Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music 9781138211735, 9781138489530, 9781315452333

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Made in Yugoslavia

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of popular music in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav region across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book consists of chapters by leading scholars and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of music in the region that for most of the past century was known as Yugoslavia. Exploring the role played by music in Yugoslav art, culture, social movements, and discourses of statehood, this book offers a gateway into scholarly explanation of a key region in Eastern Europe. An introduction provides an overview and background on popular music in Yugoslavia, followed by chapters in four thematic sections: Zabavna-Pop; Rock, Punk, and New Wave; Narodna (Folk) and Neofolk Music; and the Politics of Popular Music Under Socialism. Danijela Š. Beard is Associate Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University, UK. She was previously a lecturer in Music at Nottingham University and Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Musical Research (Royal Holloway, University of London). Ljerka V. Rasmussen holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and is on the faculty of music at Tennessee State University, USA. She is the author of Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia.

Routledge Global Popular Music Series Series Editors: Franco Fabbri, Conservatorio di Musica Arrigo Boito di Parma, Italy, and Goffredo Plastino, Newcastle University, UK

The Routledge Global Popular Music Series provides popular music scholars, teachers, students, and musicologists with a well-informed and up-to-date introduction to different world popular music scenes. The series of volumes can be used for academic teaching in popular music studies, or as a collection of reference works. Written by those living and working in the countries about which they write, this series is devoted to popular music largely unknown to Anglo-American readers. Made in France: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Gérôme Guibert and Catherine Rudent Made in the Low Countries: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Lutgard Mutsaers and Gert Keunen Made in Turkey: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Ali C. Gedik Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Shelley Brunt and Geoff Stahl Made in Greece: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Dafni Tragaki Made in Taiwan: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Eva Tsai, Tung-Hung Ho, and Miaoju Jian Made in Poland: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Patryk Galuszka Made in Hong Kong: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Anthony Fung and Alice Chik Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music Edited by Danijela Š. Beard and Ljerka V. Rasmussen For more information about this series, please visit:https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeGlobal-Popular-Music-Series/book-series/RGPMS

Made in Yugoslavia Studies in Popular Music

Edited by

Danijela Š. Beard and Ljerka V. Rasmussen

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Danijela Š. Beard and Ljerka V. Rasmussen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-21173-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-48953-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-45233-3 (ebk) Typeset in Minion Pro by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Oskar, David, and my parents. Danijela To Anton and Beki, and to their grandparents and the musicians they loved. Ljerka

Contents

List of Illustrations x Series Foreword xi Prefacexii Introduction: Reclaiming the Legacy of Yugoslav Popular Music

1

DANIJELA Š. BEARD WITH LJERKA V. RASMUSSEN

Part I: Zabavna-pop13 1 Networking Zabavna Muzika: Singers, Festivals, and Estrada15 JELENA ARNAUTOVIĆ

2

“Melodies From the Adriatic”: Mediterranean Influence in Zabavna Music Festivals of the 1950s and 1960s

25

ANITA BUHIN

3

The Sarajevo Pop-Rock Scene: Music from the Yugoslav Crossroads

36

VESNA ANDREE ZAIMOVIĆ

4

Yugoslav Film and Popular Culture: Arsen Dedić’s Songs in Films

49

IRENA PAULUS

Part II: Rock, Punk, New Wave

59

5

61

Belgrade Rock Experience: From Sixties Innocence to Eighties Relevance ALEKSANDAR ŽIKIĆ

6

Jugoton: From State Recording Giant to Alternative Producer of Yugoslav New Wave BRANKO KOSTELNIK

vii

75

viii  •  Contents

7

“Absolutely Yours”: Yugoslav Disco Under Late Socialism

89

MARKO ZUBAK

8

The Aesthetics of Music Videos in Yugoslav Rock Music: Josipa Lisac, EKV, Rambo Amadeus

99

IVANA MEDIĆ

9

Bijelo Dugme: The Politics of Remembrance Within the Post-Yugoslav Popular Music Scene

111

ANA PETROV

Part III: Narodna (Folk) and Neofolk Music

121

10

123

Starogradska Muzika: An Ethnography of Musical Nostalgia MARIJA DUMNIĆ VILOTIJEVIĆ

11

“My Juga, My Dearest Flower”: The Yugoslav Legacy of Newly Composed Folk Music Revisited

133

IVA NENIĆ

12

Music in Macedonia: At the Source of Yugoslavia’s Balkans

143

VELIKA STOJKOVA SERAFIMOVSKA

13

Fantasy, Sexuality, and Yugoslavism in Lepa Brena’s Music

152

ZLATAN DELIĆ

Part IV: The Politics of Popular Music Under Socialism

163

14

165

Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest DEAN VULETIC

15

“Rocking the Party Line”: The Yugoslav Festival of Patriotic and Revolutionary Song and the Polemics of “Soc-Pop” in the 1970s

175

DANIJELA Š. BEARD

16

“Comrades, We Don’t Believe You!” Or, Do We Just Want to Dance With You?: The Slovenian Punk Subculture in Socialist Yugoslavia

194

GREGOR TOMC

17

Music Labor, Class, and Socialist Entrepreneurship: Yugoslav Self-Management Revisited ANA HOFMAN

206

Contents  •  ix

18

Music for the “Youth Day Central Ceremony” After Tito: De-ritualization and Other Indices of Yugoslav Decline

218

NAILA CERIBAŠIĆ AND JELKA VUKOBRATOVIĆ

Coda231 19

Yugoslav Popular Music and Global Histories of the Cold War

232

CATHERINE BAKER

Afterword247 20

“What Would You Give to Be in My Place?”: A Conversation with Goran Bregović

248

VESNA ANDREE ZAIMOVIĆ, LJERKA V. RASMUSSEN, AND DANIJELA Š. BEARD

Bibliography255 Notes on Contributors 259 Index264

Illustrations

0.1 1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 10.1 13.1 15.1 15.2 16.1 17.1 17.2 1 8.1 18.2

Rimtutituki concert, Republic Square, Belgrade (April 14, 1992) Record sleeve of Zdravko Čolić’s album Ako priđeš bliže (If You Come Closer, 1977) Record sleeve of the Opatija Festival (1960) Record sleeve of the Split Festival (1969) Indexi in 1964 Top lista nadrealista, a recording session at Radio Sarajevo (1983) Record sleeve of Arsen Dedić’s album Čovjek kao ja (1970) Gitarijada (1966), collage poster by Beograd 202 radio station Cover page of Džuboks magazine featuring Siluete (November 3, 1967) Zlatni dečaci (1963), promotional Photo Cover page of Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ (1983), featuring Idoli Record sleeve of Prljavo kazalište’s debut album, Prljavo kazalište (1979) Record sleeve of Laibach’s album Laibach (1985) Record sleeve of Paket aranžman (1981) Mirza Alijagić of Mirzino jato (1979) Yugoslav disco dancing championship at Zagreb’s Štrukla club (1981) Record sleeve of Josipa Lisac’s album Hir, hir, hir (1980) Record sleeve of EKV’s album Ekatarina Velika (1985) Cassette sleeve of Rambo Amadeus’s album O tugo jesenja (1988) Record sleeve of Bijelo dugme’s single Ne gledaj me tako i ne ljubi me više (1975) Record sleeve of Starogradski biseri. Vol. 3, Jugoton (1971) Record sleeve of Lepa Brena and Slatki greh’s Mile voli disko (1982) Record sleeve of the Yugoslav Festival of Patriotic and Revolutionary Song (1977) Screenshot from the TV broadcast of Korni grupa’s Poema 1941 (1971) Record sleeve of Pankrti’s Državni ljubimci (1982) Membership card with license for a guitar player issued by the Association of Jazz and Pop Musicians of the Socialist Republic of Serbia A sample contract between artists represented by the Association of Estrada Workers and Performers and the employer (hotel manager) Scenes from the 1980 Youth Day Central Ceremony Scenography and performers at the 1987 Youth Day Central Ceremony

x

5 20 27 32 38 45 50 64 66 68 71 79 83 84 93 96 102 105 107 113 129 154 181 187 202 209 210 221 225

Series Foreword

Popular music studies have progressed from the initial focus on methodologies to exploring a variety of genres, scenes, works, and performers. British and North American music have been privileged and studied first, not only for their geographic and generational proximity to scholars, but also for their tremendous impact. Everything else has been often relegated to the dubious “world music” category, with a “folk” (or “roots,” or “authentic”) label attached. However, world popular music is no less popular than rock ‘n’ roll, r&b, disco, rap, singer-­ songwriters, punk, grunge, brit-pop, or nu-gaze. It is no less full of history and passion, no less danceable, socially relevant, and commercialized. Argentinian tango, Brazilian bossa nova, Mexican reggaeton, Cuban son and timba, Spanish and Latin American cantautores, French auteurs-­ compositeurs-interprètes, Italian cantautori and electronic dance music, J-pop, German cosmic music and Schlager, Neapolitan Song, Greek entechno, Algerian raï, Ghanaian highlife, Portuguese fado, Nigerian jùjú, Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic pop, Israeli mizrahit, Indian filmi are just a few examples of locally and transnationally successful genres that, with millions of records sold, are an immensely precious key to understand different cultures, societies and economies. More than in the past there is now a widespread awareness of the “other” popular music: however, we still lack access to the original sources, or to texts to rely on. The Routledge Global Popular Music Series has been devised to offer to scholars, teachers, students, and general readers worldwide a direct access to scenes, works, and performers that have been mostly not much or at all considered in the current literature, and at the same time to provide a better understanding of the different approaches in the field of non-Anglophone scholarship. Uncovering the wealth of studies flourishing in so many countries, inaccessible to those who do not speak the local language, is by now no less urgent than considering the music itself. The series website (www.globalpopularmusic.net) includes hundreds of audio-visual examples which complement the volumes. The interaction with the website is intended to give a well-informed introduction to the world’s popular music from entirely new perspectives, and at the same time to provide updated resources for the academic teaching. The Routledge Global Popular Music Series aims ultimately to establish a truly international arena for a democratic musicology through authoritative and accessible books. We hope that our work will help the creation of a different polyphony of critical approaches, and that you will enjoy listening to and being part of it. Franco Fabbri, Conservatorio di Musica Arrigo Boito di Parma, Italy Goffredo Plastino, Newcastle University, UK Series Editors xi

Preface

Why Made in Yugoslavia? Nearly thirty years after its disintegration, Yugoslavia still evokes entrenched images of the Balkans as a hostile, conflict-prone region. This perception set Yugoslavia apart from the otherwise peaceful East European anti-communist revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Among the many perspectives on what caused Yugoslavia’s disintegration – political, economic, social, cultural, religious – there was some consensus that it was a double failure, both as a multinational state and as a unique experiment in self-managed socialism. But beyond these popular narratives of violent dissolution and socialist utopia, there is a considerable cultural legacy that needs careful documentation and critical assessment. This is especially true for popular music produced in Yugoslavia, which is increasingly recognized as one of the most dynamic and diverse pop cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, given that Yugoslav popular music has received only partial, often non-specialist treatment within an otherwise considerable academic scholarship on Yugoslavia’s society and political system, the topic becomes even more important and timely. Notwithstanding the unease that surrounds the name Yugoslavia, evident in the array of alternative nomenclature seeking to replace or supplant it − Southeastern Europe, the Western Balkans, “the region” (region) − we believe that “Yugoslav popular music” is the most appropriate terminology for a volume that deals with music that arose and flourished during Yugoslavia’s “second” existence, as the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ, 1945–91), and which continues to exert an influence within the region to this day. The present volume constitutes an important collection of chapters by writers ranging from established academics and music journalists to music practitioners and younger emerging scholars from different regions of former Yugoslavia – today six independent countries and the Republic of Kosovo/Kosova.1 Together they provide a broadly chronological overview of the main genres and local scenes across four decades of development, from the 1950s through to the late 1980s. Contributors discuss the many influences of European and American styles, ideas of modernity, and the critical roles these played in the creation of a domestic popular music. In particular, this is the first volume to address Yugoslavia’s domestic pop, rock and unique neofolk genres on equal terms, and across the republican borders. Most of the authors also consider the continuing discourse on Yugoslav popular music within its post-socialist context, and examine its broader legacy beyond the individual ethnonational perspectives of the successor states. The evidence of this legacy abounds in numerous social media outlets, reissues of CD box sets, monographs, biographies, collaborations, and talent competitions that promote cross-regional connections. It is therefore within the context of a broad scholarly and popular consensus regarding the existence

xii

Preface  •  xiii

of Yugoslavia as a generative cultural field that our volume has been prepared. This is not to advocate for a position that is not critically reflective, and many authors deal precisely with intricate questions of artistic freedom, government control, and nationalism. However, we believe that such concerns are equally relevant for popular music studies in any multinational society, and that the complex questions of ethnonational and supranational identities are not only pertinent to Made in Yugoslavia, but are at the heart of the globalist thrust of the entire Made in series. Note 1. At the time of writing, Kosovo/Kosova has still not received full international recognition, and remains under the authority of the UN Interim Administration Mission.

Introduction

Reclaiming the Legacy of Yugoslav Popular Music Danijela Š. Beard with Ljerka V. Rasmussen

Yugoslavia (lit. the land of Southern Slavs) was a country in Southeast Europe/the Western Balkans that existed for most of the twentieth century, first as a monarchy (1918–39) and then as a socialist state (1945–91), which is the focus of this volume. With an estimated population of approximately 22.4 million (according to the 1981 census), Yugoslavia was a multinational state with ethnically and culturally diverse communities comprising six socialist republics of the Yugoslav Federation: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (with two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia. Its dissolution, accompanied by the violent wars of secession in the 1990s,1 was played out on the international media stage and reinforced the perception of Yugoslavia as an artificial state plagued by ancient Balkan hatreds, with different ethnoreligious groups who were forced to coexist under the communist dictatorship of Josip Broz Tito. Although a convenient news hook that easily explained political grievances driven by nationalism at the time, the “ancient hatreds” thesis hardly accounts for the complexity of the Yugoslav political system, its lengthy period of stable and unified coexistence, and the multitude of reasons for its collapse, both internal and external (Ramet 2005, 1–34; see also Todorova 1997). The corresponding stereotype of a Balkan people full of love-hate passions, as captured in Emir Kusturica’s films and Goran Bregović’s music, became a readily marketed metaphor for the shared cultural heritage within former Yugoslavia. In addition, ColdWar misconceptions aligned Yugoslavia culturally with Communist Europe, even though it was part of the Soviet Bloc for only three years: following the split between Tito and Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Communist bloc, and soon after started developing its own form of self-managed socialism (samoupravljanje), unlike the rest of the satellite states whose governance was imposed by the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Yugoslavia developed a distinct economic model of market socialism based on a combination of workers’ self-management, decentralization, social ownership, and increasing market mechanisms (see Lydall 1984); it fostered important economic and cultural ties with the United States and the West from the 1950s; it forged links with many countries of the developing world through the founding of the NonAligned Movement in 1961; and after Stalin’s death, it re-established a profitable relationship with the Eastern Bloc.

