Dangdut stories

Andrew N. Weintraub

"A unique and potent force in contemporary Indonesian society and culture, dangdut is Indonesia's most popular music. Dangdut, named for its characteristic drum sounds "dang" and "dut," was denigrated as a debased form of popular culture in the early 1970s, commercialized in the 1980s, re-signified as a form of national and global pop in the 1990s, and localized within ethnic communities in the 2000s. Dangdut Stories is a social and musical history of the genre, within a range of broader narratives about class, gender, ethnicity, and nation in post-independence Indonesia (1945 to the present). Using a new interdisciplinary approach that synthesizes ethnomusicology, anthropology of media, and cultural studies, author Andrew Weintraub connects the aesthetic properties and the uses and effects of dangdut music to social and material conditions in modern Indonesia.^ Dangdut Stories...