Mobile Musics

This is about those varieties of musicians that are playing on Jakarta's public tranportation buses and SUVs.

They come in varieties of sex, age, number of persons in a team, and more importantly, skills.

But they have one thing that ties them together: money.

They come from low economy class families, with no other skills but playing musics. Even those skills are sometimes rudimentary, and some of them can even considered playing musics. Many of them play guitars, some of them play the drums, very few play harmonicas. Some of them plays strange instruments such as coca-cola bottle caps (three or four of them) nailed on a piece of wood 3"-5" inches long and played by shaking the wood so that the caps produce rythmic rattling sounds. Another makeshift instrument is an empty bottle of yakult half-filled with sands and played by shaking it.

Many others, the poorest and youngest ones, clap their hands to make rough musics.

And yes, rough musics and vocals are the most common things coming from their performances. You can pity both them and your ears when listening to their sometimes abysmal performances. Especially when the performers, standing near the bus front door, leaning to door frame, and do what they do, are children with poor healths and shrills voices. Or when the performers are simply rag clothed thin men and women who simply clap their hands and mutter something.

There are many children street-musicians throughout Jakarta, and if you look at them, day by day, and watch them as they gather around on the sides of the streets, you will realize that the children are part of an organized activities which are exploiting them. The children also often are the offsprings of street-musicians who started as exploited children themselves. If not saved from the cycle, they in turn will have offsprings that will inherit their street-musicians status.

And being street-musicians are the only options available for many of them, even some who are truly gifted but don't have the appearances of resources needed to become bar/disco/restaurant performers or record musicians.

Some street-musicians choose their lives because they are rebels who don't like home and the societies in general but still need money. So they play musics or "musics" as best as they can and hope that bus passangers will give them money.

And as for passangers themselves, in a bus filled with passangers of 20-30 people, the number of them who will give their petty cash to the street-musicians can be counted in one hand. It is quite a struggle to be a bus-performing street musicians.