1

2  •  Danijela Š. Beard with Ljerka V. Rasmussen

Mapping Yugoslav Popular Music In terms of popular culture, Western cultural influences were embraced as early as the 1950s, with jazz and rock ‘n’ roll becoming the main popular music imports in the 1950s and 1960s (Vučetić 2012a, 2012b; Vuletic 2012, 2015). In the 1960s, an entire popular music infrastructure was established (recording facilities, music festivals, broadcast media and press), which yielded remarkably rich and diverse music scenes in the late 1970s and 1980s. These developments facilitated the rise of diskografija (recording industry) and estrada in the 1970s – a term for the distinctly local entertainment and music show business industry – which, by the turn of the 1980s, generated one of the strongest music markets in Southeast Europe.2 Within the unique geopolitical and cultural set up of Yugoslavia, a Western-style economy and socialist politics were played out through estrada, where megastars like pop-music heartthrob Zdravko Čolić, rock band Bijelo dugme, and neofolk icon Lepa Brena set the parameters for a lucrative industry and defined new meanings in socialist popular culture. This volume explores three major genres of popular music: zabavna-pop, rock, and narodnafolk.3 The term popularna muzika/glazba generally denotes Anglo-American or Western-style popular music, while the domestic label zabavna muzika/glazba4 (lit. “entertainment music”) refers to the Yugoslav equivalent. Initially zabavna music stood for the “light music” styles associated with zabavna music festivals (see Chapters 1 and 2), which over time became a catch-all industry label for a variety of popular music genres, from chansons to mainstream pop-rock styles. Zabavnapop, as we refer to it in this volume, was often pitted against novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music; NCFM), or more broadly “neofolk,” both as a genre category used by the music industry and as a self-defining marker of urban rather than rural culture and musical tastes that neofolk signified. Zabavna, rock, and novokomponovana music developed side by side throughout the 1970s. They were distinct genres, each promoted through more or less specialized broadcasts, and each supported by a different taste community. By the turn of the 1980s, “punks” (pankeri) and “new wavers” (novovalci) had successfully achieved artistic autonomy within the rock mainstream, and a few years later, the “folkies” (narodnjaci) were equally effective in bringing pop elements into the folk fold. For their part, zabavnjaci (zabavna musicians) also eagerly tapped into the riches of rock music and neofolk. However, due to the contentious cultural impact of novokomponovana, which triggered fears about the “folklorization” of Yugoslav popular music, novokomponovana was excluded from historiographic accounts of popular music, even though it played a critical role in the growth of diskografija, the music market, and mass media. Croatian journalist Darko Hudelist (1984, 54) offered a rare and invaluable study in which he statistically documented the power of the Yugoslav music market during 1983, one of its peak years. He observed that folk music accounted for 58% of overall production shares, pop for 29%, and rock for 13%, thus providing a compelling counternarrative to the widespread pop-rock centered accounts of popular music in the former Yugoslavia. Regarding individual album sales in the same year, the top three artists selling between 800,000 to over 900,000 copies came from the novokomponova market (Miroslav Ilić and Lepa Brena) and zabavna-pop (Novi fosili), while the bestselling rock bands sold between 500,000 and nearly 800,000 copies (Azra and Riblja čorba).5 Estrada observers attributed the unprecedented sales in the novokomponovana market to hiperprodukcija (lit. “overproduction”; market surplus), prompting concern about the “folkorization” of Yugoslavia’s popular music as a whole. In short, the cross-pollination between genres had galvanized audiences and boosted the market, but for the pop culture intelligentsia

Introduction  •  3

this was a worrisome development: populist folk gestures in rock music were particularly poorly received among rock music circles committed to the Western rock rubric of authenticity and the rebellious spirit. By the late 1980s, neofolk became largely associated with the rising tide of nationalism. With the onset of military conflicts in the 1990s, production of novokomponovana was concentrated in Belgrade, beginning the genre’s transformation into what is now known as turbo-folk – the most controversial style to emerge during the wars of secession. Beginning in the 2000s, turbo-folk’s “guilt-by-association” with the Serbian regime has been critically scrutinized (Rasmussen 2007, 89–90; Grujić 2009; Archer 2009), followed by nuanced interpretations of its broader cultural impact (Archer 2012) and studies on its impact within the post-Yugoslav diaspora (Thaden and Praetz 2014). Some authors even argue for the potentially transformative and emancipatory capacity of turbo-folk (Delić 2013; Čvoro 2014). Similarly, as turbo-folk became a music of choice for many groups of post-Yugoslav youth, along with contemporary Western pop, it has had a leveling effect, especially on the old folk/pop cultural divides that underscored social origin, class, and taste in socialist Yugoslavia. The semantics of narodna-folk has clearly shifted over time, from “newly composed” (novokomponovana) to turbo-folk, and onto contemporary “pop-folk.” This new label, advanced by scholars and media industries more recently, reflects a cultural move away from the pejorative and political associations of the 1990s toward a greater alignment of regional folk production with global pop. “Ovo je zemlja za nas” (This Is a Land for Us) During the wars in the 1990s, many musicians from all genre camps – neofolk, zabavna, rock, and even traditional folk (izvorna) music  – expressed explicit or tacit support for their new nationalist regimes. Popular music became an effective medium for political communication and contested identification, supported by the powerful state media (see Baker 2010). Famously, the folk-rock musician and soldier Marko Perković “Thompson” became synonymous with patriotic militarism and national chauvinism in Croatia (Ibid.; see also Pettan 1998, 22; Muršić 2011), while in Serbia turbo-folk was inextricably linked to the glorification of crime and nationalist xenophobia under Milošević’s regime (Kronja 2001; Kupres 2004; see also Gordy 1999). These wartime efforts were underpinned by a clear ideological stance, one that linked Croatia to Western-style pop music, and Serbia and the eastern provinces to Balkan neofolk styles. The division, however, proved short-lived, and soon after the war neofolk and zabavna musicians saw renewed popularity in Croatia and Serbia, respectively (Baker 2007; Gotthardi Pavlovsky 2014; Petrov 2016). While the nationalist music-making during the war has been widely addressed in the postYugoslav academic literature, narratives on popular music that promoted peace have received comparably little attention. Two projects from 1991 and 1992 are instructive in this regard. The first of these events was the Yugoslav anti-war rock concert titled “Yutel za Mir” (Yutel for Peace), which remains largely overlooked in academic and popular literature.6 Held in Sarajevo’s Zetra arena on July 28, 1991, at the time when the war had already begun in Slovenia and Croatia, the concert was organized and broadcast live by the short-lived TV station Yutel – the only pan-Yugoslav channel committed to the preservation of Yugoslavia, tolerance, and liberalism. Yutel’s activities (1990–92) were seriously hampered by the rival mainstream republican and regional media, and the concert was consequently broadcast only in Bosnia and Macedonia; the other four services of the Yugoslav Broadcasting Agency (JRT), in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro,

4  •  Danijela Š. Beard with Ljerka V. Rasmussen

and Slovenia, refused to show it.7 Despite the media blockade, the event remains the single most spontaneous celebration of Yugoslavia and peace, which garnered considerable attention, with some 30,000 people inside the venue and an estimated overflow of 100,000 outside.8 It included live performances by the leading pop and rock bands from Serbia and Bosnia,9 short messages read by prominent artists, writers, actors, comedians, politicians, sportsmen, miners, and representatives from various peace groups from across Yugoslavia, ending with a group performance of Yutel’s band-aid song for peace “Ljubav je ([Samo u ljubav vjerujem])” (Love Is . . . ([I Only Believe in Love])), recorded by various Sarajevo pop-rock musicians for the occasion (see full recording details in the filmography). It was a rare event where the audio and visual markers still included prominently displayed Yugoslav flags – the tricolor with a red star – and an audience that spontaneously burst into chants of “Yugoslavia!” The participants directly attacked the politicians who were instigating the war (continued references to “them” underscored the anger of the pro-Yugoslav supporters in the arena), countered by a resolute commitment to peace and love. The entire repertoire reinforced these messages, and EKV’s opening set was especially poignant in this regard: their vehement and charged delivery of “Zabranjujem” (I Forbid; from their 1991 album Dum, dum) underscored the anger directed at politicians (“I forbid all those traps of your vileness, I forbid that a touch of envy and illness becomes the end, this mustn’t be the end”), was offset with the gentler “Zemlja” (Land; from their 1987 album Ljubav [Love]), which had a clear anti-nationalist message: “This is a land for us, this is a land for all our people . . ., this is a house for all our children.” The second project was the anti-war action Rimtutituki in Belgrade (Serbia), in Spring 1992, which culminated with anti-war demonstrations and a concert titled “SOS Peace, or Don’t Count on Us” (“S.O.S. Mir, ili ne računajte na nas”). Rimtutituki was a composite supergroup made up of the members of three leading new wave bands: EKV, Električni orgazam, and Partibrejkers.10 The group formed during the anti-mobilization movement in Belgrade, reflected in their name – an anagram for “Up Yours” (lit. “Turim ti kitu”) in the local slang. They recorded the single “Slušaj ‘vamo” (Listen Here), co-released by the PGP RTB label and Radio B92, the latter a rare outlet for Western and Yugoslav news during Milošević’s regime, and a catalyst for the many demonstrations that took place in Belgrade during the 1990s (see Collin 2001). The single was promoted on March 9, 1992, from an improvised stage made on a truck-trailer, which toured the city with Rimtutituki performing and giving out free CDs. The second performance was a larger live concert at the Republic Square on April 14, put on after the war had begun in Bosnia. Yet even though it was attended by some 30,000 people, the event had no coverage on Belgrade TV (pers. comm. with one of the organizers, Petar Popović, 8 February 2018). These two concerts in Sarajevo and Belgrade attest to high-profile efforts to disseminate antiwar messages by like-minded rock musicians and media organizers,11 who worked against the nationalist blockade on the entire media space in the early 1990s.12 As the war took hold, rock musicians, many of whom spent the 1980s openly questioning and mocking the socialist system, now realigned themselves in defense of Yugoslavia and against nationalist separatist forces that were tearing the country apart. This investment in Yugoslavia marked an entire generation who used popular music to fight for a common cultural legacy, which the journalist Ante Perković dubbed a “Seventh Republic” (Perković 2018) − a spiritual and cultural space characterized by shared experiences and products rather than a territory bounded by borders. Those experiences and products, argues Perković, cannot be ascribed to a single ethnic group after the dissolution of Yugoslavia because they are “a hybrid fruit of one large state with five-to-six big cities” (Ibid., 179).13 Perković’s Seventh Republic ultimately connects the six “real” (geopolitical) republics into

Introduction  •  5

Figure 0.1  Rimtutituki concert, Republic Square, Belgrade (April 14, 1992). Image from Petar Popovic´’s private collection.

an imaginary supranational, predominantly Serbo-Croatian sphere of popular culture, characterized by the dynamic networks of activities across major urban centers that forged a common cultural capital. (He identifies the Belgrade-Zagreb-Sarajevo axis, but Ljubljana, Skopje, Novi Sad, Rijeka, and many other towns also played important roles in these networks.) He writes: Between Zagreb and Belgrade, a different worldview was created since the 1960s, with a special momentum in the last decade of the shared country’s existence [the 1980s] − a utopian land in which different nations and traditions don’t have to be a problem but a comparative advantage. . . . Until the end of the 1980s there really was an invisible seventh republic in the SFRJ: supranational, trans-territorial and unlimited. (Perković 2018, 22) More importantly perhaps, Perković’s Seventh Republic reveals the shifting identification with the very idea of Yugoslavia. Until the late 1980s, pop and rock musicians (especially punk and new wave) had increasingly avoided or criticized organized politics – initially communism and later nationalism. They defined their Yugoslav belonging through a common sense of cultural, spiritual, and social affinity entrenched in music and popular culture, and not in political ideology. But as these values became attacked by the nationalists, somewhat ironically, Yugoslavia gained new symbolic power for popular musicians, urban audiences, and the like-minded middle classes: the very music that in some cases had been created in opposition to the socialist ideological worldview was now used to defend those ideals. Moreover, since the millennium, Yugoslavia’s

