Last Saturday, EMO finally overran HARDCORE’s main headquarters. Two of HARDCORE’s own paid the ultimate price. One of them had the left side of the skull shredded by a scooter gear; his head resembled little more than a chain assembly. The other had his jaw torn clean off by a sliver of cold-formed steel. HARDCORE was done for. Word spread that their mysterious ringleader had fled in a panic. Now, EMO reigns over Buahbatu—a scenario almost too absurd to believe for Bandung’s underground, genre-specific loud music gangs. 

***

Today, Thursday, I’ve secured an appointment with the DEATHMETAL coordinator. They’re ready to be interviewed. Their war strategy hinges on irregular, asymmetrical rhythmic patterns. “5/4, 7/8, or 4/4, but executed in an unstructured way,” the coordinator explained. “In the field, we plan to directly apply lyrics from two Jasad albums,” he boasted over the phone, painting a picture of violence with the hollow shock of contemporary splatterpunk. “We’re not out for any specific target; we’re a new gang that wants to emerge and be noticed by the others in Bandung—just come to Ujungberung and you’ll see.” 

My Yamaha Nouvo rolled steadily across Bandung’s asphalt, the road as crated as the moon’s surface. Nearly a year has passed since SBY’s inauguration, and the city’s street violence keeps spiralling upward. Only in the military zones—especially Cimahi—does it stay relatively quiet. Maybe this really is a structural problem. But what exactly does that mean when it comes to the overlap between the underground music genres and street violence? Why Bandung? There’s something downright baffling about the way violence manifests here. Perhaps it’s the inevitable outcome of a generation raised on Final Destination. 

***

I park my motorcycle at a small roadside stall. Nearby, a half-finished cluster-style house stands abandoned, left to rot. I’m in the industrial district, right next to garment and chemical factories—somewhere south of Jalan Rumah Sakit. 

The DEATHMETAL coordinator appears at the end of the street, heading towards me. “From far off?” he asks—his first words. “No, from Antapani,” I reply.

We make our way to the DEATHMETAL hideout—a squat of sorts, though there’s no such thing as a squat in Indonesia. Let’s call it a hangout spot: a deserted house with a few drinks stalls out front. Around fifteen or twenty people are gathered there. Some wear long-sleeve black tees repping local death metal merch. Others wear camo trousers cut above the ankle, paired with chunky skate shoes. Five of them look like they can’t be older than fifteen.

“Has anyone made an MP3 of Asphyxiate’s “The Process of Mutilation?” I ask, nodding at the track blasting from a Sony Ericsson phone. The coordinator just nods. 

I sit down on a plastic stool and flip open my notebook. No preamble—I get right to the point: “Why are you willing to wade into violence—even risk your lives—for a music genre?” 

“Music saved our lives,” the coordinator says, and I can already tell he’s going to do most of the talking. “Everyone here owes a debt to music: music that freed us from factory work, music that let us rebel at school, music that gave us the space and the freedom to express whatever we wanted.” 

It’s a pragmatic take on the kind of expenditure George Bataille described in The Accursed Share—a surplus of energy that demands release, even if it means destruction—in this case, through violence. “But you could do that without violence, right?” I ask, my voice a little hoarse.

“True,” the coordinator replies, leaning in so close his pungent breath stings my nostrils. “But violence is far more fun than making music.” 

One of the members pipes up: “Violence is a form of total experience—a pure ecstasy. How’s that different from watching a death metal gig?” 

In my head, I’m thinking: Come on, at a death metal show, you’re not actually indulging in a Freudian death drive. “So why Death Metal? Why not a Black Metal gang?” 

“As a so-called journalist, you’re kinda clueless,” the coordinator says, visibly irritated. “Birmingham gave birth to Black Sabbath. Same place, under Thatcher? Grindcore. It’s just how it goes: you’re in an industrial area like Ujungberung, so of course you’ll find us.”

I keep pushing. “So music genres and gang identities adapt to a certain district’s landscape and social class?” 

He raises his voice. “You think NOISE could’ve sprung up in Ujungberung? No chance! Only in North Bandung could that sort of gang appear. And why? Simple, because they’re middle to upper-class university kids. EMO in Dayeuhkolot—” 

He’s cut off abruptly when one of his mates comes tearing up the street, shouting in  panic: “EMO’s coming!” 

Bedlam erupts in an instant. Amid the sudden swarm of movement, I stand and search for a way out. A moment later, blood splashes across my face—the blood of a DEATHMETAL member whose eye has been skewered by a five-centimetre concrete nail, fired from a slingshot by an EMO member at a distance. In the next breath, several DEATHMETAL members charge the EMO gang, brandishing shiny machetes. The whole place becomes a terrifying chaos. As I run, my head slams into a rock that seems to materialise out of nowhere, tossed by God-knows-who. Suddenly, everything goes black. 

***

The stench of rust woke me. It came from a dagger pressed against my throat. “I know you’re not one of them. What were you doing with them?” The voice was soft, but my vision was too blurred to make out who it belonged to. My head was spinning. I figured I was being interrogated by someone from the EMO gang. Despite struggling to speak, I managed to reply, “I just wanted to understand why you commit street violence.” 

My senses began returning. The noise in this place was overwhelming. Partitioned walls surrounded me—I was in an internet café. Some heavy track played faintly in the background. Could it be the new Dagger Stab single? 

“Are you an intel?” the gang member asked. “I wish I were! The police are impotent enough when it comes to taking you lot down, let alone having any dedicated intel division.” 

