The Airwaves

 

In 1977, Indonesian pop music was dying. Not the dramatic kind of dying, not the kind where there’s blood on the floor and somebody weeps and the priest reads something useful from Corinthians. It was the other kind. The slow, embarrassing kind. The kind of death that happens in a sick room where the curtains are always drawn and the television is always on and you can’t really remember, after a while, if the person in the bed was ever truly alive to begin with.

Remy Sylado knew it. He could smell it the way a good doctor smells gangrene—not with any pleasure, but with a kind of furious, almost helpless recognition. He was the era’s sharpest music critic, a man whose pen might as well have been a scalpel, and what he found when he cut into the body of Indonesian pop music in June of 1977 was not a living thing. It was a recording. It was the same four chords played in the same order, and over those four chords, the same word, over and over and over again, like a child pressing a bruise.

Why.

Why, why, why, why, why.

He wrote about it in the magazine Prisma, and you could feel the bile rising in every sentence, barely contained, like water behind a dam that was never built quite right. “The word ‘why’ has, on average, become a manifestation of spiritual uncertainty,” he wrote. “Pop art only asks ‘why’ over and over and never offers any answers.”

He was right, of course. He was savagely, depressingly right.

Think about what that means, really think about it—a nation’s music reduced to a single interrogative. A whole culture’s emotional vocabulary collapsed down to one syllable, one question, repeated until it lost all meaning, like a word you say too many times until your mouth can’t quite believe it’s making a real sound anymore. Why. Why. Why.

Try it yourself sometime. Say it enough and it stops being a question. It becomes something else. Something closer to a moan.

Even Tina Roy, a finalist in the 1975 Indonesian Popular Song Festival—a young woman with a real voice, a voice that could have done something, should have done something—even she’d been swallowed by the machine. Her song “Sampai Menutup Mata”—Until My Eyes Close, which sounds like the title of something sad and beautiful and true—had been bent and shaped and stuffed full of why until whatever was originally living inside it had suffocated. Written by Mus K. Wirya, who ought to have known better. Maybe he did know better. Maybe that’s the worst part.

Sylado went after everyone. He was democratic in his contempt, and there is something almost admirable about that, the way a man who truly loves something is the most dangerous enemy of the people who are killing it. He went after A. Riyanto, the mainstream star who had built a career out of giving people exactly what they expected and never, ever anything more. He went after God Bless, those loud, swaggering rock boys he called “the studs,” with their leather and their feedback and their fundamental belief that volume was the same thing as passion. He went after Panbers. He even went after Koes Plus—Koes Plus, for God’s sake, the band that half of Indonesia had grown up loving—specifically their song “Seminggu Yang Lalu,” A Week Ago, and if you think that wasn’t going to make enemies, you don’t understand how much people love the music of their youth, how much they will defend it, how a song can become a sacred object that no one is allowed to touch.

Sylado touched it anyway. He touched all of it. He was that kind of man.

But here’s the thing about sick rooms—sometimes the dying is not inevitable. Sometimes someone throws open the curtains.

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The radio station was called Prambors Rassisonia, and in another context, in another story, it might have been unremarkable. Radio stations come and radio stations go. Most of them exist in a state of comfortable irrelevance, playing whatever is safe, whatever is proven, whatever will keep the advertisers from making that particular phone call that nobody wants to receive. But Prambors had always been different. Prambors had always considered itself, with the particular confidence of the truly committed, the number-one music station in Jakarta. More than that—it thought of itself as a youth station. It understood, in its bones, that young people were not a demographic. They were a force.

And so, in the middle of this cultural malaise, someone at Prambors—and we don’t know exactly whose idea it was, which seems right, because the best ideas often arrive like weather, from no single direction—someone said: What if we just ask them?

What if we ask the kids?