6  •  Danijela Š. Beard with Ljerka V. Rasmussen

pop culture capital has gained a new lease on life, aided by the new climate that ensued following the death of the Croatian president Franjo Tuđman in 1999 and the collapse of Milošević’s regime in Serbia in 2000. As Perković notes: The Seventh Republic still exists and has started to work on some new basis, whereby the mutual advantages and disadvantages from the former Yugoslavia are starting to complement each other; Zagreb audiences are once again finding Belgrade bands interesting and vice versa. Sarajevo and Bosnia serves as a certain intersection of those forces, hence over the past twenty years the most interesting performers have come from there [Edo Majka, Dubioza kolektiv]. As soon as the politics are removed, and slowly they are evading that cultural sphere . . . the collaboration becomes stronger, which is maybe even simpler now that everybody has their own state. (Ibid., 179) “Yu Pop” as Cultural Capital: Nostalgia and Reconciliation Two concepts have become especially commonplace in the post-Yugoslav discourse on Yugoslav popular music: nostalgia – and more specifically Yugonostalgia – and reconciliation. Yugonostalgia, which is part of a broader phenomenon of nostalgia for the socialist past in Eastern Europe (Boym 2001; Todorova and Gille 2012), denotes a bittersweet yearning for the Yugoslav socialist past, and its utopian projection onto the unsatisfying present, following the conflicts of the 1990s and the unsteady transition from the socialist to a capitalist world. These nostalgic memories range from President Tito’s charismatic leadership and political accomplishments (also known as Titostalgia; see Velikonja 2008) to economic welfare and prosperity, social security, cultural cooperation and solidarity, free travel afforded by the respected “red passport,” and specific consumer products. Even though the region’s nationalist ideologues dismiss Yugonostalgia as an anachronistic, disillusioned, and biased defense of the “fifty years of communist darkness,” for many it is bounded with a discourse on normalcy (normalan život [the normal life]) that recalls economic security and social coexistence. Most scholars also recognize the commodification of Yugonostalgia produced through the manipulation of memory and consumerism, especially with regards to Yugoslav cultural products and the figure of Tito. Correspondingly, Velikonja makes a distinction between a “culture of nostalgia” created for commercial profit and a “nostalgic culture” that has a potentially emancipatory capacity (Ibid.; Petrović 2013). Still, for most scholars Yugonostalgia is recognized as a powerful ideological tool, an engaged emancipatory discourse that allows people to retain or re-establish shared values, to promote cooperation and ultimately reconciliation (see Lindstrom 2005; Pauker 2006; Volčić 2007; Luthar and Pušnik 2010, 16–21; Maksimović 2017). Popular culture is arguably the strongest arena through which reconciliation is taking place across the former Yugoslavia, and it serves not only as an important tool for reconciliation but also as a barometer of its progress (Pauker 2006, 79). In terms of popular music, some of these projects include the publication and commercial success of various encyclopedias and lexicons that deal with popular culture and music in the former Yugoslavia;14 numerous internet domains and outlets for “ex-Yu music”; renewed touring and concerts across successor states (Petrov 2016; see also Baker 2006), including reunion concerts by the most popular rock band in the former Yugoslavia, Bijelo dugme (see Pauker 2006, and Petrov in this volume); reissues of music albums and numerous box sets on Yugoslav pop and rock music, especially by Croatia Records (formerly Jugoton); new DIY record labels that are harnessing Yugoslavia’s underground rock legacy, such

Introduction  •  7

as Ljubljana’s Moonlee Records (Nash 2016); various cross-regional singing contests, including Zvezde Granda, X Factor Adria, and Idol; renewed cross-regional collaboration between artists and media outlets (for instance, the Serbian rock band Garibor, who launched their career in Croatia in 2006 following success at the Art&Music festival in Pula, which led to a recording contract with the label Dancing Bear (Perković 2018, 99–100). In short, the legacy of Yugoslav popular music continues to be promoted over individual ethnonational perspectives across print and digital media, and various social media platforms, all highlighting this shared heritage as “Yugoslav,” often also referred to as “Balkan” or “from the region.” Popular Music Studies in Yugoslavia Popular music studies in Yugoslavia is a post-Yugoslav development. During Yugoslavia’s existence musicologists generally ignored the subject,15 shielding themselves behind the Adornian rubric of the illegitimacy of popular culture, although some sociologists, ethnologists, and other scholars interested in cultural studies ventured into areas of popular culture, including music. An early monograph by Ivan Čolović, Wild Literature: An Ethnolinguistic Study of Paraliterature (Divlja književnost: Etnolingvističko proučavanje paraliterature, 1984), addressed neofolk culture, but there were no comparable scholarly works for zabavna-pop and rock music. Two publications, spearheaded by governmental organizations, fruitfully merged scholarly and journalistic approaches with discussion of cultural policy: the booklet-size study Pop Music and Youth Culture: A Survey of Rock Concert Audiences (Pop glazba i kultura mladih: Sondažno istraživanje publike rock-koncerata, 1978), was the first to address the sociocultural significance of popular music, based on field research of audiences at two Zagreb concerts, one in 1976 by the Rolling Stones and another in 1978 by Bijelo dugme; and The Music Industry of SR Croatia (Diskografija u SR Hrvatskoj, 1984), offered a comprehensive coverage of Croatian mass media, music production and cultural policy across a variety of popular music genres. Despite the paucity of academic studies, Yugoslavs produced exceptionally robust journalism on popular music and culture, which effectively laid the foundation for a historiography of popular music (see Chapter 5). Besides the main magazine dedicated to rock music, Džuboks, leading music journalists and cultural commentators compiled several invaluable books: an illustrated anthology of the new wave surge at the turn of the 1980s titled On the Other Side: An Almanac of New Wave in the SFRJ (Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ, 1981), the first Yugoslav rock biography Nothing Wise: Bijelo Dugme (Ništa mudro: Bijelo dugme, 1981) by Darko Glavan and Dražen Vrdoljak, and Petar Luković’s interview-based monograph on pop, rock, and neofolk music titled The Better Past: Scenes from Musical Life in Yugoslavia, 1940–1989 (Bolja prošlost: Prizori iz muzičkog života Jugoslavije, 1940–1989, 1989). A timely translation of Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) into Serbo-Croatian (Potkultura: Značenje stila 1980), Darko Glavan’s book on punk, Punk: Totally Offensive Negation of the Classic (Punk: Potpuno uvredljivo negiranje klasike, 1980), and a collection of essays on East European subcultures in Subcultures (Potkulture, 1989) also illustrated the interest in subcultural studies. More broadly, an array of print outlets, from daily newspapers, political magazines, and the youth press through mass media and popular-culture weeklies, provided dedicated coverage of popular music events, including critical album reviews. In the post-Yugoslavia period, academic studies have generally focused on specific successor states and/or genres: zabavna (Baker 2010; Vuletic 2008, 2012), rock (Mišina 2013; Žikić 1999) and neofolk (Rasmussen 2002; Hofman 2011). These studies coincided with a considerable

8  •  Danijela Š. Beard with Ljerka V. Rasmussen

resurgence of scholarship on Yugoslav culture over the past two decades, with monographs published by leading academic publishers on more balanced perspective on Yugoslavia’s unique form of socialism, as seen in chapters on popular culture and music (Luthar and Pušnik 2010; Duraković and Matošević 2013; Jakiša and Gilić 2015; Archer, Duda, and Stubbs 2016; Spasovska 2017; Baker 2018). It is within this dynamic scholarly context that we have prepared our volume, which is the first scholarly study of Yugoslav popular music that brings together a cross-­generational and multidisciplinary team of authors who deal with different genres and regions. Our volume offers a comprehensive study of the three main music scenes – zabavna, rock, and neofolk (novokomponovana) – which are for the first time considered to equally constitute the broad field of popular music in Yugoslavia. Our primary consideration has been the pan-national impact of the regional and local scenes and artists, forged through the most representative voices. Although we have made every effort to achieve comprehensive coverage, certain regions, artists, and genres have necessarily received more treatment; complete coverage of localized scenes would have required much more space. Furthermore, as editors we have had to make certain creative compromises influenced by the availability of authors and their scholarly interests. Ultimately, the present volume speaks clearly of the representational power of popular music: it provides the first full-length academic study rooted in ethnography and music analysis, critically assesses the sociocultural impact of popular music in socialist Yugoslavia, and is the first scholarly volume to explore the cross-regional connections of popular music made in and during socialist Yugoslavia. Notes 1. The breakup of Yugoslavia included a series of wars that led to the independence of individual Republics: The Ten Day War in Slovenia (1991) and the longer wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991−95) against the Serbian-led army, although in Bosnia and Herzegovina the infighting was also between Croats and Bosniaks; and the Kosovo conflict that involved Serbian military assault against Albanian armed resurgence in the Kosovo province, which precipitated the NATO bombing of Serbia (1999). Macedonia peacefully declared its independence in 1991 and was initially renamed the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYRM), and since 2019 the Republic of North Macedonia. Montenegro and Serbia continued a coalition as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until Montenegro declared its independence in 2006. 2. For a comparative assessment of Yugoslavia’s music market and infrastructure, and European and American industries, see Dubravko Majnarić, in Diskografija u SR Hrvatskoj (1984, 66−69). 3. Jazz (džez) was an important source for the early development of zabavna music in the 1950s (see Arnautović 2012, 103−21; Vučetić 2012b). Although this early jazz scene does not receive full-length coverage in this volume, a number of authors touch upon the incorporation of jazz within zabavna and rock genres. 4. Muzika is used in Bosnian and Herzegovinian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian; glazba/glasba in Croatian and Slovenian, respectively; muzikë in Albanian. 5. Writers often cite sales figures from accounts by popular music journalists. The industry data were not publically available, and there was also the issue of accuracy and reliability of data. The Hudelist study is exceptional in that it draws on the data from the record labels reported to SOKOJ (The Union of Composers’ Associations of Yugoslavia), and is probably the most reliable account of record sales in Yugoslav estrada in the 1980s. 6. The exception is the project “Zetra: Days of Hope,” a crowdsourcing campaign carried out by a group of German journalists (some from former Yugoslavia) in 2016, with a view to shedding more light on the concert itself and the largely overlooked peace movement in Yugoslavia. The website contains 38 recollections by members of the audience who attended the concert (see www.zetraproject.com/bhs). 7. Yugoslav Radio-Television (JRT), founded in 1958, was the national public broadcasting network. It comprised six republican and two provincial broadcast houses, each headquartered in and named after its capital (e.g., Radio Television Ljubljana, Radio Television Novi Sad). Broadcasting was conducted in Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian. Republican broadcast services, which functioned relatively autonomously, were organized around the main channels, Programs 1, 2, and 3, and Urban Radio’s Program 202. Urban Radio expanded significantly over time to include commercially oriented radio outlets and numerous local radio stations that developed throughout the country. Television broadcasting was carried out via all three channels. 8. According to estimates by the TV commentators during the broadcast.

Introduction  •  9 9. These included the bands Ekatarina Velika (EKV), Crvena jabuka, Istok iza, Plavi orkestar, Hari Mata Hari, Dino Merlin, Indexi, Bajaga, Regina, Goran Bregović of Bijelo dugme, Nele Karajlić of Zabranjeno pušenje, and the neofolk singer Haris Džinović. Singers from Croatia did not participate as most professed their loyalty to Croatia and its War of Independence, turning to patriotic songs that were commissioned, financed, and aired by Croatian national television. See Pettan 1998; Sikavica 2017. 10. Rambo Amadeus was also meant to be part of the project but did not make the rehearsals and recording sessions. 11. While nationalism is usually linked to neo-folk scenes, many zabavna and some rock musicians were also active supporters of nationalist causes, notably Bora Đorđević in Serbia and Prljavo kazalište in Croatia. 12. Two other efforts from 1993 that took place abroad also stand out. The little known Radio Brod (Radio Ship) project, funded by the European Union, was a radio station set up on a ship that sailed the Adriatic waters, broadcasting programs near the Croatian coast (Dalmatia), Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina – areas that were closed off from any cross-regional communication. The project brought together the best journalists from across former Yugoslavia, and the Croatian new wave musician Darko Rundek as its music director (formerly of Haustor, today of Cargo Orchestra), who provided news and music to audiences who were otherwise cut off from each other. The other project was a series of anti-war concerts organized in Prague and Berlin titled “Ko to tamo pjeva?” (Who’s That Singing Over There?), where the Belgrade bands EKV, Električni orgazam and Partibrejkers performed with Vještice from Zagreb, and whose shared motto was “to exchange songs, not bullets.” See also Mijatovic 2008, who analyzes several rock songs and artists who provided a powerful political critique of Serbia in the 1990s. 13. From Perković’s interview with Aleksandar Dragaš for Jutaranji list (July 2011), which is reprinted in the book. 14. Leksikon Yu Mitologije (Lexicon of Yu Mythology, 2004) and Ex YU Rock Enciklopedija, 1960−2006 (Ex Yu Rock Encyclopaedia 1960−2006, 2007). Lexicon, in particular, has become an unambiguously political statement by (ex-) Yugoslavs who seek to preserve their social history through public memory (Pauker 2006, 74). In 1989, the writer Dubravka Ugrešić and the editors of Start magazine, Dejan Kršić and Ivan Molek, initiated Lexicon as a collaborative venture. They called for ordinary readers (rather than a panel of experts) to write about everyday life in Yugoslavia since 1945, to be published as a collection of key concepts about homegrown (domaća) popular culture. The project was brought to a halt during the 1990s only to be revived in 2001, initially as an internet portal and then as a book co-published in 2004 by Rende in Belgrade and Postscriptum in Zagreb. The publishers noted their surprise at the sheer volume of responses, with entries submitted by people of different ages and professions from across the world (see Lexicon’s website). Lexicon’s mix of high and low culture marked its considerable reception, ranging from harmless sentimental remembrance and therapeutic tool for “decontaminating memories about Yugoslavia” to the cult status that made it a subject of considerable academic research (see Ibid.; Bošković 2013). 15. For a rare musicological account see Andrej Rijavec (1981), “Towards Understanding the Traits of American Popular Music in South Eastern Europe.”

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Introduction  •  11 Petrov, Ana. 2015. “The Songs We Love to Sing and the History We Like to Remember: Tereza Kesovija’s Comeback in Serbia.” Southeastern Europe 39 (2): 192–214. Petrov, Ana. 2016. Jugoslovenska muzika bez Jugoslavije: Koncerti kao mesta sećanja. Belgrade: Fakultet za medije i komunikacije. Petrović, Tanja. 2013. “The Past That Binds Us: Yugonostalgia as the Politics of Future.” In Transcending Fratricide: Political Mythologies, Reconciliations, and the Uncertain Future in the Former Yugoslavia, edited by Srdja Pavlović and Marko Živković, 129–48. Baden-Baden: Nomos Velagsgesellschaft. Pettan, Svanibor, ed. 1998. Music, Politics, and War: Views from Croatia. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research. Potkulture. 1989. Potkulture u istočnoj Evropi – potkulturni simboli. Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije. Ramet, Sabrina P., ed. 1994. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder: Westview Press. Ramet, Sabrina P. 2005. Thinking About Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates About the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 2002. Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. New York and London: Routledge. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 2007. “Bosnian and Serbian Music in the 1990s: Divergent Paths, Conflicting Meanings, and Shared Sentiments.” In Balkan Popular Music and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, edited by Donna A. Buchanan. Lanham, MD, Toronto and Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press. Rijavec, Andrej. 1981. “Towards Understanding the Traits of American Popular Music in South Eastern Europe.” In International Musicological Society. Report of the Twelfth Congress: Berkley 1977, edited by Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Škarica, Siniša. Kad je rock bio mlad: Priča s istočne strane 1956–1970. Zagreb: VBZ. Spasovska, Ljubica. 2017. The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thaden, Matthias, and Alexander Praetz. 2014. “Turbofolk Reconsidered: Some Thoughts on Migration and the Appropriation of Music in Early 1990s Berlin.” Südosteuropäische Hefte 3 (1): 92–125. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todorova, Maria, and Zsuzsa Gille, eds. 2012. Post-Communist Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn. Velikonja, Mitja. 2008. Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz. Ljubljana: Mirovni inštitut. Volčić, Zala. 2007. “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24 (1): 21–38. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 1991. “Yuga umire pjevajući.” Večernji list, March 12. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 2008. Moje brazde: Bilješke o hrvatskoj zabavnoj, pop i jazz glazbi. Zagreb: V. B. Z. Vučetić, Radina. 2012a. Koka-kola socijalizam. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Vučetić, Radina. 2012b. “Trubom kroz gvozdenu zavesu  – prodor džeza u socijalističku Jugoslaviju.” Muzikologija 13: 53–77. Vuletic, Dean. 2008. “Generation Number One: Politics and Popular Music in Yugoslavia in the 1950s.” Nationalities Papers 36 (5): 861–79. Vuletic, Dean. 2012. “Sounds Like America: Yugoslavia’s Soft Power in Eastern Europe.” In Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, edited by Peter Romijn, Giles Schott-Smith, and Joes Segal, 116–31. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vuletic, Dean. 2015. “Swinging Between East and West: Yugoslav Communism and the Dilemmas of Popular Music.” In Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc, edited by William Jay Risch, 25–41. Lanham: Lexington Books. Žikić, Aleksandar. 1999. Fatalni ringišpil: Hronika beogradskog rokenrola 1959–1979. Belgrade: Geopoetika.

