Dangdut Stories ─ A Social and Musical History of Indonesia's Most Popular Music

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 contains a wealth of new and original musicological source material, in the form of interviews with dangdut stars; information from obscure journalistic resources; and thoughtful analysis of dangdut standards, combined with a keen reappraisal of the existing literature.

"In Dangdut Stories, Weintraub has written a masterful, engaging, and exemplary portrait not only of a colorful music genre---with an audience of tens of millions---but also of a dynamic society in transition." ---Peter Manuel, Professor, Music Department, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

"From an Indonesian perspective, Weintraub's contribution to the debate about the construction of national identity in Indonesia is quite original. By focusing on dangdut popular music, he recognizes the importance of the cultural industry's role less in shaping a definite musical identity than in underlining its continual slippage as a meaning. The book, rich with field notes, suggests that a discourse on cultural identity is necessarily a discourse on cultural fluidity."---Goenawan Mohamad, founder and editor, Tempo

"Andrew Weintraub's Dangdut Stories is at once the definitive work on this important genre and a methodological tour de force. Dangdut Stories promises to be an enduring work of ethnomusicology. It also has much to offer scholars interested in popular music, the Islamic public sphere, media and transnationalism, and culture and power."---Jonathan Sterne, McGill University, author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction and MP3: The Meaning of a Format

Andrew N. Weintraub is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the University of Pittsburgh gamelan program. He is the author of Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java and the coeditor of Music and Cultural Rights. Weintraub is also the founder and lead singer of the Dangdut Cowboys, a Pittsburgh-based dangdut band whose YouTube videos have been viewed more than 150,000 times since December 2007.