creating a scene: balinese punk's beginnings

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2002; 5; 153 International Journal of Cultural StudiesEmma Baulch

Creating a scene: Balinese punk's beginnings

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A R T I C L E

INTERNATIONALjournal of

CULTURAL studies

Copyright © 2002 SAGE PublicationsLondon, Thousand Oaks,

CA and New DelhiVolume 5(2): 153–177

[1367-8779(200206)5:2; 153–177; 023569]

Creating a scene

Balinese punk’s beginnings

● Emma Baulch

Monash University, Australia

A B S T R A C T ● The promotion of alternative music by deregulated televisionand recording industries, together with the increasingly felt presence of themetropolis, converged on Balinese cultural and physical landscapes in the 1990s.Mirroring developments in broader society, a regionalist discourse, whichpolarized notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, emerged among Balinese youth inthe context of the local band scene. For certain musicians, musical authenticitywas firmly rooted in a cultural and geographical locale, and was articulated bytheir abhorrence for socializing at shopping malls. In contrast, these Balinesealternative (including punk) musicians sought authenticity in a metropolitanelsewhere. This article is a case study of the indigenization of a ‘global’ code in anon-western periphery. It contests arguments for the ‘post-imperial’ nature ofglobalization, and demonstrates the continued salience of centre–peripherydialectics in local discourses. At the same time, the study attests to the progressiverole a metropolitan superculture can play in cultural renewal in the periphery. ●

K E Y W O R D S ● ‘alternapunk’ ● authenticity ● Bali ● globalization ●

identity politics ● metropolis ● regionalist discourse ● shopping malls ●

social spatialization ● subculture ● youth

Introduction

In 1993, riots took place when US thrash band Metallica performed inJakarta. The dominant analysis reported in the Indonesian media was that

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the riots, in which fans who could not afford tickets to the concertsdestroyed luxury items and property in an elite quarter of the capital,resulted from a growing gap between the rich and poor.1 The officialresponse, however, viewed the riots in terms of law and order (Thompson,1993). Blaming the riots on ‘irresponsible gangsters’, the governmentrefused to issue permits for rock performances for more than a year, thuscementing the link between criminality, poverty and rock music in theofficial discourse.

By the time rock performances were again allowed, the media no longerseemed to contest this official line. When, in January 1996, Jakarta hostedperformances by US rock bands Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys and Foo Fightersat its Jakarta Alternatif Pop Festival (JAPF), and Californian punk bandGreen Day played in the capital in the following month, media construc-tions of alternative music depicted the genre as a peaceful realm of ‘pop’, asanctuary of privilege in which poverty was conspicuously absent. Incontrast to the media’s eagerness to report on the Metallica riots, similar(albeit lesser) clashes that took place between security forces and Green Dayfans who didn’t have enough money to buy tickets to the concert were notsensationalized.

Shifts in media constructions of rock music fandom in the final years ofthe New Order took place in a context of media deregulation, by which thegovernment surrendered its monopoly over television and opened the localmusic industry to major international recording labels. Consequently, mediaimages assumed an increasing role in the dissemination of music, and poorand peripheral youth were increasingly distanced from rock performances,which became the exclusive domain of a new rich class of youth (Baulch,forthcoming).

This was particularly evident in the case of alternative music. Unlike Brazil-ian band Sepultura (arguably the most renowned and most popular deathmetal band in the world), who played for 7000 rupiah per ticket in the EastJavanese city of Surabaya as well as Jakarta when they toured to Indonesiain 1992, neither Green Day nor the bands that played at the JAPF performedany regional shows at all. Similarly, unlike a plethora of Indonesian rock andpop bands, Indonesian alternative bands rarely conducted regional tours.

The deregulation of television afforded extended reach to media imagesof alternativeness, portraying the genre as a practice exclusive to a new richclass of youth, firmly rooted in the metropolis. This raises questions abouthow ‘global’ cultural products are indigenized at the level of periphery, forif the imagery generated by the Indonesian alternative music campaign maybe implicated in attempts by a new rich class to associate rock musicfandom with consumerism and hedonism, it did not necessarily engendersuch values. Media images played a central role in the transmission ofalternative music to Bali, where the genre served as an important inspira-tional source in the early development of a Balinese punk scene.

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As well as a number of newly formed Green Day cover bands, this scenealso included some older, Nirvana-inspired grunge bands. However, itwasn’t until early 1996 that these became collectively referred to as analternative or punk scene. Owing to the conflation of these terms in localdiscourses, I have referred to the genre of punk that emerged as a scene inearly 1996 as ‘alternapunk’. This article examines how that scene began asyouths negotiated their identities around images of alternativeness they sawon television and read about in magazines.

I begin by discussing some aspects of the local political context thatprevailed as Balinese youth engaged with alternative music.2 Specifically, Iattempt to show how they incorporated alternative imagery into a pre-existing local regionalist discourse, which polarized notions of centre andperiphery. Two most striking responses to alternative music among Balinesemusicians were evident in a dialogue that took place between death metaland alternapunk musicians. While the death metal musicians were contemp-tuous of the compliance perceived to be inherent in alternapunk, and itsneo-colonial overtones, alternapunks embraced the genre for what they sawas its metropolitan, anti-establishmentarian essence. These two responsesled to a dialogical process of defining the practice of alternapunk. Thisdialogue bore similarities to the regionalist discourse discussed by Warren(1994, 1995, 1998a, 1998b).3 But, unlike this discourse, it was not articu-lated in debates, which were mediated by the local press, but performed inthe space of the mall. Specifically, my argument for the alternapunk’s inno-vative use of mall space touches on questions of how to read music-orientedsubcultures, and shows the importance of considering not only stylistic andlyrical elements, but also territorial and performative aspects, in order tograsp their meanings.

Below, I argue that the meaning of Balinese youths’ unique renderings ofalternative music can be read as a gesture towards cultural renewal throughderacination from existing local repertoires. In turn, this gesture can be readas middle-class Balinese youths’ attempt to bridge a yawning gap betweenthe media fantasy of alternativeness and local realities. The former promisedbourgeois youths endless opportunity in a supermarket of style, but in thelatter opportunity extended only as far as the demands of the tourismindustry.4 The young Balinese musicians’ urge for cultural renewal wasaffirmed and realized as the punk movement evolved over the course of1996–99, and developed both spectacular and responsive aspects inperformance. However, this article is limited to examining the role of theso-called alternapunk period in 1996 in laying the groundwork for thesubsequent emergence of the more spectacular counter-cultural punk under-ground scene.