Discography Rimtutituki. “Slušaj ‘vamo.” PGP RTB 110047, 1992, 45 rpm.

Filmography Kupres, Radovan, dir. Sav taj folk. 2004. Belgrade: B92. Television documentary in eight parts. Sikavica, Miroslav, dir. Glasnije od oružja. 2017. Zagreb: Factum. Vesić, Dušan, dir. Co-written with Sandra Rančić. Rockovnik. 2011. Belgrade: Radio Television Serbia. Television documentary, forty episodes. Yutel za mir. July 28, 1991. Sarajevo: Yutel. Recording of the live broadcast. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx2Hl0xeliI

PART 

I

Zabavna-pop

Beyond the Balkans, Yugoslavia’s popular music invariably raises a question: how could Yugoslavia, a communist state, create a thriving commercial music industry and embrace Western market principles when such an approach was theoretically at odds with the communist ideology and state socialism? The answer is by producing a form of homegrown popular music – termed zabavna muzika or glazba (lit. “entertainment” music) – which embodied the idealized concept of popular culture at home, but that also bolstered Yugoslavia’s international image as the most liberal communist state in Europe. Zabavna-pop, to use the term we propose in this volume, stands for the “mainstream” popular music of Yugoslavia. Because it had neither the subversive connotations of jazz and rock nor the “kitsch” (šund) qualities ascribed to commercial narodna-folk, it was hailed as the most politically and stylistically suitable form of entertainment, one that best corresponded with the aspirational middle-class concept of socialist culture. With strong state support and rapid development of institutional infrastructure, namely through the founding of zabavna music festivals in the 1950s, backed by the national radio and television networks, zabavna-pop evolved into a fully-fledged entertainment industry (estrada) by the 1970s, with megastars who sold millions of records – a capitalist/consumerist mode of operation that distinguished Yugoslavia from much of the Eastern Bloc. Stylistically, zabavna-pop initially developed through emulation and creative responses to dominant European genres such as Italian canzone, French chanson, and German schlager, as well as Russian romansa and American crooners. Dalmatian klapa group singing and the starogradska (old-urban) variety of music, rooted in local traditions beyond the Serbo-Croatian nexus (namely in Macedonia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina), contributed to the regional diversity of zabavna style. As it grew into an exportable domestic product, especially into the Eastern Bloc, zabavna served as a model for the commercial rise of newly composed folk music (novokomponovana narodna muzika), a process that reversed during the 1980s when neofolk producers and singers forayed into both zabavna-pop and rock cultures. The first two chapters in this section interrogate the institutional and aesthetic foundations of Yugoslavia’s zabavna music. Jelena Arnautović analyzes the evolution of the zabavna scene through a comparative study of two megastars from the 1950s and 1970s (Đorđe Marjanović and Zdravko Čolić), illustrating how the mechanics of the pop music industry shifted from the emulation of European and American models to a homegrown estrada music business. Anita Buhin continues this theme but looks more specifically at the lucrative links between zabavna and Yugoslav tourism, one of the main drivers of the country’s economy. Buhin explores how Adriatic coastal culture was fashioned as a symbol of “European” and “civilizing” effects on Yugoslavia’s culture during the 1950s and 1960s, and argues that the creation of zabavna was part of Yugoslavia’s policy of “exporting” coastal culture designed to showcase the diversity and optimistic visions of its socialist program of development. 13

14  •  Zabavna-pop

The other two chapters in this section deal with ways in which zabavna intersected with other genres. Vesna Andree Zaimović looks at how Sarajevo’s specific cultural milieu, with its brisk social commentary and humor shaped the lasting legacy of the Sarajevo pop-rock scene. In this competing, pluralist environment, zabavna is an adaptive, responsive form, and artists associated with it consciously blurred the lines between pop and rock. By contrast, Irena Paulus explores zabavna-pop as a more inward facing, soul-searching form of personal and social critique. Focusing on the chanson-inspired aesthetic of the celebrated singer-songwriter Arsen Dedić, Paulus considers how his work as a film composer attests not only to his musical versatility but also that of zabavna music more broadly, with songs that combine a timeless mix of satire, critical commentary, and intellectual acuity. Together these four authors analyze how zabavna-pop not only reflected regional and stylistic diversity but also laid the very foundations for a music industry in the former Yugoslavia.

1

Networking Zabavna Muzika

Singers, Festivals, and Estrada Jelena Arnautović

The umbrella term  zabavna muzika/glazba1 (mainstream popular music; lit. “entertainment” music) emerged in 1950s Yugoslavia, designating a homegrown form of Western-style popular music. According to Godišnjak RTB (the Yearbook of Radio Television Belgrade 1960, 39–40), the term zabavna muzika was introduced by Yugoslav radio stations in order to distinguish entertainment genres from ozbiljna (art music; lit. “serious”) and narodna (folk) music. Until the 1960s, the zabavna label was used rather arbitrarily to denote a variety of vocal and dance music genres, film music, jazz, operettas, and arrangements of international folk songs. This practice continued the pre-war custom of Radio Belgrade, who used the term “light music” for all types of genres considered entertainment that did not require “great concentration” and were “light, cheerful, almost insignificant pieces that one could listen to ‘with one ear’ ” (Radio-Beograd 1936, 1). The stylistic variety of Yugoslav zabavna music was particularly pronounced during the early post-WWII years: genres derived from German, Italian, French, Russian, and American models included šlager (Schlager), kancona (canzone), šansona (chanson), romansa (romance), and evergrin (evergreen). Singers like Domenico Modugno and Charles Aznavour held particular appeal for audiences and aspiring singers. The first original songs emerging in the mid-1950s were characterized by simple, tender, and appealing melodies, with lyrics based on sentimental love stories. This ballad-style singing accompanied by an orchestra became known as domestic šlager (from Gr. Schlager). Cultural commentators and even politicians of the day had numerous discussions about the “ideal” style of Yugoslav popular music, some arguing that it must be neither too Western or bourgeois, nor too “folky” or Balkan, while others insisted that it must be neither “boring” nor “erotic” (Buhin 2016, 156). In other words, zabavna music had to be a uniquely domestic product, a form of entertainment that would reflect the “progressive foundations” (napredne osnove) of Yugoslavia’s socialist culture (Marković 1995, 392). The institutional infrastructure for zabavna music developed rapidly from the 1960s throughout Yugoslavia, primarily with the inception of festivals dedicated to zabavna music, bolstered by strong state support from national radio and television networks. Record companies, which produced festival programs, promoted individual singers and secured the growth of a viable commercial market for domestic popular music. As a result, the festivals of zabavna music became a central hub for networking singers, songwriters, broadcasters, and record producers, and laid the foundation for the development of a national zabavna scene in the 1960s. Over the next two decades, zabavna music was transformed into a fully-fledged national estrada (music

15

16  •  Jelena Arnautović

entertainment industry), providing an economic livelihood to composers, performers, media, and festival organizers alike. “The Golden Age”: Festivals and the First Music Stars in the 1950s and the 1960s The main venues where popular music could be heard in postwar Yugoslavia were igranke (dance-entertainment events), which were held in popular student clubs (including Božidarac and Mažestik in Belgrade), and at open public spaces such as sports stadiums. In order to tailor for the diverse audiences, igranke included medleys of revolutionary songs and dance folk music from different Yugoslav regions, alongside foreign popular songs and the latest arrangements of American dance tunes. At the time, all music performed had to be in accordance with the Communist Party’s official line on popular culture, which in the 1950s implied a “lukewarm” attitude toward the West, and especially the United States. As a result, songs imported from abroad were modified for domestic use in the form of cover versions, so-called prepevi/prepjevi, whose lyrics were translated into the Serbo-Croatian language. The vast majority of songs performed before the 1960s under the label zabavna were not original songs but rather simple adaptations of foreign songs, and even in the 1960s, many zabavna hits followed this trend (for example, Miki Jevremović’s “Kuća izlazećeg sunca” [The House of the Rising Sun, 1964] or “Zbogom Kalifornijo” [California Dreaming, 1966]). The growth of zabavna music as a distinctive genre began with local authors composing original songs in native languages (Slovenian/Serbo-Croatian), most notably Darko Kraljić, who was the first successful and most prolific songwriter.2 He rose to fame with the songs “Zvižduk u 8” (Whistle at 8, 1959), recorded by the then hugely popular singer Đorđe Marjanović (who also played the lead role in the 1962 movie Zvižduk u 8), and “Devojko mala” (Hey, Little Girl, 1958), sung by the actor Vlastimir Đuza Stojiljković in the musical comedy Ljubav i moda (Love and Fashion, 1960). Alongside Kraljić, several other songwriters started composing zabavna songs in the 1950s: Milan Kotlić, Dušan Vidak, Mladen Guteša, Aca Nećak, Bojan Adamič, Ljubo Kuntarić, Žarko Petrović, and Dragomir Ristić.3 The pioneering careers of the singers who became indentified with the genre (in Serbia, for example, Vojin Popović, Voja Milanović, Mara Petrović, Olga Nikolić, Olivera Marković, sisters Jeftić) were launched through Yugoslav radio programs, accompanied by radio orchestras that performed both zabavna and jazz music, including Plesni orkestar Radio Ljubljane (The Dance Orchestra of Radio Ljubljana, founded in 1945), Plesni orkestar Radio Zagreba (The Dance Orchestra of Radio Zagreb, founded in 1946), and Zabavni orkestar Radio Beograda (The Entertainment Orchestra of Radio Belgrade, founded in 1948; renamed The Jazz Orchestra in 1960). Political opening toward the West in the 1960s led to greater opportunities for artists, which included the founding of new cultural and educational institutions, rapid media development, and a general blossoming of cultural life. The early socialist ideals, such as modesty and collectivism, were now overshadowed by popular singers who introduced glamorous Western lifestyles as new aspirational models for Yugoslav citizens to follow (see Marković 1995, 417–24). Numerous festivals of “light music” (lakih nota) were launched and developed across Yugoslavia, including the Zagreb Festival (1953), the Opatija Festival (1958), the Split Festival /Melodije Jadrana (Adriatic Melodies, 1960), Beogradsko proleće (Belgrade Spring, 1961), Slovenska popevka (Slovenian Song, 1962, in Bled/Ljubljana), Vaš šlager sezone (Your Schlager of the Season, 1967, in Sarajevo), and Skopje fest (Skoplje Festival, 1969), as well as some traveling festivals that moved through various Yugoslav cities, namely Pesma leta (The Song of the Summer, 1967), Melodije Istre i Kvarnera

Networking Zabavna Muzika  •  17

(Melodies of Istria and Kvarner, 1964), and Karavan prijateljstva (Caravan of Friendship, 1967). From the start, these zabavna festivals were conceived as competitions, where a professional jury decided on the winning songwriters and vocalists. Indeed, winning, or at least participating at these festivals, became a rite of passage for most music careers, but also a matter of prestige and honor for every domestic singer and songwriter. For the most part, these festivals were modeled on the influential Italian Song Festival at Sanremo (1951) and the Eurovision Song Contest (1956), but they also had some specific local features. For example, the first Opatija festival, like the Sanremo, had an elite character and was held in the illustrious Crystal Hall of hotel Kvarner, which has become a meeting place for the political and social elite ever since. Potential participants at Opatija were to follow set criteria regarding their songs: the music was supposed to be lively, joyful, and express national musical features (nacionalni melos) (Lukić-Krstanović 2010, 160). According to Buhin, however, Opatija was not only intended to forge a distinctive style of zabavna music, but also to promote diverse music traditions of all Yugoslav peoples. As such, the Opatija Festival was meant to foster the socialist ideology of “brotherhood and unity,” and simultaneously aid cultural democratization by promoting light genres that ordinary Yugoslav citizens wanted to hear (Buhin 2016, 148–49, 155). The first music stars emerged as the two major record labels  – Jugoton (Zagreb) and PGP RTB (Belgrade) – started producing the festival programs. Compilations of festival songs were among their bestsellers, because these songs became instantly popular with the audience during the festivals’ television broadcasts. The first album, Zabavne melodije iz Jugoslavije (Zabavna Melodies from Yugoslavia, 1959), was produced by PGP RTB (Godišnjak RTB 1960, 39–40). Furthermore, radio stations and television programs, which belonged to the national Yugoslav Radio Television network (JRT), became critical for the organization and promotion of these festivals.4 For example, Radio Belgrade organized the Beogradsko proleće while JRT did the same for the Opatija Festival (from 1972 onwards); JRT’s ensembles of choice accompanied the singers on stage, and radio stations recorded and transmitted entire programs live. In Belgrade, even the auditions for the festivals were broadcast during the 1960s as highly popular radio shows called Izlazak iz studija (Exit from the Studio) and Radio koji se gleda (The Radio That Should be Watched). Among the most popular shows were Konkurs za šlager sezone (Competition for the Best Schlager of the Season) and Mikrofon je vaš (The Microphone is Yours), broadcast on the Second Program of Radio Belgrade (Informator RTB 1970, 22–25; Canić 2000, 147). Other radio shows that were partly or fully dedicated to zabavna, the so-called humoristic-entertainment programs, had very high ratings and also contributed greatly to the popularization of the genre. These were Mozaik lake i zabavne muzike (Mosaic of Light and Entertainment Music), Zabavni muzički program (The Entertainment Music Program), Veselo veče (Jolly Evening), Svet muzike i šale (The World of Music and Jokes), and Humoreska (Humoresque) (Godišnjak RTB 1960, 44). Based on my analysis of statistical data on Radio Belgrade’s programming since the 1950s, it is clear that the percentage of zabavna (and foreign pop) broadcasts increased significantly during the 1960s,5 mainly because audiences continually asked the editors to increase the number of humoristic shows and the amount of zabavna-pop, as well as novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music; NCFM). In order to perform on radio, television, or at a festival, zabavna singers of the 1950s and 1960s had to demonstrate impressive vocal abilities and follow certain rules regarding stage demeanor. Anthropologist Lukić-Krstanović’s analysis of the 1960s press coverage revealed that festival singers were obliged to stand still in front of the microphones, and that any hand movements had to be stylized and balanced. Dancing or “shaking” while performing was behavior associated with

