Japanese Music Cover: A Study of Gramscian Hegemony in Indonesian Pop Culture
Introduction
Today’s social media platforms give every creator an unprecedented opportunity to compose and share music. Songs that are currently trending appear quickly on YouTube, Spotify, Joox, and other services, often reworked as cover versions with different styles and presentation formats. Through musical rearrangement, performers can revive a track in a new form distinct from the original. Changes might involve the style or genre of performance, the range of instruments used, or even translating lyrics into a foreign tongue. Covers are produced freely, so any song can be revisited and posted to digital channels.
Indonesian songs are no exception. Many tracks by local artists are being translated into other languages, particularly Japanese. This cover activity is performed by the song’s audience — both domestic and foreign listeners — and occasionally by the original artists themselves. The songs most frequently remade are those currently ascendant or appearing at the top of streaming playlists. Motivations include a desire to create something new, to go viral, to demonstrate skill, or simply to increase a YouTube channel’s views. Rendering songs originally sung in Indonesian into Japanese is, however, nothing entirely fresh.
Culture, according to McIver (cited in Soekanto, 2002:304), is a manifestation of the soul expressed through ways of living and thinking, social interactions, literary arts, religion, recreation, and entertainment — work oriented toward fulfilling human needs. Over time the concept of popular culture emerged, understood here as a set of cultural elements that come from ordinary people because they relate to everyday concerns that everyone enjoys. Burton (cited in Chaniago, 2011:93) argues that popular culture is less about genuine art arising from creative motives and more about the production and consumption of material commodities for profit. In that sense popular culture emerges from industrial society, supported by advances in production technology and mass reproduction, making it available to every segment of the population without barriers of space or time.
Japan is a developed nation that maintains both its traditional and contemporary culture — the latter widely called “popular culture.” Japanese popular culture encompasses anime, manga, J-fashion, Japanese popular music, dramas, games, and more. Japanese popular music, abbreviated J-Pop, refers to all modern Japanese music genres that enjoy worldwide fame and attract diverse audiences.
Cultural hegemony spreads partly through the mass media, which instills ideology into society indirectly. The media grants hegemonic groups — the ruling or dominant class — the means to exercise power, because mass communication shapes mindsets, paradigms, and ideologies on a large scale. Gramsci distinguishes two varieties of hegemonic leadership: intellectual hegemony and moral hegemony. Intellectual hegemony focuses on leading others through knowledge, while moral hegemony relies on social relationships and emotional closeness to influence others. Roger Simon echoes this idea, noting that hegemony does not arise through overt force but through political and ideological leadership.
Contemporary Japanese music is deeply linked to Western cultural influences. Following World War II, the American military occupation introduced several new genres: jazz, boogie-woogie, mambo, blues, and country. The rise of Japanese pop came from Japanese musicians’ desire to compete with their Western counterparts; the term J-Pop emerged partly as a label for this competitive response. In its development, lyrics are sometimes written in English. Anyone today can access Japanese songs easily across numerous digital platforms.
With YouTube allowing anyone to upload music videos, the trend of converting song lyrics into other languages has grown. When an Indonesian pop song achieves popularity, two versions may appear shortly — the original and a Japanese version, often eagerly awaited by fans. Japanese versions are chosen because J-Pop already surrounds young people in daily cultural life, so it feels more familiar. Japanese musicians also capture the interest of audiences who hear Indonesian music sung in Japanese. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony can explain the enjoyment and enthusiasm around these covers. The aims of this study are to explain the process of Japanese cultural hegemony in the Indonesian pop music audience and to analyze potential dangers that may arise from that process.
Research methods
This is a descriptive qualitative study employing a Gramscian hegemonic perspective. That perspective attempts to observe how ideological domination spreads from a dominant group to a subordinate group through voluntary intellectual and moral leadership. The subjects are lovers of Indo-Japanese cover music. The study uses a literature-review method, that is, a series of activities involving collecting library materials, reading, recording, and processing relevant documents. Data was sourced from secondary materials: books, journals, and online resources.
Results and discussion
The development of J-Pop in Indonesia
Indonesia is one of the countries following the global spread of Japanese pop culture. The increasing number of Japan-themed events — such as manga festivals, cosplay gatherings, anime events, cultural festivals, and J-Pop concerts — confirms the trend. J-Pop entered Indonesia in the 1980s with the song “Mayumi Itsuwa Kokoro no Tomo.” Suddenly, many popular-music fans began using some Japanese words in everyday conversation (Ryani, 2014). Today, numerous Indonesian bands and music groups in the J-Pop genre are active; they do not just incorporate Japanese into lyrics but also adopt aspects of Japanese fashion and style.
