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Why Metallica's 1993 Jakarta concert matters for Indonesia
The decision to stream the performance may just have been a cash-grab effort to capitalize on the large metal fanbase in Indonesia. The show cost US$5.98 and tickets had to be purchased before streaming started on Sunday afternoon.
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Members of 'Metallica' from left, Kirk Hammet, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Jason Newsted pose for an audience in this publicity photo. (Mettallica Black Box/Metallicablackbox.com)
H
eavy metal band Metallica broadcast on Sunday footage of their live performance in Lebak Bulus Stadium, South Jakarta, in April 1993.
The decision to stream the performance may just have been a cash-grab effort to capitalize on the large metal fanbase in Indonesia. The show cost US$5.98 and tickets had to be purchased before streaming started on Sunday afternoon.
While the airing of this concert may just be part of a massive marketing campaign to keep the well-oiled machine that is Metallic Inc. running, we should not discount the significance of the concert as a massively influential musical if not cultural event, especially for Indonesia.
T-minus 1 HOUR until "Live in Jakarta, Indonesia: April 11, 1993" starts.
The show costs $5.98 and must be purchased before the event starts.
Don’t worry if you can’t watch live; you can catch it anytime during the following 48 hours.
Watch the Show ➡️ https://t.co/7ox0uAseUm pic.twitter.com/E53M4mByfA
— Metallica (@Metallica) February 5, 2022
There are too many examples of music concerts ending with a riot. The list is long, from the 1999 Woodstock and the Rolling Stones Altamont Speedway concert in 1969 to The Who’s Cincinnati gig in 1979. But Metallica's performance at Lebak Bulus in April 1993 is in a league of its own.
The rioting, which was the result of Metallica’s angry working-class fans not being able to gain entry to the venue due to exorbitant ticket price, took place while the New Order government was at the height of its police-state stage, where government spooks and intelligence personnel were dispatched down to the village level to monitor and crush anything that could be categorized as opposition.
And the fact that the torching of cars, homes and stores along the main thoroughfares leading to the Lebak Bulus stadium could take place in Jakarta, at the heart of Soeharto’s center of gravity, could indicate either the severity of an intelligence failure or the gross underestimation of how religiously devoted metal fans could be.
Either way, the massive rioting taking place in the wake of the Metallica concert was the largest conflagration the country had seen after the Five January (Malari) student protest almost 20 years prior in January 1974.
And many certainly could be forgiven for thinking that the Metallica-inspired riot was a precursor if not a dry-run for a bigger conflagration taking place in July 1996, which centered around the deadly seizure by pro-government thugs of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) led by the then-upstart-politician Megawati Soekarnoputri.
With hindsight, it is now easier to draw a straight line connecting the Lebak Bulus riot with the widespread social unrest that plagued Indonesia throughout 1997, which of course, ended with the resignation of Soeharto in 1998.
While the link between the music of American avant-garde band Velvet Underground and the effort from Vaclav Havel to lead the anti-Communist Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s has more or less been established, it is tempting to imagine a link connecting the aggressive power of metal with the pent-up anger that led to the rioting resulting in Soeharto's endgame in the late 1990s.
And even if you are skeptical about the power of music affecting or inspiring real changes in society, you must give credit to Metallica’s Lebak Bulus concert as the key moment in the country’s musical history where the metal revolution began, and Indonesia’s prominent position in the global metal scene today could be traced back to two days in 1993, when the youth of this nation first had their first real encounter with metal.
In the late 1980s, the music of Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth began to enter the consciousness of Jakarta's youth, those who were enamored with the speed, aggression and exuberance of metal.
In the privacy of their bedrooms, these youths began to take up guitars, tuning their amp to match the distorted sound of Kirk Hammet’s or Dave Mustaine's guitar. With only prerecorded cassette tapes of albums like Reign in Blood, ...And Justice for All and Rust in Peace, some of these teens had their first music lesson.
One of these budding metalheads is Irfan Sembiring, who dropped out of college to practice a guitar-playing technique he copied from Slayer’s Kerry King. After gaining confidence and believing that his skills were good enough, he formed the seminal metal band Rotor.
In late 1992, only months before Metallica arrived in Jakarta for its world tour, Irfan went into the studio in South Jakarta and recorded Behind the 8th Ball, arguably the country's first proper metal record, which went on to become a blueprint for how a local metal band should sound.
The album went on to sell 400,000 copies and won the band a slot to open for Metallica at the same Lebak Bulus concert.
“I began to see the fire burning right after we played the second song. Maybe they were angry for not being able to see us,” Irfan said jokingly in a number of interviews.
But none of these were supposed to happen in 1993.
As part of the Nowhere Else to Roam tour to support the 1991 Black Album, Metallica scheduled no performance in Jakarta and the closest venue it would play for the tour was in Singapore.
And only after insistent cajoling from impresario and businessman-cum-musician Setiawan Djody, the foursome agreed to perform in the capital.
With the government controlling the airwaves and all entertainment venues, it certainly helped that Djody had a direct line to the Soeharto family, a connection that allowed him to stage a metal concert that could pose serious security threats.
Jakarta was burning, but out of the ashes of homes, shops and cars torched on April 11, 1993, grew the seeds for the country’s robust metal scene.
A skinny young man in Surakarta, Central Java, certainly heard about the Metallica gig and the ensuing riot. In August 2013, the young man, then a middle-aged politician, was present when Metallica staged a concert at the Senayan Soccer Stadium.
The man was President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo.