The dialogical nature of the discourse of alternapunk also highlights therelevance of the present study to scholarly discussions of the role of globaliz-ation, particularly that of the music industry, in cultural change. Primarily,

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it challenges the idea that globalization tends to dilute the salience ofcentre–periphery divides, for in Balinese youths’ consumption of alternativemusic, centre–periphery discourses featured highly. Furthermore, while deathmetal’s othering of alternapunk accords neatly with arguments that theglobalization of cultural products promotes diversity and can help liberateyouths from oppressive state discourses, the practice of alternapunk itself isill-fitted to both these hypotheses. Rather than resisting the increasingubiquity of a neo-colonial centre, Balinese alternapunk musicians idealizedthe metropolis as a sanctuary of the essential values inherent in their genreof choice – an essence that, in their view, was not present in ‘Balineseness’.In this way, Balinese alternapunks effected cultural renewal not by incorpo-rating a global code into existing Balinese repertoires and thus spawninghybrid forms, but by defying a local regionalist discourse and identifyingwith the ‘periphery’s “foreign” Other, the centre’ (Warren, 1995: 385).

Notes on the scene

In Bali, the promotional work for the Green Day concert had already takenaudible effect by the end of 1995. Although they had only played in thecapital, and with ticket prices at a prohibitive 60,000 rupiah, Green Day’smusic echoed throughout the province. That local teenage boys werecoming together in threes and fours in bedrooms and studios to organize asalternative bands became evident at Sunday Hot Music (SHM), Bali’s onlyregular, pan-genre gig. A broad range of genres performed at SHM. It show-cased six bands per gig. Three were ‘senior’5 bands who were invited by theorganizers and three were selected from the bi-weekly auditions. Any onegig included a combination of classic rock, pop, reggae, heavy metal, deathmetal/grindcore/thrash and alternative/punk.

A year after Rahmat Hariyanto established his sound rental businessCrapt Entertainment in 1992, Bali’s gig scene began experiencing somethingof a lull. As local musicians recalled, this lull was due to the authorities’eagerness to circumvent potentially violent rock events following the Metal-lica riots, and resulted in the withdrawal of public, non-exclusive gigs, suchas those staged on campus or in civic buildings and capable of attractinglarge audiences.

Conscious of the fact that ‘if the local band scene disappears, so does myrental business’, Rahmat Hariyanto established Sunday Hot Music in 1994(Interview, 4 April 1996). In that and the following year, SHM consisted offour consecutive shows over the month of May – the so-called ‘Month ofSundays’ – which were ticketed at a mere 2500 rupiah and took place inthe walled auditorium of the Denpasar Arts Centre.

In the context of the official restrictions rock musicians suffered in theaftermath of the Metallica riots, SHM provided the kind of pan-genre,


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public event that the local band scene had been lacking. Furthermore, itadded four such events to the island’s annual gig calendar – significantindeed, considering that the event offered genres of rock music the kind ofperformance space they had been denied for the rest of the year between1993 and 1996. And yet, the musicians I interviewed in early 1996 remem-bered this as a gig-less period, a quiet time, a vacuum and a lull, thus inti-mating that SHM’s Month of Sundays was unable to keep pace with thesharp increase in the number of bands over the same period. Indeed, manyrecalled the formation of increasing numbers of bands that had precededSHM becoming a bi-weekly event. Furthermore, there was a commonperception among non-alternapunk musicians not only that the band boomwas characterized by particular enthusiasm for alternative music, but alsothat it was specifically dominated by Green Day cover bands.

The line-ups at the eight SHMs that took place in 1996 do not supportthis view. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned exaggerations serve only toreinforce the validity of remembering as a practice of identity.6 Below, Ishow how the perception that Green Day cover bands dominated the scene,if falsely premised, was politically significant. That is, Green Day wassymbolic of a metropolitan superculture that musicians experiencedprimarily as a mediascape (specifically television). Non-alternapunks per-ceived this mediascape as uncompromisingly foreign – both antithetical andthreatening to a pre-existing and authentic youth culture of which they werea part. In this way, the othering of alternapunk parallels a regionalistdiscourse that had been taking place in the broader society.

The othering of alternapunk as regionalist discourse

A common feature of scholarly writings on Bali’s experience of globaliz-ation is an interest in cartoons. Rubinstein and Connor (1999), Vickers(1996) and Picard (1996) all make use of such images by Balinese artists,and Warren (1998a) refers to such caricatures as part of a local criticaldiscourse which contested official formulations of development andprogress. One of the most frequently reproduced images depicts progress asan hourglass that transforms flooded rice terraces into a concrete jungle.Had the artist been Agus Lempog (the below-cited professional guitaristwho regularly gigged at tourist bars), guitars, amps and drum kits may wellhave appeared in place of Surya Dharma’s skyscrapers. Lempog reasonedthat the recent increase in the number of bands was because:

Musical instruments are easier to come by now. Look in Jimbaran, forexample. People sell their land and if they’ve got teenage kids they buymusical instruments. For the kids it’s a form of prestige and it gives them ahobby. (Interview, 13 April 1996)


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Land ownership and territoriality were frequent themes in the works ofBalinese cartoonists throughout the 1990s. Their caricatures ironicallysuperimpose symbols of indigeneity (live pigs, Hindu shrines, bare-chestedmen dressed in sarong and the Balinese udeng head-dress) upon those of themetropolis’ local presence (golf courses, the concrete jungle, television). Thecomic value of these superimpositions highlights the unlikelihood of suchco-existence.7 A dichotomy is thus achieved.

Warren (1998a) refers to the role of cartoons in popularizing dichot-omous notions of Balinese culture in the context of a mass reflection onBalinese identity, prompted by the tourism boom that began in the late1980s.8 She observes how caricatures of Balinese identities regularlypublished in the Bali Post set big capital against the little person, privateagainst communal interests and cultural pollution against cultural authen-ticity. In her prolific commentary on the emergence of a regionalist discoursein Bali, she posits that:

The use of environmental tropes by critics – reference to the natural andcultural erosion, the ‘concrete jungle’ of the urban cultural landscape and soon – is frequently associated with a contentious expression of distrust ofcontempt for the peripheries’ ‘foreign’ other, the Centre. This perhapssuggests the beginning of a regionalist discourse of considerable import to thehold of the previously dominant form of centrist nationalism. (Warren, 1995:385)

The discourse of alternapunk bore similarities to this nascent regional-ism, for reggae and death metal musicians commonly associated compli-ance, naivete, lack of creativity, vulnerability and ‘ABG’ or ‘teenyboppers’9

with the practice of alternapunk. Further, Green Day, television and Jakartawere equally implicated in the perceived ‘cultural grey-out’10 of the localband scene. In this way, the othering of alternapunk depicted alternapunkmusicians as caricatures that relied on dichotomies such as those identifiedby Warren (1998a) in cartoons in the local press. That is, to non-alternapunks, alternapunk represented the rootless pollutant against whichdeath metal and reggae musicians defined their respective authenticities.However, unlike the regionalist discourse discussed by Warren (1994, 1995,1998a, 1998b), the identity politics of the local band scene were not articu-lated in public debates mediated by the local press as were the critiques ofresort developments. Rather, they were performed as a theatre in thecontested space of the shopping mall.

