Soul music has specific sounds. Soul as it appears in the term Soul jazz has a vastly different sound to soul as it appears in the term Nu Classic Soul yet there are links between the two. The socio-cultural connotations of the two souls are also vastly different as one would expect given the fact that they pertain to eras that are separated by some four decades. What happened to soul in that time and space? This book describes the sound of soul in an evocative and as incisive a way by analyzing the real nuts and bolts that have been used to construct the music songform, vocal techniques, instruments, machines and production methods. The overriding interest of the book is not just standard soul but strange soul as performed by Sly Stone, Me Shell Ndgeocello, Bootsy Collins and Bilal Oliver. It also looks at the lack of clear demarcation between strange and standard soul within the work of the same artist. Marvin Gaye started with standard soul and became strange, as did Stevie Wonder. As for Omars Theres Nothing Like This, it is a piece of standard soul, a flimsy one at that, whereas Omars Best By Far is a piece of prime strange soul, a performance that could only have come from a Briton of Jamaican descent. Some soul artists are standard and strange on the same album. The tension between the two states of tradition and innovation is fascinatingly put under the microscope and has a wider resonance in one of souls musical cousins: jazz. The book is not just about music though. The notion of soul, the mythology of it, the ideal of it, has a very wide range of connotations. Le Gendre looks at culture, lifestyle and attitudes to really get a handle on what soul is and how strange some strange souls were talking pill-popping, gun-toting, S&amp;M loving, codpiece sporting, lampshade wearing brothers and sisters have been.

Soul Unsung: Reflections on the Band in Black Popular Music (Popular Music History)

Arts & Photography

Kevin Le Gendre

Music

Equinox Pub

When armed insurgents began to attack government soldiers in the Indonesian province of Aceh with increasing frequency in the middle of 1989, it was apparent that this distinctive part of the far-flung republic was adding yet another period of turmoil, rebellion, and blood-letting to those that had marked its history over the previous hundred years. Famous for their long war against the Dutch in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Acehnese were equally well-known for their willingness to resort to arms to defend their identity and interests against the encroachments of postindependence Indonesian governments. As early as 1953 a rebellion had broken out against the central government, and in the latter part of the 1970s another attempt had been made to foment revolt.This study seeks to explain the reasons for the most recent uprising in Aceh. Part One sketches the region's history up to the mid-1960s. Part Two examines the economic, political, and social changes that have occurred in Aceh over the past quarter of a century, under the New Order regime: the roots of rebellion in the province. This analysis goes beyond the period defined in the title of the study: the end of rebellion does not mean that its root causes have been resolved. Part Three looks at the rebellion itself, and at the complexion of political power in Aceh in the early 1990s. Part Four summarizes the principal arguments of the monograph.The main thesis of this study is that exploitation of Aceh's resources for the benefit of the central government; economic stagnation in the province itself; governmental and political overcentralization which has served to disenfranchise the people of the region; and social changes which have led to the mass of Acehnese losing their traditional social and political leaders, have combined to open the way for an armed separatist movement to foment rebellion in the province.

The Roots of Acehnese Rebellion, 1989-1992

History

Kell, Tim

Asia

This thesis on Madiun was written during a year spent at Cornell studying Southeast Asia on a State Department training program. I had just come from a three-year assignment in Indonesia (1968-1971) and was being trained for more service in the area. Searching for a thesis topic, I was drawn to the Madiun period: it was one of the most turbulent periods of the Indonesian revolution and one which had stirred a reasonable amount of controversy. I decided to take an in-depth look at the period, trying to come at it from an Indonesian perspective while keeping an eye cocked to world events.My methodology was simple: I read everything I could find on the subject and talked to as many people as possible. The further I got into my research, the more I realized that the key to understanding what had actually happened in 1948 was the newspapers of the period. These happily were available in abundance in Cornell's outstanding library and gave me not only an accurate chronology of events but a first-hand look at how people of the period viewed those events at the time-without the disadvantage of hindsight.I made what were to me some fascinating discoveries (historians' views of "fascinating" can be a bit obscure) and produced a thesis which is probably a bit more than most people would really like to know about the period. Hating to leave out anything, I added footnotes almost as long as the thesis itself.I had no preconceived notions when I started the thesis and tried to maintain my objectivity throughout. I was not looking for a particular solution to "what happened" and perhaps because of this, the thesis lacks a resounding conclusion. I hope, however, it will add a bit to the knowledge of the period. - Ann Swift, June 1988

The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948

Swift, Ann

It has always been a matter of national pride that independence came to Indonesia not as the result of a negotiated transfer of sovereignty, though the process was completed in that way, but through a struggle of heroic proportions in whose fires the nation itself was forged. The revolution, indeed, is central to the Republic's perception of itself. To call it a revolution is, of course, to beg a number of important questions. What is a revolution? Is the concept, developed in modern thought on the models of the French and Russian revolutions, applicable to a nationalist struggle for independence? Or must a revolution involve also a transfer of power from one social class to another and a subsequent social transformation? For Indonesians looking back to the birth of the nation, however, such questions do not arise. For them there is no question but that the events of 1945-49 constituted a revolution, a revolution that is seen as the supreme act of national will, the symbol of national self-reliance and, for those caught up in it, as a vast emotional experience in which the people -- the people as a whole -- participated directly.
The exploration of Sjahrir's recruitment of a group of followers during the Japanese Occupation and of the character and attitudes of the group is based, in large measure, on interviews with its surviving members. A highly articulate body of people, they clearly enjoyed recalling their youth, remembering particular experiences, and thinking back on the issues that had preoccupied them and the ideas that had excited them as students. For many of them it had obviously been a golden age, perceived all the more vividly now because the world they had hoped for had never come into being. There is, perhaps, a good deal of nostalgia in their memories of what it was like to be a part of a crucial period in their country's history and no doubt some misjudgment about the parts they played. Oral history is a risky business, given the fallibility of human memory and the tendency for interviewer and subject alike to collaborate in re-shaping the past in the light of their later perspectives. The dangers of such a method are discussed below. Nevertheless, provided it is kept in mind that memories are documents of the present and not of the period with which they deal, it is important to gather these recollections while members of the generation in question are still alive.

Intellectuals and Nationalism in Indonesia: A Study of the Following Recruited by Sutan Sjahrir in Occupation Jakarta

Legge, J.D.

Although numerous accounts have been published of the genesis and character of the attempted October 1965 coup in Indonesia, many important aspects of that affair still remain very unclear. The fact that in most accounts so much of the picture has been painted in black and white, and in language of categorical certainty, has served only to paper over the enormous gaps in established knowledge of the event.In his present introduction to the paper here published, Professor Anderson describes the circumstances surrounding its preparation and the reasons why it was not previously published. Indeed, because of the avowedly tentative and provisional character of this early effort, there would normally be no reason to publish it any more than there would have been to publish the scores of other preliminary drafts prepared over the years by scholars working in the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project. However, this draft has been given a unique prominence. For it has been singled out by a number of those who have subsequently written accounts of the attempted coup, among whom all too many have misrepresented the authors' ideas and cited words or phrases of theirs out of context. Thus there are special reasons now for publishing this draft in its entirety - in fairness both to the authors and to all those interested in the events of 1965 - so that readers can make their own assessments rather than having to rely upon doctored extracts and tendentious interpretations by writers hostile to the hypotheses advanced by its authors.I have found myself in disagreement with some of the views presented in this paper; however, I believe that despite the limited materials available to the authors over the few months that they collected and analyzed their data, this draft, which they wrote at the end of 1965, contains a number of important insights and a considerable amount of significant data which other writers have not taken into account. Thus, those interested in understanding the attempted coup of 1965, particularly if they bear in mind the caveats of Professor Anderson's present introduction, should find this paper useful. - George McT. Kahin

A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965 Coup in Indonesia

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G.

McVey, Ruth T.

