LATHI (ꦭꦛꦶ) cover versions of @kobold-djawa

Hi, friends. I'd like to present three cover versions of an recently popular Indonesian song called "LATHI". One is sung with the original music composition which actually the exact reason why this song is very unique and went viral. This song was composed by the band "Weird Genius" featuring "Sara Fajira".
This band doesn't have their own vocalist but let solo singers to sing the lyric.
Probably it is because their music pieces are all unique and mostly arranged by combining modern instruments in a EDM genre with various traditional music compositions of different folks/ethnic groups, so that they need to find different singers whose voice particularly suitable for the song.

For example this particular piece has been viral on the net, and popular internationally so that it has been covered by many artists in YouTube.
Some of cover versions are with modified music arrangement and they are great. But Javanese music performed with real Gamelan has absolutely different aura and gives out different feeling.
Javanese gamelan music uses pentatonic scale, so it is not possible to be recreated perfectly using a modern instrument.

The gamelan piece combined with the lyric which came from a very meaningful word of wisdom from javanese culture would be able to make every Indonesians with javanese origin to have a goosebump, because it sounds mystical 😅.

Not every singer, no matter how great they are, can bring out the mystical aura of Javanese traditional song.
The western artists who made another excellent covers of these songs can not do that, despite having atleast 90% correct pronunciation of the Javanese lyric part, because they only memorize the lyric but don't understand the deeper meaning of it.

However this is also one of the excuse given by some overly conservative religious people in my country and some other nations (even an imam of the neighbouring country) when they tried to ban this music in their society.
They call it satanic song and that this band is trying to draw the youngsters into the devil's path.
That Malaysian imam had even said something that gave a hint as if Javanese culture representing a worship to the devils and demons.
The imam finally apologized for his reckless and offensive statements and deleted his tweet 🙈🙊😆.

However this incident was the reason how I heard about this song, so the controversy whether this song was satanic or not was actually helping the song and the artists to become even more popular cos there were even more and more covers and even challenges in many different video platforms made based on this music piece.

This song had even managed to sit on the number 2 at Spotify Viral Top 50 Global.
Even my daughter also likes the song and managed to sing the javanese part perfectly 😁.
The English lyric part is sung rather fast so she can't follow it well, however she can sing the last two or three words to complete the each phrases I sung with the correct melody LOL.

Frankly speaking I don't see anything in the lyric that could show any hint about worshipping satans at all, not even in the javanese phrases.
I think it's not necessary either to write the lyric here, cos it's mostly in English.
But I would translate the javanese part for you and you can hear the pronunciation more clearly when my little girl sung it at the beginning of my video:
"Kowe ra iso mlayu, soko kesalahan
Ajining dhiri ono ing LATHI"
Means:
You can not run away from your mistakes
The honor of a person is brought out by one's own tongue.

This is an old javanese proverb, the word of wisdom to teach us javanese to be careful and cautious whenever we open our mouth and talk.
Because our tongue can give us honor but can also throw us into the mud, even able to put us into danger.

The only thing seems rather scary is the music video, where it shows some mystical dance where the dancer can even swallow a flame. But I think the video is rather artistic and basically used to describe how hurtful and damaging a toxic relationship can be.

The show of "Jaran Kepang aka Kuda Lumping" and "Reog Ponorogo" are the one inspired the original music video. In my home country the dancers were often end up in trance while performing the act of swallowing flames and crushing glasses with bare teeth.
So... this is the main reason of the controversy afterall 😁, added with the multiple horror make up challenges in social medias inspired by the original music video.

You can see the original music video here (you should check this out to build your own opinion):

One sample of video challenges in Tik Tok inspired by this song can be seen here: