dangdut stars

Inul Daratista-Goyang Ngebor "Drill Dance"

2009-01-23T07:17:00.000-08:00

Dangdut, onomatopoeically named for the Indian drumbeat that ran through most songs, was popular music, the music of the street. Inul Daratista (‘The Girl with the Breasts’) was the stage name of Ainul Rokhimah, a 25-year-old peasant girl from the abangan, or nominal Muslim, heartland of east Java. Inul was something of a hero to me. She had started out performing at village weddings and circumcision ceremonies for 10,000 rupiah (about a dollar) a song and now charged, as the papers breathlessly reported, 70 million rupiah for a forty-minute appearance. This metamorphosis from impoverished yokel to superstar, as the papers peevishly reported, owed less to Inul’s voice than to her backside. She had invented a dance move called drilling that had quickly become all the rage. It involved, to put it simply, rotating her behind faster and faster in a blur of tightening circles.

The previous year drilling had drawn the wrath of the Council of Indonesian Ulama, a powerful quasi-official group of mullahs. They called Inul ‘devilish’ and ‘lustful’ and as proof of her malign influence brought up a man who claimed that a pirated VCD of her act had led him to rape a child. Rhoma Irama, ageing and ill-tempered, joined the chorus of outrage. Concerned about her future in the industry a cowed Inul approached Rhoma for his blessings, but this only brought on public humiliation. ‘She performs trash,’ announced Rhoma at a press conference. (This from a man with a fondness for white leather bodysuits.) Rhoma proceeded to ban Inul from performing any of his songs.

In the end, however, Inul appeared to have the last laugh. The former president Abdurrahman Wahid and a clutch of women’s groups rallied behind her. Though his eyesight prevented him from appreciating the finer points of drilling, Wahid declared that it ought to be protected as an art form. Hundreds of noisy feminists drilled in solidarity at the Hotel Indonesia circle. The pious Rhoma’s reputation received a jolt when a tabloid journalist reported him exiting a starlet’s bungalow at dawn. Since then Inul’s popularity had acquired new proportions. She had become the best-paid entertainer in the country. She was on television advertising everything from motorcycles to mosquito coils and playing herself in a miniseries based on her life story. On the streets they sold Inul pencils—made of rubber, supple and flexible.

Elvy Sukaesih-The Queen of Dangdut

2009-01-23T07:15:00.000-08:00

Since the mid-1970s the funky dangdut style has dominated the Indonesian popular-music world. This hybrid genre, a combination of Indonesian and Malaysian urban and traditional forms, American rock and Indian film music, has been the voice of the poor masses of urban Indonesia for nearly three decades. Today the genre appears in many variations and regularly reinvents itself every five years or so, incorporating new far-flung inspirations. While certain artists, such as Rhoma Irama, the so-called "Dangdut King," have tended toward crafting lyrics concerned with Islamic moralizing and social criticism, the genre's original spirit lies in light flirtatious songs expressed through the playful dialogue between male and female singers. Since the 1970s Elvy Sukaesih, the Queen of Dangdut, has been its matriarch.

Born in Jakarta in 1951 as the daughter of a professional musician in popular Jakartan gambus ensembles, Sukaesih began performing on stage by the third grade. She wasn't trained specifically in any traditional form, so Sukaesih first began singing in several bands led by her father who introduced her to various Western popular forms as well as to the orkes melayu, the acoustic progenitor of the later, electrified, dangdut ensemble. As a child Sukaesih grew up watching Indian popular films shown in the public theater in front of her humble Jakarta home. Early on Sukaesih learned to imitate the musical and dance styles of Bollywood, later incorporating these styles within the dangdut form.

By her early teens Sukaesih was popular throughout Jakarta as a melayu singer for weddings, parties and other special occasions. But her father died soon after, so Sukaesih began performing nightly with numerous groups in order to help her mother make ends meet. Around then the musician, singer and producer Zeth Zaidun, who also managed the young Oma (Rhoma) Irama, met Sukaesih and began a personal and professional relationship, and at the age of 14, Sukaesih married the 23-year-old Zaidun. Between 1973–1976 Sukaesih regularly recorded and performed love duets with Irama, afterward launching a solo career when Irama departed from the playful dangdut style to forge a more serious form of Islamic influenced moralistic dangdut.

