Madrotter on Bandung rockers “Homicide”, their music and battles with the FPI.
Walking through Jakarta or Bandung you might’ve seen youngsters walking around with the t-shirts of “Homicide”. They were only the second Indonesian band ever (I think Mocca was the first) to get 4 stars for one of their albums (The Nekrophone Dayz) in the Asian edition of the Rolling Stone magazine as well as in Tempo Magazine and the Jakarta Post. They broke up in 2007 but still have a huge following.
Homicide
With one foot in the punk-movement and another foot in the hip-hop scene they put out 3 albums plus a 500 copies only split-album with Oregon based MC Homeless. They were one of the most outspoken political bands in Indonesia ever, communist/anarchist in their thinking, earning them an intense hatred from right-wing Islamic groups like the Front Pembela Islam (FPI) and there was a time when you never knew what would happen when they were performing.
Godzkilla Necronometry album cover.
They received death threats on a daily basis, especially after the release of the album “Godzkilla Necronometry”, which contained the song “Puritan (Godblessed fascists)”:
[audio:homicide-04-puritan.mp3]
Puritan
“Puritan” deals with the burning of left leaning books by the FPI and other groups a few years previously in Bandung.
This was one of the things that led to the raiding by the FPI of the small bookshop Ultimus in Bandung, which sold a lot of left-leaning books, among lots of other things, and where small underground bands could regularly perform. The attack on Ultimus was done WITH HELP of the police and the military, the FPI came in busload after busload, all the books were taken, the shop ransacked and some people beaten up so badly they went into hospital.
Homicide’s band logo
Homicide was Morgue Vanguard, producer, rapper, designer of all the merchandise and cd covers, rapper Sarkasz (who has a brother playing in…… Peter Pan), Dj E-One on the turntables, rapper Punish who left the group quite early, and Andre on guitar.
Nowadays, Morgue is working hard, supporting his family doing graphic designing but is busy with his new group Trigger Mortis and some side-projects like the Phenam Phlegm album with yours truly, Madrotter.
Dj E-one is still with his other hip hop group Cronik, while the others have left music altogether.
For more Homicide music and info:
Also you can download a few of their albums (with permission) at:
You can buy their last album, Illsurrekhun, at the Remains store in Jl. Cihampelas in Bandung and there’s probably still some for sale in distro’s around Jakarta.
EnJoY!!!
Possible, but rare – though we can heartily agree on Anthony Lloyd: he’s brilliant, and significantly better than RLP…
I’m out of the country until September. Continued argument will have to wait for now… 🙂
ehrrr bandung punkbands,…. jeruji, burgerkill, keparat, forgotten, there’s many but no venues to play anymore….
So Madrotter,
Where else is there an underground scene ?
well, you’d be surprised achmad, you’ll find it in the smallest villages, but right now it’s the biggest around yogya…
i have a bunch of books from that periplus series, there are some beautiful books there and you’re right about those parallels between then and now, then was pretty great for a lot of us bule’s. did you know that in colonial times you could arrive in bandung, a complete stranger, yet you could go to any store and get what you needed even if you didn’t have any money???? back then you would just sign an IOU note and you would pay soon as you had some money… Now I come down from the mountain that i live on with my bike to go to braga and visit the nordsea bar, back then they would come down with horses to go to the savoy homann hotel…
for sure you wouldn’t be thrown out of the country, blacklisted in the worst way so you can’t come back no more for being two days late renewing your visa as happened here in bandung to a swedish guy i know a few months back…
speaking about colonial times, i got these pics a while back, my grandfather who served with the mariners in indonesia from ’36 till ’40..
