Sexuality In Dangdut Lyrics: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Dangdut is claimed to be the original music genre of Indonesia has been undergoing radical change lately in both rhythm and lyric. The latter is manifested into sub-genre called dangdut koplo which manipulates the rapid beat of ketipung ‘tom-tom’. The latter is expressed by altering message of the lyric to be blatant vulgar which leads to sexuality. This study investigated mainly on the latter case; the language expression and linguistic features used in dangdut lyric to exploit sexuality, the form of relation among the participants, and socio-cultural phenomena reflected within dangdut lyric with sensual content. The qualitative analysis using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) proposed by Fairclough (1995) were used to be the conceptual framework. There were 19 controversial dangdut songs lyric considered as sensual and exploit sexuality were taken as the source of the data and twenty listeners were interviewed. The results of the study show that: Firstly, the lyrics employed Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese, figurative language in both dialogue and monologue, narrative text, rhymes, rhetorical question, seducing expression, and incomplete sentence structure. Secondly, the songs talked about man and woman relationship, sensual desire, and gender stereotype. Finally, the songs concern on the justifiability of the sensual content and economy motive. Besides, free sex and gender stereotype are the reflection of sociocultural phenomena.