I met Jeremy Wallach in a music store in Jakarta in 1997. We’ve stayed in touch.
Jeremy is an American academic who studies heavy metal, specifically what happens to the genre when it lands somewhere like Indonesia. Some people call him the Professor of Heavy Metal. Well, he literally is. He got into Iron Maiden as a teenager. The interest never left; he just eventually turned it into a research career.
The thing that kept coming up in his Indonesia fieldwork was the community. Metal shows there built a collective, participatory energy he didn’t always see in Western scenes. Bands like Voice of Baceprot and Eternal Madness, which play metal while drawing on Sundanese traditional music, are part of why the scene is worth studying separately from the Western version.
We talked about the underground music scene’s connection to the fall of Soeharto, which Jeremy has written about at length. We also talked about what it was like working in metal studies before anyone in academia thought that was a real thing to do. He was doing it anyway.
His approach: follow the music that’s actually interesting and trust the research will hold up. He’s applied that to his whole career.
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