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Jakarta Expat 25 May–8 June 2011
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| Indonesia’s Largest Expatriate Readership | 44th Edition | 25 May–8 June 2011 |
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Dancing in the Street by Graham Strauss
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usking is an activity that can be witnessed in any number of the world’s cities. London, for example, is particularly famous for its tube station musicians, many of whom are actually music students trying to make a few pounds on the side, and those underground platforms that reverberate to the sounds of guitars and saxophones are virtually a tourist attraction in their own right. Things are a little different in Jakarta however. When one enters a traffic lights queue here, hoping to reach the front before the planet suffers the heat death, you’re unlikely to be confronted by anyone who’s had any formal musical training or indeed any education whatsoever. There will usually be one or two youngsters outside your taxi or car window, and it is quite likely that, age wise, they won’t have made it to double figures yet. They may have a stick with a couple of bottle tops nailed to it which they shake whilst singing along listlessly in a monotone mumble. If you’re really unlucky, they’ll have a guitar between them. It is possible to buy one of these buskers’ guitars extraordinarily cheaply, however most of them haven’t really been built with the same loving care as a Fender Stratocaster, and tend to slice one’s fingers when one presses down on the cheese wire strings. You get the picture, the noise produced is not usually a thing of beauty. Busking here thus represents the inverse of its usual function. Basically, you pay these poor fellows to stop playing and to go away and assault someone else’s sensibilities, rather than because you enjoy their caterwauling. A couple of thousand rupiah will usually see these poor unfortunates scuttling away like greyhounds into the traffic. If you don’t pay up, then they’ll usually just shuffle away anyway, although occasionally they can practice some of the few choice…
Courtesy of Sukianto Therry
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