Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997-2001. New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies

The social science research agenda on Indonesia has historically focused on the nation's socio-economic extremes: the majority restricted to the poverty-stricken villages and urban slums versus the elite power brokers entrenched in metropolitan high-rises and government offices. The musicians and fans that represent the primary subjects of Wallach's project represent an emerging middle class of educated, but hardly wealthy, youth who have seized upon emergent electoral democracy and defied the attribution of "depoliticized floating mass" assigned to their parents.