Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 22, Issue 2, Pages 198218

The Wishes of Your Parents: Power Ballads

in Tana Toraja, Indonesia
Andy Hicken
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Consider the power ballad. Sneered at, in the United States, by most serious
critics of rock, it is nonetheless among the most popular forms of Western
rock worldwide. At least it is so in Toraja, a region of the island of Sulawesi
in Eastern Indonesia. There, power ballads of the 1970s and 1980s that are
all but forgotten in the United States are collected on pirated video compact
discs (VCDs) and sold as collections of Slow Rock. Rock bands that
are remembered in the United States for their hardnessGuns N Roses,
for example, or Scorpionsare better known in Toraja, and in Indonesia
generally, for their softer side. The Guns N Roses power ballad November
Rain is far more commonly collected and replayed in Indonesia than heavier
hits like Welcome to the Jungle, Paradise City, or even Sweet Child
o Mine. And before I spent a year in Indonesia I could have identified
only two songs by the German group Scorpions: the rocker Rock You
Like a Hurricane and the power ballad Winds of Change. That was
before a 12-hour bus ride on Sulawesi in which I heard a pirated VCD
collection of 12 Scorpions power ballads played at least five times in a
row.
Not surprisingly, Indonesian rock musicians have worked the power
ballad into their own musical practices. The seminal Indonesian alternative
rock band Slank included a few Aerosmith-esque power ballads on each
of its 1990s albums. The more recent wave of mainstream Indonesian
alternative rock bands record a few power ballads for each album. Often,
these ballads have an overlay of alternative rock style. But the power ballad
heritage shines through in the songs choruses, with their meaty power chord
progressions and sing-along major-key melodies. And typically, the most
tender power ballads are the biggest hits.
This paper, however, is not about Indonesian rock, but about the
Indonesian genre of pop daerahliterally, regional pop. Regional pop,
unlike Indonesian national pop, serves only regional audiences: most
Indonesian regions have their own variation on regional pop. Regional pops


C 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The Wishes of Your Parents 199

set of themesromantic love, family love, migration, homesickness, and

nostalgiaspeaks to Indonesias hinterlands, not to its hegemonic center,
the giant capital city of Jakarta. Perhaps for this reason, regional pop is
an object of scorn in metropolitan Indonesia, where to be kampungan,
country, is embarrassing and comical. Thus, when Toraja regional pop
artists appropriate power ballads, they fuse two genres that are frequently
reviled as bad music (Washburne and Derno) in their respective urban and
academic music centers. As both genres lack the overt political agendas that
are still the best guarantor of critical and academic acclaim, they are scoffed
at by journalistic critics, understudied by scholars, and considered a guilty
pleasure even by many of their own fans.
Toraja regional pop artists, however, do not see themselves as
composers of kitsch or schlock. They have their own reasons for creating
regional pop power balladsreasons that are based in the deeply local
cultural and emotional politics of love in Toraja. A careful examination of
one regional pop power ballad, Trio Pandins Paporaianna Tomatuammu
(The Wishes of Your Parents), shows how it deftly twists the Western power
ballads standard lyrical and musical narrative of overcoming adversity
through love into a new, more locally relevant narrative of romantic
self-denial.

Indonesian and Toraja Regional Pop

Indonesian regional pop is identifiable first and foremost by its
language. Regional pop is any popular music sung in an Indonesian regional
languagein other words, any language other than the national language,
Indonesian. It follows that any music sung in the national language is
considered a national genre (Yampolsky 1989: 117). Every regional pop
sub-genre is simply named for the language in which it is sung, which is also
(as is the pattern in Indonesia) usually the name of an ethnic group, and often
of an island or a region: pop Batak is sung in the Batak language of the Batak
people of Sumatra, pop Ambon is sung in the Ambon language of the Ambon
people from the island of Ambon, and so on. Regional pop is generally
marked by a somewhat conservative, Western-derived style, although in
some regions it borrows some sonic markers of regional culture, such
as local instruments (Yampolsky 1995: 70025). This is not the case with
Toraja regional pop, however. In fact, as I explain later, contemporary Toraja
regional pop is, except for the language, highly derivative of the regional
pop of the Batak.
200 Andy Hicken

