Javanese Pop and Javanese Keroncong: The Paradigm of Domination Strategy

Songwriters and presenters can be viewed as the main factors for ensuring success to lyrical songs in the music market. However, there are not many studies available that specifically explore the strategy of composing and presenting lyrical songs in achieving market dominance in Indonesia. This study aims to reveal the strategies used by composers as well as songwriters to gain dominance in the music market in that particular country. Researchers collect music, photos and videos and gather responses from audiences. Musical works produce data on scales, lyrics, and musical accompaniment. Concert photos and videos generate information about costume styles. Concert videos and song clips generate data about audience response and stage appearances. The next stage is to interpret the data groups, followed by confirming the meanings of the concepts of capital, distinction, domination and repression in the field of psychoanalysis. This study shows that songwriters make use of the lyrics as their distinctive features. Popular landmarks in the lyrics of songs invoke the listener’s personal memory and repression attached to those landmarks. This study shows that songwriters achieve market dominance by creating product distinctions. At the same time, reconciliatory feelings connected with repression are aroused by recreating the past by means of stories and particular places. Popular landmarks invoke listeners’ sense of repression and their memories, so that they feel at peace with their past, or at least become involved in the songwriter’s works. The predominating works by songwriter show that elements of evoking memories, maintaining traditions and evoking popular places of past activities have leverage on the popularity of the music.