From Ruse with Love

Investigating of Sundanese culture, much of work involves scrutinizing artistic
and cultural expression to evaluate what it is that makes them “Sundanese”. It
seems unavoidable that words such as tradition
and traditional will shape our
discourse. Among the question “How does the practice of traditional Sundanese performance
affect the community, including Sundanese artists?” Implicit in this question,
I shared understanding what the word traditional
means. For answer this question, we
should probe the implication of word tradition
by considering two contemporary Sundanese music and dance expression, that is jaipongan and dangdut.

Jaipongan is a Sundanese
traditional music and dance, wich to suggest is an indigenous dance form, or
the other words jaipongan is a
regional and traditional genre, showing little or no detected influence form West. Dangdut, in the other hand, often characterized as full of foreign
influence. The common notion that jaipongan
is indigenous and traditional, while dangdut
is not, considers primarily the dimensions of instruments and tuning, and
disregards social implications.

A common approach is to enumerates the authentic fetures of sundenese
dance to be form, movements, accompaniments, rhythm, and costume. In general,
the criteria for including something in the category of traditional because it involves no western musical instruments and
uses sundanese tunings and dance styles, as well as because the songs are sung
in the sundanese language.

By these measures of what it means to be traditional,  jaipongan indeed sounds more
indigenously sundanese than dangdut.
From the point of view of musical style, it is difficult to argue that dangdut
has much to do with sundanese arts. Dangdut
songs typically are sung in the Indonesian language; their sound is dominated
by non-indigenous instruments such as guitars and synthesizers. Although some dangdut music has distincly West Java
flavor, with sundanese rhythms played on sundanese kendang, and although most dangdut
superstars come from

West Java

and have
had a profound exposure to Sundanese culture, because dangdut’s sonic signature is dominated by non Sundanese-sounding
instruments, it is difficult to locate it within any sundanese tradition.

In Summary, comparing the traditional arts, jaipongan is a result from sundanese indigenous culture, so we can
define that jaipongan is a
traditional music and dance expressions. In a contras, dangdut is not a from sundanese culture, because dangdut is an
extraordinary mix or foreign song.