The call went out to high school students, to college students, to anyone in Jakarta young enough to believe that the world could be different from what it was. Got a song? Send it in. We’ll make it a competition. Simple as that. Casual as a dare made on a school roof on a hot afternoon. You can almost hear the shrug in it.

The competition was called the Lomba Cipta Lagu Remaja—the LCLR—which translates roughly to the Youth Songwriting Competition, which sounds modest, academic even, the kind of thing you’d see on a flyer tacked to a community center bulletin board. Don’t let that fool you. It didn’t look like a revolution. Revolutions rarely do, at first. They look like a flyer. They look like a dare.

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Sys NS—Soerio Soebagio, who went by the nickname Sergeant Prambors because of course he did, because that was the kind of world this was, a world where the people shaping the culture were young enough to still find their nicknames funny—served on the LCLR committee. Later he would become a politician, found the Democratic Party, navigate the treacherous waters of Indonesian political life. But in 1977 he was just a young man who understood what the music had become, and it made him tired in the way that only witnessing something preventable can make you tired.

“Back then,” he said, “our pop music was basically just a commercial product that barely cared about quality.”

The melodies were simple and repetitive. The chords were the chords everyone always used, worn smooth as worry stones from handling. The lyrics—well. We’ve been over the lyrics. The same template, used and reused until the paper had gone thin and translucent, until you could hold it up to the light and see right through it to whatever cynical calculus had produced it in the first place.

The Festival Lagu Populer Indonesia had been running since 1971, and God bless it, it had tried, but it had also been captured by the same formulas, the same safe choices, the same terrified avoidance of anything that might not connect, might not sell, might not make someone, somewhere, comfortable. And comfort is a fine thing, in its place. But comfort is not art. Comfort does not change anything. Comfort is just the absence of risk, dressed up warm and offered to you like a blanket, and you can take it if you want—most people do—but you should know what you’re giving up when you pull it around your shoulders and stop.

Meanwhile, in high school hallways and teenagers’ bedrooms—in those small, close spaces where the real thinking happens, where the real music always comes from—something was happening. You could feel it if you paid attention. A restlessness. An itch. Kids writing songs that didn’t sound like the songs on the radio, playing them for their friends on battered guitars, singing them into recorders held too close to the microphone. Brilliant, raw, imperfect, alive. And completely invisible to anyone who mattered.

That was the gap. Between what was being made and what was being heard, there was a chasm—not particularly dramatic, not the Grand Canyon, nothing so mythic. Just a quiet, ordinary chasm of the kind that swallows talent every single day, all over the world, without anyone marking the occasion.

Prambors saw it. And they built a bridge.

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No one was prepared for what happened next.

You understand—they expected something. They weren’t naive. But the results from that first competition landed with the force of a fist against a chest, and anyone who tells you otherwise is misremembering or lying. Three of the standout tracks—“Akhir dari Sebuah Opera,” “Angin,” and “Di Malam Sang Sukma Datang”—came from members of the SMA III Jakarta Vocal Group: Fariz RM, Adjie Soetama, Raidy Noor, Iman RN. High school students. High school students. Names that would later be spoken with the reverence reserved for the genuinely great, names that would be on albums that people’s children and children’s children would still be listening to, and in 1977 they were teenagers doing homework and eating lunch in a cafeteria and writing songs that would outlast all of them.

“Kemelut” by Junaedi H. Salat officially took first place. But the song the people loved—the song that Prambors would eventually call their Most Beloved Song, which is a title that means something, that carries weight—was “Lilin-Lilin Kecil.” Little Candles. Written by James F. Sundah.

The track was simple. This matters. Simplicity is not the same as emptiness, and the music industry of 1977 had confused the two so thoroughly that it had started to seem like they might be the same thing, like they might always have been the same thing. “Lilin-Lilin Kecil” was proof that they were not. It was warm in the way that only things without pretension can be warm. It was the musical equivalent of a light left on in a window.

It was sung by a young man named Chrismansyah Rahardi.

