More than a dozen western pop songs, including Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, have been deemed pornographic and banned from being played in daylight hours in Indonesia’s notoriously conservative West Java province.
The West Java broadcasting commission singled out 85 songs, including 17 western pop songs, it said contained adult and offensive content.
In a memorandum issued on Tuesday the commission cautioned that the offending material should be played or broadcast only between 10pm and 3am.
“In this case, what is banned is not the songs, but the lyrics of the songs that contain pornography, pornographic association, and obscenity,” Rahmat Arifin, deputy head of the commission, told Tempo.co.
The British musician has not commented on the inclusion of his song on the explicit content list, but according to his website Sheeran is scheduled to hold a concert in Jakarta on 3 May.
Besides Sheeran’s hit, other foreign pop songs on the restricted playlist include Ariana Grande’s Love Me Harder and Bruno Mars’s That’s What I Like.
In the official memorandum, commission head Dedeh Fardiah said some of the lyrics could be perceived as “objectifying women as sexual objects”.
The broadcasting body in Indonesia’s most populous province, home to 48million people, said the list was more a guideline than regulation, although it could sanction radio and television stations for contravening it.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, already has a national pornography law although local governments do occasionally issue sharia law-inspired bylaws.
In October last year, for example, several regencies in West Java called for discriminative policies to combat a perceived “LGBT threat”. Among other measures, local decrees reviewed by Human Rights Watch proposed measures to hand over lists of allegedly gay and bisexual men to authorities, and change curriculums to teach hatred of LGBT people.
The provincial guidelines on explicit music follow recent uproar over a proposed music bill in the national parliament last month, which sought to restrict “negative foreign influences”.