Indonesian regional pop is not, most of the time, what most

Americans would call rock, except perhaps in the terms most inclusive
definitionpopular music with a backbeat. Indonesian regional pop more
closely resembles Japanese enka or 1980s-vintage Hong Kong Cantopop,
all of which have a basis in Western tonality, a sad, sentimental ethos,
slow tempos, and an easy-listening aesthetic. Regional pops musical style
fits its dominant lyrical themes of migration, the effects of migration on
romantic love and family love, homesickness, and nostalgia. Given its lyrics
and slow, quiet musical tendencies, regional pop is compatible with the
power ballad genre, despite its lack of strong affinity with rock widely
defined. In more direct ways, too, regional pop shows the influence of power
balladsespecially in its guitar solos, which are invariably soaring and
distorted.
If Indonesian regional pop belongs to a family of Asian sentimental
pop and borrows stylistically from power ballads, the niche of regional pop
in Indonesian pop ecology is in many ways like that of country music
in the United States. Regional pop identifies with the countryside, not
with the city, despite a significant urban fan-base. It is sung in regional
languages, not in the national language, as American country is sung in
rural varieties of American English rather than urban. Regional pop is self-
consciously nostalgic, often concerned with the loss of an idealized place
that exists in the past. It is generally considered embarrassing hillbilly music
by self-consciously sophisticated metropolitans. It grew to popularity and
became an explicit, named genre as rural people migrated to urban areas
in large numbersa phenomenon that occurred in Indonesia in the post-
World War II, post-colonial era, following independence from the Dutch
in 1945. Correspondingly, the experience of migration is a key theme
in regional pop lyrics. Regional pop is stylistically conservative when
compared to other forms of popular music, but like American country
music it does take on influences (albeit slowly) from other popular styles.
It is produced in a Nashville-style system, centralized in the Indonesian
capital of Jakarta, with the labor of production divided extensively among a
large pool of aspirational songwriters, singers, and producers, and a small
cadre of established synthesizer programmers, studio musicians, recording
engineers, and mixing engineers.
The concern here is the regional pop of Toraja, the region in Indonesia
where I have done fieldwork. The Toraja region is in the highlands of the
southern peninsula of Sulawesi island, in the Eastern part of the Indonesian
archipelago. It is a relatively isolated area of Indonesia in the geographic,
The Wishes of Your Parents 201

cultural, political, and religious senses. The Toraja, in their remote homeland,
were conquered relatively late by the Dutch, in 1905. In contrast to most
of the rest of Indonesia, the Toraja were also missionized by European
Christians.1 As a consequence, the Toraja are today a strongly Christian
minority of fewer than a million people in a majority-Muslim nation of about
230 million. Simultaneously, the Toraja fervently maintain elements of pre-
Christian religious practices, called aluk to dolo (rituals of the ancestors),
in a syncretic blend with Christianity.
Aluk to dolo stipulates a caste system that divides society into slaves,
free people, and nobles, and assigns different religious prerogatives to them.
While slavery is illegal in modern Indonesia, the Toraja caste system lingers
on as a less formal social distinction. The caste system, including the
web of debt and labor obligations that sustains it, helps to constitute (and
is reinforced by) an exchange-based economy. Toraja people give large
gifts, most often livestock such as pigs and water buffalo, to create these
obligations at rituals, especially funerals. In giving or accepting these gifts,
they reinforce their families positions in the caste system (Volkman 216).
The music and dance performed at aluk to dolo rituals play an affective
role in enforcing this caste system (Rappoport 1999: 14362, 2004: 378
404).
Rappoport notes that popular music was adopted relatively recently
in Toraja: [p]rior to the advent of Christianity, the Indonesian government,
and the tourism industry, Toraja music appears to have been practiced only
during ritual ceremonies (2004: 382). In conversations with older Toraja
musicians, I found evidence that external popular music probably reached
Toraja even in the colonial (pre-1945) era by way of travelling musicians
and returning migrants who had learned to play popular genres.
The earliest recordings of Toraja regional pop were released as
cassette tapes beginning in the 1970s. Around this time, a government-
owned radio station first began broadcasts that reached Toraja, and audio
cassette players became available. The Toraja singers Hamzah Palinggi
and Johan Sampetoding each released cassettes featuring original songs
and songs credited to NN, an English acronym for No Name used in
the Indonesian cassette industry to signify a song with no known author.
The NN songs are folk songs of indeterminate age, although their use
of Western scales strongly suggests that they were written sometime after
the 1905 Dutch conquest of Toraja.2 The NN songs feature simple 3- or
4-chord progressions and stepwise, narrow-range vocal melodies, ideally
suited for group sing-alongs.
202 Andy Hicken

