I should start this review with a caveat: I am not an expert on the music of Bali or of Southeast Asia more generally. My review of Emma Baulch’s Making Scenes, then, is written from the point of view of a reader less interested in the area studies component of the book than in its usefulness as a case study concerning the musical genres under discussion, especially death metal and punk. On this score, Baulch’s book stands out as one of relatively few that takes the relationship between disti..

Waksman, Steve

English

OpenEdition

 
Volume !
La revue des musiques populaires 
9 : 2 | 2012
Contre-cultures n°2
Emma BAULCH, Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death
Metal in 1990s Bali
Steve Waksman
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/volume/3375
DOI: 10.4000/volume.3375
ISSN: 1950-568X
Printed version
Date of publication: 15 December 2012
Number of pages: 226-227
ISBN: 978-2-913169-33-3
ISSN: 1634-5495
 
Electronic reference
Steve Waksman, « Emma BAULCH, Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali », Volume !
[Online], 9 : 2 | 2012, Online since 15 May 2015, connection on 10 December 2020. URL : http://
journals.openedition.org/volume/3375  ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/volume.3375 
L'auteur & les Éd. Mélanie Seteun
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Dossier metal studies
I !"#$%& !'()' this review with a caveat: I am not 
an expert on the music of Bali or of Southeast Asia 
more generally. My review of Emma Baulch’s Making 
Scenes, then, is written from the point of view of a 
reader less interested in the area studies component 
of the book than in its usefulness as a case study con-
cerning the musical genres under discussion, espe-
cially death metal and punk. On this score, Baulch’s 
book stands out as one of relatively few that takes the 
relationship between distinct musical genres or scenes 
as a primary focus of scholarly analysis. Making Scenes 
complements the e*orts made in my own book, !is 
Ain’t the Summer of Love: Con"ict and Crossover in 
Heavy Metal and Punk (reviewed elsewhere in this 
issue), and in other notable recent work such as 
Fabian Holt’s Genre in Popular Music, to think across 
genres, scenes and subcultures rather than treat them 
as discrete and isolated cultural formations.
+is is not to say that the context of Baulch’s study is 
of no consequence. Her work is very much a study of 
reggae, punk, and death metal in a particular time and 
place. +e complex mix of authoritarian and democra-
tizing elements that characterized the ,nal years of the 
“New Order” regime of Indonesian president Suharto is 
the backdrop to Baulch’s analysis. Although she refrains 
from overstating the connections between music and 
politics in this setting, Baulch e*ectively demonstrates 
throughout Making Scenes that the changing musi-
cal and subcultural affinities of Balinese youth were 
informed by state discourses on youth that were by turns 
a-rmative and repressive. Also crucial to her account is 
the transnational culture industry whose impact upon 
Bali was being experienced with new force during the 
years of her ,eldwork. Baulch observes of the emergent 
death metal scene in early 1990s Bali that the scene 
“seemed preoccupied with an elsewhere” (p. 56), taking 
its cues from a distinctly non-local repertoire of sounds, 
gestures, and visual style markers. Yet her work is no 
simple study of “Westernization.” Like Ian Condry in 
his valuable study of Japanese hip hop, or the contribu-
tors to the recent collection, Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy 
Metal Music Around the World, Baulch stresses the ways 
in which Balinese scene participants moved between 
local and trans-local frames of reference as they reshaped 
subcultural norms to suit their own purposes.
Within Bali, Baulch concentrates most of her atten-
tion on the interrelationship between metal and punk. 
Balinese death metal, for all its absorption of in.uences 
from “elsewhere,” was a determinedly underground 
phenomenon from the moment of its inception. Punk 
in Bali, by contrast, derived its early stimulus from the 
pop-punk style of Green Day. When Baulch arrived 
in Bali in 1996, the principal habitat for local punks 
was the shopping mall, a space that death metal adher-
ents treated with great ambivalence. At this stage, she 
observes, the punk embrace of global consumerism 
encouraged metal scene participants to put forth their 