Hetherington argues that space and performance are key elements in theformation of expressive identities. In his view, the elective basis of such ‘neo-tribal identifications’ means that they

create a sociation that is affectual rather than traditional. The identity thatis formed is not one that is unified, perfect and lasting, but one that is a


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monstrous heteroclite, whose syncretism is empowering because its momen-tary transitional state requires a concerted reflexive process of self-identity inthe context of forms of emotional identification with others. It is an identitythat is performed. . . . (Hetherington, 1998a: 101; my emphasis)

Furthermore, he notes how ‘particular sites take on symbolic significancearound which identities are constituted’, and refers to such sites as ‘shrines’(1998a: 106).

Space and performance are also key to this study of the identity politicsof the Balinese band scene in the 1990s. In each of the genres underdiscussion, the use of space was much more revealing of the bands’ identi-ties than their use of literal forms. For example, it became increasingly clearover the course of 1996–99 that both death metal and punk musicians caredmuch less for the meaning of the English lyrics they performed than for thenoise and energy that the English language lent to their performances.Furthermore, in 1997, a debate concerning authenticity in the undergroundmusic scene, mediated by the local daily Bali Post and Denpasar radiostation Casanova, disintegrated when participating musicians concludedthat what constituted ‘the underground’ should not be subject to debate(Baulch, 1997; Syahreza, 1997a, 1997b).

Therefore, a politics of space was far more central to the discourse ofalternapunk than debates were. Of particular importance in shaping thedefinition of alternapunk was the space of the shopping mall. Shoppingmalls mushroomed all over Indonesia in the 1990s, effecting considerabletransformation of urban landscapes across the archipelago. Frequently,malls accommodated subcultural practices. Nevertheless, in Bali, thedominant portrayal of malls was as symbols of an encroaching metropolitansuperculture – a kind of neo-colonialism in action that threatened to oblit-erate the agrarian values and local livelihoods contained in the traditionalmarketplace. For example, a spate of articles appeared in the local press in1995–96 decrying the chaotic and imposed nature of Denpasar’s develop-ment, strongly implicating the shopping mall in the city’s transformation.11

The alternapunks were viewed with contempt by ‘senior’ musiciansacross the board. But in this performative aspect, the important role of thedialogue between death metal and alternapunk musicians in shaping thediscourse of alternapunk becomes clear. Significantly, death metal musiciansperformed their othering of alternapunk through a conspicuous absencefrom the mall. In their explanations of why they chose not to display them-selves at the mall, death metal musicians reconjured the caricature of alter-napunk musicians as definitively rich, compliant teenyboppers.

In his study of the West Edmonton mall, Shields (1989: 148) discusseshow the discursive nature of space is constituted by the spatial practices thattake place in and around them. He terms this ‘social spatialisation’ – at once‘a mode of being, a manner of seeing and a way of doing’. He further notes


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(1989: 154) how ‘place ballets are concretised in the built environment andsedimented in the landscape’ and cites Barthes’ observation that ‘the userof the city takes up fragments to actualise them. . . . He dooms certain sitesto inertia or to decay, and from others he forms “rare”(“fortuitous”) orillegal spatial “shapes”. . .’.

By performing an absence from it, Balinese death metal musicians alsodoomed Denpasar’s malls to ‘inertia or . . . decay’. Shields coins the term‘truant proximity’, which accords an equal importance to absence as topresence in the constitution of the discursive aspect of a given space(1992). Following Shields, therefore, in spite of their contempt for themall, the death metal musicians’ absence from that space contributed asmuch to its construction as a ‘shrine’ as did the alternapunks’ presencethere.

Opposition, hybridity or dislocation?

Death metal’s othering of alternapunk through a ‘truant proximity’ to themall provides an instance of the hybrid regionalism to which Warren(1995: 386) refers. As such, it is consistent with critiques of the culturalimperialism (CI) thesis in recent literature on the globalization of the musicindustry. Cultural imperialism theorists of the 1970s and 1980s hypothe-sized that a globalized media with its source at the political and economicsources of power would encourage cultural homogenization. Now, it isstandard for scholars of identity politics to view globalization as simul-taneous unification and fragmentation (Hesmondhalgh, 1998; Mitchell,1996).

The issue of audience reception has assumed central importance in thisargument. Many scholars of rock and pop argue that non-westernconsumers of western media texts tend to negotiate the meanings of suchtexts as they seek discursive ammunition with which to resist local oppres-sions (Laing, 1986; Shuker, 1995).

The notion of hybridity is also premised on the idea that compliance andpassivity rarely characterize consumption of media texts. Proponents ofhybridization argue that CI theorists’ fear of homogenization, or ‘culturalgrey-out’ (Lomax in Mitchell, 1996: 50), is unrealistically purist because itsets an imagined Third-World indigeneity against the West, which isperceived as essentially unauthentic. Instead, the mode of interpretation thatcurrently predominates in scholarly accounts views the indigenization offoreign cultural products as a creative process that entails agency, promptscritique and resistance, and results in endless cultural diversity (seeAppadurai, 1996: 7; Lakha, 1999: 261).

The nature of Balinese youths’ othering of alternapunk supports the idea


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that globalization spawns syncretic identities, and thus promotes diversity.Balinese death metal musicians (unwittingly) refer to the language of CItheorists to denounce alternapunks’ perceived homogenizing tendencies,thus providing a spectacular, and most ironic, instance of hybridization. Italso affirms the argument that globalization can link local communities withforeign discourses which support their resistances to oppressive regimes. Inthis case, young Balinese referred to reggae and death metal – both foreigncodes – in expressing a localism that resisted an encroaching metropolitansuperculture, as represented in their view by alternapunk.

But if the death metal musicians demonized the metropolis, the alterna-punks idealized it; if the death metal musicians practised a conspicuousabsence from the shopping mall, the alternapunks gestured towards it.12

The cultural significance of alternapunk is thus deceptive and slippery, as ifrefusing to be pinned to conventional notions of opposition and hybridiza-tion, which tend to privilege indigenization, symbolized by certain languageuse, spatial play or embodied styles, over instances of rupture throughbricolage. That is, while the utility of cultural dislocation in non-westerncontexts has often been acknowledged, it is frequently cast as ‘opposition’rather than as hybridization.13 Thus, in spite of its centrality to a broadspectrum of subcultural theory, the notion of dislocation is rarely appliedto peripheral areas such as Bali, as though the national metropolis isincapable of delivering cultural forms that can also liberate people fromlocal regimes particular to the periphery, and as if the periphery is in essenceoppressed and the metropolis by nature oppressive. Such bias is evident inRubinstein and Connor’s assertion that ‘Balinese recognise localness as theirprimary resource in the international marketplace’ (1999: 6; emphasisadded). Such a view hinders a reading of Balinese alternapunk as an instanceof the indigenization of a foreign code, and provides ammunition forStraw’s (1991: 369) argument that an overemphasis on the disruptive effectsof globalization risks:

the valorization of . . . practices perceived to be rooted in geographical,historical and cultural unities which are stable and conflated. Popular musicscholars and analysts of the cultural industries have been generally lessattentive to ways in which . . . migrations of populations and the formationof cultural diaspora . . . have transformed the global circulation of culturalforms, creating lines of influence and solidarity from, but no less meaningfulthan those observable within geographically circumscribed communities.

