Myth as Political Strategy: Barthesian Semiotic Analysis of Ideological Construction in Indonesia's 2024 Campaign Music Video
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24256/ideas.v14i2.11570Keywords:
Barthes's semiotics, campaign music videos, Indonesian Election, political communication, naturalization of ideologyAbstract
This study analyses the construction of political meaning in Oke Gas Prabowo Gibran Paling Pas, a campaign music video used in Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election. Using a descriptive-interpretative qualitative approach, the study applies Roland Barthes’s semiotic framework of denotation, connotation, and myth to 24 purposively selected scenes, focusing exclusively on lyrics and visual elements. The analysis shows that denotative representations of political figures, popular-cultural symbols, bodily performances, and campaign slogans acquire connotative meanings associated with familiarity, resilience, transformation, and collective legitimacy. These recurring connotative patterns generate four overarching political myths: joyful and relatable leadership; resilient and morally legitimate leadership; transformative leadership; and popular legitimacy and historical inevitability. The myths function strategically as political communication through three interconnected mechanisms: naturalizing ideological meanings through popular culture, legitimating political identities through symbolic association, and reframing potentially negative meanings through humor, appropriation, and semantic reversal. The findings further demonstrate that myth and ironic counter-signification operate simultaneously within the same campaign text: desirable political and identity-related meanings are naturalized as self-evident, while potentially negative meanings are reworked through humor and semantic reversal. The study contributes to political media semiotics by extending Barthesian analysis beyond ideological naturalization to demonstrate how naturalizing myth and ironic counter-signification can coexist within a single campaign text. This contribution provides a more nuanced account of ideological meaning-making in Indonesia’s digital political communication and extends international political media research to an underrepresented Southeast Asian context.
References
Agina, A., & Ekwevugbe, A. (2017). Celebrity endorsement of political aspirants and its effects on college students in Lagos. Journal of African Media Studies, 9(3), 487–505. https://doi.org/10.1386/jams.9.3.487_1
Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans). Hill & Wang.
Barthes, R. (1985). Rhetoric of the Image. Semiotics: An introductory anthology. Hill and Wang.
Barthes, Roland. (1974). S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. Jonathan Cape.
Bani, M., & Masruddin, M. (2021). Development of Android-based harmonic oscillation pocket book for senior high school students. JOTSE: Journal of Technology and Science Education, 11(1), 93-103.
Behr, A. (2022). Music, digitalization, and democratic elections: The changing soundtrack of electoral politics in the UK. Popular Music and Society, 45(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2021.1984020
Bennett, W. Lance. (2012). The personalization of politics: Political identity, social media, and changing patterns of participation. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 644(1), 20–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716212451428
Blasch, L. (2021). Indexing authenticity in visual political (social media) communication: A metapragmatics-based analysis of two visual registers of the authentic. Multimodal Communication, 10(1), 37–53. https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2020-0019
Brusila, J., Cloonan, M., & Ramstedt, K. (2022). Music, digitalization, and democracy. Popular Music and Society, 45(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2021.1984018
Calimbo, A. C. (2016). Deconstructing myths via humor: A semiotic analysis of Philippine political internet memes. Langkit: Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 6, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.62071/jssh.v6i.63
Chandler, D. (2022). Semiotics: The basics. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003155744
Chou, H.-Y. (2015). Celebrity political endorsement effects: A perspective on the social distance of political parties. International Journal of Communication, 9, 523–546. https://doi.org/1932–8036/20150005
Creswell, J. W., & Poth, C. N. (2016). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Sage Publications.
de-Lima-Santos, M., Gonçalves, I., & Quiles, M. (2024). Visual political communication on Instagram: A comparative study of Brazilian presidential elections. EPJ Data Science, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00502-0
Enli, Gunn. (2017). Twitter as arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 50–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323116682802
Febriandy, R. K., Habibah, T. M., & Hutapea, E. B. (2024). Humor, symbols, and power: Prabowo-Gibran political memes on social media in the 2024 presidential election. Jurnal Komunikasi Ikatan Sarjana Komunikasi Indonesia, 9(2), 537–548. https://doi.org/10.25008/jkiski.v9i2.1133
Furwana, D., Muin, F. R., Zainuddin, A. A., & Mulyani, A. G. (2024). Unlocking the Potential: Exploring the Impact of Online Assessment in English Language Teaching. IDEAS: Journal on English Language Teaching and Learning, Linguistics and Literature, 12(1), 653-662.
