occur, however, until WWII when Indonesia was taken over by the Japanese. Although the brief Japanese rule offered more social mobility for the Indonesians, the birth of the Indonesian nation happened just before Japanese surrender to the Americans where, rather than surrender their territory, they chose to grant it independence. Although the Dutch and British tried to reclaim the islands, the Indonesians were able to resist and assert their national independence once and for all.
Origins of Dangdut.
The Arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro by Raden Selah. Shows the capture of an Indonesian prince by the Dutch.
President Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia.
Rhoma Irama
While there's no definite way of pinpointing the exact origin of Dangdut, the words of Dangdut legend Rhoma Irama are a great place to start. Per Google Translate, in his song 'Viva Dangdut' he says "This is Malay music, influenced by the West and by India" and specifically identifies it as originating in an area of north Sumatra called Deli. Although this may or may not be the true birthplace of Dangdut, it certainly creates a compelling story about its inception.
Deli was one of the prominent sultanates of Indonesia that dominated trade on the archipelago before European colonization. By placing Dangdut's origin in Deli, Rhoma Irama establishes Dangdut as having a Muslim lineage that predates European influence on the area, making it a firmly Indonesian style. According to the book I am reading to research Dangdut, Dangdut Stories by Andrew Weintraub, there may be even more to Irama's theory.
Although Dangdut can not be definitively traced to Deli, a different genre of music popular from the 1930s to the 1950s called Orkes Melayu can be. Orkes Melayu is similar to Dangdut in that it's inspired by a variety of different cultures and genres. It's scored with mostly western instruments (Orkes = Orchestra) but includes musical elements like Chinese and Middle Eastern scales and traditional Malayan rhythms. This may have formed a blueprint of sorts for Dangdut -- a region was able to make a distinct new sound by fusing together many other genres, just like individual areas of Indonesia were able to form their own cultures by selectively adopting elements of other cultures.