by Theethad Thipsoda
My digicam flashed as I took a photo of the crowd of familiar faces whose hands were holding almost-finished and completely-forgotten plates, huddled tightly around the small 27-inch television in the living room of my shared apartment. It was not the typical Sunday night here at our apartment: Felicia Aldiyani, one of my closest friends here in college, who grew up near the beaches of Bali, dressed in Indonesian batik and passionately sharing about Jedak Jeduk, the TikTok viral dance music style in Indonesia, with so much enthusiasm it was almost contagious.
The scene looked like a lecture, but also a potluck dinner. Before long, it transformed into a dance floor. In fact, it was somewhat all three at once. This was the first edition of a new event series as part of our Southeast Asia Club’s Grassroots Project, an initiative to create meaningful shared space to celebrate local cultures, flavors and ideas from the Southeast Asian region.
After weeks of planning and persuasion, we had brought together a few of our fellow Southeast Asians on campus to share their homegrown electronic dance music styles, including Viet Vinahouse, Thai Morlam remixes, Pinoy Budot, Indonesian Jedak Jeduk and Malay Dangdut music. These electronic beats are often described as psychedelic, distinct with rapid rave-like beats, extremely easy to dance to, but also often dismissed as “low-brow”.
Take the example of Budot, the Filipino EDM, which was born in the late 2000s in a squatter’s settlement in Davao City. Over time, it gained popularity with local populations but also became associated with drug cartels, gangsters and marginality. Like many of these other styles, budot was born and raised in the periphery of mainstream culture and what it meant to have “good taste”.
These electronic dances are remarkably different from polished, mainstream popular music, which one can argue is Western-influenced, with a slow pace, piano and guitar instrumental. Because of their humble origins, many of these music genres were stigmatized during the early years of their development in the late 90s and 2000s.
However, in recent years, these music styles have begun to be embraced with the process of globalization and the growing popularity of short-form video content. We see these music styles resurfacing in new forms. Thai remix, for example, was used by the K-Pop band CORTIS (one of their members, James, is half-Thai) in their song Fashion (2025), which they danced to on TikTok, gaining 6.7M likes, or by LISA from Blackpink when teaching Thai dance moves on Korean television. Moreover, young teenagers take control of these music styles, embracing them on TikTok and Reels.
Chiara Francesca de la Cruz (2A), our Filipino lecturer, shared that local politicians have used budot dances in their campaigns. Even former President Rodrigo Duterte had danced to budot. Another interesting fact was from Dita, one of our Indonesian presenters, that in Indonesia, many Gen-Z youth post their college acceptance letters to jedak-jeduk edits with slow-motion “velocity” transitions and bass-heavy montages. Many await this TikTok ritual as if it were somewhat of a rite of passage.
What made the evening particularly meaningful was that it was our fellow classmates presenting to us, not academics at a usual panel talk. They have experienced growing up listening and dancing to these sounds and can provide personal analysis from the ethnographic side of these dances to the musical style of the specific genre.
The “living room lecture format” was not an original invention of ours but rather an adaptation from a few other community initiatives we had seen online. We were inspired by New York-based Living Room Lectures, a queer event series where local academics, professionals or simply passionate amateurs would share about a subject they are passionate about to an open-minded crowd in a living room.
Another event series we drew inspiration from is GrownKid, also based in the Big Apple. This social club’s self-proclaimed slogan is “The Meaning of Life is Play.” It brings together 18-24 year olds through play-based events with the quirkiest and somewhat whimsical concepts including “Wrestling Speed Dating” where you literally bring yourself to the arena and challenge someone to a physical brawl (consensually, of course) with hopes of finding your soulmate, or “Loitering” where the whole event’s goal is just to loiter around a speaker under a bridge.
I believe creating safe spaces for creative and cultural exchange, intertwined with play-culture, is something many youth our age yearn for, especially in the present-day era where the loneliness epidemic, emotional detachment, and the virtue of non-chalant-ism reigns. Dancing to electronic music in a living room is perhaps an antidote to our modern boredom and lack of community without performativity. This little experimental event was an attempt to counter this.
By the end of the night, we had made no less than five dance videos to be posted on our social media. But in the atmosphere, we could sense a lingering energy of personal connection, and from our presenters, a shared sense of pride in our local homegrown cultures.
I would like to extend a big thank you to those who made it all happen: my fellow SEA Club captains Bartholomew and Nikki, as well as all of the guest lecturers for their passionate dedication: Anh, Carla, Ha My, Angelia, Minh-Tam, Chiara, Felicia and Dita.
