Chrisye

Christian Rahadi was born in 1949 in Jakarta into a middle-class urban family. He started playing music from a young age and stood out for his ability to handle a wide range of instruments.

Curiously, his neighbours were the Nasutions, a family whose five children, roughly his own age, were all musicians: Keenan played drums, Debby keyboards, and Gauri, Joe Am and Odink guitar. Thanks to their many connections, the Nasution siblings would become Chrisye's main link to Jakarta's cultural scene, whose youth music world was exploding right around that time, driven in part by the success of a landmark band like Koes, whose local impact was comparable to that of the Beatles.

At that time Jakarta was the epicentre of Indonesia even more than it is today: despite the archipelago's vast territorial extent and a national population that had already topped 100 million by 1965, outside the capital there was neither the logistical infrastructure nor the organisations and social fabric needed for a cultural scene capable of generating any economic return to take root. Writers, intellectuals, and artists from the film and music industries all came from there, and the few exceptions still had to move there in order to make a name for themselves.

Rahadi's name soon began to circulate among the small local bands, particularly those linked to the Nasution circle, and he thus managed to establish himself as a bassist and, on occasion, as a singer, even ending up performing in the United States for Indonesian immigrant communities.

He returned home after learning of the sudden death of his younger brother Vicky from a stomach infection, and went through a period of depression, which he once again overcame thanks to the Nasutions, when they called him to take part in a new project: their band, Gipsy, intended to record an album together with keyboardist and composer Guruh Sukarnoputra, the young son of former Indonesian president Sukarno, who had been deposed in a coup in 1967.

Partly due to the scarce resources available, the sessions dragged on in fits and starts over a very long period, from July 1975 to November 1976: however, they allowed Rahadi to get fully back into the circuit and laid the groundwork for a memorable 1977, the year of his recording debut, during which his contributions helped produce a string of releases whose cultural impact remains perhaps unmatched in the history of Indonesian music.

It was also around this time that he began using the stage name Chrisye, following the fashion of the era, which saw many musicians drop their surname or reduce it to its initial letter.

It all begins in 1977, when he agrees to take part in the Lomba Cipta Lagu Remaja ("Young Songwriters' Contest") with "Lilin-Lilin Kecil", written by budding songwriter James F. Sundah. It's keyboardist and arranger Yockie Suryoprayogo, in charge of the festival's arrangements, who convinces Chrisye to take part: the two strike up a friendship and begin working together on their own project, eventually also collaborating on a film score under the guidance of composer Eros Djarot.

That same year Chrisye thus releases, in order: "Lilin-Lilin Kecil", included on the compilation "Lomba Cipta Lagu Remaja 1977"; Sukarnoputra's debut album together with Gipsy, pragmatically titled "Guruh Gipsy" (Chrisye sings and plays bass, as well as two percussion instruments typical of Balinese gamelan, the gentorag and kelenang); "Jurang Pemisah", an album credited to him and Yockie S. (stage name of the aforementioned Suryoprayogo); and "Badai Pasti Berlalu", an album featuring the music from the film of the same name directed by Teguh Karya, written, as already mentioned, by Djarot (Chrisye plays bass and guitars and sings eight of the thirteen songs, while Yockie handles keyboards and drums - also featured are two of the Nasution brothers, singer Berlian Hutauruk and drummer Fariz Rm: in short, a concentration of names that would go on to shape the history of local music).

The various projects have wildly uneven impacts: "Lilin-Lilin Kecil" is a pop ballad that essentially becomes the song of the year; the Guruh Gipsy record is a heavily experimental album blending Western-style symphonic progressive rock with traditional music from the islands of Java and Bali, and as such is released without any record label backing, pressed in just five thousand copies (it would later become a major cult work, given the names involved); "Jurang Pemisah" passes largely unnoticed despite being a fairly accessible pop record, aside from a few prog intrusions; "Badai Pasti Berlalu", boosted by the film, ends up becoming one of the year's biggest record success stories.

As if that weren't enough, over the course of the summer Chrisye also recorded an album to be released exclusively under his own name, while still drawing on the collaboration of several names already featured on the records mentioned above. "Sabda Alam" ("The Word of Nature") is thus ready for release as early as January 1978: it's the record that definitively establishes him as the biggest star in the national music scene, a role he would never relinquish again. Chrisye's cultural impact on his home country remains comparable only to that of singer-songwriter Iwan Fals (an entirely different story and musical world, one perhaps worth telling on these pages in the future).

The album is played almost entirely by Chrisye and Yockie, in their usual roles, alongside Keenan Nasution on drums and, on a couple of tracks, keyboardist Ronny Harahap, previously of Gipsy. The lyrics are mostly credited to actor Junaedi Salat, who at the time was also enjoying some success as a songwriter. Sukarnoputra, despite not taking part in the sessions, ultimately gives Chrisye two unreleased songs (there's also a third track credited to him, but it's actually a reworking of a Guruh Gipsy piece).

