Politik kekirian: Ucok and Homicide’s brokerages of protests in Bandung, Indonesia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine politics and protest during the post-authoritarian Indonesian regime by analysing the song ‘Puritan (God Blessed Fascists)’ by Homicide (2002)., drawing from my fieldwork in Bandung and Jakarta to do so. By framing my analysis through Bräuchler’s (2019) notion of rappers as ‘protest brokers’, I identify three key sites of protest in Homicide’s song: morality, ideology, and policy. My research shows that Indonesian rappers in the early 2000s, especially those from Bandung, tried to fight the rise of conservatism and fascism by reclaiming their space through the so-called ‘Bandung underground scene’. In Bandung, rappers, their politics and their acts of protest were direct, despite the city and the region being home to the largest concentration of radical Islamic groups in Indonesia. By tapping into their ‘leftist’ ideologies, Homicide established a resistance network in which other rappers could participate and reclaimed their space in an increasingly politicised city.