Word: jakartan
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...sophomore album, The Headless Songstress, Tika and her band - the aptly named Dissidents - file slow-burning postcards from the Jakartan edge. Recorded in a mix of English and Indonesian, these are songs of cynicism ("My midlife crisis was at its peak that Friday night"), urban ennui ("My dad's religious, my mum's a bore/ Can we talk about something else?") and modern manners ("Harry loves Betty .../ But daddy wants Betty to marry Eddy/ But Eddy loves Larry"). Classic jazz scoring - for piano, acoustic bass and drums - steeps the work in an atmosphere of late nights and darkened rooms...
...protagonist, Hidayat, is a Jakartan intellectual caught up in the Japanese occupation. The conquerors use Bahasa Indonesia, the archipelago's lingua franca, as an administrative tongue in their polyglot territory. Hidayat - drawing on Alisjahbana's actual wartime employment in occupied Indonesia's language office - is put in charge of formalizing its grammar and syntax. In the novel (as it was in life), the office is a meeting place for nationalists who seize on Japan's defeat in 1945 to declare independence and adopt Bahasa Indonesia as the new nation's official tongue...
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