The arrival of Japanese music culture cannot be separated from the influence of Japanese animated films, or “anime.” The original soundtracks played during beloved anime on national television — series such as Doraemon, Dragon Ball, and Sailor Moon — were among the first experiences many Indonesians had with Japanese music. Since J-Pop entered the country, it has immediately captured people’s attention and become popular. The popularity of J-Pop, anime, and other facets of Japanese pop culture in Indonesia has even affected language learning: surveys by the Japan Foundation place Indonesia as the country with the second-highest number of Japanese learners in the world (Widodo, 2010; 2018). However, J-Pop also carries negative impacts in the eyes of the public, most noticeably excessive fanaticism, characterized by enthusiasts loving every aspect of the culture too deeply in all parts of their lives.
J-Pop hegemony in Indonesian pop music covers
J-Pop’s style and the way it is incorporated into Indonesian pop songs are extremely popular. Many people today record and post cover versions of others’ work to YouTube. The productions vary widely, from simple recordings to elaborately prepared videos. A cover song is generally defined as a recording by someone other than the original performer that reproduces parts or all of a previously recorded song. Covers need not change the original text or melody (Devi, 2017:513).
Japanese popular music has spread far beyond Indonesia, of course. The strategy used globally to spread J-Pop is tied to other popular Japanese cultural forms — anime, manga, fashion, television shows, movies, games, and music — which together sustain one another (Venus and Lucky Helmi, 2007:73).
Among those fields, anime, manga, J-fashion, and J-pop are the most influential in Indonesia. This abundance of Japanese products in the arts sector indicates Japan’s superior power relationship relative to the Indonesian people — though this power is exercised without overt threat of violence, which is a textbook case of hegemony.
The noted process of hegemony unfolds massively through the mass media. Media outlets indirectly spread Japanese ideology via the shows they broadcast. Through such platforms, Japan introduces and normalizes Japanese pop culture among cover-music fans. Gramsci (as cited in Strinati, 1995:57) stated that mass media and popular culture are conceptually intertwined. The media then broadcasts ideology stacked inside Japanese pop culture, eventually creating false consciousness among enthusiasts. Major Japanese media corporations such as Kadokawa Shoten, Libre Shupan, and Tokuma Shoten function as ruling groups that spread Japanese pop culture in Indonesia. This media consumption not only enhances opportunities for cultural exchange between Japan and Indonesia but also acts as a vehicle for hegemony that reshapes people’s minds, tastes, and lifestyles—particularly for the younger generation. Eventually, the community of Japanese pop culture lovers, who unself-consciously consume these products in daily life, becomes the hegemonic group at the local level.
Figure 1: An Indonesian pop song re-sung in Japanese by the original artist.
Figure 2: An Indonesian pop song remade into a Japanese version featuring anime-style visuals.
Gramsci (cited in Amroshi, 2014:3) contends that some forms of control over specific groups rely on intellectual and moral leadership built on a consensus—in other words, the subordinate group freely assents to the rulers’ ideological values. Intellectual hegemony focuses on leading others through knowledge, whereas moral hegemony centers on leadership founded on emotional closeness and social interaction that—over time—makes the ideologies permeate and take root among fans. Without being fully aware of it, cover-music lovers begin to see their thought patterns and behavior shift under the influence of Japanese pop culture. This is one of the pernicious aspects of hegemony: it subtly shapes where people’s interests grow. Among the political forces benefiting from this arrangement stand large Japanese media corporations, which sense the spread of awareness and then depend upon their fan base. Gramsci notes that hegemony inevitably also involves the role of capitalists: in seizing state power, then in preserving that power once obtained.
To be clear, the overspread of Japanese culture through mass media does not necessarily mean one should refrain from studying or exploring another country’s traditions, nor does it mean rejecting the performers’ creative work. The issue becomes fatal if listeners become passive consumers without understanding the likelihood of intellectual colonization. By preferring Japanese versions, we help sustain the picture that Indonesian songs are only better or more global-sounding after being translated into Japanese. An example: when Japanese fans cover Indonesian songs in Japanese and receive many (deserved) praises without the original track being appreciated proportionally, the result inadvertently establishes Japan as a cultural-forms spreader. The public carries this symbolic weight unconsciously and without payment from the Japanese government.
Then, the media corporations treat music-cover followers not only as core consumers of Japanese popular-culture products but also as further spreaders of that culture, along with TV programming, magazines, and the internet. As Japanese song cover audiences enlarge, Japan can broadcast its culture further and into a broader array of formats receiving diverse socio-economic groups. That is where the hegemonic function persists — capitalists assisting both political and cultural power to seize and stay within national spectrum.
Finally, to use without preternatural sense of national identify the trend exposes Indonesian youth to systematic displacement well protected by capitalism.
Conclusion
The media gives hegemonic forces a central front to pass (such through broadcasting) without direct overt methodology of disseminating. Through YouTube’s cover realm, two particularities stand off as intellectual aspects— where use of the Japanese in quotidian manners falls under that sphere — side the less thought element: covers receiving moral adjustment inclusive behaviors produce social value via offers forming new lean processes collect often more items imitating fashion hairstyle accessories et cetera that people easily misinterpret distinct background rules fine-line.
Recommendation
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