18  •  Jelena Arnautović

officially unfavorable American dance music and jazz, and later with rock ‘n’ roll (Arnautović 2012, 103–12 and 141–9); performers were expected to maintain a dignified and visually pleasing appearance, keep gesticulation within the decorum of modest behavior, and impress the audience with their voices and not their bodies (Lukić-Krstanović 2010, 175–76). Indeed, as Ivana Lučić-Todosić (2002, 55) suggests, the singer Vojin Popović was banned from Radio Belgrade broadcast in the late 1940s after he was declared to be under American influence when he had made a single overly expressive hand gesture instead of standing still while performing at a concert at Kolarac Concert Hall.6 It is not surprising, then, that at the turn of the 1960s, Đorđe Marjanović caused mass euphoria when he broke these stage rules and introduced the spirit of American rock ‘n’ roll into zabavna by impersonating Elvis Presley on stage, moving and dancing freely with the microphone in his hands and making physical contact with the audience. Since he had publicly transgressed the officially sanctioned behavior, he was exposed to harsh criticism in the press, but this only made him more popular with audiences. Marjanović’s popularity led PGP RTB to release his first album, Muzika za igru (Music for Dancing) in 1959 − the first release for a zabavna singer in Yugoslavia. According to journalist Petar Luković (1989, 83), all 11,000 copies sold out in just one month, at a time when there were approximately 20,000 gramophones in the entire country. Fanatically worshiped by his fans nicknamed djokisti, Marjanović was the first Yugoslav music star. When Marjanović was not awarded the 1961 Zlatni mikrofon (the Golden Microphone prize) at the competition in Dom sindikata,7 his fans’ stormy reaction remains a memorable djokisti event: As the results were announced, the indignant audience left the hall shouting Marjanović’s name, literally carrying him out on their shoulders. The masses paralyzed the flow of traffic in downtown Belgrade, finally assembling in front of the hotel Moskva, with Marjanović singing on top of a car (Luković 1989, 83–84). Later that year, the djokisti also bombarded different magazines with letters after Marjanović was not selected to compete at the prestigious Opatija Festival, despite winning three prizes there the previous year (Marković 1995, 400). Marjanović’s fanzine also demonstrates the growing market for more original pop music in Yugoslavia: he is said to have been the first Yugoslav singer to sell 25,000 albums and the first to sell out eight successive concerts in Dom sindikata (Ibid.). The euphoria surrounding Marjanović spread across Yugoslavia and beyond. In the Soviet Union, he was the first Yugoslav singer to perform for more than 90,000 people at a football stadium (in only two months, he held 147 concerts) (Savić 2007, 16–17). He covered songs by the Beatles and Bob Dylan in Russian, again serving as a mediator for Western pop culture, this time for Soviet audiences. The foreign press also took note of the Marjanović phenomenon. In 1969 the Italian magazine La stampa described him as a Yugoslav idol for the young Soviets, saying he looked like a hippie and his performances resembled those of the Rolling Stones and Dylan, while American Newsweek wrote that he was the biggest foreign star to tour the Soviet Union (Ivačković 2014, 38). Many other Yugoslav zabavna singers also toured the Soviet Union in the 1960s as part of the “cultural exchange” programs between the two communist countries. Some of them had concerts in other countries too (notably Lola Novaković’s tour in Japan in 1963) or they participated in the Eurovision Song Contest (Ljiljana Petrović in Cannes in 1961, Lola Novaković in Luxembourg in 1962, and Vice Vukov in London in 1963 and in Naples in 1965).8 Some of the most popular zabavna singers who developed careers during the 1960s include Miki Jevremović, Krunoslav Kićo Slabinac, Dušan Jakšić, Dragan Stojnić, Tereza Kesovija, Gabi Novak, Anica Zubović, Ivo Robić, Leo Martin, Ivica Šerfezi, Majda Sepe, and Zafir Hadžimanov, and numerous zabavna

Networking Zabavna Muzika  •  19

songs from the 1960s remain popular today, including “Devojko mala,” “Zvižduk u 8,” “Samo jednom se ljubi” (You Love Only Once, 1956), “Bila je tako lijepa” (She Was So Beautiful, 1965), and “Obriši suze, draga” (Wipe Off Your Tears, Darling, 1970). Commercialization and Genre Fusions in the 1970s and the 1980s If in the 1960s the festivals of light music were intended primarily as competitions that promoted unknown but quality performers, in the 1970s they became part of a lucrative estrada, driven by high profits guaranteed by showcasing already famous and popular artists. Moreover, the success of the singers was greatly dependent on their good relationships with leading songwriters, who effectively held a monopoly over the market. Renowned pop composer-arrangers wrote the winning songs and the biggest hits for the leading zabavna pop stars, including Zdravko Čolić, Mišo Kovač, Josipa Lisac, Oliver Dragojević, Tereza Kesovija, and groups like Pro Arte and Novi fosili. Some of the most notable collaborations include: Kornelije Kovač and Čolić, who proved a perfect fit for numerous hits during Čolić’s long career, including “April u Beogradu” (April in Belgrade, 1975), “Zvao sam je Emili” (I Called her Emily, 1975) and “Ti si mi u krvi” (You’re in My Blood, 1984);9 Đorđe Novković wrote some of Pro Arte’s most popular songs, including “Lola” (1970) and “Jedna mala plava” (A Little Blondie, 1975); Zdenko Runjić captured the essence of the Adriatic idiom for Dragojević’s ballads “Galeb i ja” (Seagull and Me, 1975) and “Poeta” (The Poet, 1978); Đelo Jusić reflected the šansonjer (chanson singer) trend with Frano Lasić’s “Volim te budalo mala” (I Love You, Little Fool, 1983); and Arsen Dedić, a proponent of the Zagreb Chanson School and a leading singer-songwriter, wrote some of his greatest ballads, such as “O, mladosti” (Oh Youth, 1971) or “Ne daj se, Ines” (Don’t Give Up, Ines, 1976). According to rock journalist Branko Vukojević, for a young singer who hoped to become famous and make a fortune, the best move was to become a part of a team led by Novković, Kovač, Jusić, or Runjić (Vukojević 2005, 314). Since the priorities became who would win and how much could be earned from selling festival tickets and albums, the new phenomenon of estrada managers emerged. They operated a privately run and poorly regulated management of artists and concerts within the so-called “gray economy,” and sometimes even manipulated the votes of the festival jury (Luković 1989, 290–91; see also Chapter 17). Alongside the nationwide audience, zabavna music was supported by the political and cultural establishment. While rock music was seen as both too provocative and not commercial enough (see Arnautović 2012, 141–81), zabavna was perceived as a suitable means for gaining profits while staying within the bounds of “desirable behavior,” which explains why zabavna singers had a more favorable status in the media and at the festivals compared to rock musicians in the 1970s. As Branko Vukojević put it in 1979, “Even the silliest festival of zabavna music was broadcast. We always see the same faces in the so-called ‘show’ programmes, while rock musicians could be counted on one hand” (in Vukojević 2005, 263). Further evidence for the preferential treatment of zabavna was the festival Omladina (The Youth) founded in 1961 in Subotica, intended for young singers and songwriters who were not yet established. Although both zabavna and rock musicians competed there, the awards were mostly granted to the former (Ibid., 144). For instance, Korni grupa performed both progressive rock and zabavna music (see Chapter 15), and even though the band’s main interest was rock, the group’s leader Kovač realized that a media breakthrough could only be achieved by performing zabavna. The band effectively gained fame thanks to their zabavna hits, such as “Dzum-ram” (1969) and the witty “Trla baba lan” (The Grandmother Wasted Time in Idleness, 1970), the classically orientated rock songs “Jedna žena”

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(One Woman, 1970) and “Etida” (Etude, performed at Opatija in 1973), and music inspired by the Partisan WWII heritage (the 1973 song “Ivo Lola”). “Trla baba lan,” sung by Dado Topić, earned the “silver record” for 60,000 copies sold.10 The band won various festival awards, and after they won the first prize at the 1974 Opatija Festival with the song “Moja generacija” (My Generation), sung by Zlatko Pejaković, they were chosen to represent Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton with that song the same year, shortly before they disbanded (Kovač 2010, 48; Žikić 1999, 126–27, 175). Perhaps the best example of the commercial spirit of the 1970s was the zabavna singer from Sarajevo, Zdravko Čolić. His powerful voice, good looks, and charismatic appearance, together with a highly functional team of managers, songwriters, and media promoters, all helped create a pop megastar who set new standards in the Yugoslav music industry. Čolić’s solo career started in 1972 when he won third prize at the Sarajevo festival Vaš šlager sezone, with the song “Sinoć nisi bila tu” (Last Night You Were Not Here), which launched his career throughout the country.

Figure 1.1  Record sleeve of Zdravko Cˇolic´’s album Ako prid¯eš bliže (If You Come Closer, 1977)

Networking Zabavna Muzika  •  21

His hit songs – mostly ballads with romantic lyrics, lavish orchestral arrangements and melodies that showcased his vocal abilities – were composed by leading songwriters of the time, primarily Kovač, but also Arsen Dedić, Goran Bregović, Kemal Monteno, and the lyricist Marina Tucaković. Even today, his signature songs remain popular, including hits like “Ti si mi u krvi,” “Loše vino” (Bad Wine, 1975), “Zvao sam je Emili” (I Called Her Emily, 1975), “Glavo luda” (Crazy Head, 1977), “Živiš u oblacima” (You Live in the Clouds, 1977), “Pusti pusti modu” (Forget about the Fashion, 1980), “Mađarica” (Hungarian Girl, 1981), and “Stanica Podlugovi” (The [Railway] Station Podlugovi, 1983). Čolić performed and won many prizes at all the important zabavna festivals and represented Yugoslavia at the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest in Luxembourg, with the song “Gori vatra” (The Fire Burns [Within Us]). He toured the Soviet Union and held some of the most spectacular concerts, including the one in 1978 at the Belgrade soccer arena, Marakana, with an impressive audience of over 60,000 (see the documentary Pjevam danju, pjevam noću in filmography). As the 1970s unfolded zabavna lost mass appeal, and the NCFM genre became the new mainstream by the end of the decade. Despite that fact that it was considered “kitsch” (šund) and constantly exposed to harsh criticism, NCFM was extremely popular and therefore represented widely in the media (see Dragićević-Šešić 1994).11 Over time, a new trend of bringing together zabavna and narodna (folk) singers at the festivals and other touring shows proved highly popular, for instance at Karavan prijateljstva, Kup pevača (The Singers’ Cup) and MESAM (The International Music Fair). In response to changing audiences and new trends in Yugoslav popular music, Čolić also modified his style, his lasting popularity ensured through his modernization of the  zabavna  genre to incorporate disco, rock, and especially NCFM ­elements – a synthesis that broadened his audiences and placed him at the center of contemporary pop culture in the 1980s. Besides Čolić, other singers fostered fusions of zabavna, disco, and/or rock music in the 1980s, including Oliver Mandić, Bebi Dol, Merlin, Hari Mata Hari, Viktorija, Zana, and the bands Srebrna krila, Novi fosili and Magazin. The purely zabavna-šlager style of music gradually lost appeal in the 1980s, performed occasionally on evergreen shows, although Radio Belgrade continued to promote zabavna through several shows on their First Program (Informator RTB 1981, 1984, 1985, 1987; Simović 1989). Conclusion The zabavna music scene remains an example of genuine musical and cultural diversity in the popular culture of former Yugoslavia, developed through a variety of resources and musical influences. As the prime medium for networking musicians and fans from all republics, it was truly a trans-regional and cross-generational phenomenon. Unlike rock and neofolk singers, zabavna performers were commonly enlisted to perform at state ceremonies, and to represent Yugoslav popular culture abroad. Importantly, zabavna music was deeply connected to the founding of Yugoslavia’s music industry (diskografija), and it was through the zabavna scene that Western popular music mechanisms were applied and developed, giving rise to the national estrada, with its pop-stars, hit songs, and millions of fans who bought records and tickets for live shows. In the post-Yugoslav period, interest in zabavna has been revived through new festivals modeled on the old ones, like the Montenegrin Sunčane skale (Sunny Scales, 1994–2015) and concerts by former Yugoslav stars, such as Đorđe Marjanović, Tereza Kesovija, Kemal Monteno, and

