Several decades after having provoked indignation in the West, heavy metal, punk and hip-hop, musical genres qualified as anti-system when they first appeared, no longer shock many people today. These types of music are still tied to fringe circles, but their messages have sanitized over time and been absorbed into mainstream culture – at least in the West.
Despite this process of assimilation and commercialization, heavy metal, punk and hip-hop continue to serve as an echo chamber for protest, particularly in Southeast Asia, a region home to the most authoritarian regimes and the most corseted societies on the planet, and who has done a lot of work to make these musical genres disappear.
Indonesia, a unique case
These alternative cultures arrived in the region in the mid-1980s, and flourished in the 1990s, when they began to attract the attention of the authorities.
In Singapore, the practice of pogo was banned for ten years in the 1990s. In 2001, then in 2005, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, attacked black metal, sending the police to concerts to arrest enthusiasts in order to put an end to the rise of this practice considered antisocial among young people. In December 2011, in Banda Aceh, the capital of an Indonesian province that practices strict Islam, the police arrested a group of 64 punks and humiliated them by shaving their heads in the name of a “re-education” Islamic.
Since, certain elements of Indonesian punk and metal have taken hold. The birth of Muslim musical movements like Punk Muslim and the One Finger Movement in Java in the late 1990s shows how Indonesian Muslims reinvented these foreign musical genres by fusing fundamentally Western values with local culture and religious beliefs. .
In Thailand, against the royal taboo
Elsewhere in Asia, punk, heavy metal and rap artists have returned to the source and primary purpose of their music: challenging the power in place. Recently, Defying Decay, a metalcore band [un genre musical né aux États-Unis, mêlant punk hardcore et metal] based in Bangkok, went after Thai elites with the February 2022 release of the track The Law 112 : Secrecy and Renegades [“la loi 112 : secret et renégats”]. This is a political charge against section 112 of the Thai Penal Code, which punishes with a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison any criticism of the king o