Sinta and JoJo go through their moves on their YouTube video.
West Java, it seems, is not just a hotbed of hard-liners and religious intolerance. It is the home of Internet sensations, too.
Two teenage girls from the provincial capital, Bandung, have captivated Web surfers and garnered mentions from media around the world after uploading a video of themselves lip-synching to a dangdut song.
“Keong Racun” (“Poisonous Snail”), which they posted on YouTube, has grabbed more than 1.2 million hits since it was uploaded a month ago.
It has also been the No. 1 trending topic on microblogging site Twitter for the past three days, a rare accolade for a site with a notoriously short attention span.
On Thursday, the video earned itself a mention on the Web site of British newspaper The Independent, which recorded how Twitter users were “going crazy” over the video, which sees the girls by turns giggling, grimacing, snarling, pouting, wriggling, guffawing and singing at full blast.
Sinta and Jovita “Jojo” Adityasari, both 19, told RCTI, a private television station, that they had never expected their video to become such a sensation.
“Sinta and I have been best friends since senior high school,” Jojo said. “Last month we heard about the dangdut song ‘Keong Racun’ from a friend. We downloaded it and liked it because the lyrics are funny.
“We taped ourselves lip-synching in the living room of my parents’ house. We had originally meant to upload the video on Facebook, but the file size was too big.” So a friend suggested they upload it on YouTube.
“Keong Racun,” written by Bandung singer-songwriter Buy Akur, was originally sung by Lisa, a local singer, but only became popular after Sinta and Jojo uploaded their version online.
The song is about a sleazy man shamelessly hitting on a girl on their first date.
The duo’s video created a buzz among Indonesian Twitter users and was linked by Facebook users and to other online forums.
Even politicians have been caught up in the craze, with House of Representatives Deputy Speaker Pramono Anung professing to be an instant fan.
“Per your request, I just watched ‘Keong Racun’ and it has cheered me up,” Pramono wrote on his Twitter account, adding that the teenagers “made me laugh so hard.”
Jojo said she and Sinta had received numerous offers to make an album and act in sinetron.
“But we turned all of them down because we know we have no talent,” she said.
However, they have agreed to star in a music video. “Charly, the vocalist for [the band] ST12, asked us to be in his video. He will be singing his version of ‘Keong Racun,’ and we said yes,” Jojo said.
As a result of the video’s success, Jojo, an international relations student at Bandung’s Pasundan University, has been asked to be her campus icon and will be given a full scholarship.
But things do not look so rosy for Lisa.
Entertainment Web site Cumicumi.com reported on Friday that she had become ill due to stress. The singer claimed that Charly had reneged on his initial promise to sing “Keong Racun” with her.
“Charly did not specify if I would sing the song in a duet with him or as a back-up singer, but he promised to include me,” Lisa told the Web site.
She said the arrangement on the song’s remake apparently changed after Charly met Buy.