22  •  Jelena Arnautović

Josipa Lisac across the former Yugoslav territories. Today, zabavna music is an important part of “YU nostalgia” – an idealized set of memories about Yugoslavia’s “golden age.” In that respect, Čolić is exceptional because, after more than forty years of singing, he continues to record new songs and tours both in post-Yugoslav countries and throughout the world. Since the collapse of Yugoslavia, he has released six new albums and sold more than 100,000 copies of each, while his Belgrade concerts remain spectacular live performance (at the Sava centar in 1997, Marakana in 2001 and 2007, the Belgrade Arena in 2005 and 2014, and the open venue Ušće in 2011). Čolić and other singers continue to revive the zabavna scene in the twenty-first century, which suggests that zabavna songs still form an important part of everyday life for many people across the region and throughout the diaspora. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Dragan Indjić for valuable suggestions in my final phase of work on the book Between the Politics and the Market: Popular Music on Radio Belgrade in SFRJ, on which this paper is largely based. This chapter is dedicated to my father Slobodan. Notes 1. Glazba is the Croatian word for music (glasba in Slovenian); muzika is used in other languages spoken in former Yugoslavia. 2. According to Ivana Lučić-Todosić (2002, 23), Kraljić composed music even during WWII for the Šareno popodne (Colorful Afternoon) cultural event at Kolarac Hall in 1943 and 1944. 3. Most of these composers were also important for the formation of the jazz scene in Yugoslavia since they composed and/or performed jazz and broadcast the first jazz radio shows (see Arnautović 2012, 103–21). 4. Yugoslav Radio-Television (JRT) was a network of radio and television stations from all major centers within the federation: Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skopje, Titograd [now Podgorica], Novi Sad, and Priština. As a public national broadcasting service, it was founded, financed, and governed by the state, and hence treated as an important medium for promoting dominant ideologies. Each broadcast center had its own ensembles that performed and recorded music for different occasions. 5. In 1960 zabavna and pop music constituted 40% of Radio Belgrade’s overall music program. In 1961 it increased to 45%, and in the following years to 65%. Data from 1970 shows a further increase of newly composed folk music and popular music, and a decrease of classical music (Godišnjak RTB 1960, 39–40; Informator RTB 1970, 11; Simović 1989, 207). 6. Radio’s “dictatorial” approach to popular music and musicians in the early years after 1945 extended also to jazz musicians, who were not permitted to record because American music was ideologically and politically undesirable (Marković 1995, 392). Later, some Yugoslav rock musicians during the 1960s and 1970s experienced similar difficulties breaking through the strict editorial policies in force at Radio Belgrade and the Serbian PGP RTB record label, while Croatian Jugoton supported rock musicians to a great extent (see Žikić 1999; Arnautović 2012, 141–81). 7. Since its opening in Belgrade in 1957, Dom sindikata has been an important venue for zabavna singers, many of whom became popular after performing there. Similar functions were served by Dvorana Vatroslav Lisinski in Zagreb, Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana and Skenderija in Sarajevo (Lukić-Krstanović 2010, 150). 8. Yugoslavia won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1989, with the song “Rock me” by the Croatian pop band Riva. 9. The documentary Pjevam danju, pjevam noću (I Sing Day and Night, 1979), directed by Jovan Ristić, has great scenes of Kovač and Čolić working together. 10. Usually, a “gold record” was for a single that sold at least 100,000 copies and “silver” for at least 50,000 copies. For albums, “diamond” was for 100,000 copies, “platinum” for 50,000, “gold” for 25,000, and “silver” for 12,500. Those figures would change over time. 11. Greater awareness of market demands called for increased advertising and more revenue, leading to the deregulation and commercialization of public radio programming, with newly composed folk music playing a key role in this process (see in Arnautović 2012, 63–101 and 183–212).

Bibliography Arnautović, Jelena. 2012. Između politike i tržišta: Popularna muzika na Radio Beogradu u SFRJ. Belgrade: Radio-­televizija Srbije.

Networking Zabavna Muzika  •  23 Arnautović, Jelena. 2017. Interkulturni dijalozi na muzičkim festivalima u Srbiji. Zvečan, Kosovska Mitrovica: Fakultet umetnosti Univerziteta u Prištini. Buhin, Anita. 2016. “Opatijski festival i razvoj zabavne glazbe u Jugoslaviji (1958–1962).” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 48 (1): 139–59. Canić, Slobodan. 2000. “Istraživanja i auditorijum Radio Beograda.” In Dežurno uho epohe (Radio-Beograd 1924–1999), edited by Milivoje Pavlović, 144–63. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Srbije. Dragićević-Šešić, Milena. 1994. Neofolk kultura: Publika i njene zvezde. Sremski Karlovci and Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića. Godišnjak RTB. 1960. Volume 1. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Ilić, Dragoljub. Ed. 2015. Anthology of Serbian Popular Song: The Age of the Festival. Belgrade: The Association of Serbian Composers. Informator RTB. 1970. No. 148: 11. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Informator RTB. 1970. No. 150: 22–25. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Informator RTB. 1974. No. 195: 3. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Informator RTB. 1981. No. 284: 8. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Informator RTB. 1984. No. 315: 7. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Informator RTB. 1985. No. 328: 3. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Informator RTB. 1985. No. 330–31: 10. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Informator RTB. 1987. No. 347: 5. Belgrade: Radio-televizija Beograd. Ivačković, Ivan. 2014. Kako smo propevali: Jugoslavija i njena muzika. Belgrade: Laguna. Kocić, Ljubomir, and Ljubinko Miljković. 1979. “Tragovima sazvučja muzike.” In Ovde Radio-Beograd, edited by Milan Bulatović, Radivoje Marković, Milutin Milenković, and Slobodan Džunić, 103–28. Belgrade: Radio-Beograd. Kovač, Kornelije. 2010. Fusnota: Priče o pesmama koje su obeležile YU-rock scenu. Belgrade: Laguna. Lučić-Todosić, Ivana. 2002. Od trokinga do tvista: Igranke u Beogradu 1945–1963. Belgrade: Srpski genealoški centar. Lukić-Krstanović, Miroslava. 2010. Spektakli XX veka: Muzika i moć. Belgrade: Etnografski institut. Luković, Petar. 1989. Bolja prošlost: Prizori iz muzičkog života Jugoslavije 1940–1989. Belgrade: NIRO “Mladost.” Marković, Predrag J. 1995. “Društveni život Beograda 1948-1965: Uticaji sveta podeljenog na Istok i Zapad.” PhD diss., Filozofski fakultet u Beogradu. Marković, Predrag J. 1996. Beograd izmedju Istoka i Zapada 1948–1965. Belgrade: Službeni list SRJ. Petrov, Ana. 2014. “ ‘A Window Towards the West’: Yugoslav Concert Tours in the Soviet Union.” In Serbian Music: Yugoslav Contexts, edited by Melita Milin and Jim Samson, 127–42. Belgrade: Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Radio-Beograd. 1936. 16. Belgrade: Radio Beograd. Savić, Slobodan. 2007. Istočno i zapadno od raja. Belgrade: Laguna. Simović, Živomir. 1989. Vreme radija. Belgrade: Radio-Beograd. Vukojević, Branko. 2005. Kako je bio rokenrol (izabrani tekstovi 1975–1991). Edited by Goran Tarlać. Belgrade: Društvo ljubitelja popularne kulture. Žikić, Aleksandar. 1999. Fatalni ringišpil: Hronika beogradskog rokenrola (I deo: 1959–1979). Belgrade: Geopoetika.

Discography Čolić, Zdravko. Ti i ja. Jugoton LSY 63047, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Čolić, Zdravko. Ako priđeš bliže. Jugoton LSY 68038, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Čolić, Zdravko. Ti si mi u krvi. Diskoton and Kamarad LP 8160, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Arsen 2. Jugoton LPYVS 50928, 1971, 33⅓ rpm. Dragojević, Oliver. “2002. godine u Splitu”/ “Galeb i ja.” Split 75. Jugoton SY 22904, 1975, 45 rpm. Dragojević, Oliver. Poeta. Jugoton LSY 68050, 1978, 45 rpm. Jevremović, Miki. “Ako jednom vidiš Mariju”/ “Oprosti mi.” Jugoton SY 1737, 1970, 45 rpm. Korni grupa. Dzum-ram. PGP RTB EP 50353, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Korni grupa. Moja generacija. PGP RTB SF 52596, 1974, 45 rpm. Kovač, Mišo. Mišo Kovač. Jugoton LPYVS 60923, 1971, 33⅓ rpm. Marjanović, Đorđe. Muzika za igru. PGP RTB LPII 502, 1959, 33⅓ rpm. Martin, Leo. Odiseja. PGP RTB LPV 5235, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Monteno, Kemal. Kemo i prijatelji uživo u Beogradu. Music Star Production CD 031/1 and 031/2, 2004, compact disc. Double CD. Novak, Gabi. Gabi Novak. Jugoton, LSY 63129, 45 rpm. Novi fosili. Da te ne volim. Jugoton LSY 61410, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Novi fosili. “Ja sam šef ”/ “Saša.” Jugoton SY 23862, 1983, 45 rpm. Pro Arte. “Plačem (Mama Juanita)”/ “Lola.” Jugoton SY 1720, 1970, 45 rpm. Pro Arte. “Jedna mala plava”/ “Stavi ruke oko struka mog.” Suzy SP1984, 1975, 45 rpm. Robić, Ivo. “Samo jednom se ljubi”/ “Prva ljubav.” Jugoton SY 1026, 1958, 45 rpm. Sepe, Majda. “Čovik ča ga više ni”/ “Ribič, ribič me je ujel.” Helidon FSP 5116, 1979, 45 rpm.

24  •  Jelena Arnautović Šerfezi, Ivica. Moj život, moje pjesme. Jugoton, LSV 63179, 45 rpm. Slabinac, Krunoslav. “Zbog jedne divne crne žene”/ “Sviraj, svirče.” Jugoton SY 22011, 1972, 45 rpm. Stefanović, Boba. “Obriši suze draga”/ “Kada te nema.” PGP RTB S 51510, 1970, 45 rpm. Stojiljković, Đuza. Ljubav i moda. Jugoton EPY 3094, 1961, 33⅓ rpm. Stojnić, Dragan. Bila je tako lijepa. PGP RTB EP 50289, 1965, 33⅓ rpm.

Filmography Ristić, Jovan, dir. Pjevam danju, pjevam noću. Zvezda Film/RTV Novi Sad, 1979.

2

“Melodies From the Adriatic”

Mediterranean Influence in Zabavna Music Festivals of the 1950s and 1960s Anita Buhin

Often regarded as the pulse of modern times, popular music offers a particularly rich case study on identity formation in ethnically diverse, and often contested, cultural regions such as Southeast Europe. Within the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the centuries-long convergences of native South Slavic populations with different colonial rulers and cultures (Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg) generated several distinct cultural spheres: the Balkan, Central European, and Mediterranean. Although most Croatian ethnologists refute the idea that the Mediterranean was central to Yugoslav cultural identity (Rihtman-Auguštin 1999; Čapo Žmegač 1999; Gulin Zrnić 2011), others recognize that “a common cultural discovery of the [Adriatic] sea” (Vuletic 2010, 127) played a critical role in the development of domestic popular music in Yugoslavia, known as zabavna glazba/muzika (lit. entertainment music).1 By examining the golden era of zabavna music (the 1950s and 1960s) and its formative institution of music festivals, I argue that Adriatic coastal culture – the Yugoslav Mediterranean – was appropriated as a symbol of European, modern, and “civilizing” effects on Yugoslavia’s culture. A number of scholars illustrate the complexity of defining Mediterranean music, especially in the context of historiography: Predrag Matvejević’s influential writings locate the notion of the Mediterranean across the vast expanses of Southern Europe, the Middle East, and the Arab world (see Matvejević 1998), where its manifold meanings are inseparable from discourse on the Mediterranean (Matvejević 1999, 12); Goffredo Plastino paints a picture of multiple musical sites of the Mediterranean, interconnected through geography, creative processes, and discursive practices (Plastino 2003, 16–17); David Cooper and Kevin Dawe’s critical perspectives on The Mediterranean in Music (2005), informed by the work of Michael Herzfeld, explore the identifications of various communities with this cultural construct. In comparison, multinational Yugoslavia, which neighboured Austria and Italy in the West and Albania and Greece on the Southeastern side, developed a complicated relationship with the Mediterranean, identified in popular culture chiefly with the Adriatic-Dalmatian littoral, and by extension Italy. My study renders the creation of zabavna-pop music as part of the broader process of Yugoslavia’s “exporting” coastal culture into the hinterlands, aimed to showcase the country’s diversity and optimistic visions of its socialist program of development.

25

26  •  Anita Buhin

The Festivals and the Birth of Zabavna Music In her study on Croatia’s popular music and nationalism, cultural historian Catherine Baker describes zabavna as “ ‘light entertainment music’ or perhaps, in its heyday, ‘easy listening,’ which for a long time connoted the specific musical style of televised festivals” (Baker 2009, 2). During the 1950s and 1960s, zabavna music festivals emerged as the greatest forum for the production and definition of Yugoslav popular music (Rasmussen 2002, 41). Moreover, the rise of these festivals paralleled the growth of the Yugoslav recording industry (diskografija). As Dražen Vrdoljak has pointed out, “not until the beginning of the 1960s, upon the initiative of Jugoton [record label] editors, did performers begin to include one song by a domestic composer on their EP records; otherwise, they were recording covers of foreign hits” (Vrdoljak 1984, 25). The festivals of zabavna music were sophisticated media events, with big-band style revijski (revue) orchestras led by prominent conductors, showcasing the newest songs and songwriters and the latest crop of singers. Promoted as supranational cultural manifestations in terms of organization, participation, and audiences, these major inter-republican events mediated and helped foster the unitary concept of Yugoslav culture, inscribed in the motto “brotherhood and unity” (Škrbić Alempijević and Mesarić Žabčić 2010, 319). The Zagrebački festival (the Zagreb Festival) was the first in a series of major festivals, founded in 1953, followed by Festival Opatija in 1958 and the Melodije Jadrana (Adriatic Melodies) in 1960, better known as the Split Festival, which was distinctive for its Mediterranean image and Dalmatian style of popular song. Similar festivals popped up throughout Yugoslavia from the 1960s onwards, including Belgrade, Sarajevo, Bled, and Skopje, each with a locally distinctive style of zabavna music. Croatia contributed most to the zabavna music scene, including founding festivals and participating singers, many of them from the coastal areas. As Vuletic (2010, 127– 28) indicates, songs performed at the Opatija and Split festivals showcased the cultural, economic and social developments in the early postwar decades along Yugoslavia’s coastline: The symbolism of the Adriatic was so pervasive that the sea, summer and other maritime motifs were staples of Yugoslav popular music: in the first years of the Opatija Festival, many of the songs performed tapped into Yugoslavia’s discovery of the Adriatic as its new cultural and leisure center by focusing on the themes of the sun, sea and summer  – all essentially accompanied, of course, by love. (Vuletic 2008, 220–21) The international success of Italian canzone spurred Yugoslav fascination with contemporary Italian music, which was regarded as both familiar and exotic (Gundle 2000, 352). Festival organizers looked to their Adriatic neighbour and took the influential Italian Song Festival of Sanremo as their prime model. Before long, Yugoslav composers were arranging covers of Sanremo hits, and eventually the festival became the inspiration for creating Yugoslav counterparts. Visiting observers noted how zabavna was closely related to its Italian neighbor in terms of festival culture and shared sensibility. Reporting from the Opatija festival, the Swedish magazine Svenska Dagbladet asserted that “Italians and Yugoslavs have festivals of popular melodies that they take way too seriously” (Anonymous 1963a), implying that only the impulsive and passionate Southern Europeans would put so much effort and thought into light entertainment. For Yugoslavs, however, it was not just a matter of perceived temperament but also their own political identity in a world deeply divided into communist and capitalist blocs.

