Jeremy Wallach

Bowling Green State University | BGSU · Department of Popular Culture

The relationship between metal and disability is distinctive. Persisting across metal’s sub-genres is a preoccupation with exploring and questioning the boundary that divides the body that has agency from the body that has none. This boundary is one that is familiar to those for whom the agency of the body is an everyday matter of survival. Metal’s...

Since its beginnings more than fifty years ago, metal music has grown in popularity worldwide, not only as a musical culture but increasingly as a recognised field of study. This Cambridge Companion reflects the maturing field of 'metal music studies' by introducing the music and its cultures, as well as recent research perspectives from discipline...

This chapter reconsiders the history of popular music studies in Indonesia. It shows a novel paradigm for the analysis of post-Reformasi-era popular music studies. Prior analyses, as the chapter suggests, were preoccupied with nationalism, democratization, totalitarianism, and identity, viewing popular music primarily (or only) as a form of politic...

This book showcases the breadth and complexity of the music of Indonesia. By bringing together chapters on the merging of Batak musical preferences and popular music aesthetics; the vernacular cosmopolitanism of a Balinese rock band; the burgeoning underground noise scene; the growing interest in kroncong in the United States; and what is included...

This essay examines the discourse of power relations in classic 1980s heavy and thrash metal. We consider how the dialectics of freedom and constraint, victimizer and victim, play out across texts and subgenres and investigate their implications for gender, class, and globalization of metal culture..

The philosopher Alfred Schutz labored to unite Max Weber’s sociology with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, while Emmanuel Levinas theorized the ethics of encounter with another consciousness. Similar in background and age—both were European Jews whose work in the mid-twentieth century was fundamentally shaped by World War II—these thinkers are rarel...

This essay employs insights from social phenomenology and the anthropological study of Indonesia to understand metalhead sociality and the pleasures of belonging to the metal scene. We seek to locate an alternative approach to dominant subcultural-capital-oriented studies, one that highlights cooperative rather than competitive interactions between...

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research is the first comprehensive academic survey of the field of rock music as it stands today. More than 50 years into its life and we still ask – what is rock music, why is it studied, and how does it work, both as music and as cultural activity? This volume draws together 37 of the leading academics worki...

Steven Feld’s ethnomusicological framework was originally formulated to investigate the music culture of an indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. Nonetheless, its potent amalgamation of linguistic anthropology, ethnoaesthetics, social phenomenology and Geertzian interpretivism has become an influential approach to popular musics that avoids reduct...

A phenomenological approach to music fandom, based on the writings Alfred Schutz and insights gleaned from Indonesian nongkrong culture.

A literary/cultural analysis of heavy metal and its representations of power, in the essay we discuss the centrality of metal's multisubjective sensibility in its variegated lyrical and genre constructions.

Metalheads of color are marginalized when metal is loudly claimed in the name of hegemonic whiteness, and grappling with metal and race means contending with metal's whitewashing. Scholars too often perpetuate metal's presumed whiteness even though metal music's fans are found all over the world and come in all colors; for instance, today's multi-r...

If performance events are crucial sites where ideologies, perceptions of self, and relations of power converge in the context of intense multisensory experience (as ethnomusicologists and performance studies scholars would have it) then it is surprising that so few studies of cultural globalization have focused on the meanings of local performances...

This chapter examines leisure activities practised in Southeast Asia, a region consisting of 11 countries. We have structured the chapter into five main sections. First, we examine the varied influences on pre-colonial Southeast Asian leisure and patterns that demonstrate the regional spread of particular activities. Second, we examine how leisure...

‘Punk to me means, it’s a way of life’, says Dolly, a 22-year-old Jakarta punk, to a Canadian film-maker. ‘It’s like a place where I can get freedom and happiness and love’ (Crawford, 2006). One would think that by now, after more than 20 years, the novelty would have worn off. Nonetheless, the no-longer-unusual sight of South-east Asian youths cla...

From dangdut to indie rock, kroncong to jazz fusion, music genres are and have been dynamically interpreted, combined, and created throughout the history of the Indonesian archipelago. The seven articles in this special issue of Asian Music investigate how genres are used by musicians and listeners to intervene in debates about modernity, national...

This introductory essay discusses genre as an organizing principle in Indonesian popular music. It suggests that the wildly creative hybridizations produced by Indonesian popular musicians occur against the backdrop of a relatively stable tripartite macro-genre system, consisting of dangdut/daerah, pop, and underground/indie. The articles in this s...

This article, based on 15 years of interviews and interactions with the band, investigates the career and musical development of Krakatau, a unique jazz/ethnic fusion group from West Java, Indonesia. We highlight in particular statements about the band’s musical philosophy and approach by its leader Dwiki Dharmawan and bassist/cofounder Pra Budidha...

Much existing literature in metal studies contains an implicit theory of scene formation; the following article aims to articulate an explicit one. This theory is based primarily on ethnographic research on metal scenes in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Toledo, USA. These two field sites are quite dissimilar culturally, demographically, and geographically...

The first book of the online-network Norient discusses contemporary movements and trends within globalised music scenes in Europe, Africa, Latin-America, Asia and the US. In Out of the Absurdity of Life – Globale Musik, journalists, scientists, artists and photographers question protest and provocation within the US, Ghana and England. They dive in...

From its inception, both outsiders and insiders have associated heavy metal with men and masculinity. Some have even maintained that metal culture is hostile territory for women. Despite this, a significant proportion of writers who have documented, analysed, and indeed celebrated heavy metal has been women, from the groundbreaking sociological stu...

This article investigates the Jakarta punk scene at the turn of the century, shortly after the collapse of the Soeharto dictatorship. It was one of the first articles on one of the largest punk communities in the world, even if it was largely unknown in the Anglophone world at the time.

What happens to “local” sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? Jeremy Wallach explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime. Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s chaotic and momentous tra...

This is an article that was reprinted two more times and still gets cited by folks curious about the Indonesian political transition twenty-two years ago. The leadership role of metal and punk fans in the political demonstrations that overthrew Soeharto arguably constitutes heavy music's most laudatory sociopolitical achievement to date anywhere in...

A review of Jose Buenconsejo’s ethnography of Manobo ritual music.

The sources of Indonesian popular music are extraordinarily diverse.1 Middle Eastern pop, American hip-hop, Ambonese church hymns, Sundanese degung, British heavy metal, Indian filmsong, Chinese folk music, and Javancscgendhing are but a few of the influences one might detect on a single cassette. Despite this complexity, the question of where the...

The dramatic collapse of President Soeharto's autocratic New Order government in the wake of the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis shattered widely held assumptions about the weakness of Indonesia's civil society and the strength of its totalitarian state. At the time, observers both inside and outside the country marveled at the seemingly instantaneou...