The sessions are overseen by Chrisye and Yockie, with the support of sound engineer Broer Rusmin (later to work closely with Iwan Fals): the two build up a fair amount of mystery around the record, since to ease the pressure during the recording sessions they deny access to executives from the Musica label, who find themselves hoping that all this secrecy won't result in something too difficult to sell.

Luckily for them, the album, certainly rich and refined, would also prove highly appealing from a commercial standpoint, crystallizing the sound that Chrisye and his collaborators had inaugurated with the other releases of the period, later dubbed by the local media pop kreatif: the genre has been extensively covered on OndaRock in the article "Pop kreatif - When Indonesia discovered its own modern sound", which is well worth reading. Here, we'll simply describe it as a sort of local counterpart to Japanese city pop, given the many shared influences (funk, jazz fusion, disco, boogie, West Coast-style pop, Latin American music), with a few nods to the symphonic wing of progressive rock thrown in.

The tracklist opens with "Juwita", driven by a disco-music groove that weaves together a bass line mixed at a prominent volume and a syncopated piano pattern, while the synthesizers indulge in all manner of sounds, mimicking strings, woodwinds and harpsichords. The song is also ingenious on a harmonic level: its opening section, carried by female backing vocals steeped in samba and jazz, is marked by a sharp key change, shifting from E major to C major before returning to E within the space of just a couple of chords.

The lyrics are a love poem with several references to local culture:

Softly I feel the gaze of the moon,

you are my goddess, morning star,

there is no light I long for more,

you stir my soul with your charm.

Beautiful as a violet sunset panorama,

when the heart is drunk with love,

I am cradled by the fire of Smara,

like the legend of Rama and Sita.

You are beautiful as a flower in the palace of butterflies,

light of my heart, guide of my life,

the warmth converges, there are no words as sweet as honey,

desire leads to the happiness I dreamed of

The “fire of Smara”, in the original text “Smaradahana”, refers to a poem in Old Javanese, written by the court poet Mpu Dharmaja in the 12th century: the story tells of how the goddess Parvati, wife of Shiva, asked the god of love Smara to track down her husband, who had withdrawn to the mountains to meditate, and to awaken in him the desire to see her again. Smara carries out her request and strikes Shiva with a love dart adorned with a flower, but Shiva, furious at being disturbed, opens his third eye and burns him to ashes on the spot. Overcome with despair, Smara's wife, Ratih, embraces her beloved while he is still in flames, and burns together with him. In the end, however, Shiva takes pity on the couple, causing Smara to descend into the spirit of men and Ratih into that of women, thus making them indissolubly bound to the romantic relationships of human beings.

Rama, an avatar of Vishnu, and his wife Sita are the two protagonists of the Sanskrit epic poem “Ramayana”, one of the most important texts of Hinduism. Being more than three times the length of the “Iliad”, this is not the place to summarize its plot: the key point is that in the song the two characters serve to embody the concept of love and to give it a sacred aura.

The title track is a slow number that emerges from a bucolic landscape crossed by a variety of birdsong and dominated by the sound of keyboards, amid ethereal string synth and pianistic romanticism. The entrance of the drums in the chorus transforms it into a liberating anthem, almost as if to represent the rising of the sun, thus enacting the unfolding of the lyrics:

The chirping of the singing birds,

a sign that the world opens the day

and even the dew fades away,

welcoming the dawn.

For a moment I am enchanted

by fleeting life,

[from the] delights of the universe,

[from the] splendid, unspoiled islands. [note 1]

The morning seems to smile sweetly,

the breeze blows, awakening the spirit:

will it smile again tomorrow,

granting me the warmth of a million sensations?

The word of nature

sweeps away my mood,

at times boredom

grips the soul.

The word of nature

it fulfils an unstoppable destiny,

the feeling of love and the feeling of shame

merge into one

"Smaradhana" is a piece salvaged from the Guruh Gipsy repertoire. This new version strips away the traditional elements from the arrangement, transforming in a surprisingly natural way a slow track steeped in the harmonies of Indonesian music, thanks to a rhythmic, fully Western feel, with touches drawn from disco music, soft rock with a progressive bent (one might even risk a comparison with Supertramp) and even ragtime (the piano's colouring).

This lyric too is centred on the figures of Smara and Ratih, capturing the exact moment in which the two deities, reduced to ashes, penetrate the human spirit, bringing with them the feeling of love:

Goddess Ratih,

living figure of my fantasy

in my life thirsting for romance,

the pleasure of being in love.

