Javanese Black Metal: towards a definition of post-heritage music

Folk metal, as a genre combining features of metal and different “traditional” musics, raises several issues concerning the construction of national identity through music. This is especially true in multiethnic and multicultural countries like Indonesia, where ethnic, regional, and national identity are in a constant process of renegotiation and settlement. My paper, starting from the song Pitakon Djroning Kubur by the band Pandhowo, intends to analyze the musical elements of Javanese Black Metal, a folk metal style born in Java in the last decade, characterized by pentatonic scales, sampled traditional instruments and long gamelan-like introduction. These features seem to match the description made by Owe Roström in his paper published in the Oxford Handbook of Music Revival (2014) for the forms of Heritage Music where “specific forms of traditional music are boiled down to a minimum of signs, a few distinctive and highly typified stylistic traits that become possible to download and stage everywhere” . Despite the attempt to assert its rebellious nature, Javanese Black Metal absorbs from the State the discourses about the construction of a stronger national identity, and from the Heritage industry the means and strategies to compete within the global metal scene by producing what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) calls the “value of difference”. At the end I propose to investigate folk metal as a dynamic process in which contrasting elements are at stake: as a genre through which musicians try to assert their threatened (national) identity, as Deena Weinstein demonstrates in her chapter in the book Pop Pagan (2014), but also as a key point to verify and investigate broad cultural processes that characterize globalization.