own paradoxical brand of localism. Whereas death 
metal musicians “demonized the metropolis,” Balinese 
punks in this early phase “idealized it” (p. 100).
During the next three years, the oppositional character 
of metal/punk interaction would largely give way to 
a more complementary sensibility. Punk led the way 
in this transformation. Pop-infused “alternapunk” lost 
ground to a more confrontational style termed “punk 
chaos” or “punk anarki,” through which Balinese punk 
Emma Baulch, Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali.  Durham, 
NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 226 p.
227
Volum
e ! n° 9-2
assumed an underground stance more akin to that 
found in death metal. +e changes could be observed 
in the way that the mall was displaced by distinctive 
subcultural spaces that emerged in the Balinese capital 
of Denpasar, most notably Underdog State, a combi-
nation rehearsal studio, merchandise outlet, and café 
that “attracted death metal and punk groups alike” (p. 
137). Sharing space in this way created the ground-
work for a growing sense among Bali’s death metal and 
punk proponents that they were part of a “pangenre 
underground scene” that was also decidedly “pan-Indo-
nesian” in character (pp. 154-155). Soon, death metal 
and punk bands would be appearing side by side at 
underground music events, joined in their disdain for 
“trendy people” with “trendy ears” (p. 159).
Reggae occupies a comparatively subsidiary place in 
Baulch’s analysis. It is a third musical and cultural space 
wherein the tensions between local and global, under-
ground and commercial that inform the rest of Making 
Scenes assume a di*erent shape. Unlike either punk or 
metal, reggae’s place in Bali – or at least, the place that 
Baulch assigns it – is de,ned by the island’s tourist 
economy. Although Balinese reggae began in a kind 
of heterotopic border zone located at the beachside 
Bruna bar, by the late 1990s local performers such as 
Gus +ey principally value reggae for being “nice to 
sway to, to accompany the tourists as they get drunk” 
(p. 77). As such, reggae marks for Baulch “the power 
of state discourses, including state-generated discourses 
of tourism development,” to transform local landscapes 
and the forms of culture that can be sustained (p. 87). 
For death metal proponents in particular, reggae’s 
other-directed opportunism became another point of 
opposition against which the scene’s underground stat-
ure was forti,ed, but also in relation to which death 
metal could be construed as a more authentically 
“local” brand of music making.
+is emphasis on the interconnectedness of Bali’s vari-
ous scenes is the real strength of Making Scenes. Taking 
this approach, Baulch valuably interprets reggae, punk, 
and death metal all to be taking part in a larger dia-
logue concerning the practice of “Balineseness” in rela-
tion to widely circulating aspects of global cultural pro-
duction. One wishes at times that some of the broader 
ways in which punk and metal have assumed meaning 
in contexts outside of Bali were addressed with more 
attention. While it is interesting to learn that Green 
Day, for instance, had such a potent impact on the for-
mation of Balinese punk, it would be useful for Baulch 
to have o*ered more context for Green Day’s signi,-
cance relative to punk’s history and development, as it 
would have been for her to provide more background 
to the growth of a global extreme metal underground 
in the years leading up to the rise of Bali’s own death 
metal scene. Absent these elements, Making Scenes still 
provides much of interest for those wishing to under-
stand how competing music scenes, genres and subcul-
tures derive much of their meaning from the interac-
tions – whether con.icting or cooperative – that occur 
between one scene and another.
References
W(%%(/" J, B0)10) H. 2 G)0030 P. (eds.) (2011), 
Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the 
World, Durham & London, Duke University Press.
C#3&)4, I 2006, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of 
Cultural Globalization, Durham, Duke University Press 
H#%', F (2007), Genre in Popular Music, Chicago, 
University of Chicago Press.
W(5!6(3, S (2009), !is Ain’t the Summer of Love: 
Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk, 
Berkeley, University of California Press.
Steve W(5!6(3
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