In the 1980s and early 1990s, for unclear reasons, very few pop
Toraja cassettes were produced, and those that were released are not, in
my experience, remembered fondly today by locals. The current Toraja
pop boom began with the 1996 release of a cassette of songs by the
singer-songwriter Daniel Tandirogang. Tandirogang, a Pentecostal pastor
and migrant to Java and Jakarta, told me that he became a fan of Batak
pop music while studying at seminary in Java, and eventually decided
that he wanted to make an album of Toraja-language songs in the Batak
style. The Batak, an ethnic group from distant North Sumatra, are majority-
Christian, like the Toraja, and they are famous throughout Indonesia for
their sentimental, rather weepy pop songs (2006).
Many others have followed Tandirogangs path: Toraja pop albums
today are usually produced in Jakarta studios by non-Toraja musicians,
synthesizer programmers, and engineers who work predominantly in the
well-developed Batak pop style. Usually only the singers on these recordings
are from Toraja. I spent three months studying the recording of regional pop
at Studio Gemini, Jakartas leading recording studio for Christian-majority
regions, and I learned there that indeed there is no difference between
the musical style of Toraja and Batak pop in the minds of the musicians
and producers. The flashy, professional playing on these albums contrasts
strongly with the more amateurish playing heard on the aforementioned
cassettes from the 1970s. Toraja pop, unlike its NN song predecessors,
is now more a studio audio art (Turino 258) than a live performance
genre. It relies on programmed synthesizers (a longtime regional pop studio
practice pioneered by Batak pop producers, who had tired of the hassle and
expense of recording full bands) overdubbed with relatively virtuosic vocal
performances and professional-quality electric guitar and saxophone solos.
Toraja pop, along with a parallel genre of Christian pop called rohani
Toraja (Toraja spiritual), is now most commonly sold on VCDs that
feature, in addition to the music, original video clips, and scrolling karaoke-
style lyrics. In Toraja, they are sold predominantly at stalls in traditional
markets, where they compete with other popular genres. The most-purchased
VCDs in Toraja are albums of pop Indonesiathat is, national pop and
rock sung in the national language. Pop Indonesia VCDs, and all non-Toraja
VCDs except for some of the regional pop from areas near Tana Toraja, are
always pirated (i.e., illegal copies). Pirated VCDs sell for between Rp. 6000
and 9000 (between about USD 0.66 and 0.88 at the time of my research).
Toraja regional pop and rohani, on the other hand, is never pirated. Toraja
producers tell me this is because Toraja extended family networks are large
The Wishes of Your Parents 203

and meticulously remembered, and some remote relative of the pirated singer
would inevitably see the pirated VCD being sold. Thus, Toraja-language
VCDs sell for about Rp. 35,000 (about USD 3.88) in the market, making
them very expensive by local standards. Despite its premium price, Toraja
pop sells well.3
The relative success of Toraja regional pop, however, has sparked
controversy. Toraja pops local critics dismiss the music as being always
about love, criticize it for just imitating the music of other ethnic
groups, and rail against the lowly bahasa pasar (market language, in
Indonesian) used by Toraja pop songwriters. Critics tend to be high-caste
intellectuals, which is perhaps appropriate given the fact that Toraja pops
ethos of romantic love inevitably clashes with Torajas tradition-bound caste
system.

Power Ballads in the U.S. and Toraja

Before exploring The Wishes of Your Parents as a Toraja regional
pop power ballad, we ought to attempt a definition of the power ballad
genre. Of course, the very word genre exists to finesse problems of
definition. While in some cases a genre may have a standardized definition
with identifiable, if not impermeable, borders (a Baroque solo concerto, a
19th-century murder ballad), or may be identical to a standardized musical
form (lancaran in Javanese gamelan, a 12-bar blues), we more commonly
use genre to categorize cultural production that we believe belongs together,
even when we would have difficulty identifying clear and consistent criteria
for inclusion in the category.
Any reader of this journal will be familiar with how the definition
of a genreits borders, meanings, and associationscan change as
the genre is pushed and pulled through any number of fields: through
modes of production and consumption (folk), through socioeconomic
identifications (blues), through subcultural formations of resistance
and subsequent colonization (punk), and through aesthetic debates and
factional splintering (hip-hop, jazz, metal). Such is the case even
with the relatively circumscribed (relative to, say, pop, rock, or jazz)
genre of the power ballad. While the genre-name is used in both scholarly
and journalistic writing, I have found only one explicit scholarly definition
of the genre. Focusing on the 1980s, it uses power ballads to distinguish lite
metal (also known as glam metal and hair metal) from less-popular
and (perhaps) more authentic forms of metal:
204 Andy Hicken

The subgenre [of lite metal] is especially known for its power
ballads, which are songs with just enough metal sound (the bass)
to be heard as metal, but not so much metal sound that they will
be detested by those who are turned off by traditional heavy metal
music. Power ballads have been played on radio stations with formats
that typically exclude heavy metal. They are crossovers, standing
inside and outside the genre simultaneously. They sell albums to a
nonmetal audience and enlist part of that audience into the true metal
audience. Power ballads are similar in effect to the cover versions
of black songs that Pat Boone and other white performers sang, in
the process eventually bringing a wider, whiter, audience to rock and
roll. (Weinstein 4647)

Weinstein perhaps speaks with the voice of a subculturally self-

identifying metal fan when she distinguishes the crossover power ballad
audience from the true metal audience and compares power ballads to Pat
Boones covers of early rocknroll. We could, of course, deconstruct this
discourse of authenticity, but it is more useful for the purposes of this article
to note that Weinstein accurately characterizes the discourse surrounding
power ballads: the metal subcultures of the 1980s did, in fact, commonly
consider power ballads to be inauthentic crossovers. Music journalists
naturally sided with the subcultures on this issue. Popular music scholars
may have, tooif we judge their interest by the paucity of scholarship on
power ballads and the much larger body of work on the less commercially
successful forms of metal.
Indonesia, too, has its distinction between a true metal audience
and a crossover power ballad audience. Even in remote Toraja, there are
dedicated metal fans who would sneer at the crossover power ballad fans.
There is even at least one niche radio program dedicated purely to heavy
(non-power ballad) metal. However, the general audiences awareness of
heavier metal would seem to be lower in Toraja than in the US.
The 1980s hair metal (lite metal in Weinsteins preferred
terminology) stream of power ballads is probably the main group of songs
associated with the genre, both in the US and in Indonesia. Following
closely is a stream of 1970s (and early 1980s) power balladspredecessors,
obviously, of the mid-1980s hair metal power ballads. These songs are
associated, in the words of Leslie M. Meier, with bombastic rock bands
such as Journey and Chicago (251). Music journalist Carl Wilson (67,
quoted in Meier 251) characterizes the power ballad as an invention of
The Wishes of Your Parents 205

1970s arena rock. Similarly, music journalist Ann Powers (Powers 46) traces
the power ballad to 1970s precedents. Powers, however, cites a set of songs
by bands that generally rocked harder and garnered more critical respect than
the bombastic Journey and Chicago: Led Zeppelins Stairway to Heaven,
Aerosmiths Dream On, Lynyrd Skynyrds Freebird, and Queens
Bohemian Rhapsody (one could also cite We Are the Champions).
Powerss proto-power ballads clearly forged a path for rock artists to craft
songs that contrasted quiet, sensitive sections with power chord-backed
choruses and metal- or hard rock-style guitar solos. On the other hand, these
prototypes are all distinguishable in some way from whatever Platonic ideal
might leap to our minds when we hear the term power ballad. None are
obvious love songs, for one thing, and all but Dream On take sprawling,
extended forms unlike those commonly assumed by later power ballads.
But Meier and Wilsons power-balladeersthe bombastic, less critically
acclaimed arena rockers of the 1970sare just as commonly heard in Toraja
today, if not more so.
Powers goes on to examine how power ballads changed with the
ascent of alternative rock in the 1990s. Alternative power ballads adopted
a new attitude toward love and life, moving from the beleaguered-but-still-
believing stance of most 1970s and 1980s power ballads to a bleaker, more
angst-ridden pose:

Arena rockers [of the 1970s and 1980s] gave their male working-
class fans a way to believe in themselves when others degraded
them; todays alternative rockers [i.e., those of the 1990s] express
the doubts of young middle-class men about the power they inherit.
(Powers 46)

Nicely put. And Powerss linkage of pre-alternative power ballads to

believing in oneself is key to a comparison offered later in this paper. But
a discussion of 1990s alternative power ballads moves away from the cluster
of songs that have clearly influenced Toraja regional pop. Alternative and
post-alternative power ballads of the 1990s and 2000s can certainly be heard
in Torajabut less so than the 1970s and 1980s power ballads, which have
achieved canonical status in Toraja.
As a hard artifact of the claims I make from experience gained during
fieldwork, I present a collection I bought in the Toraja traditional market
that nicely traces the outlines of the power ballad genre as it is known in
Toraja. Titled International Slow Rock, it is an MP3 CD, combining over
206 Andy Hicken

100 tracks on one CD. MP3 CDs cost the same amount as a standard VCD,
so they obviously offer a lot of songs for the money. On the other hand,
they are no good for karaoke (no video, no lyrics), perhaps explaining why
they have not overtaken VCDs in popularity. If its karaoke deficiencies
can be tolerated, however, International Slow Rock offers great value for
the power ballad aficionados rupiah, bringing together (or pirating, if you
prefer) seven other slow rock collections. The titles of the original collections
(which were themselves probably pirated VCDs) highlight the canonical and
timeless status of their contents: International Best Slow Rock, Forever Slow
Rock (1 and 2), 70S Rock Classic Forever, Slow Rock Band, Best of Heavy
Rock, and Slow Rock Memories. The complete track listing can be read in
Figure 1.4
This collection should not be taken as perfectly representative of the
Toraja taste for power ballads. It misses some songs I heard frequently in
Toraja: prominently, Extremes ubiquitous More than Words, Air Supplys
The Power of Love (You Are My Lady) (or Shania Twains The Power

Figure 1: The track listing on the back cover of International Slow Rock, an MP3 CD that offers a fairly
representative sample of the Toraja taste for power ballads.
The Wishes of Your Parents 207

of Love (Im Your Lady)), and Bon Jovis Ill Be There For You. The
collection also seems to show a bit more familiarity with 1960s rock than I
observed in Torajaunsurprising, given that it was probably put together in
Malaysia, Jakarta, or Makassar, and then copied and re-copied until someone
brought it to Torajaas seems to be the case with most VCDs sold in Toraja,
except for regional pop VCDs.
What this discussion has highlighted is that power balladswhether
in the US or in Torajaare, in fact, a surprisingly diverse group of songs,
despite the fact that anyone broadly familiar with post-1960s rock can
probably call to mind a hackneyed aural stereotype for the genre. Extremes
subtle, acoustic More Than Words and Bon Jovis entirely electric, entirely
un-subtle Livin on a Prayer might serve as antipodes of the genre: one is
mostly ballad, the other mostly power, but we could claim that they are both
in some sense power ballads.
We should not fence power ballads in, then, with a well-bounded
definition. Rather, if we could somehow plot the songs characteristics on a
scatter-plot (an impossibility, of course, but this is an analogy), there would
be a cluster of similar songs in the middle, a few smaller competing clusters
that share some alternate set of traits, and a large number of outliers that
share one or two characteristics with the middle cluster and could easily be
classified in other genres. Such a model would, in fact, work as a decent
analogy for many genres.
If we had, however, to boil things down to a list of the most common
traits found in that center cluster of English-language power ballads, we
might arrive at the followingin order from most definitive to slightly less
definitive:

1. A slow, quiet, wordless introduction.

a. Usually played on guitar, or more rarely piano.
b. Usually without drums, or with some very restrained drumming
(kick drum on the downbeat, cymbal flourishes).
c. Often acoustic.
d. Often minor-key.
e. Often accompanied by arpeggiated chords.
f. Generally introducing the chord progression over which the first
verse is sung.
g. Often with gradual introduction of the other instruments (especially
drums) in subsequent repetitions of the verse.
208 Andy Hicken

2. Later, a hard rock- or heavy metal-style guitar solo. (The juxtaposition

of a distorted, soaring, heavy metal-influenced guitar solo with a tender,
slow, sentimental song is perhaps the best explanation for the genre-
name power ballad).
3. A meaty, sing-along chorus, usually over long, held power chords.
4. A lyrical narrative of overcoming adversity, usually in and/or through
love.

The Wishes of Your Parents as Power Ballad

The purpose of the preceding discussion has been to highlight how
diverse songs are often grouped as power ballads without having all of the
above characteristicsQueens We Are the Champions does not have the
wordless introduction, and Metallicas Fade to Black contemplates suicide
rather than struggling against adversity. Similarly, my example of a regional
pop songThe Wishes of Your Parentsis a straightforward power ballad
in its slow, arpeggiated, minor-key introduction (see Figure 2) and its heavy
metal guitar solo (not transcribed), but the other two traits are altered. In
the chorus, the power chords are there, but the lyrics and melody are too
complex to be called sing-along (the entire vocal melody, along with the
lyrics and chord progression, is transcribed in Figure 3). And the story of
the song is not about overcoming adversity in or through love, but about
accepting the denial of love.
The song paints the familiar tableau (to a Toraja person) of a boy
who has fallen in love with a girl, only to have the girls parents forbid the
relationshippresumably because the boy is too low in social status for
their daughter. Torajas caste system firmly forbids men marrying up to
women of a higher caste. (Women are allowed to marry up, although the
mans parents may forbid it.) Stories of parents ending their childrens love

Figure 2: The arpeggiated, minor-key acoustic guitar introduction to Trio Pandins The Wishes of Your
Parents. The rhythm guitar is accompanied here by swelling synthesizer chords and an acoustic guitar solo. The
voice enters on the following bar.5
The Wishes of Your Parents 209

Figure 3: Vocal part of Paporaianna Tomatuammu (The Wishes of Your Parents).

affairs for reasons of incompatible social status are a common theme in

Toraja discourse (Hollan 99102) and have become a trope in regional pop.6
A translation of the lyrics shows how the singer reacts to being forbidden to
marry his love:
210 Andy Hicken

PAPORAIANNA TOMATUAMMU THE WISHES OF YOUR PARENTS

O siulu kaboroku Little sister [lover],7 my love,
La malena umpessalaiko I will go, though it is wrong.
Kuissan dikka kaleku I know, pity me,8
Tang sielle la dio kalemu That it is not right for you,
REFRAIN (all lyrics from this point on are repeated once after guitar solo)
O siulu kaboroku Little sister [lover], my love.
Moraipa dikka la torro I want to stay, pity me,
La tontong dio kalemu to stay with you
Susi tu puramo ta allu as we had promised.
(Pre-chorus)
Apa la kupatumbari What can I do?
Tangia kaleku It is not me
Tu la mendadi who makes
Bayu sangkalammamu your intimacy [with me] grow stale.
Denmo tau to sengana There is already that other person
La dio kalemu For you.
Paporaianna The wishes
Torro tomatuammu of your parents remain.

(Chorus, with entry of backup singers)

La malenaku dikka I will go, pity me,
Ussaleoi padikku though it hurts me,
Moina magasa kusading although I feel heavy
Tang la dio kalemu without you.
Apa la kupatumbari What can I do?
Iamo aganku It is my way.
Iamo duka It is
passukaranku my allotment.
(Guitar solo, then return to top of Refrain.)

The four lines that conclude the song are a variation on a verse that
Toraja people recite when they are feeling fatalisticwhich is often. The
full version of this verse (the saying follows the metric rules of a londe, a
traditional Toraja verse), as I encountered it in other places, translates as
follows:
Buarika dipatumba What can be done?
Tendika ladiapa It must be accepted
Dikua iamo dalle We have to say it is fate
Iamo passukaran It is the allotment9

In fact, this verse was presented to me as the key to Toraja philosophy

by a high-caste intellectual to whom I often spoke in Toraja: the verse
expresses an acceptance of fate, of ones lot in life, of the cosmologically
ordained castes that structure Toraja society.
The video for The Wishes of Your Parents depicts the story told
in the lyrics. During the first two verses, the singer, Herman Salempang, is
The Wishes of Your Parents 211

Figure 4: The singer broods about his girlfriend.

shown alone, moping about his village. In one shot (Figure 4), an inset of
the singer talking to his girlfriend is superimposed in the upper left corner,
to make clear the subject of his thoughts.
In previous shots, the singer is shown sitting on the same bench
from different perspectives, to illustrate that he has passed much time alone,
brooding, on this bench. This section of the video artfully depicts the two
verses, which ponder, indecisively, the injustice of the two lovers separation.
As he reaches the third verse or pre-chorus, the singer suddenly sits
up and looks directly into the camera for the first time. In the lyrics, the
singer begins to accept the separation, reasoning What can I do?/It is not
me/who makes/your intimacy [with me] grow stale. At this same point, the
rhythm guitar switches from arpeggios to distorted power chords, and the
backbeatwhich had previously been maintained with (synthesized) hi-hat
and rim shotsswitches to the snare drum. The singers movement toward
a decision is marked both by the change in his stance in the video, and by
the musical movement of the pre-chorus, wherein the melody changes and
the musical accompaniment thickens and becomes louder.
In the section I have labeled chorus, the singer announces his
decision: I will go, pity me/though it hurts me/although I feel heavy/without
you (Figure 5). He is joined here by a female backup singer, the Toraja
212 Andy Hicken

Figure 5: The singer begins his journey away from his village.

regional pop star Salma Margareth (who appears elsewhere on Trio Pandins
album as a guest star, but is in fact of higher profile than Trio Pandin).
Doubling the male singer at the octave, Margareth sings the tense, ascending
minor-key melody of the first half of the chorus, lending a Gothic eeriness
to the male singers announcement of his decision to leave. The video shows
the male singer walking. The lyrics may be meant to imply that he will
migrate out of Toraja.
The chorus reaches its highest pitch at the end of the first half,
then begins to descend just as the lyrics reach the final verse, the variation
on the key to Toraja philosophy discussed above: What can I do?/It is
my way./It is/my allotment. It is as if the singer is using this invocation of
Toraja fatalism to release himself from the feeling that he is doing something
wrong by accepting the wishes of his lovers parents. On passukaranku (my
allotment), the last word of the song and of this traditional verse, the
melody tragically cadences on the minor tonic. Set to this minor melody,
this recitation of the traditional verse sounds rueful, suggesting a measure
of resistance against the verse proclaimed by upper-caste intellectuals as the
key to Toraja philosophy.
The guitar solo follows the chorus. During the solo, the video outlines
the tableau of the song, showing the singer visiting his girlfriend in her
The Wishes of Your Parents 213

Figure 6: The girlfriends mother pulls her away from the singer.

house, then the girlfriends mother pulling her away (Figure 6), and finally
the girlfriends father angrily shooing the singer out of the house. The singer
half-crouches over in a familiar local gesture of obeisance as he passes in
front of his girlfriends father.
The Wishes of Your Parents bears a striking similarity to the
Western power ballad Still Loving You, by the German heavy metal band
Scorpions. Both songs are minor-keyg minor for Still Loving You, f
minor for The Wishes of Your Parents. Both begin quietly, slowly, with
arpeggiated guitar parts. Most strikingly, both songs vocal melodies start
on the 5th scale degree (a 4th below the tonic), then, in the second line of
lyrics, leap dramatically up a minor 6th to the 3rd scale degree (see Figures 7
and 8).
Whether this similarity is by consequence or coincidence, it is
instructive to compare what these two stylistically similar power ballads
say about love. The Scorpions power ballad sings of the lovers pride and
of how she no longer trusts the singer. The singer resolves to overcome
this adversity, however, declaring: Fight, babe Ill fight/to win back your
love again./I will be there./I will be there. The power of love itself will
overcome the couples problem: Love, only love/can break down the walls
someday./I will be there./I will be there. The song concludes: Im still
214 Andy Hicken

Figure 7: The beginning of the vocal melody of Scorpions Still Loving You, showing, at the beginning of the
second line of lyrics, the dramatic leap up of a minor 6th, from a 4th below the tonic to the minor 3rd above (d to
b-flat).

Figure 8: The beginning of the vocal melody of Trio Pandins The Wishes of Your Parents, showing, at the
beginning of the second line of lyrics, the dramatic leap up of a minor 6th, from a 4th below the tonic to the
minor 3rd above (c to a-flat).

loving youdespite all obstacles to love. Still Loving You is the classic
power ballad narrative of overcoming adversity both in and through love.
Love is the problem, and love is also the solution. The song says, in effect:
Were having difficulty in love because of our own difficulties being in
relationships, but I am going to keep loving you, and we will overcome this
difficulty. By contrast, Trio Pandins The Wishes of Your Parents says, in
effect: We are having difficulty in love because your parents have decided
that I am too low-caste for youand so we must give up. It is our fate.
There is an explicit protest in the lyricsthe singer says that the prohibition
of their love is sala, wrong. Nonetheless, he concludes that it must be
accepted, because that is his allotment in life.

Conclusion
Robert Walser characterizes Bon Jovis Livin on a Prayer as a
musical construction of romantic transcendence (110). That transcendence,
of course, comes in the transition from the brooding versesin which
Jon Bon Jovi sings of the economic hardship of a young coupleto the
satisfying, sing-along chorus, in which Bon Jovi assumes the voice of the
couple and pledges: Well make it, I swear. Theyll make it because theyve
got each otherthat is, they will overcome adversity on the strength of
their love. Love conquers all.
The Wishes of Your Parents 215

