“Rio de Janeiro” by Chaseiro: Indonesia’s City-Pop Arcade Dream
Long before playlists, passports, or “world music” marketing, Indonesia imagined Rio de Janeiro as a dancefloor—and pressed it to vinyl.
In a dimly lit Jakarta crate-digging spot earlier this year, vinyl hunters unearthed something peculiar: a copy of Chaseiro Vol. 3 — a 1982 Indonesian LP whose opening cut, “Rio de Janeiro,” sounds like a fever dream city-pop fantasia, equal parts bossa rhythm, slick funk basslines, and disco sheen. Its credited composer isn’t a Brazilian but Guruh Soekarno Putra, better known as the son of Indonesia’s first president, a cultural polymath whose work spans choreography, composition, and genre-bending pop.
This isn’t a throwaway lounge track. It’s a standout from a moment in Indonesian music history when local artists were digesting global currents — jazz fusion, soft rock, disco, and funk — and reshaping them into something uniquely urban. Indonesian critics later dubbed the broader scene pop kreatif— a creatively hybrid genre that clung to the slick grooves of Western pop while retaining an unmistakable Nusantara sensibility.
At first listen, “Rio de Janeiro” feels like a trans-Pacific love letter to rhythm capitals. Pulse-quickening electric guitar licks and crumbly keys conjure street scenes not of Jakarta but of another city wholly imagined through sound — one that bridges Southeast Asia with the effervescent allure of Brazil. There’s no obvious Brazilian instrumentation; rather, what this track captures is the idea of Rio as an imagined locus of samba breeze and perpetual night rhythm, refracted through Indonesian musicianship and production aesthetics.
The Man Behind the Groove: Guruh Sukarno Putra
Putting Guruh’s name on a disco-inflected track might surprise Western crate diggers — but in Indonesia, his fingerprint on modern music isn’t incidental.
Born into political royalty, Guruh could have comfortably stepped into the nation’s corridors of power — and he eventually did — but in the 1970s and ’80s he carved a parallel life in art and music. Early in his career, he collaborated with Chrisye — one of Indonesia’s most revered pop voices — and members of the band Gipsy to create Guruh Gipsy, a landmark progressive-fusion album that later Indonesian critics elevated to near-sacred status.
Unlike the garage rock rebirths and retro global jazz leaks dominating crate culture in the West, Guruh wasn’t merely sampling diaspora. He was part of a homegrown cosmopolitanity: mixing Indonesian gamelan echoes with Western electric instrumentation, jazz harmonies with urban funk, and national identity with global aspiration. “Rio de Janeiro,”in that light, sits less as a novelty and more as a document of an artist comfortable with hybridity; someone for whom borders were sonic landscapes, not constraints.
From Jakarta to the World
Tracks like “Rio de Janeiro” challenge the narrow frames used to classify non-Western music in global digger culture. They aren’t just “world beats” or kitchen-sink fusion. They emerged from a local scene in which Indonesian artists defined their own relationship to global pop idioms — long before streaming playlists dubbed aesthetics like “Indonesian city pop” or “city-pop parallels.”
That’s what makes this record rare: it doesn’t fit neatly into the crate-digger’s checksheet. It isn’t Japanese city pop, Brazilian bossa nova, or Indonesian kroncong. It’s something like pop kreatif played at dance-hall tempo — an early hybrid that anticipated the future genre recycling now happening on Bandcamp and TikTok.
In the era before constant global access to music, Guruh and his collaborators weren’t assimilating influences — they were interpreting dreams of distant places through the filter of local artistic consciousness.
Collectors have always chased obscurities. But it’s worth pausing when a record like “Rio de Janeiro” resurfaces. It reminds us that transnational pop ecosystems existed long before the internet, and that non-Western artists weren’t passive consumers of global trends — they were active interpreters, remixing, refracting, and redefining sonic geographies on their own terms.
In “Rio de Janeiro,” Jakarta sounds like Rio. Jakarta sounds like New York. Jakarta sounds like a metropolis you imagine at 3 a.m. with neon reflections on wet asphalt. And in that sense, this is music that doesn’t just cross borders — it imagines new ones.
