Rhoma is one of those musical geniuses who bends genres, mixes influences and smuggles multiple ideas to an unsuspecting public that mistakes the sound and fury as his own. Rhoma wields so much influence that he was able to send shivers down the spines of the security apparatus of the New Order regime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rhoma was responsible for creating a unique mix of influences taken from both indigenous and foreign musical traditions and made it something that Indonesia can really claim as its own.īy trading acoustic instruments traditionally used in Melayu music with Western-oriented electrical instruments - guitar, Hammond organ and mandolin - Rhoma found a medium to express novel sentiment, some of it political, which he used to communicate with millions of his fans throughout Indonesia. The tribute is indeed fitting for a figure that not only transformed a musical genre but also left a mark on the country’s social and political landscape. In 2007, he founded the Dangdut Cowboys, a tribute band that plays Rhoma’s biggest hits and deep cuts. In fact, Weintraub is so enamored with dangdut that he wrote a tome on the subject titled Dangdut Stories: A Social and Musical History of Indonesia’s Most Popular Music, published in 2010. It is easy to see why Pittsburgh University ethnomusicology professor Andrew Weintraub is so fascinated by Rhoma Irama and his brand of dangdut. Yee-haw: American ethnomusicologist Andrew Weintraub (center), the lead singer and guitarist of Pittsburgh-based dangdut tribute band the Dangdut Cowboys, converses with fellow band members before kicking off their performance at American cultural center on Saturday. This article originally appeared in The Jakarta Post on March 18, 2019 Weintraub was a 1993 Fulbright-Hays DDRA grantee and 2006 Fulbright US Scholar.
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