One is tempted to view alternapunk’s idealization of the metropolis asevidence of its incorporation into a dominant, hegemonic discourse. But, asI shall attempt to show below, it is also possible to view alternapunk’s questfor deracination as an attempt to unhinge from a dominant discoursespecific to this ‘peripheral’ locale.


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Alternapunk: ‘lifestyle shopping’ or ‘ludic practice ofresistance’?

Several writers have drawn on theories of ludus (play) to highlight theimportance of play in social practice. Victor Turner, for example, asserts that‘the way people play is perhaps more profoundly revealing of a culture thanthe way they work’ (1983: 104). In a work that draws on Turner’s notionof liminoid (see Turner, 1997: 37), Hetherington (1998a: 103) considers theway in which ‘space, through the creation of transgressive situations andembodied displays, shows how performance in places constituted asmarginal has been significant for transgressive and ludic practices of resist-ance’. Some writers have cited also conviviality, humour and play asstrategies deployed by the weak, or the masses, to survive authoritarianism.14

Play and conviviality, however, may not always seem subversive. Forexample, Hetherington (1998a: 1) refers to lifestyle shopping as ‘consump-tion practices and lifestyles that are indicative of the playful and styleconscious arena of identity performance and bricolage among urban, middleclass young shoppers interested in malls and designer labels’, thus recallingdeath metal’s depiction of the alternapunks as compliant fashion victims.

In the current discussion, it is useful to examine the link between resist-ance and the ludic, for Balinese alternapunks attributed both oppositionaland ludic qualities to their genre of choice, as exemplified by Superman isDead’s call to ‘yell whatever . . . punk is anti-establishmentarian’. Yet, in aneffort to ascertain the local implications of such anti-establishmentarianism,when I asked the musicians how their professed desire for freedomconnected with their own lives, they were quick to deny any link:

It’s hard to be carefree (like Kurt Cobain) here . . .15 you can’t really in Bali’cos our lives are ordered by tradition. It’s not that we want to be released(lepas). We still believe in God. We have to choose the right moment: if we’rehanging around with our friends, it’s OK to let go. But if there’s a ceremonywe have to forget all that . . . we have to be flexible. (Obligasi)

Our anti-establishmentarianism is not a lifestyle. We want to have a good life. . . only to be anti-establishment in our music. (Superman is Dead)

These comments suggest that an aspiration to some kind of liberation,release or anti-establishmentarianism was inherent in the practice of alter-napunk. And yet, whenever I urged the musicians to explain how theygrounded those aspirations in the reality of their everyday lives, theyconstantly proved ungraspable, leaving little but a mild cynicism as the onlyreminder of punk’s counter-cultural intent, as if alternativeness touchednothing of real value for young Balinese. At first glance, then, alternapunkseemed to be little more than an example of Hetherington’s lifestyleshopping (1998a: 1).


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This hypothesis is supported by the alternapunks’ stylistic blandness andperformative unresponsiveness in the spaces they frequented in the first halfof 1996 – the shopping mall and SHM. Such seeming unresponsivenesscontrasts with the shots of the Jakarta Alternative Pop Festival publishedin Hai magazine which portray alternativeness as a convivial style. Thepunters depicted in Hai sport brilliantly coloured hair, an abundance ofcheap jewellery and swimming goggles. They are photographed grinningawkwardly, brimming with enthusiasm, revelling in the celebratory atmos-phere of the mosh pit where child-like bodies are tossed skyward and, limbsflailing, cushioned from the hard earth by a sea of upturned palms.

The performance of Balinese alternapunk at Sunday Hot Music in early1996 was in stark contrast to these images. When Superman is Dead andUtero performed in March, and Triple Punk and Obligasi did so in May,they sparked none of the celebratory and aggressive energy suggested byHai’s alternative imagery. Rather, fans and friends remained firmly andsolemnly planted, cross-legged, and in their silence and motionlessnessrendered the performance similar to a television show. Nor was the festival’sconvivial style repeated at SHM. While some of the performers followedGreen Day’s Billy Joe in donning a slip, or shirt sleeves and a fat noveltytie, the punters formed a ‘straight’ mass of jeans and T-shirts. Thus, eventhough Jerink and Bobby, two members of Superman is Dead, had attendedthe Green Day concert in Jakarta and excitedly recounted the abundance ofjackboots, chains and mohawks there, the Balinese scene remained untex-tured by the true grit that had peppered the Green Day gig.

Stylistic blandness was also a feature of alternapunk’s performance in theshopping mall – a space with which alternapunk had become stereotypi-cally associated. In 1996, the alternapunks’ choice of hangout was NuDewata Ayu (NDA). Unlike Matahari and Siwa Plaza, two other malls thatexisted in Denpasar at the time, NDA had no food halls and thus no spacewhere alternapunks could legally gather and interact in a spontaneousfashion as they might have done at Matahari. Although they could gatherin booths at Matahari’s KFC or Swensen’s without being compelled toconsume, the McDonald’s that served as an annex to NDA was reserved forconsumers, and loiterers were moved on. When the alternapunks enteredthe building they were therefore channelled directly to Timezone, whereverbal interaction was minimalized and attention focused on objects ofconsumption. When they gathered at NDA, it was the alternapunks whoseemed to be consumed.

This was first brought to my attention when, after interviewing them forthe first time in April 1996, members of Superman is Dead invited me tojoin them on an afternoon out at NDA. I accepted eagerly, expecting to joinother musicians and enthusiasts there and to sit around chatting. Instead, Iwas led up the escalator to a space in one corner of the unused top floor,and a scene reminiscent of my own teenagehood, where bleeping and


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roaring video games obliterated any possibility of conversation; then leftalone to feign interest as the boys engaged with their screens.

The question of intent

In its performative aspect, therefore, alternapunk identity seemed to be inline with the naive and compliant stereotype in which it had been cast.However, in hindsight, it is difficult to accept this view, given the pivotalrole played by the musicians cited in this article in the increasingly spec-tacular punk style that evolved over the ensuing years. The stereotype ofthe alternapunk musicians as naive and compliant also does not gel wellwith the sense I gained from conversations with them as responsive, creativepeople who harboured sharp senses of irony.16

It may be that their initial unresponsiveness can be attributed to the roleof media imagery in inspiring them to establish alternative bands.17 Indeed,one aspect of the stereotypical images with which the alternapunk musi-cians concurred was the role of media imagery in inspiring them to formalternative bands. That is, although they acknowledged that SHM affordedthem a performance space, the alternapunk musicians identified the athe-atrical process of media consumption as the source of their genre of choice.They were among those who identified television, videos and cassettes asthe source of enthusiasm for Green Day and alternative music in general.