Sukaesih remains the godmother of the dangdut style, although her active recording and singing career has effectively ended. Since the early 1970s she has released more than 100 records and has appeared regularly in films and as a personality on local television. Sukaesih's vocal style defined the female dangdut sound for a generation; her perpetually girlish voice could sound at once Indian, Middle Eastern and American, all the while singing in Indonesian with distinctly Indonesian/melayu ornaments.

Rhoma Irama-The King of Dangdut

2009-01-23T07:02:00.000-08:00

In the late 1960s a new popular music called dangdut emerged from the slums and suburbs of Jakarta in Indonesia. The music was performed on an electrified and modernized version of the older acoustic orkes melayu orchestra and combined influences from Indian and Malaysian film music, Islamic popular music and American popular song, primarily rock. The name dangdut is an onomatopoeic reference to the tabla-like pair of drums used in the ensemble that supply the genre with its defining rhythm: DANG dut, in which a heavy, low-sounding pitch off the beat ("dang") is followed by a light, higher pitch note on the downbeat ("dut"). The form was originally characterized by love duets between young men and women.

Oma Irama (b. 1946) began his dangdut singing career performing these light tunes, often with the legendary Elvy Sukaesih, who later became known as the Dangdut Queen. However, beginning in 1976 Oma changed his name to Rhoma (father) Irama (rhythm) and launched a solo career in which he crafted a newer and lyrically more sophisticated style of dangdut. In this new form, Irama downplayed the influence of Indian film scores (although he continued to lift and rearrange melodies from Bollywood) while emphasizing the American (primarily hard rock) and Middle Eastern (primarily contemporary cabaret music) influences. Irama's lyrics began to acquire an unmistakable air of social criticism and Islamic moralizing.
The dangdut audience is overwhelmingly poor, urban and Islamic, and the stir created by Irama's subtle (but significant) recognition of the major economic disparities between social classes in Indonesia and the hopelessness of the Indonesian poor attracted the then dictatorial government's notice. For a short time afterward Irama was banned from appearing on state-sponsored television.

During the 1980s dangdut was synonymous with the on-stage persona of Irama, the King of Dangdut, dressed in a tight black tanktop, headband, leather pants, gloves and boots, and playing a black flying-V guitar, sweatily glistening in heavy-metal dangdut glory—certainly a far cry from the bubblegum, coy flirtatiousness of the heavily made-up teen dangdut singers of the genre's early years.

By the late 1980s the superstars of dangdut had become fabulously wealthy, and Irama reconciled with the government by joining the dictatorial ruling GOLKAR party. While continuing to pen lyrics that extolled the virtues of Islam, Irama's outright criticism of Indonesian politics and social order faded. During this era Irama continued to record and develop an international reputation, collaborating with such legends as Lata Mengeshkar, the golden voice of Bollywood. Beginning in the late 1980s Irama pioneered a new form of Indonesian cinema, biographical rags-to-riches films often portraying the stellar rise of dangdut stars such as himself.

Today dangdut remains popular through its ability to transform and reinvent itself every five years or so, always incorporating far-flung popular influences. However, with Irama in semiretirement, dangdut has reverted mostly to light flirtatious songs, and today it greatly resembles other forms of more overtly Westernized Indonesian genres of popular music.

Inul-mania Strickens the Malaysian Fans

2009-01-23T06:40:00.001-08:00

Inulmania

Dangdut queen Inul Daratista thrilled the 5,000 odd Malaysian fans at Stadium Merdeka yesterday even though she did not perform her sensuous gerudi (sexy gyrating dancing style) and any of those hot stuff that had propelled her to fame.

Before the concert began, about 150 PAS Youth were seen distributing flyers in protest against the concert. According to this group's philosophy, those who attended the concert are engaging in hedonistic activities and a direct contradiction to the Islamic principles of Islam Hadhari.

Whatever it is, the two-hour concert was a success ... in commercial senses, and she had delivered her product/service that had satisfied her customers needs and expectations ... according to the quality management philosophy.