http://www.sendspace.com/file/uxrll4
http://www.sendspace.com/file/mlo79u
when he got back to holland they bombed his ship (the van galen) but he survived that, then spent a few days fighting on the maasbridge in rotterdam, a pretty famous fight, only 8 mariners survived, they held off the nazi’s for three days till their ammo was finished and the whole city was on fire because of the first firebombing of a whole city in history (the bombings of spanish cities in the civil war by the nazi’s were more testruns) and they were nicknamed “the black devils of rotterdam”. their commander made all these nazi’s stand in line and salute the survivors because of their bravery… spent the next 5 years in camps in germany…
but, ehrrr, that’s a different story…
but the bule’s nowadays huh… i’ve met tons and tons of ’em in the almost 13 years i’ve lived here, seen ’em come seen ’em go, often with the craziest ideas on how to make money here, so far the guy that started the cloud9 cafe is the only one i’ve seen who’s been quiet succesfull, and ofcourse bart from bugil’s but i’ve never met him.. knew one guy, a belgium guy who lived as a homeless person on the streets of bandung and jakarta for two years, he would smoke stoogies from the street, sleep under the kaki lima’s in jl. jaksa, got a 40.000 euro heritage and blew it away in a year and then on purpose drank himself to death in pelabuhan ratu, an incredible painter who at one time had a pretty good restaurant/cafe up in ciumbeleuit called the copacobanna (anybody remember that place?)…
another funny kind of dutch bule is the kind of guy who was a heroin junkie for years and years in holland, got cleaned up but are still considered unable to work (and the ones i know are healthy as a horse) and are staying here with permission and a monthly allowance (around 1750 euro’s, not to shabby) i know two of those here…
right now a new zealand guy i know is surviving (last thing i heard in jakarta) by hooking up with these indonesian girls, tells them some bullshit story about how he’s waiting for millions of dollars, due any moment, to start a business resort in bali and then proceeds to live off them till they broke, moving on to the next victim. weird, he ain’t even much to look at but he’s able to survive like that…
Madrotter,
Maybe you could profile such Bules for IM — attempting to explain how they became so… Gembel.
well, all sorts of reasons, alcohol often, the kiwi guy had a very succesfull dutch wife here but he was seeing too many bargirls so she split and for some reason he can’t go back home again… brokenhearted… mostly i think these folks should just go home, indonesia has enough gembel people as it is, but every now and then you’ve got guys getting through it and getting up again and i can respect that, everybody’s gotta to go through some hard times sometimes and i’m not one to knock a man when he’s down. often they’re much better company then the stuck-up bule types that have drivers, maids, gardeners and what not…
used to be that lots of the english teachers were xtc burn-outs from overseas…
oh.
interesting.
what do u do on the mountain up there ?
i’m jealous… ; p
ps – i’d like to see teaching english restored to the noble profession it is !
well i’m doing the cihideung thing right now! and it’s bloody busy with jakartans right now, driving is hell!
english teaching is still a pretty good life i think, they mostly make like 12 to 15 million a month, it used to be better though, i remember in ’96 folks could get 40, 50 dollars an hour. i tried it a few times but didn’t like it much.. nowadays you also really have to be a native speaker to get the job..
so you’re a flatlander achmad? not to worry! there’s loads of sexiness in flatlanderness!
time for a shower and head for cloud9, see if the cops been at it again with their silly razzia’s and get-money-quick schemes and enjoy a good meal…
as a ukulele player, the money’s in flatlanding, but i get my inspiration in the hills of West Java.
oh yeah you play ukulele right??? one of my best friends in holland is absolutely obsessed with playing ukulele and so is his american girlfriend. they perform at festivals, give workshops, he couldn’t give you a road-directions without at least mentioning the ukulele five times.. i’ll find his myspace, you might like what he does!
starting a new blog as of today, kept pondering and pondering. what am i going to call it???
then a flash of divine inspiration hit me and it’s called:
http://www.madrottersecondblog.blogspot.com/
going to be doing all sorts of music there!
… but there is one magnificent book in that series, a slightly odd one, and defintiely a very different beast from the others, not least because it doesn’t count as “colonial fiction”. It dates from the 1970s (it’s subject matter is pre-independence, and it’s author was a colonial administrator, which is how it gets in). It is the delightfully named Albert Alberts’ short story collection, The Islands…
They are marvelous pieces. I love his sparse, yet elegant prose, a bit like Hemingway without the muscle-bound swagger. And I love the strange, otherworldliness and melencholy of the stories. The real territory on which they were based (very loosely) is Madura and the nearby islands, which makes them all the more fascinating for me…
I’ve been experimenting with a new musical genre, speed-metal-dangdut on the ukulele.
HELLO TO ALL, EVEN IF THERE IS ANY MATERIAL OF HOMICIDE Please let me know!
thankz!!
A//E
best instrumental music, and me your fans guy’s !!!
good job.
Copyright Indonesia Matters 2006-2023
Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Contact
Dunno, Mate. I think its possible to write a great journalistic memoir and still provide the readers with a good basic understanding of what was going on. Anthony Lloyd is a great example of how to do this.
But yes…perhaps we can continue over those beers. I’ll be over that way in just over a week, and specifically in Bandung at some yet to be determined time 🙂