TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Dividing Canyon: Top five Yockie Suryoprayogo songs
He was a tough act to follow and these five tracks are reminder of his rare genius.
Change Size
The young Yockie Suryoprayogo. The former keyboard player of hard rock band God Bless died on Monday from multiple illnesses. (facebook.com/jsopofficial/File)
Y
ockie Suryoprayogo was both ahead of his time and a man of his times. In the early 1970s, long before the explosion of punk in London and New York, he formed a band and named it Contrapunk. He was against the idea of punk even before we had a name for it. In an era where albums mostly contained fillers and one-hit songs, Yockie wrote a concept album that was meant to be heard as a singular piece of art like Jurang Pemisah (Dividing Canyon) or the soundtrack to the movie Badai Pasti Berlalu (Storm Will Pass). Yet, his breakthrough resulted from the freewheeling environment in Jakarta's music scene in the mid-1970s where the absence of genre boundaries and rules allowed him to marry different influences that would create a new art, the likes of which the country's pop scene had never seen before.
Yockie shone the brightest when he broke down barriers, hopping from one musical project to another, lending his craft to other artists, elevating disposable pop into a works of art that would stand the test of time. When he succumbed to illness on Monday, he left an indelible mark. He contributed to more than two dozen albums, with some of them being certified classic. Yockie was a tough act to follow and these five tracks are a reminder of his rare genius.
1. Kesaksian (Testimony)
As poetry, this song’s lyrics is an art form of the highest order, an ode written by poet W.S. Rendra for the downtrodden mass who toiled under the stifling oppression of the New Order regime. For this, Yockie wrote the majestic background music made up of soaring orchestral arrangements complete with an angelic choir that lends the song a spiritual quality.
2. Kehidupan (Life)
This track is Yockie at his most versatile. Mostly known in the late 1970s as composer of art pop songs, by the late 1980s he had mutated into a consummate rock writer and Kehidupan is the pinnacle of his rock phase. Not content with writing a rock song driven by heavy guitar riffs, he added a keyboard and piano flourish that sends the composition soaring.
3. Jurang Pemisah (Dividing Canyon)
The album is the peak of Yockie's art rock phase, when he was hitting all cylinders, simultaneously working on two albums that went on to become classics, the other being the Badai Pasti Berlalu soundtrack. While Badai Pasti Berlalu is a surefire hit that could easily connect with even the most casual music fans, Jurang Pemisah has some of the most complex experimentation that still sounds relevant today.
4. Pelangi (Rainbow)
Even in an album packed with beautiful love songs, Pelangi (Rainbow) shines the brightest, thanks to sublime arrangements constructed mostly from Yockie's inventive use of the piano, keyboard and synth, evoking the timeless beauty of Beethoven-inspired chamber music.
5. Maret 1989 (March 1989)
The 1989 God Bless album Raksasa (Giant) suffered from many problems that plagued most of his albums from the 1980s, too much drum reverb and cheap synth sound, but what the band lacked in the sound department, Yockie made up for it with socially conscious lyrics. How many Muslims in this country dared criticize Ayatollah Khomeini's decision to put a price on Salman Rushdie's head for writing The Satanic Verses in the late 1980s? Yockie did just that in a hard-charging rock song. (mtr)