“Melodies From the Adriatic”  •  27

Figure 2.1  Record sleeve of the Opatija Festival (1960)

Festival Opatija Following the Zagreb model, Yugoslav Radio-Diffusion2 organized a new festival in 1958 in the small coastal town of Opatija in the northwest corner of the Adriatic. With the support of the Association of Yugoslav Composers, early broadcasters sought to improve production of domestic light music genres intended to replace foreign models that came mostly from Italian, German, and American sources. The Opatija Festival was a major organizational and technological achievement for the newly established Yugoslav Radio Television network (JRT), offering the first live broadcast of the Festival just two years after television service began in Zagreb (Anonymous 1958a). Extensive media coverage by the local and state newspapers, as well as the emerging regional TV centers within the national network, responded to the wide demand for modern forms of entertainment.

28  •  Anita Buhin

As a popular tourist town, Opatija was the perfect setting to test public taste. During the first three years of the Festival, the official weekly publication of the JRT (Radiotelevizija: Časopis Jugoslavenske radiodifuzije i televizije) reported that the Opatija Award, which was adjudicated by the audience, involved the world’s largest international jury: one-half were locals, and the other half Yugoslav and foreign tourists on vacation (Anonymous 1958c).3 Performers emphasized that the Festival was “set on the neutral grounds” of a coastal city rather than in the administrative centers of power in Belgrade and Zagreb (Česi 1965), and that its programming was open to a variety of nationalities and languages, including the minority Albanian language that was spoken in Kosovo.4 Following the initial success of the Festival, the officials stated that their aim was to create a supranational event that represented all republics, with a recognizable pan-national style (Anonymous 1958b). But while the organizers were satisfied with the songs accepted for the inaugural Festival, others criticized certain songs, including those that received awards.5 This disparity reflected conflicting ideological attitudes about popular music, the nature of entertainment, and the very definition of national style in music. Namely, the newspapers Borba and Politika, mouthpieces of communist cultural policy, questioned the Festival’s notion of zabavna music that promoted frivolous and romantic topics, instead advocating folk music and optimistic lyrics as the true reflection of Yugoslav socialist reality (Buhin 2016, 150–52). Reflecting on five years of the Opatija Festival in 1962, the organizers concluded that maritime themes had become the Festival’s identifying feature. When composer Mario Nardelli received the Golden Anchor Award for his contribution to the “national popular music style,” the jury’s comments captured the enthusiasm for the Adriatic formula: This is an award for an author who best expressed the maritime theme of the Opatija, and whose work is mostly dedicated to the sea [and] seaside. . . . The musical expression of his whole artistic creation is inspired by and based on the melodies of the Adriatic shore. (Anonymous 1985) Two years later, the same award was given to Ivo Robić, a pioneer of Yugoslav zabavna music, who passionately sang about the Adriatic and intimately identified with the coastal lifestyle: “The Adriatic is my prevailing inspiration. I love the sea, fishermen and sailing. I feel like I grew up by the shore and have always lived [there]. I’m always down there, I walk or row, and for me that is the best inspiration for melodies” (Robić cited in Anonymous 1962a). Robić’s songs like “Seranada Opatiji” (A Serenade to Opatija, 1951) and “Jadran u noći” (The Adriatic at Night, 1953) celebrated the beauties of the Adriatic coast, and above all, the nocturnal atmosphere of romance – a sure draw for generations of Yugoslavs, especially the young ones. Other performers cultivated personal styles to reflect the atmosphere of the Opatija environment, feeding media narratives about Mediterranean passion and the “fervor” of individual singers. Notable among these was Tereza Kesovija, herself a native of Dubrovnik. Praised for her natural talent and optimism and heightened emotionality, Kesovija epitomized the Mediterranean character and celebrated her southern upbringing (Luković 1989, 115). In “Stani” (1964), a song about unrequited love, Kesovija built her performance up emotionally, from a shiver to almost a painful scream. The press noted that audiences were astonished at how “along with her extraordinary voice, Tereza’s whole face, her eyes, hands and every nerve [seemed to] sing” (Zlatar 1964). A visiting Polish journalist wrote: “She was in an ecstasy, embodying a range of emotions . . . that gave a particularly dramatic tone to the composition” (Anonymous 1964).

“Melodies From the Adriatic”  •  29

With the glitzy rendering of the Festival, the town of Opatija helped create a national and international vogue for the Adriatic lifestyle and the idea of the Mediterranean. After the 1962 finals, the editor of music programming for Czechoslovakian radio, Jiří Štilec, remarked: It is really hard to express the feeling [when] a person visits Opatija and its music Festival for the first time. The poetry of the sea and nature melts with the whole Festival into something so magnificent and unique that all words fail me. (Handl 1962) Macedonian singer Zoran Georgiev was similarly impressed, wistfully noting how the coastal life felt so distant for the majority of his fellow Macedonians (Anonymous 1962b). Even JRT’s magazine resorted to poetic language, praising the town “that sprung up sixty years ago in the forest of laurels, bamboo and palms” (Handl 1959), with the descriptions of the “lush Mediterranean flora, charming promenades and cheerful people on vacations [under the] warm Mediterranean sun” (Anonymous 1958c), which heightened the appeal of Mediterranean fantasy and the perfect environment for zabavna music. The Split Festival: Melodije Jadrana (Adriatic Melodies) Even though the Opatija Festival gained popularity and helped establish zabavna as the mainstream pop style, music critics and cultural ideologues maintained that it failed to create a “high-quality” national product, a distinctively Yugoslav style that was modern and optimistic in content (Buhin 2016, 155–56). Other festivals faced similar criticism, except the Split Festival. Co-organized by the Tourist Board and the Cultural Committee of the city, first as a tourist attraction and later as a small music competition, by the end of the 1960s the Split Festival had grown into the most successful festival in Yugoslavia, launching hit songs every year and gaining an international reputation. It started when a music segment of the runway fashion show More – Revija – Split (Sea – Revue – Split) separated in 1962, becoming the Adriatic Melodies music festival. Fusing the Mediterranean atmosphere of Italian canzone with local elements such as mandolins, Dalmatian dialects, cultural motifs and melodies, and adding the popular sound of the twist (Rolandi 2015, 157), songwriters and arrangers created a modern version of “popular Adriatic song” (Anonymous 1963b). Unlike Opatija, the Split Festival gained approval from critics and the public alike. Although the founders’ primary intent was to boost tourist appeal, the Festival soon validated achievements of Yugoslav popular music as a whole and overshadowed other festivals. Split introduced a novel, recognizably Dalmatian “cheerful pop” that many preferred compared to Opatija’s highbrow, often melancholic, and more varied all-Yugoslav repertoire. Like Opatija, Adriatic Melodies attracted an audience of locals and tourists to Croatia.6 For the Split Festival managers, however, it was imperative to portray the Adriatic as a broader cultural space encompassing the entire Yugoslav littoral. The 1966 awards highlighted what this panYugoslav Adriatic represented: All 1380 listeners [in the audience] were representative of Yugoslav diversity, thereby demonstrating that the Adriatic Sea for them is not only Kaštela Bay [around Split], or . . . only from Pula to Dubrovnik. Rather it really starts from [Slovenian] Koper and ends at [Montenegrin] Ulcinj. (Marković 1966)

30  •  Anita Buhin

Mapping the Festival’s imagined Adriatic from the northernmost coastal town of Koper to the southernmost Boka Kotorska and Ulcinj symbolically reframed the narrow Croatian-Adriatic span from Opatija to Dubrovnik. This symbolic reframing was also reflected in the winner of the first prize for lyrics, “Gradovi pokraj mora” (Cities by the Sea), written by Stjepan Jakševac and sung by Maruška Šinković and Beti Jurković in 1966: Nek stoje gradovi ovi/Na rubu mora sinja/I do njih se radosno plovi/Od Kopra do Ulcinja. Let these cities stand/On the edge of the blue sea/And you can happily sail to them/From Koper to Ulcinj. Song lyrics inspired by maritime places, themes and customs proved a successful strategy by the organizers (Antić 1963). Ritam magazine reported in 1964 that “Most of them are charming rhymes that ‘natter’ about heavy Dalmatian fjaka [a relaxed state under a hot sun], chatter by the sea, and the amazement of onlookers ‘when Ana goes by the riviera’ [‘Kada rivon projde Ana,’ 1964], the beauty of a bather [or] about olives” (Kupusinac 1964). However, it is hard to imagine how some lyrics met even the basic entry standards, for instance “Uz gradele” (“By the Grill,” 1964) by the vocal ensemble Jeka Jadrana, which lists forty different types of fish suitable for grilling, or “Marenda” (“Brunch,” 1963) by the ensemble Dalmacija, which is a cheery illustration of workers taking a marenda break.7 On the other hand, the positive image of the Mediterranean way of life conveyed in these songs was widely embraced and popularized throughout the country. According to sociolinguist Ivo Žanić, the Adriatic Melodies successfully “thematized not only local patriotic and pastoral motifs,” but also promoted values of the new normative system endorsed throughout the country, including “gender relations, contacts between us and them – i.e. locals and tourists  – linguistic and cultural differences, consumer culture, [and] attitudes towards traditional and modern [lifestyle]” (Žanić 2014, 214–15). With the development of domestic mass tourism in the late 1950s, the Dalmatian zabavna idiom produced an idealized sound-image of the Adriatic that depicted real experiences and memories from holidays, as well as imaginary travel and summer fantasies. The Festival’s “maritime imagination” spread into most Yugoslav homes with the help of the mass media. In 1965, the magazine Studio commented on earlier editions of the Festival: From the outset, the Split Festival has demonstrated that the interest in ancient Dalmatian song has not perished, [the songs] sing about our coast, ports and bays, about people who live and breathe our [Adriatic] sea, sharing all their joy and sorrow with irresistible charm and exuberant Mediterranean temper. Tunes written in the typically melodic Dalmatian manner gained extraordinary popularity: “More, moje Jadransko more” (Sea, My Adriatic Sea [by Ivo Robić]), “Sedam galebova” (Seven Seagulls [by Gabi Novak]), “Ja ti pivam serenade” (I Am Singing a Serenade For You [by Marko Novosel]), and particularly “Maškare” (Carnival [duet by Novak and Novosel]) – were sung already the day after the festival . . . from Koper to Ulcinj. Their success was followed in subsequent years by the melodies “Veslaj, veslaj” (Row, Row [duet by Novak and Novosel]), “Dalmatinke male” (Dalmatian Girls [by Novosel and Zdenka Vučković), “Balada o tovaru” (A Ballad about a Mule [by Đorđe Peruzović]), “Vraćam se Splite tebi” (Split, I am Returning to You [by Maruška Šinković]), “Kuća pored mora” (House by the Sea [by Arsen Dedić]) and “Nima Splita do Splita” (There’s No Place like Split [a duet with Kesovija and Toni Kljaković]). All these melodies are a standard repertoire

“Melodies From the Adriatic”  •  31

for all Yugoslav radio-stations and TV studios, released on [compilation] albums and breaking sales records. . . . Even today they are sung on our Dalmatian streets . . . by the candle-light, in taverns [betule], at our rivieras. (Anonymous 1965) Using words from the unique ikavica dialect, these song titles illustrate the Dalmatian zabavnamusic koiné8 that would become familiar to the rest of the country (e.g., ikavica “pivati,” which means “to sing,” compared to the equivalent pevati/pjevati in ekavica and ijekavica dialects). Magazines occasionally provided translation guides of specific Dalmatian words and idiomatic expressions such as fjaka and ćakula (chit-chat), and they soon became a part of the zabavna-pop and everyday vocabulary across Yugoslavia (Žanić 2012, 193). Singers also cultivated Mediterranean imagery through their appearance and performing characterization as well as their singing. Sociologist Ana Petrov (2015, 4–5) depicts the stereotypical image of Dalmatian male singers, apparently modeled after the zabavna star of the 1970s and 1980s Mišo Kovač, as “dressed casually, in accordance with the identity of the vagabond or Mediterranean lover, with obligatory characteristics that included dark, usually longer hair, mustaches, and sometimes golden jewelry.” Their popularity reached a peak in the 1970s when the Dalmatian style became a major zabavna-pop brand across Yugoslavia, especially with singers like Kovač and Oliver Dragojević. Kesovija was eventually dubbed “the first lady of Adriatic Melodies,” and like Robić, she frequently emphasized that she adored performing for Split audiences because they identified with her emotions: “That is the real audience! People of Split know how to cheer, how to create atmosphere, how to carry the singer with their emotions” (Juričko 1966). Her emotionality had full reign in the sweetly melancholic and nostalgic “Nono, moj dobri nono” (Grandpa, My Dear Grandpa), which brought victory to the composer-arranger Nikica Kalogjera at the 1969 Festival. With its languid melody in triple meter and its lush string and mandolin accompaniment, the song was not only perfect for Kesovija’s interpretative style, which according to Kalogjera was “engrained in the Mediterranean,” but it ensured its popularity long after the Festival. (Kovačić 1969). By the mid-1960s, the Split Festival had become the most successful festival in Yugoslavia. The organizers, seeing its potential for broader exposure of the country’s culture and tourism, decided to open the Festival to international participation, which started its international phase (1967– 74). The organizers had hoped to draw the attention of foreign media, looking toward a longterm investment in disseminating Yugoslav music on the international market (Rolandi 2015, 157). However, the Festival’s international policy only allowed participation by foreign singers; composers still had to be Yugoslav and songs had to be written in the accepted Dalmatian/Mediterranean style. The ambitious goal of generating international interest among mass media, especially among famous singers, was ultimately not realized. For example, when the singer Claudio Villa sang Kalogjera’s “Nono, moj dobri nono,” as “Il tuo mondo” (Your World) on Canzonissima (one of the most popular Italian music TV shows of the 1960s and early 1970s), Kalogjera had hoped that Villa’s popularity might trigger the “breakthrough of zabavna music outside of Yugoslavia” (Anonymous 1969). The Italian version of Kalogjera’s hit, however, registered only modest success. Nevertheless, participation of major European artists in the Festival, including Spanish singer Betina, British bands the Shadows and the Lords, and Italian stars Domenico Modugno, Claudio Villa and Milva, did align Yugoslavia closer to the European world of high entertainment. Indeed, the quest for international recognition became even more apparent in 1961, when Yugoslavia joined the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the only socialist country to do so.