The role alternapunk musicians attributed to the media in inspiring themto embark on careers as musicians raises questions about how they relatedto these images. To what, specifically, did these images link them? Theiranswers to this question contain a number of common themes and revealsome curious instances of subversive readings. One of these themes is theidea that the media images issued from a core (‘Jakarta’ or ‘Java’) whichcontained not only the heart of the nation’s music industry but also certainideal values perceived as the essence of alternativeness. Jakarta, therefore,featured highly in the alternapunks’ self-definitions, just as it did in thereggae and death metal musicians’ perceptions of them. Notably different,however, were the ways that these two groups related to the metropolis.While the non-alternapunks identified Jakarta as the source of culturalpollution, the alternapunks associated it with authenticity.18

By locating the cultural centre of alternativeness at the heart of the musicindustry in the national metropolis, interviewees constructed Bali as periph-eral to the scene; as a fringe where the core values of alternativeness weresignificantly diluted. That is, their idealization of the metropolis served asa counterpoint for their characterizations of Balinese youth. Specifically, thealternative musicians I interviewed lamented local youths’ unresponsive(loyo) consumption of media images which, in their opinion, ran counterto the ideals of spontaneity and disorderliness contained at the metropolitan


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core of alternativeness. These critical characterizations of local youth servedto distance the alternapunks from the ‘fashion victim’ stereotype with whichalternative music had become associated.

The alternapunk musicians also identified themselves in opposition todeath metal and reggae, respectively. They associated reggae with the spacesof the tourism industry, and a realm in which artistic freedom was restricted.The Balinese alternapunks shied away from performing in tourist bars,similar to the manner in which death metal musicians performed theirabsence from the shopping mall. This represents a significant departurefrom the role traditionally accorded to tourists and tourism in the mutualconstruction of the other and the self by Balinese (Picard, 1990a, 1990b,1996). In contrast to death metal musicians, which they cast as primarilyconcerned with virtuosity, order, frustration, angst, melody and exclusivity,alternapunks reified disorder, egalitarianism, release, grunge, lack of controland openness.

In a critical essay, Stanley Cohen (1997: 156) reviews Birmingham Schooltheorists’ ‘constant impulse to decode style only in terms of opposition andresistance’. He remarks cynically on their tendency to dismiss instances ofconservative styles that support the dissemination of the dominant commer-cial culture, ‘because – as we all know – style is a bricolage of inconsisten-cies and anyway, things are not what they seem so the apparent conservativemeaning hides just the opposite’ (1997: 153–4). The alternapunks’ style wasindeed seemingly conservative. However, the fact that alternapunk de-veloped into a conspicuous subcultural style and performance in ensuingyears makes it difficult to ignore the possibility of alternapunk’s anti-establishmentarian intent, in spite of the stylistic evidence to the contrary.

One very useful contribution of the Birmingham School has been to locatesubcultural style in relation to ‘three broader cultural structures – the“parent” culture, the dominant culture and mass culture’ (Gelder, 1997:83), thus drawing attention to the fragmented and multi-level nature of ‘theestablishment’. That fierce competition takes place among these structuresis no clearer, perhaps, than in Bali in the 1990s. Here, an encroachingmetropolitan consumer culture was met with a subaltern regionalistdiscourse – a discourse of Balinese identity that was at once predominantin the local press and challenged the ‘nationalist meta-narrative’. Thisconfuses the parallel dualism of ‘establishment: counterculture’, ‘domi-nation: resistance’, ‘conservative: radical’. In many ways, the regionalistdiscourse that urged youth to model preservationist ideals was more restric-tive and conservative than the metropolitan mass culture, as the musicianscited above imply. The dilemma thus posed recalls Hebdige’s (1979: 62–3)description of the choices facing English punks. Rather than repertoiresindigenous to their white, working-class parent culture, they chose punk as‘a white translation of black ethnicity’.19

The clarity and consensus among alternapunks in the way they positioned


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themselves vis-a-vis the metropolis, reggae, death metal and the stereotypi-cal ‘fashion victim’ image of alternativeness suggests that they were (self)-consciously engaged in a practice of negotiating identity. Thus they defiedtheir stereotyped ‘naive and vulnerable’ reputation in the local band scene.This reading forces a reappraisal of the musicians’ hesitation about linkingthe core values of alternativeness with what it meant to them to be Balinese,interpreted above as an example of the alternapunk’s temporary andephemeral nature. In the present context, such hesitation becomes evidencethat the young men who played in punk and grunge bands understood theirlives as a dual existence. It was made up of moments experienced in, on theone hand, the restricted, tradition-ordered realm of indigeneity and, on theother, the release, freedom and anti-establishmentarianism possible whenthey played their music.

In this way, the alternapunks turned away from prescribed notions oflocalness. These had hitherto been embraced in different ways by both deathmetal and reggae musicians. Death metal organization 1921 encouragedmembers to ‘reach into local culture’ and incorporate traditional Balinesephilosophies, values and sounds into their music. Reggae musicians attrib-uted their success on the tourist bar circuit to reggae’s coincidence withnotions of a peaceful, coastal Balinese essence.

The urge among alternapunk musicians to identify with a non-Balineseelsewhere was also evident in their responses to the question of why theychose to write songs in English rather than their native Balinese or theofficial national tongue, Bahasa Indonesia:

Q: Do you have any original songs?A: Yeah, we’ve just starting writing our own songs. We have written six, but

we’ve only performed three of them. We write in English.Q: Why?A: It flows better with the music (lebih menarik). English is a perfect fit for

punk. (Superman Is Dead)

It’s difficult to perform alternative music in Indonesian. (Rest In Peace)

Q: Some heavy metal musicians from the band Blackburn told me that theylike heavy metal music because it’s similar to traditional Balinese music.Is that the way you feel about punk music?

A: Ah, we’re not interested in that kind of thing, inserting traditional soundsinto our punk music. Punk music’s too different (terlalu jauh). (SupermanIs Dead)

Cohen charges theorists of the Birmingham School with making exces-sively optimistic interpretations of a ‘style which is conservative . . . takenover intact from the dominant culture’ (Cohen, S., 1997: 155). But culturalforms do not remain ‘intact’ when they cross cultural and discursive bound-


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aries, such as the one separating ‘Jakarta’ from ‘Bali’. Balinese alternapunkswere not inherently subversive or oppositional. As described, stylisticallyspeaking, the scene was somewhat conservative. But similarly, both reggaeand death metal may also be judged as conservative in different ways. Nocultural form is ever wholly conservative or wholly radical, but is both,containing at once elements of consent and elements of refusal.

