Rakyat MTV: music videos and the quest for a reified cultural identity in post-Suharto Indonesia

• Main Author: Lee, Abigail Qi-En
• Other Authors: Marc Gloede
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Visual arts and music; Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166356
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

As creative spectacles, as well as becoming a new tool to stoke engagement for the music industry’s commercialistic landscape, music videos quickly became short-form visualisers steeped in the popular culture of their eras. In such a manner, music videos encapsulate the politics and aesthetics of their makers, whether they be popular and pandering to the mainstream or pushing the boundaries of censorship and controversy. This paper aims to demonstrate that the study of aesthetics in Indonesian music videos, between political eras functions to engage with the effects of globalisation and censorship on regional pop culture and the utilisation of music videos in building a revised cultural identity through the analysis of case studies taken from two of Indonesia’s eras: late-New Order in the 1980s and post-Suharto, the era of reformation at the turn of the century.