Dangdut stories: A social and musical history of Indonesia's most popular music

摘要

Ethnomusicologist Andrew Weintraub's Dangdut stories is the first comprehensive study of dangdut, 'Indonesia's most popular music', as the title rightfully claims. Given dangdut's enormous popularity and sheer inescapable aural presence in the daily life of modern Indonesia, it is in fact remarkable that it has taken so long for it to be recognised as a subject worthy of serious scholarly attention. However, one may wonder if this academic neglect somehow reflects dangdut's longstanding reputation of being a debased commercial music genre without any sophistication or originality - cheap music catering for the trivial tastes of the lower classes. Weintraub's work is the first volume dedicated fully to dangdut, covering its multiple musical, aesthetic, social, and political dimensions. As such it is a long overdue contribution to the study of Indonesia's enormously rich contemporary musicscape. This was quickly recognised in Indonesia itself: this spring, the Indonesian publisher Gramedia published an Indonesian translation of Dangdut Stories entitled Dangdut: Musik, identitas, dan budaya Indonesia.