Very little has been written about the twilight of Dutch rule in the Netherlands East Indies, in the period immediately after the Japanese army swept through Java and parachuted its forces into south Sumatra. When the Commander-in-Chief of the Netherlands Indies Army, Lt. General Hein Ter Poorten, surrendered to the Japanese in Kali Jati on March 9, 1942, that incident did not mark the end of Dutch control throughout the Indies. Major elements of the colonial government on Sumatra held out for a further three weeks before finally capitulating on March 28. The following memoir, Prisoners at Kota Cane by Leon Salim, presents the events of these final days in Sumatra from the perspective of an Indonesian arrested by the Dutch shortly after Ter Poorten's surrender.  Although this diary was brought together into the form of a memoir shortly after the events it describes, the Indonesian version has never been published. I am grateful to Leon Salim for letting me translate and publish it, and for checking the translation and answering queries on it, for I think the memoir is an important contribution to our understanding of this period of Indonesia's history. - Audrey Kahin, November 1985

Prisoners at Kota Cane

Salim, Leon

Since its inception in 1945, the Republic of Indonesia has experienced a series of profound social changes. The spread of schooling, the transformation of the economy, and the consolidation of a unified state have transformed the lives of Indonesian citizens. It is seldom recognized, however, that the most fundamental changes have occurred in the family sphere. Marriages that used to be arranged by parents are now more likely to be determined by couples. Unions occur when the couples are much older. The adoption of birth control practices has reduced fertility from large families to a two-child norm in just over thirty years.These changes have molded the lives of individual women, described here through a series of personal case studies, and shaped the size and structure of the national population, as seen in the statistics produced by the government on a regular basis. The story that emerges gives strong hints about where the Indonesian population will be heading in the next fifty years with a growing proportion of aged citizens. Most importantly People, Population, and Policy in Indonesia shows the importance of collaborations between Indonesian leaders and their foreign colleagues in the efforts to reshape the Indonesian population and improve its social and economic welfare.

People, Population, and Policy in Indonesia

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Sidelines: Thought Pieces from Tempo Magazine

Mohamad, Goenawan

Philosophy

Saman is a story filtered through the lives of its feisty female protagonists and the enigmatic "hero" Saman. It is at once an exposé of the oppression of plantation workers in South Sumatra, a lyrical quest to understand the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary lives, a playful exploration of female sexuality and a story about love in all its guises, while touching on all of Indonesia's taboos: extramarital sex, political repression and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. Saman has taken the Indonesian literary world by storm and sold over 100,000 copies in the Indonesian language, and is now available for the first time in English.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ayu Utami was born in Bogor, grew up in Jakarta and obtained her bachelor degree in Literature Studies from University of Indonesia. She worked as a journalist for Matra, Forum Keadilan, and D&amp;R. Not long after the New Order regime closed Tempo, Editor, and Detik, she participated in the founding of Indonesia's Alliance of Independent Journalists to protest the closure of those three weeklys. Currently she is working for the cultural journal Kalam, and at Teater Utan Kayu. Saman was awarded the Prince Claus Award in the year 2000.

Saman

Literature & Fiction

Utami, Ayu

Contemporary

The Bubble Economy tells the story of the greatest failure of Japanese economic management since 1945. In the second half of the 1980s Japan's financial madness and arrogance centered on a booming stockmarket and rocketing land prices, which dragged the solid manufacturing economy into a whirlwind of outrageous speculation. Then the boom when spectacularly bust, leaving in its wake a withered stockmarket, crashing land prices, mountains of bad loans, an economy in recession, and a slew of political and financial scandals, graphically exposing the seedy underbelly of Japan's feudal finance system. The Bubble Economy reveals how Japan is spending the first half of the 1990s paying off these excesses in a process that threatens the world's economies with dire consequences, and questions many of the myths built up around Japanese management, pointing to levels of incompetence never before thought possible.

The Bubble Economy: Japan's Extraordinary Speculative Boom of the '80s And the Dramatic Bust of the '90s

Business & Money

WOOD, Christopher

Investing

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