Economic uncertainty, political turbulence, and youthful restlessness

Thoughts Words Action reviews ‘My Altercation: The Bandung Melodic Punk Scene 1995-2008’ by Prabu Pramayougha.

Punk rock histories are usually told through the familiar capitals: London, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. Maybe Berlin, maybe Tokyo if you’re lucky. What’s lost in those recycled myths is the truth that punk rock has always thrived in the margins, in places the spotlight rarely lands. That’s why Prabu Pramayougha’s My Altercation: The Bandung Melodic Punk Scene 1995–2008 is such a vital book. It shifts our gaze to Bandung, Indonesia, and demonstrates how punk was never just a Western export. Pramayougha writes as someone who lived it, inhaled it, and helped shape a local punk rock scene. A journalist and musician himself, he understands how to put memory to paper without sanding off its roughness. The book almost serves as a diary splintered into essays, notes, recollections, and sharp cultural observations. That fragmentation is the point. Punk was never about linear progress. It was about collisions, false starts, and bursts of energy that refused to be contained. Bandung in the mid-1990s wasn’t an obvious candidate to become a melodic punk rock hub, yet Pramayougha shows how economic uncertainty, political turbulence, and youthful restlessness created a perfect storm. Music became the glue holding together scenesters who wanted something beyond regular routine, beyond family expectation, beyond the national mainstream that left little room for dissent. Melodic punk rock became their soundtrack for everyday life, shaping them as the personas they are today.

Pramayougha explains it all. The humid rehearsal spaces where amps threatened to blow. The photocopied zines passed from hand to hand like manifestos. The venues, sometimes just borrowed halls or basements, they used for gigs. These details matter. They take what could have been a subcultural footnote and elevate it into lived history. Pramayougha isn’t nostalgic, and his tone is affectionate but unsparing. He knows scenes fracture as much as they unite. He admits the contradictions, the egos, the cliques, the arguments about purity, the struggles to survive in a city where being punk meant being misunderstood. Rather than weaken the story, these fractures give it honesty. Reading My Altercation, the reader is reminded of what makes music scenes worth remembering. It isn’t fame or polish. It’s the sense of building a world within a world, of creating rituals and aesthetics that feel like oxygen when the rest of society is suffocating. Bandung’s melodic punk was exactly that, a breath of fresh air, and Pramayougha is sharp enough to link that cultural oxygen to Indonesia’s broader shifts, the loosening grip of authoritarianism, the expansion of youth culture, the growing hunger for expression in a society still wrestling with tradition. There are passages where Pramayougha writes like a reporter, cataloguing events with crisp precision. Then, without warning, he’ll pivot to something almost poetic, describing the emotional high of a show, the way a chorus can lift a room, or the calm after an all-night gathering. This dual register gives the book rhythm. It feels alive, closer to the music it documents.

Anyone who has ever been part of an underground scene, whether in Detroit, Belgrade, Manila, or São Paulo, will recognize themselves here. The struggles are the same, how to stay independent without burning out, how to balance passion with survival, how to carry on when the outside world dismisses you. Bandung’s details are specific, but the spirit is global. Punk has always been about local accents to a shared language, and Pramayougha captures that brilliantly. Too many cultural histories look back with neatness, trying to make movements seem more coherent than they were. Pramayougha resists that temptation. He preserves the noise, the disagreements, the false starts. He admits memory is slippery. He even leaves space for contradictions, stories told from different perspectives, rumours that were never confirmed, moments that blur in hindsight. It’s fidelity to the way scenes actually function. Punk was always about confusion channelled into community. Of course, the book is also an act of preservation. Without works like this, scenes fade into obscurity, remembered only by those who were there, their stories scattered across fading flyers and lost demo tapes. By putting Bandung’s story into print, Pramayougha ensures it will not vanish. He gives the city’s melodic punk its rightful place in the global map of underground culture, and he does so with the authority of someone who understands that scenes are not sidebars to “real” history. They are history, shaping lives, politics, and identities in ways official narratives rarely acknowledge.

Writing a book like this requires the courage to revisit personal memories, to confront failures alongside triumphs, to insist that what happened in Bandung matters as much as what happened in New York or London. That conviction animates every page. Prabu Pramayougha wrote a love letter to a scene that deserved to be remembered. My Altercation is essential reading, not only for anyone interested in Indonesian music but for anyone who wants to understand how culture moves from the ground up. It proves once again that punk rock’s most radical act is the refusal to be forgotten.

Head to Earth Island Books for more information about ordering.

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