Seymour Totti’s Foreign Policy

Everywhere you go in Asia you’ll find bars and discos that play the latest western pop and disco hits. It’s easy to forget that most places have their own indigenous pop music. Watch a group of Thai bar girls when the music suddenly changes from western pop to luuk thung or mor lam. Music that grew out of the folk styles of the Isaan district. Suddenly they dance and sing along with considerably more passion. The lyrics often tell of treacherous love or hardship in the fields, subjects to which they can all relate.

Probably the most licentious is an Indonesian style called Dangdut. These days the word dangdut is applied to almost any locally produced pop but it was born in the seedy working class areas of north Jakarta in the mid-1970s. It sounded like a cross between Indian, Arabic belly dance music and reggae and was always played live by a band comprising 4 or 5 musicians, usually male.

By the mid eighties, when I first caught up with it, the style was already well on its way into the mainstream but there were still a few clubs along Jalan Mangga Besar. One that I found was ‘rustic’ to say the least. But the band was pumping and the waitresses, when not fetching beers, would perform a hypnotic dance.

It was obviously rooted in classical dance styles but adapted for modern rhythms. It seemed as if the girls were almost in a trance. There was no pelvis thrusting or hip wiggling, they were not dancing for any audience. They seemed to be dancing for the sensuality of the moves themselves. It was one of the most erotic dances I have ever witnessed. And, of course, there was a facility out the back where the waitresses could serve you more fully.

That old style of dancing may have passed into history now but in 2003 dangdut star Inul Daratista scandalised the nation by taking the hip thrusting style to entirely new heights prompting calls for a ban on her concerts and the drafting of a new anti-pornography bill.

But the hip thrusting caught on and continues unabated, as singer Mela Anjana admirably demonstrates