When YouTube launched twenty years ago, I was in the final month of PhD fieldwork in Bandung, Indonesia, researching the DIY hardcore scene. At the time, digital video was well-established in the scene but still largely circulated hand-to-hand, on CD or VCD. I can’t claim to have noticed the launch of the now ubiquitous video sharing platform, but in the years following I would regularly find or be sent links to Indonesian hardcore recordings uploaded to the site. YouTube clearly met a need (or desire) in the scene for networked video hosting. Yet it also accelerated the process – already evident in the uptake of early social networking sites – of DIY media moving onto corporate-owned platforms. This raises questions about the autonomy of DIY cultural production as it has been drawn into an emerging “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017) that thrives on user-generated content.

Here, I am considering a video of a 2023 live performance by the Bandung straight edge hardcore band Manusia Buatan – a band who participated in my research back in 2004-2005, but who have also been sporadically uploading new recordings of live shows to YouTube over the last few years. This video, uploaded to the band’s YouTube channel on October 19, 2023, captures their set at Sumedang Edgefest a few days earlier. Like many videos hosted on YouTube, this recording does not fit neatly into any of the major formats that are made natively for YouTube. In many ways the video is much more like those that were copied and passed around in the scene twenty years ago, although the context of being on YouTube alongside billions of other videos does frame it rather differently. Part of this framing is the band’s active refusal to make “YouTube videos” despite making videos that are hosted on YouTube. Indonesia has an active YouTube user base and audience, and in this theme week of In Media Res both Dag Yngvesson and Frans Ari Prasetyo discuss examples of viral YouTube videos from Indonesia with millions of views. Live music videos can also do well on YouTube – yet Manusia Buatan eschews the pursuit of virality or even popularity.

The relative unpopularity of their videos can be taken as a marker of their “DIY authenticity”, a form of value which is based on the autonomous organisation of DIY production as well as being associated with particular aesthetic markers (Martin-Iverson 2016). In the case of the Edgefest video, this is associated with the intimacy of the video and its presumed audience as well as recording features that convey a feeling of “liveness” – a sense of presence and immediacy along with a messy amateurishness of production. As Lingel and Naaman (2011, 333) argue, such DIY videos on YouTube serve an important archival function and “are valued as a replication not only of the music recorded, but of the experience of attending shows; and offer a point of connection within fan communities”.

The Manusia Buatan video captures their full set, with most of the video comprising a single, unedited, fixed camera shot. The poor lighting, low fidelity sound, and somewhat awkward camera angle convey that this is a “Do-It-Yourself”, non-professional recording. It does, however, capture all of the band members, their interactions with the small audience, and the cramped and ramshackle performance space – all communicating a strong sense of DIY authenticity. These features also reinforce that the video is intended primarily to document the original live performance, rather than as an entertaining aesthetic object in its own right.

Some limited editing and processing has been done, such as adding a title card and song titles to strengthen the video’s archival value. Most notably, there is a short introductory section (00:00 – 01:33) showing the venue, the merch tables, and the collective work of setting up for the show, conveying a sense of place and DIY community. The video begins with a shot of the neighbourhood as seen from the entrance of the venue, situating the show at its (unadvertised) location on the outskirts of Sumedang, a town in West Java near Bandung which has long been an important centre for the area’s straight edge scene. The camera then turns inside, where we see people gathering and setting up, highlighting the intimate and collective nature of the show. The merch tables, non-alcoholic refreshments, and leaflets on display further reinforce that this is both a DIY and a straight edge show.

Sumedang Edgefest was one of many held around the world marking “Edge Day”, and so the liveness of the show itself and the “liveness” of the recording express both the coming together of the local straight edge scene and its translocal connections. Straight edge (sXe) is a hardcore punk movement and lifestyle based on abstinence from alcohol and other drugs (and often from eating meat as well). Straight edge “youth crew” bands formed a significant current within the Bandung DIY hardcore scene in the early 2000s, combining their commitment to straight edge with an anti-commercial and sometimes explicitly anti-capitalist DIY ethic. While this scene is ageing, they still cultivate something of a youthful sensibility and affect, especially through an emphasis on (largely homosocial) friendship and a sincerity of commitment to straight edge and DIY principles, while rejecting commercial youth culture. We see an expression of this youth crew sincerity in Manusia Buatan vocalist Tedy’s introduction to their song “SXE is What We Are”: 

“This is for all our friends who – back in the day, a lot of people in the scene who were into hardcore, into punk, liked to smoke, to drink. That’s fine, whatever. But as for ourselves: straight edge is what we are!” (11:55 – 12:11, my translation)

Gestures of amateurish intimacy and personal sincerity are also a significant feature of major genres of YouTuber videos (Cunningham and Craig 2017), although they are harnessed to an embrace of marketing and brand culture which is anathema to DIY hardcore. It is not just that the specific aesthetics of the Manusia Buatan video are out of step with the major styles of YouTube video, but that they refuse the platform’s logic of branding and viral growth. It is the social relations of production that are most definitive when it comes to evaluating DIY authenticity, but also in which DIY values conflict with their use of the YouTube platform. DIY hardcore and similar underground scenes have always relied on appropriating (or reappropriating) the infrastructure of the commercial culture industry as well as finding spaces of autonomy. Yet, while individual DIY videos such as Manusia Buatan’s are not directly profitable for YouTube and do not replicate the dominant logic of the platform, they add to the overall bulk of low-viewership videos which, as aggregated “content”, contribute to the overall growth and value of YouTube as a corporate enterprise. Still, rather than a total subsumption of DIY production and its values into platform capitalism, I view the fact that videos such as “Manusia Buatan Live @Sumedang Edgefest 2023” are now typically hosted on YouTube as a further iteration of the partial and contradictory nature of DIY autonomy.

References

Cunningham, Stuart and David Craig. 2017. “Being ‘Really Real’ on YouTube: Authenticity, Community and Brand Culture in Social Media Entertainment.” Media International Australia 164 (1): 71-81.

Lingel, Jessa and Mor Naaman. 2011. “You Should Have Been There, Man: Live Music, DIY Content and Online Communities.” New Media & Society 14 (2): 332-349.

Martin-Iverson, Sean. 2016. “Punk Sejati: The Production of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Authenticity in the Indonesian Hardcore Punk Scene”. In Punks, Monks and Politics: Authenticity in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, edited by Julian C.H. Lee and Marco Ferrarese, 105-124. Rowman & Littlefield.

Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Polity Press.