The Hammersonic heavy metal music festival will be held for the third on March 8 in the Bung Karno Stadium Complex in Senayan and will feature a lineup of several major metal bands, including American rockers Lamb of God.
Jakarta has a pretty passionate population of heavy metal fans, but everybody know’s Jakarta’s most famous metalhead is President Joko Widodo, who has expressed a specific love for Lamb of God (he’s even been spotted wearing their t-shirts).
So it’s not entirely surprising that the media relations manager for Hammersonic, Dila, said that he had been contacted by the State Palace to see if it was possible for the President to come watch Lamb of God live.
“Our promoter got contacted by the palace and they asked if [the president] could come or not,” Dila said as quoted by Kompas.
Dila said Hammersonic would of course make the appropriate preparations for the president but said there was no guarantee Jokowi would actually show up. But he also said the president might show up by surprise, like when he attended Metallica’s last concert in Jakarta while he was the city’s governor.
Kompas questioned Dila about the possibility that Indonesia’s current diplomatic tensions with Australia over the upcoming executions of Bali Nine duo Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran will lead to some of the Ozzie bands pulling out of the concert, but Dila dismissed the concern.
However we know that at least one of Jokowi’s other favorite metal bands, Napalm Death, feels strongly enough about the death penalty that they wrote an open letter to the president imploring him to grant people clemency. We wonder how Lamb of God feels.
At any rate, we hope that Lamb of God’s other famous Indonesian fan, Meliani Siti Sumartini, will be able to attend the concert. She’s the 15-year-old girl from Bandung known for wear a traditional jilbab and starring in a viral video in which she straight-up shreds a guitar to Lamb of God’s “Hourglass.”
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