ABSTRACT
Relatively affordable means for producing and distributing music have, over the last two decades, facilitated the spread of novel popular musical genres in Southeast Asia. But at their foundation lay reactive sentiments prompted by contemporary political and social issues. Experiments with ethnic pop, fusion, and world music remained popular in Southeast Asia in most of the 1990s, albeit in diverse guises. In Malaysia, ethnic music, often in tandem with nationalist policies, mostly came to stand for a revival of ‘indigenous’ (read ‘Malay’) genres such as dondang sayang, zapin, and joget. Its most popular advocates were Malaysian pop singers Noraniza Idris and Siti Nurhaliza. Both singers are reputed performers of irama Malaysia, a fusion between the more traditional styles just mentioned and an Anglo-American pop idiom. In Indonesia, regional pop songs have, similarly, remained a popular format to express ethnic sentiment, with, in particular, pop Jawa and pop Minang doing reasonably well in terms of commercial success. Online radio explains why such music genres are now also popularly consumed by Javanese or Minangkabau migrant communities abroad, in Europe, the United States and as far as Latin America. In line with postmodern preferences for mash-up, collage, and the local appropriation of globally circulating trends, fusion and especially world music have also gained some currency in the Southeast Asian pop industries. A good example of the latter is the 1993 song ‘Denpasar Moon’, which achieved great commercial success in Indonesia and across most of Southeast Asia. Based on a generic Western pop style with a prominent back beat and largely played on electronic instruments, the song incorporates sounds and musical patterns derived from various Indonesian/ Asian genres, including dangdut percussion, gamelan gong-chime sounds, and melodic scales that evoke associations with Sundanese musical instruments, such as the degung or kacapi suling. The fact that the song was created by an Englishman and interpreted by a Filipina living in Indonesia underlines the trans-national origins and appeal of the song.
