Navicula: a Psychedelic Grunge Band from Bali
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1 Navicula: A Psychedelic Grunge Band from Bali by Daniel Lopez A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, Bachelor of Arts Music The Colorado College May 9, 2019 Approved by 2 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I want to thank my advisor Dr. Victoria Levine for her assistance in securing necessary grant funding to help finance my ethnographic research in Bali, Indonesia. Her support helped motivate me to make that first phone call to Indonesia to contact Lolot band’s sound engineer and to contact several other bands in the region. I want to thank professor I Made Lasmawan and the Tangkas family for welcoming me into their banjar in Baturiti, Bali and Dr. Elizabeth Macy for her unending support in helping me navigate my project both in the U.S. and in Bali. I thank Putu Hiranmayena for his advice on local popular music performers in Bali, as well as his help in contacting I Wayan Balawan. I thank Meggy of Rumah Sanur, and her welcome to the Rumah Sanur music and management family each time I decided to spectate weekly line-ups of artists at the venue. I also appreciate I Putu “Balot Ne” Sukaryana and Jonathan Adams of Insiturec for both their invitation to a temple ceremony during the Balinese Galungan and Kuningan festival, and to the “Banjar Campout" concert. I thank the CC Anthropology Department, the CC Music Department, and the Music Library staff Dave Dymek, Daryll Stevens, and Annette Megneys for helping make my project possible. I thank the Keller Venture Grant for their assistance and support in my independent research project. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my mother, Graciela Santellano who has driven me to and from the airport in the early hours of the day. Without her help, it would have been almost impossible to be able to conduct this research. I wish to acknowledge my loving and supportive sister Karen Gaytan-Pizano whose advice made me certain of my educational goals pursuing music and anthropology. I also thank my brothers, Javier Gaytan and Arturo Gaytan, for their financial support for travel and research in Bali, and to my young brother Geovanny Lopez for reminding me of my love for metal music every time I head home to our quiet Chicago suburb Waukegan, Illinois. 3 4 Navicula: A Psychedelic Grunge Band from Bali Indonesia’s music, particularly that of Bali, has long been of interest to scholars, musicians, travelers, and anthropologists (Gold 2004: 277; Royo 2007:57). Today this interest has been magnified by the growing trends of globalization, neoliberalism, and tourism. In recent years, musical research has shifted towards Indonesia’s contemporary popular music genres or musik negara (national music). As I attempt to analyze the position the psychedelic grunge band Navicula holds within this broader history, I shall describe a concert experience in Milwaukee as someone who grew up listening to alternative rock and indie music during the 2000s. I then provide an overview of the current scholarship on Balinese popular music and elaborate on how it can inform our understandings of Indonesian music. Finally, I elaborate on how this connects to Navicula’s background and describe their live concert performance, focusing on two songs, including “Ibu,” a single from their 2018 Earthship album, and “Orangutan,” from their 2013 Love Bomb album. “Busur Hujan” (Rainbow Warrior), a single released as part of a collaboration with Greenpeace, further substantiates the political nature of Navicula’s songs. I argue that Navicula’s music exemplifies the ways in which bands localize and hybridize grunge, rock, and alternative genres to create what they call “green-grunge.” The paper as a whole investigates the degree to which Navicula incorporates karawitan music into their artistry and analyzes what extent the terms “indie,” “DIY,” and “alternative,” have come to mean in Indonesian music study. My goal is to contribute to an understanding of the ways Balinese musicians adapt to globalization. 5 From Milwaukee to Bali I crisscross through a car-filled parking lot with my younger brother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where we see a procession of young people walking towards the concert venue ticket gates. The concert features alternative and punk-rock and bands signed to small independent music labels, such as Epitaph, Fearless, and Equalvision, as part of a larger tour here in the U.S. However, these labels do not serve the same function they did a generation ago during the 1990s, as the “Big Five” of the music industry have slowly blurred the lines of what is considered independent. These days in the U.S., alternative and punk rock music attract a variety of audience members including early-teens to mid-thirties attendees, with a notable presence of younger women, a trend that has developed in contrast to the music’s previous predominantly