The deceptive nature of alternapunk practice and its capacity to evadecategorization as either a peripheral and resistant or as a recuperated,metropolitan style is highlighted by the alternapunks’ gestures toward themall. Since the advent of tourism, and probably before, the en massepresence of turis, implying the concomitant presence of an elsewhere, hasshaped dualities of exclusion and inclusion in discourses of Balinese identity,recalling Shields’ (1992: 184) term ‘truant proximity’. But in contemporarydiscourses of identity, the turis has become increasingly familiar andsyncretized into the mundane and banal rational orderings of everyday life.A new kind of foreigner has come to assume an important role in local ideasabout what constitutes an ‘insider’. The ‘stranger’ of the 1990s symbolizeda metropolitan, new rich lifestyle.

In the realm of youth culture, this manifested in the spatialization of themall. The increasing ubiquity of shopping malls on local land meant thatforeign metropolitan-ness was at once present and absent in a ‘hyperspace’.Such hyperspatiality serves to cut the ties that bind parallel dualities ofpresence–absence, interiority–exteriority and inclusion–exclusion. Forexample, death metal musicians performed localness (presence) through atruant proximity (self-imposed exclusion/exteriority) from the mall, whereasthe alternapunks practised truancy from localness by ritually appearing there.

Thus, rather than either opposition or compliance, the practice of alter-napunk is more reminiscent of qualities Turner assigns to liminality – ‘astate and a process of mid-transition’. Like Turner’s so-called liminaries, thealternapunks transgressed classificatory boundaries (being neither foreignnor ethnically loyal), and senior musicians thus perceived them as ‘pollut-ing’. There were also ‘words and phrases which indicate that they are “beinggrown” into a new postliminal state of being’ (Turner, 1997: 37–43). In theview of senior musicians, the practice of alternapunk was not only pollut-ing, it also epitomized ABG (anak: child, baru: newly/recently, gede:big/grown) status, and thus symbolized paradox, ‘being both this and that’(Turner, 1997: 37; emphasis in original).

Conclusion: the cultural significance of ‘elsewhere’

I introduced this article as a discussion of how Balinese youth negotiatedtheir identities around media images of alternative identities. In conclusion,


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I would like to revisit the notion of negotiation and reassess its applicabilityto the present study.

Many writers have used the term negotiation to imply agency in theconsumption of media texts. The idea that media texts can be negotiatedthus departs significantly from the cultural imperialism (CI) thesis popularamong left-wing scholars in the 1970s and 1980s. As Mitchell (1996:48–51) and Hesmondhalgh (1998: 163–83) point out in their reviews ofthis literature, such theorists argued that globalized media, with their sourceat the political and economic centres of power, encourage culturalhomogenization by urging Anglo-American products and lifestyles on tonon-western audiences.

But evidence that audiences are active not passive agents has been animportant feature of globalization theory’s broad-ranging critique of the CImodel, and I have attempted to show that the Balinese alternapunks werenot passive consumers. Nevertheless, there are other elements of globaliz-ation theory that both the practice of alternapunk and its broader, discur-sive aspects do not support. One aspect of pop and rock music scholars’critiques of the CI model is their argument that globalization of the musicindustry has followed a post-imperial model. For example, Appaduraiasserts that ‘the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex,overlapping, disjunctive order that can no longer be understood in terms ofexisting centre–periphery models’. He continues, ‘as [electronic] media linkaudiences and performers across national boundaries, we find a growingnumber of diasporic public spheres: the crucibles of a post-national order’(Appadurai, 1996: 3, 31).

The case of Balinese alternapunk provides no evidence of the nationalcentre’s decreasing role in the mediation of music produced and promotedby major international recording labels. In fact, the deregulated media bywhich alternative music was transmitted to Bali actually increased the roleof the capital in the everyday lives of local youth, and at a time when, owingto the tourism boom, a metropolitan superculture was increasingly presentin local landscapes. Notably, young Balinese musicians – non-alternapunksand alternapunks alike – associated alternative music not with a global codebut with a metropolitan superculture, and they articulated their negotiationof alternative identities in the language of a broader regionalist discourse.Rather than giving them direct access to foreign repertoires, the alternativemediascape urged them to focus more intently on the metropolis in seekinginspiration for their youth cultures.

The continued salience of centre–periphery models in local dominantdiscourses was pivotal to the practice of alternapunk. Rather than demon-izing the metropolis, they idealized it as a core of disorder, thus effecting acarnivalesque inversion on official notions of the centre as the epitome oforder. This is akin to New Age travellers’ use of rural spaces in England,discussed by Hetherington as an instance of ‘utopics’, which describes:


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the translation of ideas about a good society into spatial practice [which] canbe described as a cultural performance of moral orderings through spatialpractice. This cultural performance takes place in a hiatus, a space of un-certainty which . . . draw(s) on Derrida’s notion of différance, whereby themeanings of texts are seen not to be fixed by endlessly deferred. (Hethering-ton, 1998b: 328–43)

According to Hetherington, such différance is also present in the text ofthe English countryside, which ‘while for many . . . is imagined as some-where picturesque, tranquil and timeless, free from the problems of the city,for New Age travelers represents something different: freedom, authenticity,mystery, spirituality and nomadism’ (Hetherington, 1998b: 330). Thus, thetravellers practise a rural authenticity that contrasts sharply with theromance of the rural in the dominant discourse. It is ‘grounded in anidentification with small-scale communal solidarity, often expressedthrough the idea of tribes, through an identification with nomadism that isseen to be more authentic than the sociality of modern industrial societies’(Hetherington, 1998b: 330).

Unlike the New Age travellers, Balinese alternapunks’ notions of authen-ticity are centred on urban, specifically metropolitan spaces. This ‘utopicsof metropolitan authenticity’ further muddies the already uncertain andcontested meanings of the alternative mediascape, and highlights the wayin which this text was positively riddled with différance. The dominantportrayal of alternative identities in Indonesian teen publications reifiedconsumerism and hedonism as ideal qualities of a celebrated new richstatus. As shown above, death metal musicians rejected this ideal. In theirview, it threatened the cultural grey-out of the authentic and local rocksubcultures, and such suspicion served as a basis for their contempt of thealternapunks. The alternapunks, meanwhile, also contested dominantrepresentations of alternative identities. If the national media portrayedalternativeness as a peaceful realm of privilege and a sanctuary of new richmetropolitan lifestyles, Balinese alternapunks identified Jakarta as a core ofdisorder. In this way, as New Age travellers redefined dominant notions ofrural authenticity, the Balinese alternapunks subverted hegemonic represen-tations of Jakarta as the centre of a national cultural order. This is aninstance of what Sen and Hill (2000: 164) have referred to as the indigen-ization of foreign music codes into ‘disorganised, carnivalesque disorderli-ness that show up the cracks in the New Order’s attempts to control culturalproduction and create “cultural order”, an “ordered culture” ’.

