Long time no post! All I'm doing these days is work, and I can't write about work for a variety of reasons including 1. corporate confidentiality and 2. I don't want to.
Here is a classic dangdut song about my blog featuring two stars of the 70s and 80s, Mansyur S. and Elvy Sukaesih. I've been sneakily subtitling it on my Mac at work over the last week or so. Since I'm in a list-making mood, here are a few of the reasons why I love this video, besides the obvious one:
1. The soaring eagles, drifting swans and nibbling chipmunks. (Er ... nibbling chipmunks?)
2. The bad acting.
3. The great singing. These guys have feather-light voices that dance all around the notes without ever straying off key.
4. Elvy Sukaesih busting out what look like little Balinese-dancer style head moves.
5. Mansyur S. waving a banana around naughtily. And is he really pretending to wipe drool off his chin?
"Basket eyes," by the way, are eyes like baskets -- always hungry to be filled.
Props to Novia and Ade for help with the translation!
4 comments:
Nice! I like 'We can talk first.'
Um, would that be before you eat your banana cake?
Chipmunks? I for one could think of nothing *but* when we were at the dangdut bar last week.
Elvy is pretty much leading the geriatric dangdut society nowadays, so it was very surprising to see how (relatively) young she looks in this video. I'm guessing it was somewhere in the 80s (an era in which Rp 500 for a kopi susu seems so terriby overpriced!).
I just want to add a little translation to the little background exchange that happens around the 02:03 mark (just after Elvy charges Rp 3000 for the conversation):
Mansyur: Uh, why is the conversation more expensive than the kopi susu?? are you sure??
Elvy: Well, that's what you get when you have naughty (in a touchy-touchy kinda way) hands!
Mansyur: I didn't mean to!
Okay, that translated really weird..
oh, and I prefer "deliciously campy" acting than "bad" .. hehe
Ha! Would that be due to Mr. Falsetto, Robyn? He certainly achieved chipmunk-like vocal heights.
Nadya, thanks for the added translation! It's awesome! I poked around online to try and find out when these videos were made but came up empty. I kind of figured it was the 80s; that would have been the first global wave of karaoke, right?
There's another great video on this disc where Elvy wears a tight dress that looks kind of like a dirndl, with a big straw hat, and plays a distinctly middle-aged "Small-Town Virgin."
Our 80s and 70s is just as (hillariously) awesome as any other countries' old days.
I remember seeing my professor's picture when he's still in college. God, the corduroy trousers and afro hair. I can't believe that he's the same guy as my old professor now.
You should try to find some old movie. We got our answer to james dean, flower generation, and things like that.
I remember watching a lot of old movie reruns at tv on my childhood. Back then, in Indonesia's golden age of movie before the 21 cineplex monopolize our theatre, we got dozens of movies per year. Dunno where we can find them now.
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