Noble god, [note 2]

the ashes of love dissolve,

penetrates the soul,

steals calm from thought.

So I grow restless,

a storm of sorrow,

as if I could not

contain the passion

of those in love.

The wave of passion

in the ocean of feelings

it enchants me,

cradled by love

While “Duka Sang Bahaduri” is a slow number that forgoes the rhythm section to let the arrangement's baroque flourishes shine, “Cita Secinta” is by contrast driven by a midtempo drum pattern that plays with off-beat hi-hat in the chorus, alongside the piano's dynamic swells and dips.

Sukarnoputra's first unreleased track is “Kala Sang Surya Tenggelam”, a refined piano ballad in which descending harmonies and oscillations between minor and major keys convey the tense, intimately dramatic mood of the lyrics:

The sun sets

swallowed by the dark fog,

a gloomy dusk

in a broken, faded heart.

[On] life's winding road,

two young people have lost

the cure to their longing, the person they love,

they face a trial.

Oppressive night,

sad and vulnerable moon,

a young girl endures a burning desire

The song was re-recorded by Chrisye in 1997, in a version that later ended up on the soundtrack of the excellent series “Gadis Kretek” (international title: “Cigarette Girl”), one of the biggest Indonesian TV hits of 2023. That's no coincidence, since a good part of the show is set between 1966 and 1975: the song's lyrics are a perfect portrait of the sense of patriarchal oppression felt by young Indonesians at the time, when girls' romantic relationships in particular could very easily fall apart if a parent disapproved of them (Indonesia remains a fairly conservative country from this point of view even today, although the situation has obviously improved a great deal over time).

After the symphonic epicness of “Citra Hitam” and “Adakah”, capable of rivaling the most romantic and airy moments of the Genesis of “Wind & Wuthering”, the album comes to a close with “Anak Jalanan”, Sukarnoputra's other unreleased track: it opens with a crisply articulated piano, and in the verses follows a descending chord progression reminiscent of great Anglo-American pop classics of the Sixties, like “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks and “One” by Harry Nilsson, yet transposing them into the technology of his own time, with the flood of analog keyboards that characterizes the whole album.

The tight, at times almost martial rhythm once again matches the lyrics, which accuse the society of the time and its rigidity toward its own children (even though the tone remains fairly generic, in a regime like General Suharto's, even asserting young people's need to be understood was no small gesture):

Street kid, urban beetle,

always alone in the middle of the crowd,

street kid, victim of hypocrisy,

always alone in the middle of the crowd.

You have no place to let it out,

nowhere to pour out what's in your heart,

a father's and mother's affection

is nothing but an illusion. [note 3]

Young woman, urban flower,

always restless as you wait,

young woman, victim of circumstance,

always waiting in restlessness,

you don't have approval to meet him,

approval to live together,

a father's and mother's affection

it's just a label.

Child of high society [note 4], symbol of the metropolis,

you ask for a life of peace,

child of high society, victim of obligations,

you live restlessly amid the crowd,

there's no time to meet,

no time for affection or to let off steam,

because of your metropolitan parents

you're nothing but a slave to obligations

The album is an instant success, selling 400,000 copies, most of them on cassette. Chrisye remains the standard-bearer of pop kreatif for several more years, and his fame is such that even when the rest of the movement declines commercially with the arrival of the 1990s, his career is unaffected. Never cheapening his art, though with a few too many sentimental concessions from a certain point onward, he stays at the top until his death on March 30, 2007, at the age of 57, from lung cancer.

From then on, his legend has only grown. In 2011 Rolling Stone Indonesia ranked him the third greatest Indonesian musician of all time (surpassed only by the aforementioned Koes and Iwan Fals). In 2017 a film about his life, "Chrisye," directed by Rizal Mantovani, was released. In 2021 the band Diskoria, the production duo Laleilmanino and singer Eva Celia released the track "C.H.R.I.S.Y.E.," faithfully following the tenets of his pop kreatif, and scoring one of the biggest national hits of that season. And if we were to count the covers by other artists and the tribute concerts, that would require an article of its own.

Amid all this, "Sabda Alam" remains arguably his finest calling card, the perfect pop kreatif album.

[note 1] Just as in Italy, by metonymy, "the boot" can refer to our country, so in Indonesia the term "nusa" (island/s) can refer to theirs.

[note 2] This time Smara is not mentioned by name, but addressed with the honorific "Andika Dewa", meaning "noble god".

[note 3] and [note 4] This song features typical Indonesian expressions that are hard to translate: an attempt has been made to preserve their meaning. "Peri palsu" translates literally as "false fairy": "illusion" is decidedly easier to understand. Likewise, "Anak gedongan" would mean "child of the mansions", but the concept is better rendered as "child of high society".

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

02/11/2025