ABSTRACT
Although its reggae rhythm, diatonic melody, and functional harmonic vocabulary give it an unabashedly global sound, Indonesian singer-songwriter Doel Sumbang’s song “Ronggeng” 1 nevertheless relies on a local Sundanese 2 image of a ronggeng (professional female entertainer) for its impact. In this essay, I place Doel Sumbang’s “Ronggeng” into its local cultural context by discussing how the ronggeng image in West Java provides a framework in which men can negotiate Sundanese masculinity; I then demonstrate how Doel Sumbang deploys the musical gestures of modern global pop to recreate the sensations that an encounter with a ronggeng is understood to initiate in a typical Sundanese man to create a song that addresses West Java’s Sundanese past as well as its modern present in the ongoing negotiation of masculine identities.