He laughed uproariously. “So then?” he pressed, waving the dagger in front of my nose. “I’m an anthropologist,” I said. 

***

The music got louder. Through a dark corridor, he led me to a room at the back of the café. My hands were tied behind my back. He hurled me to the ground. A woman—likely another member—shut the door. 

This space held a handful of people I assumed belonged to EMO. They were decked out in black, skinny jeans, messy hair, some with messy wolf cuts. Surprisingly, they weren’t uniform in style: I spotted two dressed like skaters. Another sat at a computer, surfing the net. The woman who’d shut the door now lounged on a filthy sofa. She looked a bit older, wearing an oversized sweater. 

“So who’s this?” one of them asked. “He says he’s an anthropologist,” answered the man who’d been interrogating me. The one in front of the computer spoke in a panicked tone, “We’re screwed if he’s an informant. Once the cops find out, they’ll raid this place! We’re running pirated Windows!” 

That said a lot about the impotence of law enforcement around here, if what they truly fear is having their internet café shut down rather than the street violence they carry out. “We should kill him now. We don’t want him to tell everyone about our 3GP business,” someone piped up. The guy with the dagger at my throat suddenly roared, “Shut up, idiot! He doesn’t know anything!” 

Although in appearance and demeanour, they probably were the least threatening of the city’s gangs, EMO had a systematic, organised way of doing things. It mirrored the structured compositions of their genre, with clear patterns. Except, of course, the more chaotic side of it, like “emoviolence.” They likely hadn’t run across that subgenre yet. 

I also sensed they had a more solid business model, like HARDCORE, running an internet café and churning out 3GP porn for shady forums like BB17 and LalatX. For the past few years, internet cafés in Buahbatu had been a war zone. Online porn forums were their propaganda channels. This shaped the psychogeography of Buahbatu differently from Ujungberung—here, people browsed more. Geography wasn’t just a physical space, but also internet access and the topology of cyberspace. Unlike DEATHMETAL, EMO, and HARDCORE, they didn’t limit their battles to real life; they fought online as well. Now, EMO had seized everything

Talk about rotten luck—of all the cafés in Bandung, I had to end up in theirs. 

“So, what do we do with him?” asked the member slouched on the decrepit sofa. “I don’t believe he’s an anthropologist. I’m sure he’s someone else!” The woman chimed in. “Stay out of this, newbie!” snarled the dagger-wielder. The woman gave a cynical smirk. DEATHMETAL had apparently been crushed. Now, the only choice left was to get rid of me. They knew I’d seen too much.

Suddenly, the guy at the computer leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair. “What the hell!” he yelled, panic in his voice. “Shit! HARDCORE isn’t finished—they’re on the move! Get out of here!” He swore frantically. On his screen, a malware attack was looping a Mexican cartel beheading video, impossible to stop, with “WE WILL ANNIHILATE EMO” scrawled across the bottom.

The EMO members looked baffled, and a few snickered. The woman just smiled. Then she stood abruptly and pulled off her sweater, revealing a tight shirt and a bomb strapped to her torso. The laughter stopped cold. The rest of them stared in astonishment. 

“You think you can just laugh and assume you’ve destroyed HARDCORE?” she shouted, clutching a detonator in her hand. Turns out, she was the HARDCORE ringleader all along. “It’s easy to deceive fools, feeding them words like passion and solidarity!” she laughed again. The EMO members recoiled, cursing, some trying to rush her, others taking off, but the door was locked. No one had a clue how powerful the bomb might be. In this cramped room, the explosion alone would be deadly enough, never mind what it might do to the building.

“HARDCORE FOREVER! HARDCORE FOREVER!!” 

Then the blast happened. Body parts went flying. A head was sheared clean off. Someone’s duodenum flung to the floor, tangled with the debris. The filthy sofa went airborne, crashing on top of me and saving me from the falling rubble. 

I could only hope my rotten luck ended right there. 

***

Two months have passed since the incident. I still think about that day. Riding my motorcycle north of Bandung, I can’t help but replay the memory in my mind. 

I’m certain the abundance of bomb-making tutorials posted by Jemaah Islamiyah on internet forums, combined with the intense media coverage of various violent acts, has, to some extent, influenced HARDCORE’s decision to employ a suicide bomb. 

Now there’s no sign of EMO. DEATHMETAL shows up sporadically. HARDCORE has reclaimed Buahbatu.

In my view, this whole underground gang phenomenon is the product of Indonesia’s militaristic pragmatism, with Bandung at the epicentre. It is a legacy of a military regime that compels us to adopt identities that are neither fluid nor nuanced—everything viewed in black and white. Identities are treated as fixed and devoid of complexity. Music genres and their subcultures—along with their boundaries and aesthetic codes—are treated as monolithic categories. 

Yet there’s no such thing as a pure cultural product. No identity is ever truly pure. Still, militarism forces us to believe otherwise. Identity becomes tied to “soil and blood,” to something that must be staunchly defended at all costs. Cross-pollination seems impossible; if it were allowed, perhaps these genre-based music gangs wouldn’t exist. Even so, the violence they commit won’t simply vanish. In a militarised society, violence expands, always seeking out some new ‘pure’ identity to enforce or destroy. No matter what happens, the city’s violence goes on. 

My motorcycle finally comes to a halt outside a house in Ciumbuleuit. From inside, the greatest album of all time is blaring, Incapacitants – As Loud As Possible. My friends are busy assembling an acoustic hailing device with a 2 kHz firing capacity—something we plan to use next week, when we go after HARDCORE.