Contrastingly, The Wishes of Your Parents, in which love is

conquered by the social-cosmological order, never transcends its brooding
into a satisfying chorus. Instead, the song gets darker and more brooding. The
singer is joined by male and female backup singers, the melody peaks and
then descends, and the songs last word, passukaranku, or my allotment,
lands, defeatedly, on the minor tonic.
In this essay I have explored why the power ballad style of the 1970s
and 1980s travels so well in Indonesiaso much better, in fact, than most
other Western rock. It is clearly not the narrative of overcoming love through
adversity that travels. What does travel is a sense of anomie: the sense of
being a young person who feels that he or she does not really have a place
in society. This sense of anomie is poignantly depicted in the video for
The Wishes of Your Parents in the scenes of the singer sitting alone in his
village, being shooed out of his girlfriends house by her father, and walking
away from his home villageperhaps to migrate to another land, as so many
young Toraja people do when they find there is no economic or marital future
for them in Toraja. In my own research in Toraja, as I interviewed consumers
of VCDs, I met many young people who graduated from or dropped out of
high school and found themselves unemployed, sitting around their parents
houses, perhaps spinning a VCD over and over again, until they finally
realized that there was nothing to do but to leave Toraja to find work.
In many Western power ballads, anomie is redeemed through love:
the singer rejects society, but searches for belonging, for redemption, in
love and in his beloved. This narrative of anomie, then of the redemption
of anomie through love, seems to appeal to many young Indonesians; many
mainstream Indonesian rock songs do invoke romantic transcendence. The
aesthetic power of The Wishes of Your Parents, however, rests on how it
plays off our normal expectations of romantic transcendence in the power
ballad. The song begins like a standard power ballad, suggesting that we
might be moving toward the cathartic payoff: the big sing-along chorus that
affirms how we will transcend our problems, our lot in life, through love. But
The Wishes of Your Parents pointedly declines the expected resolution:
its chorus gives us only a brooding, defeated descent to the minor cadence.
The last questionthe unanswerable oneis whether The Wishes
of Your Parents protests or accepts the Toraja caste system. Some elements
of the song suggest it may be a protest: the forceful speech against the
lovers separation in the first two verses, the tragic feeling of the final
cadence. Still, I cannot help wondering whether the song is, in fact, a lesson
for young Toraja people: a way to practice controlling the negative emotions
216 Andy Hicken

brought on by obeisance to the caste system; a pop-musical disciplining. Are

Toraja listeners supposed to be troubled by this video, or are they supposed
to nod approvingly? As the singer walks away from his lover and his home
village, does he feel he has done something wrong? Or does he feel proud,
as if he has taken a step toward learning a skillacceptance of the order of
thingsthat all adults must learn?

Notes
1. The Dutch were more mercantile than missionary for most of their
colonial period in the Dutch East Indies. However, in the late 19th century
and early 20th they came to regard Islamwhich had grown in influence
throughout the colonized areas of the archipelagoas a potential basis
for organized resistance. Thus, as the colonial government consolidated its
military control over the archipelago to include even remote areas like Toraja
and the Batak regions of Sumatra, it encouraged missionaries to convert the
non-Islamic peoples in these areas to Christianity, thinking that they would
serve as bulwarks against the spread of Islam.
2. Toraja ritual music, on the other hand, uses slendro- and pelog-like
scales (i.e. scales whose intervals resemble those used in Javanese gamelan
music) (Rappoport 1997:42024).
3. As part of my research, I conducted a survey of over 450 VCD
and cassette purchases by about 300 buyers: Pop Indonesia garnered 50.9%
of the sales; Toraja regional pop and rohani represented 10.5% of sales;
rohani in other languages (mostly Indonesian with a smattering of English)
garnered 9.9% of sales; and Western pop, rock, and R&B sales constituted
7.2% (Hicken 4344).
4. Intentionally or not, the track listing repeats the two-disc
collection Forever Slow Rock as Forever Slow Rock 2. These songs are
actually on the CD only once.
5. The musical transcriptions in this article are by the author unless
otherwise indicated.
6. For example, the Toraja pop singer Salma Margareth has a
similar song told from a womans perspective. Its title, Paporaianna
Tomendadianmu, also translates to The Wishes of Your Parents (see
Hicken 2009).
The Wishes of Your Parents 217

7. Siulu means younger sibling. Like the English word baby, it

is a slangy term of affection for ones boyfriend or girlfriend.
8. The word dikka, translated here as pity me, is a common
interjection, especially in Toraja songs but also in speech. It is a plea for the
hearer to pity the speaker.
9. This translation is a combination of an on-the-spot translation of
the verse into Indonesian by the speaker, Ulia Salurapa, a second translation
that I made with my translation assistant, Paulus Kamben Mangngi, and my
own work with the Toraja-Indonesian dictionary (Tammu and van der Veen
692).

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Discography
Rappoport, Dana. Indonesie, Toraja: Funerailles et fetes de
fecondite. Compact disc. Paris: Chant du Monde CNR 2741004, 1995.
Trio Pandin and Salma Margareth. [no date, ca. 2006.] Pop Toraja.
Video compact disc. Toraja Record/Romora Record.