You know him as Chrisye.

He was already in those circles, already present in the underground rooms where the real conversations happened, playing bass alongside Eros Djarot and Jockie Surjoprajogo. But “Lilin-Lilin Kecil” was the moment the world found out. It was the moment a candle became visible beyond the room where it was burning.

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If LCLR 1977 was a spark—and it was, it absolutely was, a spark struck against flint in the dark—then LCLR 1978 was what happens after a spark meets something dry.

It was fire.

First place in 1978 went to “Khayal”—Illusion—by Christ Kaihatu and Tommy WS, performed by Purnama Sultan, and it was good, it was genuinely good. But once again the official winner and the people’s winner were different creatures, and once again the people were right in the way that crowds are sometimes right, that they know something before the judges do, that they feel in their chests what the scorecards can’t quite capture.

The song they loved was “Kidung.”

“Kidung” was written by Chris Manusama and performed by the trio of Bram, Dianne, and Chris, and it was—there is no other word for it—a revolution. Not a political revolution, not the kind with barricades and proclamations, but the deeper, stranger kind. The kind that happens inside a person while they’re listening to something they didn’t know they needed. The lyrics were not about heartbreak. They were not about a lover who left or a lover who stayed or a lover who was considering either option while the narrator stood in the rain asking why, why, why. They were about something older and more frightening and more beautiful than any of that.

They were about a servant’s intimacy with God.

The twinkling star smiles playfully,

as if it understands the meaning and the feeling.

Oh, beautiful hymn, you have delivered me

from one of my sins.

Read that again. Actually read it. In the context of what Indonesian pop music had been—the formulaic heartbreak, the commercial calculation, the endless interrogation of loss—those words landed like an open window in a sealed room. The melody moved between major and minor keys in ways that were exceptionally rare in mainstream pop, ways that felt inevitable once you heard them and impossible to imagine in advance. It was the melody of something that had always existed but had never been played.

The full 1978 LCLR album—titled Dasa Tembang Tercantik, Ten Most Beautiful Songs, named by Prambors creator Temmy Lesanpura—was arranged entirely by Jockie Surjoprajogo, the Musical Adventurer, and he brought to it piano, organ, bass synthesizer, and mellotron, and he arranged it with the ambition of someone who understood that they were standing at the edge of something historic and intended to be worthy of the moment. In the context of 1978 music, the soundscapes in that album felt like transmissions from a few years in the future, stylish and strange and utterly alive. That album would eventually be ranked No. 3 on Rolling Stone Indonesia’s list of the 150 Greatest Indonesian Albums of All Time.

Number three. Of all time.

And the 1978 LCLR album also gave the world Keenan Nasution—a Batak musician whose songs “Awan Putih” and “Saat Harapan Tiba” lodged themselves in the collective memory of a generation and stayed there, the way the best songs always stay, the way they become part of the furniture of your inner life until you can no longer remember a time before them.

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Each year the competition evolved. Each year it pushed further. By the third year, LCLR had incorporated classical and rhythm-and-blues influences, Debby Nasution bringing the heavy, gorgeous gravity of the Hammond organ, J.S. Bach processed through a Jakarta teenager’s understanding of what music could be, and Addie MS arriving with the horns and the groove of Earth, Wind & Fire, that irresistible American machine of funk and soul, filtered through something entirely its own. And every year the most anticipated album release in Indonesian music was the new Dasa Tembang Tercantik, the new ten best songs, a document of where the music had gotten to and a hint of where it was going.

In 1979 it was Ikang Fawzi, and his song “Cahaya Kencana,” performed by rock legend Achmad Albar, landing at No. 3 like a fist on a table.

In 1980 it was Dian Pramana Poetra with “Pengabdian,” Devotion—a name that would become one of the most productive in the history of Indonesian songwriting.