There is a tendency to view dislocation in non-western contexts asprogressive only in as far as it is ‘oppositional’ – a notion frequentlymeasured against official (state) discourses. Appadurai is one of the fewscholars of globalization to have explored the general transformative poten-tial of cultural dislocation. He does not refer to opposition, and theorizes


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that the global modern is characterized by the transformation of the imagin-ation from ‘the faculty of the gifted intellectual’ into the property of collec-tives (1996: 7). Owing to the global dissemination of mass mediation,people now collectively imagine existences that differ from the socialrealities in which they live. Thus, the electronic media’s impact on theimagination serves not just as an escape, nor to ‘re-prime ordinary peoplefor industrial work’, but as a ‘staging ground for action’. Furthermore, heargues that ‘as mass mediation becomes increasingly dominated by the elec-tronic media . . . we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres’(1996: 229–60).

The social spatialization of the mall in Bali provides a prime example ofsuch a ‘diasporic public sphere’. Shields’ West Edmonton mall ‘presents anallegorical rejection of the geographic world of distant centers in whichEdmonton is on the periphery’, and transcends ‘the geographic barrier ofdistance which has for so long kept the provincial capital of Edmontonculturally isolated’ (Shields, 1989: 153). Likewise, NDA operates as a hyper-space that collapses parallel dichotomies of local–foreign, centre–periphery,insider–outsider. In this way, the mall exemplifies the kind of marginal spacethat, according to Hetherington, comes to assume ‘social centrality’ in theformation and performance of expressive identities (1998a: 107–8). Like theshopping mall in Bali, Hetherington’s margins ‘are not only things pushedto the edge, they can also be in-between spaces, spaces of traffic, right at thecenter of things’.

As such, the mall accommodated alternapunk’s (performatively unre-sponsive) liminality well. This only becomes clear, however, when we viewalternapunk both retrospectively, as the crucible of an ‘underground punk’style that subsequently developed, and contextually, amidst the variousdiscourses of identity that existed in Bali in early 1996. Death metal’s utopiaof local authenticity was performed via a conspicuous absence from the mallas death metal musicians attempted to insert Hindu-Balinese themes intotheir original songs. Against this, the alternapunks disavowed any linkbetween Balinese-ness and their genre of choice. Their orientation towardsthe différance-ridden shopping mall, and their idealization of Jakartaimagined as a ‘core of disorder’, makes the practice of alternapunk appearas an engineered state of exile. It was a practice of self-diasporization, anda strategy by which young Balinese transformed themselves into the irre-pressible ‘alien in our midst’ (Hebdige, 1997: 401). It seemed to themimpossible to reconcile their urge for spontaneous self-expression with theirideas on how they were supposed to behave as Balinese.

This reading complies with the emphasis that subculture theorists haveplaced on the role of an imagined elsewhere in the generation of culturalrenewal. In particular, the stylistically bland alternapunk’s orientationtoward the mall recalls Albert Cohen’s hypothesis that subcultures migratetowards ‘new frames of reference’ even before ‘conceivable solutions to


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their problems’ are ‘embodied in action’ (Cohen, 1997: 48). This privilegessocial spatialization over Hebdige’s (1979) emphasis on embodied style asa metaphor for refusal. Furthermore, the alternapunks’ disavowal of anylinks between alternapunk-ness and a prescribed Balinese identity recallsThornton’s (1997) critique of Birmingham School theorists’ tendency toequate difference with deviance and dissidence.20 Like Thornton’s ‘youthfulwill to classlessness’, alternapunk’s orientation towards the mall’s hyper-space can be seen as an effort to transcend ethnic identification and, as such,‘a means of obfuscating the dominant structure in order to set up an alterna-tive’ (Thornton, 1997: 208–9).

Notes

1 The concert became symbolic of increasing socio-economic injusticesbecause, in spite of Metallica’s popularity among poor urban youth, highticket prices had prohibited them from attending the performance, thuslimiting it to wealthy metal fans.

2 This article draws on interviews with musicians and other youth involvedin the local band scene (conducted in the official national language, Indo-nesian, and not the native tongue of most interviewees, Balinese), as listedin the reference section. It is part of a broader study that focuses on thethree genres most intimately interconnected with those processes: punk,death metal and reggae.

3 The dialogic definition of alternapunk described in this article also recallsWarren’s (1998a: 98) discussion of the mediatory role of the ‘traditional’puppet master and the ‘modern’ cartoonist, and provides another instanceof ‘Balinese in dialogue with themselves, and of the import of contestedmeanings with which they grapple’.

4 Indeed, Balinese youth were perhaps more fortunate than those in otherperipheral areas of the archipelago. As many Balinese increased theirwealth during the tourism boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s, agrowing number of local youth acquired musical instruments, such aselectric guitars and basses. The great many bands to form as a result,however, were poorly accommodated by the local ‘scene’. Until 1996, rockperformances were few and far between, and there were no studios on theisland where local rock bands could record their songs. Making rock musicwas not among the many artistic pursuits considered lucrative in Bali,where securing a contract to play Top 40 covers in hotels was seen asevidence of a promising career as a contemporary (as opposed to‘traditional’) musician.

5 Bands considered as senior by SHM organizers were those with experiencein bars, as well as those who had performed, and been successfully received,at a minimum of two major gigs.


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6 As Thornton (1997: 208), writing of English club culture, observes: ‘Inter-estingly, the social logic of subcultural capital reveals itself most clearly bywhat it dislikes and by what it most emphatically is not’. In the same articleshe reflects on clubbers who lament the perceived commodification of their‘underground’ culture thus: ‘whether these “mainstreams” reflect empiricalsocial groups or not, they exhibit the burlesque exaggerations of animagined “other” . . . to quote Bourdieu. . . “nothing classifies somebodymore than the way he or she classifies” ’ (1997: 204).

7 The relationship between ‘Bali’ and its ‘foreign other’, the centre, in thesecartoons contrasts the way in which Balinese painter I Made Budi depictedthe relationship between the tourist other and the local landscape. Hispainting, used in an advertising campaign for Garuda Airlines and repro-duced in Picard’s book (1996: xiv–xv), depicts tourists videoing, surfing,waterskiing and riding pillion on motorbikes, well accommodated by adarkly verdant, flourishing nature-scape. Unlike the cartoons that lateremerged, Budi’s work depicted a benevolent tourism industry, which didnot have a detrimental effect on the local environment.

8 The boom resulted in land speculation and massive increases in land valuesin certain areas, of which Jimbaran, mentioned by Agus Lempog, was acase in point. There, resort developments invited land speculation andprompted sharp increases in the value of surrounding rocky and undulat-ing land. Some local smallholders took advantage of this, and some enjoyedtheir new-found wealth by investing in luxury items and lifestyles stereo-typically associated by educated middle-class locals with a Jakartanesenouveau riche class (see Heryanto, 1999a).