Jirsa, T., & Korsgaard, M. B. (2019). The music video in transformation: Notes on a hybrid audiovisual configuration. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 13(2), 111–122. https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2019.7
Joseph, J. E. (2022). Saussure’s dichotomies and the shapes of structuralist semiotics. Sign Systems Studies, 50(1), 11–37. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2022.50.1.02
Klinger, Ulrike, & Svensson, Jakob. (2015). The emergence of network media logic in political communication: A theoretical approach. New Media & Society, 17(8), 1241–1257. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814522952
Koivukoski, Joonas, Laaksonen, Salla-Maaria, Zareff, Janne, & Knuutila, Aleksi. (2024). Challenging and enhancing legitimacy through humor: A comparative study of candidates’ use of humor on Facebook before the 2019 and 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections. Alternatives, 50(1), 74–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/03043754241272272
Korsgaard, M. (2017). Music video after MTV: Audiovisual studies, new media, and popular music. Routledge.
Miles, M., Huberman, M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook. In (No Title). Sage Publication.
Prasetyawan, A. F., Adiputra, W. M., & Irnanda, P. D. P. (2025). Decoding the meaning of Gemoy as a political gimmick: A Semiotic analysis approach to presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto. The Korean Conference on Arts & Humanities 2024 Official Conference Proceedings, 185–196. https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2759-7571.2024.17
Prior, M. (2013). Media and political polarization. Annual Review of Political Science, 16(1), 101–127. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100711-135242
Purwanto, H. E. (2024). Political communication strategy through campaign songs for presidential and vice-presidential candidates: An analysis of the song Okay Gas Prabowo Gibran is Most Fitting". Riwayat: Educational Journal of History and Humanities, 7(3), 1362–1372. https://doi.org/10.24815/jr.v7i3.40541
Richard Jersey. (2024). Oke Gas Prabowo Gibran Paling Pas [Video recording]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwYRwOj9RdA
Sahly, Abdulsamad, Shao, Chun, & Kwon, K. Hazel. (2019). Social media for political campaigns: An examination of Trump’s and Clinton’s frame building and its effect on audience engagement. Social media + Society, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119855141
Sakakeeny, M. (2024). Music, sound, politics. Annual Review of Anthropology, 53(1), 309–329. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041422-011840
Stieglitz, S., & Dang-Xuan, L. (2013). Social media and political communication: A social media analytics framework. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 3(4), 1277–1291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-012-0079-3
Verhulsdonk, I., Nai, A., & Karp, J. A. (2022). Are political attacks a laughing matter? Three experiments on political humor and the effectiveness of negative campaigning. Political Research Quarterly, 75(3), 720–737. https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211023590
Wahyudi, A., Satrya Wibawa, I., & Ariani Arimbi, D. (2026). Digital discourse on “Politainment” TikTok #jogetgemoy from the perspective of digital heterotopia. The Journal of Society and Media, 10(1), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.26740/jsm.v10n1.p1-35
Way, L. C. S. (2019a). Discourse, music and political communication: Towards a critical approach. Journal of Language and Politics, 18(4), 475–490. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18065.way
Way, L. C. S. (2019b). Music video as party political communication: Opportunities and limits. Journal of Language and Politics, 18(4), 579–597. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18063.way
Way, L. C. S. (2022). Anti-populist populism: Musical challenges to Trump’s America and Erdoǧan’s Turkey. Popular Music, 41(3), 387–404. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143022000447
Yarnis, Y., & Muksin, N. N. (2024). Semiotic analysis of “Gemoy” animations’ political communication strategy in efforts to change Prabowo-Gibran’s branding. Lentera: Jurnal Ilmu Dakwah Dan Komunikasi, 8(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.21093/lentera.v8i1.8069
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
Citation Check
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Hendri Pitrio Putra, Ade Yolanda Latjuba, Nurul Khairani Abduh, Asyrafunnisa, Yohanis Rongre, Sairil
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See the Effect of Open Access)
