BMTH live in Jakarta 2024

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This time around Ravel gets it right and BMTH (Bring Me The Horizon) are headlining the Nexfest festival in Jakarta which also features Babymetal. In this format there is no seating - which makes for a much more intimate experience - although you do have to arrive really early if you want to pick a spot right up close to the stage.  We arrived about six hours before BMTH were scheduled to start their performance and bought plenty of drinks to stay hydrated in the tropical afternoon heat (mind you, some of those were Iceland vodka mix!) This was a gig I had long been looking forward to - especially after the debacle last year. Not everyone likes BMTH of course. For deathcore fans the band sold out. For metal heads the band is not purist enough. And for the wider mainstream audience, the band is too heavy. You can't please everyone of course but there are few bands in the rock world which can match the sheer emotional velocity of BMTH. To bring metal and even aspects of metalcore t...
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Budi, teruslah main bola

Good to see XL giving the two-pointed fingers up to the terrorist loonies in this defiant piece of advertising:

Budi, teruslah main bola
But advertising in Indonesia is not always this sharp, and sometimes they come up with stuff that is so wide of the mark that the other team would get a throw-in rather than a goal kick. 

A good example of this being HM Sampoerna’s slogan for its recently launched super slim kretek cigarettes "Sampoerna Avolution": Begin what Next 

Er, you what? You what, you what you what? 

Completely baffling even to native English speakers (including those with Philosophy and Linguistics degrees), I can’t imagine what Sampoerna thought the average Indonesian dude was going to make of it: that confusing consumers with indecipherable slogans is a good way to get them to buy the company’s cigarettes, perhaps? 

Another really bizarre piece of advertising that I came upon recently was on an absolutely huge billboard in the Tanah Abang district of central Jakarta:

kopi kapal api iklan Nope – means nuffin to me - and I don’t think I’m the only one in Indonesia who isn’t freezing his butt off either!

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