The video I’m engaging with, entitled Sayur Kol! Arab Gokil Mantavv –– Punxgoaran Cover 3way Asiska (Cabbage! Crazy Arab Awesome –– Punxgoaran cover by 3way Asiska https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVxC_3KlNb4), is made by a small Indonesian social media collective known as 3Way Asiska, especially known for producing parodies of local and global music and popular culture. It is. What fascinates me about Sayur Kol is the depth and cleverness of its critique of recent conservative turns in what are often presented as “Indonesian” values and the breadth of its appreciation on social media. The video accomplished all this despite being made by young, then-relatively unknown, rurally-based kids with very simple tools, almost no money, and little training (see the behind the scenes video for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9rkhueW1j4). The way they work and the aesthetics that they consciously (and perhaps also unconsciously) innovate appear to be shaped by the global-digital specificities of YouTube and by the varied, but more specific, tastes of the massive domestic audience that the platform enjoys in Indonesia.

In this case the group sends up the politically sensitive, 2017 hit by the ethnically Batak punk/rock band Punxgoaran. The original song, also titled Sayur Kol, or “Cabbage,” tells the story of a man on the way to Siborongborong, a Batak area in Northern Sumatra, where he’s never been. It starts raining hard, but luckily a Batak woman appears and sizes him up (by asking about his family and clan lineage––“martarombo”), then suggestively invites him to her house to “eat cabbage with dog meat,” which is often considered an aphrodisiac.

The video for the Punxgoaran version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jzpEDLUYms) has received an impressive 15 million views on YouTube, while the Asiska parody stands at 32 million, making it a bigger “hit” in its own right. What interests me about the parody is how it comments on the potentially exotic, particular/subnational status of the original, while making a complex engagement with the issue of the Batak song’s haram-ness for the majority of Indonesians (Punxgoaran, like most Bataks, are part of a Christian minority, while dogs, and thus their meat, are considered extremely unclean for most Muslims). The parody uses these elements to turn the video and song from a local vs. national discourse to a cosmopolitan, globally-infused satire––but one that is still best understood from a local perspective. 

For me, this localized-cosmopolitan translation resonates with the aesthetic attitudes that dominated Indonesian and other Southeast Asian films in the 1950s and 60s (and beyond), while attaching these attitudes to an emergent, rough, do-it-yourself digital mode of production and representation. In the early post-independence films of writer-directors like Usmar Ismail, Nya Abbas Akup, or Armijn Pané, for example, we can see the rapid emergence of a sharp, critical wit that takes on Western imperialism, and especially Hollywood imperialism. Doing so, it uses ‘fake’ versions of popular Western/global cinematic tropes to reflect on their limitations, and thereby “lower” the overall status of such products and conventions. For example, in Akup’s 1958 film Djendral Kantjil (General Mousedeer), he mocks the transnational ubiquity of the western/cowboy genre in a carefully designed dream sequence. In it, cross-eyed children act like absurd-looking cowboys and Indians (Native Americans in this case), waving pistols and bows and arrows, smoking a hallucinatory “peace pipe” and riding obviously fake, plywood horses with wheels that roll on tracks between painted backdrops of tumbleweed and mountains. The much-heralded conventions of the western are thus stripped of their globe-trotting sheen and revealed as cheap, fake-looking constructions.

The way that Asiska’s parody does something similar (but also different) has a few layers to it. The first level of satire is the most obvious: changing out the haram dog meat for another unusual, but not unheard of (and halal) food that also evokes the Middle Eastern birthplace of Islam. The entire narrative of the song is the same, except that the mysterious Batak woman now invites the (non-Batak) male to “eat cabbage with camel meat.” The purposely stereotyped Arab costume and obviously superimposed mise-en-scène build on this image, placing the character––a young Indonesian man of Middle Eastern descent with a thick, allegedly ‘Arab’ accent––in the midst of a desert filled with camels and magic carpets. What could be understood (if you didn’t watch the video or listen to the song) as a typical “Islamization” of the original hence turns back on itself and pokes fun at the geographic and cultural-ethnic “sources” of Indonesia’s biggest religion. It makes them appear fake, foreign, and absurd, although without seeming to reject Islam more broadly. This is because what we are shown mainly relates to recent trends in local formal aspects of Muslim-ness that, when held up for critique, do not necessarily read as a rejection of the faith (and as far as I understand from other videos on their channel, the members of Asiska are products of Islamic boarding schools or pesantren).

Reading further into the parody, what seems to be the target is not the Christian-Batak reference to the (very) haram. Rather, I would argue the Asiska video works to poke fun at the waves of increasingly overt piousness and adoption or mimicry of Arab/Middle Eastern garb (and ways of pronouncing Qur’anic verses, among various other things) that have been steadily crashing on Indonesia since the fall of dictator Suharto in 1998 and advent of the democratic Reformasiperiod. While the lyrics are the same as the original (save for the one contested word: anjing/dog), the music couldn’t be more different. It starts off with a synthesized (and so also fake sounding) 1001 Nights-type flute melody that gradually turns into something closer to a Reggae-fied version of Javanese dangdut, an ultra-popular form of Indonesian music that is loosely associated with Islam, but transcends it. When a chorus of voices begins to chant “Eh-Ah-Eh!!” in between lines, the song becomes fully Javanized, and, because of the position of Java and Javanese culture nationally, to some extent “Indonesianized” (the group is ethnically Madurese, so have their own, Java-adjacent-identities). This implies a particular grounding for the kind of perspective that would understand what’s funny, and also what is clearly political, about the parody. It slyly falsifies not only aspects of mainstream religion, but with them, the ways in which conservative, allegedly scripturalist Islam has come to seem increasingly (and problematically) definitive of the “national.” In this sense, Asiska aligns itself with what appears to be the intent of Punxgoaran’s original––destabilizing the position of one, specific religion as a basis for the values of a nation made up of adherents of many different faiths––even while parodying it.

The fact that what they produced resonates with the political-modernist attitudes toward globalization shown by the exalted fathers (and mothers) of Indonesian national cinema suggests the presence of certain repeating aesthetic patterns and ideas. Like cultural undercurrents, these modes of representation can be expressed in different media at different times and clearly do not require big budgets to reach “the masses,” especially now in the digital era. To me this helps to explain the rapidity with which these emergent tools and networks caught on and were adopted for production, not simply reception, in Southeast Asia and especially in Indonesia. Contemporary Indonesian films are shown with increasing frequency on streaming services like Netflix, and are accordingly to some extent (although not completely, at least yet) translated in form and narrative for global audiences. As powerful, but somewhat less regulated platforms, social media like YouTube support political humor and aesthetics that exploit the huge potential audience at home. Content creators like Asiska are able to talk about the their particular relations to nation, region and world, potentially earning money as they do so, but without feeling the need to translate or explain themselves in “universal” terms. 

Sources

3 Way Asiska. 2019. Sayur Kol! Arab Gokil Mantavv –– Punxgoaran Cover 3way Asiska (Cabbage! Crazy Arab Awesome –– Punxgoaran cover by 3way Asiska) [Video]. YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVxC_3KlNb4).

3 Way Asiska. 2019. Kocak! Dibalik Video Sayur Qol versi Arab (Funny! Behind the Video Cabbage, Arab Version) [Video]. YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9rkhueW1j4).

Punxgoaran Official. 2017. Punxgoaran –– Sayur Kol (Punxgoaran –– Cabbage). [Video]. YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jzpEDLUYms).