The young men have traveled many kilometers
to the one-mosque town of Pelaihari in Indonesia's South Kalimantan
province to see the country's hottest and most controversial dangdut
singer. They're rowdy, they're eager and, in clear defiance of the laws of
physics, all 10,000 of them want in, now, through the soccer stadium's
single narrow entrance. The snarling soldiers posted as security are
helpless against this crush of sweating humanity. Somehow we all push
through safely, and for a moment we pause inside the stadium, the open
space disorienting after such close quarters. Then Inul swaggers on stage,
packed in tight red jeans and a glittering crimson tank top. She turns her
back to the audience. The guitars crunch, Inul's hips swing low and hard,
and I realize why we labored to breech this gate.
Like her spiritual kin Eminem, Inul
Daratista is whatever you say she is. Her singing would make Simon Cowell
cringe, but she regularly packs concerts and performs on national
television. She hasn't released a single recording, but one critic
estimates that some 3 million pirated VCDs of her performances have been
sold in Indonesia. Muslim clerics denounce her bump-and-grind dancing,
attempt to ban her concerts, even pray for rain to keep impressionable
fans away from her shows, yet politicians are lining up to recruit her
support for the 2004 elections. She's become the live wire connecting
Indonesia's still nascent freedom of expression with the country's
entrenched—and often hypocritical—moral majority, yet her popularity
just keeps surging. "She's the one and only one who can survive [in
the country's cutthroat music scene]," says maverick TV and music
producer Arswendo Atmowiloto. "She's what the people want."
And the people have placed phenomenal
demands on the country's one-and-only pop sensation. "I'm very tired,
very happy and a bit depressed," she says over lunch in Pelaihari.
Last night she finished a late perfomrance in the city of Melak, took a
three-hour motorboat trip, a 1 1/2-hour flight and then an hour-long drive
to make it to Pelaihari. It's her 11th show in 11 cities in 11 days, the
heart of a brutal if-this-is-Monday-it-must-be-Balikpapan tour of the
Kalimantan region. With reddened eyes and leftover makeup—not to mention
the diamonds embedded in her teeth—she looks older than her 24 years but
acts younger, clutching a pillow to her chest and resting her head on a
TIME reporter's shoulder. In 10 hours she'll be doing her heavy-duty Fly
Girl routine on a Pelaihari stage; 12 hours after that, she'll be in
Jakarta running through a version of her moves for SCTV. She hasn't seen
her family in more than three months. No one said the life of an itinerant
dangdut singer was easy.
But then few dangdut performers have reached
Inul's level of national popularity, and none so quickly. Inul (her real
name is Ainul Rokhimah; Inul Daratista means "the girl with the
breasts") was born poor in the East Java village of Kejapanan,
Gempol. She started her performing career as a rock singer at age 12 but
soon switched to dangdut, the beat-happy folk-pop blend of Indian,
Arab and Malay music that has long been the sound of rural Indonesia.
Originally the music of the lower class, complete with bawdy lyrics and
sexually suggestive dancing, dangdut was cleaned up in the late
1970s and '80s when it was popularized by singers like Rhoma Irama, who
diversified the music and turned the lyrics safely sweet. Cynical
politicians began using dangdut musicians, including Suharto
favorite Rhoma, to court the lower classes. "Dangdut has been
corrupted for the political campaigns," says Kompas music
critic Bre Redana. In a familiar Indonesian story, the music of the people
became a tool of the powerful.
Inul wants to take it back. "The real Inul is the
people's singer," she says. Her roots run deep in dangdut's
heartland. Though she initially earned a mere 40¢ per gig, Inul built a
strong following in East Java, where her slam-dancing style was hardly
unique. "A singer like Inul is quite familiar there," says Bre,
who's been following Inul for two years. "You could find so many
Inuls in any small town in East or Central Java."
East Java may have seen enough of Inul, but
Jakarta was about to feel her heat. In January, Inul came to Jakarta and
performed on Warung
Tojedo, a national television program. Virtually overnight, Inulmania
swept Indonesia, and within weeks, Inul was bumping and grinding on the
cover of major national magazines and appearing on television more often
than the country's President. Inul's concert fees rose dramatically, to
anywhere from $1,100 to $1,700 per show. TV programs in which she appeared
consistently drew 14 share points, well above the norm for music shows.
Indonesians snapped up copies of illegally recorded VCDs of Inul's old
East Java performances—making her perhaps the first musician to owe much
of her fame to piracy.
Such sudden and vertiginous popularity was
bound to provoke a backlash, and in Indonesia it came not from teens who
discovered a newer, hotter idol but from Muslim clerics condemning a false
one. In a country obsessed with thy neighbor's morality, Inul's dancing
was deemed pornographic. In early February, the Indonesian Ulemas Council
(MUI), concerned that Inul's performances encouraged lustful acts,
declared that her dancing and costume were circumscribed by its July 2002
fatwa against pornography. Authorities in devout Yogyakarta banned Inul
from performing, fearing that she would "degrade the morality of the
highly civilized and educated residents" of the city. Tabloids had a
field day when Taufik Kiemas, President Megawati Sukarnoputri's husband,
was photographed shaking his considerable booty behind Inul after a TV
performance. Even the television stations profiting from her appearances
paid unintentional homage to Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show
by cutting away from Inul's hips when gyrations commenced. Many
middle-class and upper-class Indonesians read their papers and shook their
heads at the controversy—then told their drivers to pick up a copy of
Inul's VCD.
On the way to meet a glad-handing official for lunch in
Pelaihari, Inul appears spent after a night of "drilling," as
her dance has been termed by the Indonesian media. Yet one mention of her
detractors is enough to energize her. "Write this down," she
commands. "The MUI should realize that Indonesia is not a Muslim
country, it's a democratic country." Inul, who says she prays daily,
insists that her art doesn't clash with her Islamic beliefs and suspects
the religious hierarchy castigates her because the real threats to
Indonesia's fragile morality, particularly corrupt officials, are too
dangerous to attack. "Why should they care about me when there are
pornographic VCDs and prostitutes in the street? They choose me because I
am an easy target."
It's difficult to understand why the
authorities need to save Indonesians from the dangers of Inul. True, her
wardrobe seems to consist entirely of Lycra, but her sartorial style and
stage manner are tame compared with the scantily clad Indian stars who can
be found shimmying away on any TV in the country. And as for the forbidden
dance itself, it's less erotic than pneumatic. As Inul bends her knees and
swings her butt—in what, after careful and repeated observations, I'd
estimate to be a 120° arc—she resembles a glittering piston. Betraying
her rock roots, Inul doesn't so much twist in time with the music as
arrhythmically hurl herself around the stage like a dangdut Joan
Jett. If her performance is inspiring Indonesians to lustful acts, I just
hope they limber up first.
—With
reporting by Zamira Loebis/Jakarta