The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World by Richard Poplak

Author:Richard Poplak [Poplak, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Islamic Studies
ISBN: 9781593762926
Google: 5_ApRAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1593762925
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2010-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

I do as David Tarigan orders: I go to Bandung, one hundred miles southeast of Jakarta, along a highway lined with terraced rice paddies, through clouds so low they begin at the tarmac. When I arrive, I hop on the back of Helfi’s motorcycle. Helfi (one name only, like a soccer star) is a punk pioneer, used to manage Puppen, wears a Teenage Death Star T-shirt. He runs the record label FFWD Records and a clothing label called Airplane Systm.

“Bandung was in Dutch era famous for food, fashion, music, architecture, design,” says Helfi, who shares the Indonesian predilection for talking while madly piloting a two-wheeled vehicle. “I want to base business on Bandung model—to synergize.”

This was once, during colonial times, an open city, and its richness derives from centuries of interacting with other cultures, while its citizenry—the better-off ones anyway—are beneficiaries of that legacy. And so, in turn, are many of Indonesia’s two hundred and forty million citizens, especially those who work in the creative industry, because Bandung is a feeder town, sending forth musicians and graphic designers and architects and filmmakers into the green isles, dispensing the fruits of Bandung to all and sundry.

I cling to the Teenage Death Star T-shirt as Bandung whips by: stately Dutch residences with their dirty red sloped roofs; Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired modernist structures; outlet stores with papier mâché Supermen flying from the walls; stores called Jeans World and Spiderman Party Store; hyper-designed glass and steel boutiques that would not be out of place in Zurich or Montreal. Which is not to say that Bandung feels like anywhere other than Indonesia: there’s something distinct in the architecture, the febrile jitter of the calamitous weather, the jungle foliage, the intensity of the traffic.

Helfi gives me directions to the hamlet of Indramayu, site of a punk show that Ika told me about, where one thousand or so punkers descended on a small town that foolishly rented out a space. It is about a hundred miles outside of Bandung, surrounded by rice paddies descending toward the ocean in a giant mossy staircase. There is little here other than a traditional market covered in places by blue tarpaulin, a motley line of bamboo-rigged warungs and a single road leading to a rusted syrup factory that reeks of rotting sugar. A Cronenbergian menagerie slithers through the underbrush; bird calls sound like babies dying in agony.

I ask around, wondering what the locals thought of the show, which took place in November 2006 and no one has forgotten. It was a bad thing, a father of two barefoot children tells me. What do these kids want? he asks. No work. Just make noise. Just foul our town.

No, says an older woman. When we were young, we danced to all the songs from the West. Kids need something to do. This is good. It’s just that they were messy. We were upset. There was vomit on the ground.

This conversation is as old as rock ’n’ roll itself.

Then I do what most visitors to Indonesia do: I make for the island of Bali.

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