male orientation. My brother and I fit neatly in that category as nineteen and twenty-year-olds. It is not unusual to see attendees wearing ripped jeans held together with safety pins and scribbled over with sharpie markers, topped with a t-shirt from their favorite band. In this way youth display visible markers to develop a common social identity geared towards a darker, rougher artistic style that draws from goth, punk, and emo aesthetics, as well as British and American DIY-culture. It is common for concertgoers, usually males, to engage in a mosh pit or a ritual in which attendees expose an open circular space in the crowd where people may join in physically emotive and even aggressive body movements. The mosh pit is often relished as a highlight of the concert experience. Meanwhile, about 9,700 miles southwest across the Pacific Ocean, one can bear witness to the site of an alternative/indie music scene more than thirty years in the making. It visually and musically blends western popular music forms such as grunge, rock, punk, indie, jazz and New Age experimentalism, with musik daerah (regional music) (Baulch 2007: 91; Luvaas 2012:138). This has complicated genre distinctions and music scholars have observed that the Balinese have conflated 6 and blurred popular genres in ways that appear to be more hybridized in nature (Baulch 2007: 71). Whether they recognize it or not, the Balinese regardless of age, cultural roots, or religion grow ever cloistered in a mortar and concrete urban agglomerate that is Denpasar. Though Bali has been considered a bastion of traditional music, significant developments have resulted in new music forms taking hold on the island. It is not uncommon to drive through the city and find yourself in the middle of a Hindu ngaben (funerary) procession featuring a lavishly-decorated lembu (an image of an ox on a cremation tower), with men, women, and children playing gamelan beleganjur through central Denpasar, only to come across a 1950s-inspired rock pub ten minutes later, and a reggae bar soon thereafter (Moore 2013: 137). A walk on Jalan Raya Kunti, where I found my main base of operations, revealed to me how easy it is to find restaurants, spas, koskosans (renters), tattoo bars, and beach locales all in the immediate vicinity of Balinese shrines or temples. Likewise, foreign music genres have taken residence alongside traditional Balinese gamelan music and worldview. It is here where I began my research on Balinese popular music in Denpasar. My research methods included audio-interviews with members of Navicula and attendance at their concerts over a period of two months. I employed a comparative studies approach when analyzing the music of Navicula and drew connections from fieldwork observations between popular music and Balinese traditional musics, broadly known as karawitan. I also considered the visual components of Balinese performers’ live concerts. I asked how Balinese bands, such as Navicula, have negotiated between popular music genres and the karawitan cultural domain they inherently share. While it may seem to the untrained eye that the rise of tourism suggests the Balinese are losing their authentic cultural roots, this is far from the case (Luvaas 2012:135). By 7 contrast, the Balinese have reframed popular music cultural symbols here in Indonesia over the last fifty-years and continue to do so today. Popular Music of Indonesia Until relatively recently, Bali’s role in global music production has been overlooked as a site where artists have used pop music to contest the local music vernacular and the national politics of the region. When one considers Bali, the geographical space and place-name elicits images of resorts and five-star hotels lining the coast as well as vast swaths of rice paddies welcoming locals and tourist alike. Very rarely does one consider Bali the rightful home for growing alternative rock and grunge band scenes housing artists such as Navicula. Whereas Bali has inspired the interest of Western music scholars and composers, most notably Colin McPhee, the musical politics of the region have been largely neglected. Perhaps beginning with Clifford Geertz’s interpretive study of Balinese culture there has been a growing trend toward more analytical studies of Indonesia, including music. One scholar, Emma Baulch, discusses identity politics and identity formation in Balinese popular music (2007). Rebekah Moore has researched the Balinese punk music scene, including the band Navicula (2013). Her essay discusses the Balinese soundworld, a term referring to both the liminality music spaces inhabit and create as well as their seamless ability to co-exist within a larger environment. Through deeply listening she attempts to make sense of the many song genres, styles, and cultural allusions that each genre carries, which permeate Balinese streets. Rock harmony and punk DIY sounds in Bali intersect with often competing sounds of reggae, metal, and rockabilly.