9 ABG stands for anak baru gede, which literally translates as ‘recentlygrown-up kids’. ABG refers to junior high-school-age adolescents, and isprobably best translated as ‘teenybopper’.

10 Lomax, quoted in Mitchell (1996: 50), depicts the cultural imperialismhypothesis as ‘an assumption that the predominantly one-way flow of culturalproducts from the west to the rest threatens to produce a cultural grey-out’.

11 Suardika also (1999: 8) laments the rapid transformation of Denpasar’surban landscape, identifying shopping malls as ‘one example of how therearrangement of Denpasar’s physical landscape has precipitated the emerg-ence of a new, urban culture’.

12 I say ‘gestured’ because the alternapunks’ allegiance to the mall space wasweak. While a number of alternapunk bands associated their musical iden-tities with a presence at the mall, they never came to gather there en masse,and their interactions took place only on an imaginary level in a media-scape. That is, if the alternapunks cohered at all, it was around a commonidealization of the metropolis which, somewhat subversively, they identifiedas a ‘core of disorder’. However, unlike the media images of alternativeidentities, in Bali alternapunks were non-responsive at gigs and on thewhole their embodied styles lacked spectacularity.


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13 For example, Rubinstein and Connor (1999: 4) state that, in Bali, ‘global-isasi signifies a sense of participation in an international order that leavesspace to challenge the national meta-narrative’, and Sen and Hill (2000:110) cite the global media as ‘the mainstream opposition’s ally against anageing ruler’.

14 For example, Appadurai (1996: 7) mentions humour as one of thestrategies people deploy in their critical consumption of images of the massmedia. Citing his children’s (naively) subversive idealization of communistvillains, Heryanto (1999b: 162) differentiates such ‘convivial misreadings’from ‘resistance a la James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak [and] MikhailBakhtin’s topsy turvy carnival’. Rather, he draws parallels between the NewOrder’s autobiographical meta-narrative and Mbembe’s simulacral regimeswhich ‘free up the potential for play, improvisation and amusement withinthe very limits set by officialdom’ (Mbembe in Heryanto, 1999b: 163).Writing of the everyday idiom koh ngomong (‘I can’t be bothered talkingabout it’), Santikarma (1995: 2) claims that the ‘weak engage in tacticalprocedures of consumption’, and in doing so create spaces for ‘integrity andhumour at the expense of the powers that be’.

15 Reference to the angst-ridden Cobain as ‘carefree’ (cuwek) seems incon-gruent. However, my sense is that the Balinese punks viewed Cobain’ssuicide as affirming his disregard (perhaps a more accurate translation ofcuwek) for materialism and rock glory.

16 My interviews with alternative musicians are peppered with insightful,tongue-in-cheek quips on their everyday lives, and affirm Appadurai’s(1996: 7) assertion that ‘images of the media are quickly moved into localrepertoires of irony’.

17 This hypothesis accords with Baudrillard’s (in Merrin, 1999: 128–9)pessimistic view of the effect of television on symbolic exchange. Thisprophecy seems to have been enacted in the transmission of alternativemusic from Jakarta to Bali. Like most ‘peripheral’ Indonesians, Balinesealternapunks did not experience the JAPF as participants in a mosh pitwhere spontaneous expression was sanctioned and encouraged, but asconsumers of a media image, and their performance of alternative identi-ties were significantly dull in comparison with those who attended theAlternative Pop and Green Day gigs.

18 Death metal and punk musicians’ contrasting views of the metropolis recallthe alternative paths followed by hippies and punks in the US (seeGoldthorpe, 1992: 38).

19 While Balinese punks’ reference to a foreign repertoire is similar toHebdige’s characterization, it also defies the essentialism inherent in hisinsistence on Rastafarian dread as the ultimate form of subcultural capital,and his suggestions that punk’s ‘earthy and scruffy aesthetic’ (1979: 62–3)was derived from black ethnicity. Similarly, and in spite of their critiquesof the cultural imperialism thesis inherent in Orientalism, proponents of


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hybridization have frequently sustained Orientalist dichotomies by linkingauthenticity with rootedness and, in turn, rootedness with (non-western)ethnic origin (Lent, 1995; Lakha, 1999; Rubinstein and Connor, 1999).Thus, the term ‘deracinated’ often implies compliant consumption ofwestern cultural products. Rather than deracinated, the alternapunks sawthemselves as rooted, if ambivalently, in a utopic, metropolitan elsewhere.

20 According to Thornton (1997: 208):

If one considers the function of difference within an ever more finelygraded social structure, its political tendencies become more ambiguous.In a post-industrial world, where consumers are incited to individualisethemselves and where operations of power seem to favour classificationand segregation, it is hard to recognise difference as necessarily progres-sive. The flexibility of new modes of commodity production and theexpansion of multiple media support micro-communities and frag-mented niche cultures.

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Gelder and Sarah Thornton (eds) The Subcultures Reader, pp. 200–9.London: Routledge.

Turner, Victor (1983) ‘Carnaval in Rio: Dionysian Drama in IndustrializingSociety’, in Frank E. Manning (ed.) The Celebration of Society: Perspectiveson Contemporary Cultural Performance, pp. 103–24. Bowling Green, OH:Bowling Green University Popular Press.

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Interviews

Alternapunk bands

Rest in Peace (RIP), 31 May 1996Superman is Dead (SID), 10 April 1996Triple Punk, 29 May 1996Obligasi, May 1996Utero, May 1996


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Death metal musicians

Angel Head, death metal band, 26 April 1996Ari, bassist for death metal band Phobia, 13 June 1996Sabdo Moelyo, vocalist/bassist for death metal band Eternal Madness, 13 July

1996 and 2 February 1998Dek Ben, lead vocalist for death metal band Triple Six, 1 March 1996Agus Yanky, head of Bali’s death metal organisation, ‘1921’, 4 February 1996Age, death metal merchandise retailer, 6 February 1998

Other

Rahmat Hariyanto, manager of Crapt Entertainment, 4 April 1996Gung Joni, reggae musician, 16 April 1996Gregor, Radio Casanova announcer and co-organizer of Bali’s first high-school

band competition sponsored by Hai magazine, AN-TEVE and RadioCasanova, 3 April 1996

Gus Martin, Bali Post’s resident historian of the local band scene, 26 March1996

Agus Lempog, a ‘senior’ professional rock musician who regularly gigged atlocal tourist bars, 13 April 1996

● EMMA BAULCH is a student in the Politics Departmentat Monash University, Australia. She is writing her doctoraldissertation, a comparative study of reggae, death metal andpunk scenes in Bali, where she lived from 1996 to 1999.Address: 35 Gourlay Street, East St Kilda, Victoria, Australia3183. [email: [email protected]] ●


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creating a scene: balinese punk's beginnings

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