In 1981 it was Utha Likumahuwa, whose voice had a quality that is very hard to describe without resorting to the kind of language that sounds overblown until you hear the thing it’s trying to describe—a jazz-inflected uniqueness, a willingness to go to the places where the melody got uncomfortable and stay there, to make the discomfort beautiful.

And then 1982/1983, and the cover of the Dasa Tembang Tercantik compilation featuring a young woman who had just returned from Germany. Vina Panduwinata. The slight German accent, the presence, the sense—unmistakable, the way these things are always unmistakable in retrospect—that something had just turned over. That a page had been turned.

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This was the era of what the music journalists called creative pop—Seno M. Hardjo and Bens Leo coined the term to mark the distinction between what LCLR was producing and the picisan pop, the cheap pop, the formulaic heartbreak machine that had prompted Remy Sylado’s furious critique back in 1977. Creative pop blended global and local influences with a confidence that didn’t need to announce itself. It was sophisticated without being cold. It was nostalgic without being sentimental. It was—and this is the thing that mattered most, the thing that made it real—good.

People who listened to LCLR songs occupied a certain position in the culture. There was a prestige to it. Not a snobbish prestige, not the kind that excludes—the kind that invites, the kind that says come hear this, come hear what we found, come hear what these kids made out of nothing but talent and ambition and a radio station that was willing to throw open the doors.

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It couldn’t last forever. Nothing does. After the 1982/1983 album, LCLR went into a long hiatus, nearly four years, and you can trace the reasons if you like—the shifts in the industry, the rise of the cassette era, the way young people were finding their own paths through the emerging indie scene, producing and distributing their own music with a freedom that no competition could quite match or replicate. The world had changed, as worlds do, quietly and without asking permission.

LCLR came back from 1987 to 1991. It came back briefly again in 1995. And then there was 1996, the final Dasa Tembang Tercantik edition, and the music was once again arranged by Jockie Surjoprajogo—the only musical director who had been there from the very first competition in 1977, who had guided the whole improbable thing from its inception to its conclusion, who had been at takeoff and was there for the final landing. There is something right about that. Something that feels like intention, like narrative, like a long story that knew how it needed to end.

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Did LCLR truly end?

Ask that question carefully, because the answer depends on what you mean by end.

The contest ended. The trophies gathered dust, as trophies do, in whatever closets and archives hold such things. The radio station moved on, because radio stations move on, because that is what they do, it is their nature, they exist in time and time carries them.

But Vidi Aldiano recorded Keenan Nasution’s “Nuansa Bening” and a new generation heard it and something passed between them, across the years, across the distance, the way these things pass.

And Titi DJ—who first rose to fame with “Salahkah Aku” in the 1990/1991 edition of LCLR, who was herself a product of this machine, this beautiful accidental machine—performed remastered versions of the early classics, and the songs sounded like what they always were: not nostalgia, but continuation.

The music didn’t end.

Music never really ends. It just changes rooms.

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What Prambors gave Indonesia was not only songs, though the songs were extraordinary. What it gave was proof. Proof that the death of a culture is not inevitable. Proof that creative suffocation—the slow, depressing, why, why, why death that Remy Sylado had diagnosed with such bitter precision—can be reversed. Proof that sometimes the right institution at the right moment with the right crazy idea can throw open all the windows at once and let the air back in.

It was a gamble. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Sys NS and Imran Amir and Mohammad Noor and Temmy Lesanpura and all the others who made it happen were betting that the kids had it in them, that the songs were already written and just waiting for somewhere to be heard, that talent exists in inverse proportion to opportunity and all you have to do—all you ever have to do—is build the bridge and then get out of the way.

They were right.

The airwaves carried it. That’s what the airwaves do. They carry things. They carry music and voices and the desperate, hopeful transmission of one mind toward another, and sometimes—not always, but sometimes, if you’re very lucky, if the moment is right—they carry something that changes everything.

Lilin-lilin kecil. Little candles.

Enough of them in the dark, and you can see.