Club culture shakes Jakarta
By Dini S. Djalal
JAKARTA (JP): Is club culture coming to Jakarta? The last year has seen a spate of new clubs shifting the city's sonic tolerance to new levels.
But neither the model-infested Garasi at the Jakarta Stock Exchange Building, a newly-refurbished Tanamur, or smaller dens like @ Cafe (pronounced as At Cafe) and Morgan's, can compare to the behemoth christened Bengkel jutting out in the middle of the Sudirman Central Business District.
A 11,000 square-meter pyramid-shaped tome to steel, glass, and cement, three-floored Bengkel offers 60,000 watts of that which parents love to loathe: pure noise.
And it's not even noise that they're used to reviling. The rock'n'roll which terrorized trustees of tranquil homes is slowly being replaced by even more incomprehensible rhythms. Open your eyes to the blinding strobe lights and your ears to the pulsating beats. The future is here, and it's called electronica.
Electronica is the buzzword ripping through the United States to describe the dance music that's been coming out of the U.K. for the last 10 years. And save for churning a few Beatles tribute albums (whither Oasis?), the Brits are making their name in music circles dancing out of the dole.
House, deep house, hard house, techno, trance, garage, ambient, trip-hop, acid jazz, jazz funk, soul, jungle, drum'n'bass, ragga: spot the train your itchy feet want to hop on. London's night-out listing Time Out scans the expanding terms of musical terminology, and offers more than 50 clubs on a Saturday night, a good 20 more than 10 years ago.
But the bookish ghettoization of dance music has its drawbacks. Young men turned pale from spending too much time in record shops rule over turntables and fanzines like music fascists, dissecting bands and deejays like Oppenheimer peering over a microscopic atom. To become famous in England means becoming unfamous almost immediately after. Music has long been a religion for unemployed British youth, but this piety is often so zealous that it has lost the joy.
As the wise men say, ignorance is bliss. When Ministry of Sound, England's biggest club, took over Bengkel last Saturday, what stayed most on the minds of deejays Marc Auerbach and Jan Mehmet was the audience's unfettered glee.
"Wicked, mate!", Auerbach and Mehmet repeated over and over again on the mammoth stage and off as they presided over more than 7,000 writhing bodies. Ministry's two resident deejays, who had never heard of Jakarta prior to this visit, were shocked that so many people turned up. And better yet, turned up happy.
"The vibe is like England in the late 1980s," said Auerbach, describing the atmosphere as "still innocent". London, Auerbach said, was "too serious" and "elitist". In fact, the deejays thought the mood that night was so good that they regarded it as one of the best shows they have ever done.
And that's a lot of shows. In the six years since its inception, Ministry of Sound has not only become the biggest club in the U.K., but the biggest club in the world, touring through the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. The original club, a booming maze of tunnels and caves in South London, week in and week out still packs the crowds, mixing out-of-towners with local celebrities (a few dishevelled members of Take That marked my last visit).
In fact, Ministry has become so big, it's less club than corporation. After all, the Ministry of Sound Recordings is the largest independent label in Europe. Ministry was also one of the first clubs to charge exorbitant entry fees -- 15 (Rp 70,000) on a Saturday night and more on special occasions. Ministry charged Rp 30,000 for their show in Jakarta.
Nightclubbing
Many making a living of nightclubbing say that Ministry's business mentality is helping ruin club culture.
They claim that corporate sponsorship -- Pepsi on last year's tour, Levi's for the Indonesia show and Sony, which allegedly paid 50,000 (Rp 250 million) for a Playstation room at the London club -- is undermining the "underground" spirit of clubbing.
Deejays once commanded only triple-digit fees; years ago, Ministry paid Todd Terry only $150 a night. He now demands 10,000 (Rp 50 million) after his remix of Everything But the Girl's Missing became a worldwide platinum hit. A top deejay easily walks away with 5,000 pounds a night, plus first-class airfare and accommodation.
Clubbing for music
What really matters, said manager of Bengkel Anton Wirjono, is having fun. "Most people in Jakarta don't know what Ministry is, they're not experts in club culture," he said. "They don't know if it's commercial. It's just good entertainment, it's fun, that's the most important thing."
Anton is trying to bring in more outside deejays, such as Boy George and the deejays of Liverpool's club central Cream, because he wants kids to come clubbing for the music, not drugs.
"That's the next step, bringing in deejays from abroad so that people here can better understand club culture. I want to shift the attention on dance music away from drugs," said Anton.
Anton doesn't have to convince 23-year-old Ndun, a student at Jakarta's Institute of Arts. Ndun danced for four hours non-stop to Ministry's tribal rumble, without any chemical assistance. "If you take Ecstasy, you can't appreciate the subtle nuances in the music," said Ndun.
The nuances Ndun loved, however, were somewhat lacking on the night. "The first set wasn't so good. I expected harder beats, something different. I wanted to hear some Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, and jungle," he said.
He may have never been to London but he is well-versed in dance music, going often to raves held at his college. And he's heard of Ministry of Sound -- specifically of its commercial reputation.
So has Simon, an 18-year-old high-school student who wants to be a deejay. He has read about Ministry of Sound in music magazines, particularly deejay magazine Mixmag, which he bought in Singapore.
"I go clubbing about three times a month," said Simon, mostly to Bengkel, Garasi, or, before Anton moved to Bengkel as deejay and manager, Parkit. Simon said that if more deejays come from London or the U.S., he'd definitely stand in line to see them. That is exactly what the management at Bengkel likes to hear.