32  •  Anita Buhin

In 1968, after years of disappointing results, the vocal-instrumental sextet Dubrovački trubaduri (the Dubrovnik Troubadours) advanced to seventh place with their song “Jedan dan” (One Day), a madrigal-like celebration of life saturated with rich vocal harmonies, mandolins and the Mediterranean spirit of Dubrovnik (Buhin 2015, 8–9). Yugoslavia also paid attention to the cultural Cold War on the Eastern front. Again, the Adriatic Melodies festival served as a perfect platform for representing the country’s achievements. By broadcasting the Festival program to Eastern European countries through their Intervision network (the Eastern Bloc equivalent to the ESC), Yugoslavia demonstrated its ability to attract international singing stars based on the modernity of zabavna music and the overall image of a thriving socialist country. Moreover, Yugoslavia’s non-aligned policy was enhanced by the Mediterranean ambiance of the Festival venue and by its image as a country that could take the best from the West without abandoning the socialist principles of its political system.

Figure 2.2  Record sleeve of the Split Festival (1969)

“Melodies From the Adriatic”  •  33

Conclusion The formative years of the Yugoslav zabavna music were shaped by the major festivals of the 1950s and 1960s, but the success of the Mediterranean style of zabavna-pop fully flourished in the 1970s with the rise of estrada (music entertainment industry), whose biggest stars, like Tereza Kesovija, Mišo Kovač, and Oliver Dragojević, sold millions of records. As the influence of zabavna festivals gradually faded in the 1980s, new bands like Magazin brought fresh pop images and modern sounds to Dalmatian-style zabavna music, with songs like “Sve bi seke ljubile mornare” (All Girls Would Make Out With Sailors) or “Dva zrna grožđa” (Two Grapes) from the 1986 album Put putujem (The Journey I’m Traveling). This legacy has continued to exert influence on younger pop singers, like Severina Kojić, today one of the most celebrated contemporary-pop singers across the region. The breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, however, brought two different directions of the Mediterranean brand of pop music. Croatia, as the biggest producer of Yugoslav zabavna-pop music, started “nationalizing” its legacy by adding the prefix Croatian to the Adriatic Melodies. It also fostered the revival and creation of uniquely Croatian styles, such as the traditional Dalmatian klapa (small group) singing (Ćaleta 1999)9 and ča-val, a pop-rock idiom in the regional Istrian chakavian dialect. The other Yugoslav republics developed a Yugonostalgic attitude toward Dalmatian music, associating it mostly with memories of summer holidays and “better times” (Petrov 2015). Recent revivals, such as the television music-show Retromanija, by commercial Croatian television station RTL in 2005, and the RetrOpatija festival in 2017, show that Dalmatian pop is afforded a special meaning in the Yugonostalgic narratives, which continue to shape popular culture production across the successor states to the present day. Notes 1. Glazba is the Croatian word for music (glasba in Slovenian); muzika is used in the Serbian, Bosnian, Macedonian and Montenegrin languages, and muzikë in Albanian. 2. Founded in 1952 and renamed Yugoslav Radio-Television (JRT) in 1958. For a history of the early years of Yugoslav Radio-Television, see Vončina 1999 and 2001. 3. The festival hall in the Kvarner hotel accommodates about 1,300 people. 4. Archives of Jugoslavia (AJ). 646 Poslovna zajednica radiodifuznih OUR-a “Jugoslovenska radio-televizija.” F-71 Programski odbor za radio. Zapisnik sa zajedničke sednice Muzičke komisije i Komisije za muzičku produkciju, održane u Zagrebu 27. marta 1970 godine. 5. There were officially six different juries: the expert jury, the JRT jury, the audience in Opatija, and the awards from radio stations in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, based on the votes by radio listeners. In the 1960s, the three radio awards were joined into the JRT Listeners’ Award. 6. The festival was held at the Summer Stage of Bačvice cinema until 1967, when it was moved to the central square Prokurative. The auditorium could accommodate about 1,400 visitors. 7. Marenda is a typical light meal in Southern Europe, eaten as a mid-morning brunch during a work break. In Yugoslavia, the term was used in coastal areas only. 8. A koiné dialect arises through contact between two or more mutually intelligible dialects of the same language. Žanić (2012) concludes that the lyrics of Dalmatian zabavna songs do not originate from a specific local dialect but are intentionally simplified combinations of most representative Dalmatian dialectal traits. 9. Traditional Dalmatian klapa song is a capella and homophonic, performed in groups of four to eight men who sing in three or four parts.

Bibliography Anonymous. 1958a. “Stasera il via al Primo Festival.” La voce del popolo, September 15. Anonymous. 1958b. “Opatijski festival utjecat će na poboljšanje kvalitete domaće zabavne muzike.” Novi list, September 22. Anonymous. 1958c. “Proglašene su nagrade za najbolju popularnu pjesmu.” Jugoslavenski radio: Časopis Jugoslovenske radiodifuzije, September 28. Anonymous. 1962a. “Život sa melodijama.” Ritam, June 15. Anonymous. 1962b. “Riječ imaju: Robić, Kuntarić, Georgiev.” Novi list, October 6. Anonymous. 1963a. “Pod lupom strane kritike.” Ritam, November 1. Anonymous. 1963b. “Melodije Jadrana 63.” Ritam, June 1.

34  •  Anita Buhin Anonymous. 1964. “Svetske klase u Opatiji.” Ritam, November 1. Anonymous. 1965. “Šarm dalmatinskog melosa.” Studio, August 7. Anonymous. 1969. “Sam sebi konkurencija.” Studio, August 23. Anonymous. 1985. “Opatija pomalo gubi dah.” Studio, March 30. Antić, Miroslav. 1963. “Vlatković x2 − to je bio Split.” Ritam, September 1. Baker, Catherine. 2009. Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia Since 1991. Farnham: Ashgate. Buhin, Anita. 2015. “A Romantic Southern Myth: ‘Jedan dan’ (‘One Day’) by the Dubrovački trubaduri (Troubadours of Dubrovnik).” TheMa – Open Access Research Journal for Theatre, Music, Arts 4 (1–2): 1–19. Accessed January 8, 2018. http://archive.thema-journal.eu/thema/2015/1-2/buhin. Buhin, Anita. 2016. “Opatijski festival i razvoj zabavne glazbe u Jugoslaviji (1958–1962).” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 48 (1): 139–59. Ćaleta, Joško. 1999. “The Ethnomusicological Approach to the Concept of the Mediterranean in Music in Croatia.” Naro­ dna umjetnost: Hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku 36 (1): 183–95. Čapo Žmegač, Jasna. 1999. “Ethnology, Mediterranean Studies and Political Reticence in Croatia.” Narodna umjetnost: Hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku 36 (1): 33–51. Česi, V. 1965. “Veliki rat.” Studio, May 15–21. Cooper, David, and Kevin Dawe. Eds. 2005. The Mediterranean in Music: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences. Lanham, MD, Toronto and Oxford: Scarecrow Press Inc. Gulin Zrnić, Valentina. 2011. “Prostor i mjesto u hrvatskoj etnologiji/kulturnoj antropologiji.” In Mjesto nemjesto: Interdisciplinarna promišljanja prostora i kulture, edited by Jasna Čapo and Valentina Gulin Zrnić, 69–110. Zagreb and Ljubljana: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku – Inštitut za antropološke in prostorske študije ZRC SAZU. Gundle, Stephen. 2000. Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991. Durham: Duke University Press. Handl, Cino. 1959. “Zabavne melodije Opatija 59.” Radiotelevizija: Časopis Jugoslavenske radiodifuzije i televizije, October 20. Handl, Cino. 1962. “Opatija – očima inozemnih gostiju.” Jugoslavenska radio-televizija: Časopis jugoslovenske radiodifuzije i televizije, October 21. Janjetović, Zoran. 2011. Od internacionale do komercijale: Popularna kultura u Jugoslaviji, 1945–1991. Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije. Juričko, Z. 1966. “Kome najduži pljesak?” Studio, July 9. Kovačić, Zvonko. 1969. “Sam sebi konkurencija.” Studio, August 23. Kupusinac, Branislav. 1964. “More, ribe i dueti.” Ritam, September 1. Luković, Petar. 1989. Bolja prošlost: Prilozi iz muzičkog života Jugoslavije 1940–1989. Belgrade: Mladost. Marković, Z. 1966. “Festival se zvižduće.” TV novosti, August 20. Matvejević, Predrag. 1998. Il mediterraneo e l’Europa: Lezioni al College de France. Milano: Garzanti. Matvejević, Predrag. 1999. Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Petrov, Ana. 2015. “ ‘My Beautiful Dalmatian Song’: (Re)Connecting Serbia and Dalmatia at Concerts of Dalmatian Performers in Belgrade.” TheMA: Open Access Research Journal for Theatre, Music, Arts 4 (1–2): 1–21. Accessed June 12, 2016. http://archive.thema-journal.eu/thema/2015/1-2/petrov. Plastino, Goffredo. 2003. “Introduction: Sailing the Mediterranean Musics.” In Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds, edited by Goffredo Plastino, 1–36. New York and London: Routledge. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 2002. Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. New York: Routledge. Rihtman-Auguštin, Dunja. 1999. “A  Croatian Controversy: Mediterranean  – Danube  – Balkans.” Narodna umjetnost: Hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku 36 (1): 103–19. Rolandi, Francesca. 2015. Con ventiquattromila baci: L’influenza della cultura di massa italiana in Jugoslavia (1955–1965). Bologna: Bononia University Press. Škrbić Alempijević, Nevena, and Rebeka Mesarić Žabčić. 2010. “Croatian Coastal Festivals and the Construction of the Mediterranean.” Studia Ethnologica Croatica 22: 317–37. Vončina, Nikola. 1999. TV osvaja Hrvatsku: Prilozi za povijest radija i televizije u Hrvatskoj III.: (1954–1958.). Zagreb: Hrvatski radio. Vončina, Nikola. 2001. RTV Zagreb 1959–1964. Prilozi za povijest radija i televizije u Hrvatskoj IV. Zagreb: Treći program hrvatskog radija. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 1984. “Zabavna glazba.” In Diskografija u SR Hrvatskoj, edited by Nena Franičević and Mata Bošnja­ ković, 23–29. Zagreb: Zavod za kulturu Hrvatske. Vuletic, Dean. 2008. “Yugoslav Communism and the Power of Popular Music.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Vuletic, Dean. 2010. “European Sounds, Yugoslav Visions: Performing Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest.” In Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, edited by Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik, 121–44. Washington: New Academia Publishing. Žanić, Ivo. 2012. “Kako govori more? Jezična konstrukcija Dalmacije u hrvatskoj zabavnoj glazbi.” In Aktualna istraživanja u primijenjenoj lingvistici. Zbornik radova s 25. međunarodnog skupa HDPL-a održanog 12–14. svibnja 2011. u Osijeku, edited by Leonard Pon, Vladimir Karabalić, and Sanja Cimer, 185–97. Osijek: Hrvatsko društvo za primijenjenu lingvistiku.

“Melodies From the Adriatic”  •  35 Žanić, Ivo. 2014. “Kome se dijalekt opire – konzervativizmu ili modernizmu? Festivali zabavne glazbe i sociokulturna lingvistika suvremene Hrvatske.” In Otpor. Subverzivne prakse u hrvatskome jeziku, književnosti i kulturi. Zbornik radova 42. seminara Zagrebačke slavističke škole, edited by Tatjana Pišković and Tvrtko Vuković, 211–42. Zagreb: Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu – Zagrebačka slavistička škola. Zlatar, Pero. 1964. “Lado [Leskovar].” Studio, October 15.

Discography Dubrovački trubaduri. Jedan dan, Jugoton EPY 4008, 1968, 45 rpm. Jeka Jadrana. “Uz gradele.” In Melodije Jadrana 4 – Split 64. Jugoton EPY 3425, 1964, 45 rpm. Kesovija, Tereza. “Stani.” In Opatija 64. PGP RTB LPV 5903, 1964, 33⅓ rpm. Kesovija, Tereza. “Nono, moj dobri nono.” In Tereza Kesovija/Vice Vukov – IX Internacionalni Festival Zabavne Muzike Split 69. Jugoton SY 1437, 1969, 45 rpm. Magazin. Put putujem. Jugoton CAY 1890, 1986, cassette. Novak, Gabi. “Sedam galebova.” In Melodije Jadrana – Split 1962. PGP RTB EP 50940, 1962, 45 rpm. Novosel, Marko and Gabi Novak/Ansambl “Dalmacija.” In Melodije Jadrana 1963. Jugoton SY 1267, 1963, 45 rpm. Robić, Ivo. “La paloma”/“Jadran u noći.” Jugoton C 6206, 1953, 78 rpm. Robić, Ivo. Serenada Opatiji, Jugoton F 0105, 1966, 33⅓ rpm. Šinković Kalogjera, Maruška and Beti Jurković. “Gradovi pokraj mora.” In Melodije Jadrana 2 – Split 66. Jugoton EPY3688, 1966, 45 rpm. Various. 5 Godina Melodija Jadrana − Split 1960–1964. Jugoton LPY 668, 1965, 45 rpm.

3

The Sarajevo Pop-Rock Scene

Music from the Yugoslav Crossroads Vesna Andree Zaimović

This chapter is an overview of the Sarajevo pop-rock scene, also referred to as the “Sarajevo Pop-Rock School,” from the perspective of its most influential artists. Sarajevo, as the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has nurtured some of the most influential voices of Yugoslav popular music since the 1960s, including singers Kemal Monteno, Jadranka Stojaković, Zdravko Čolić, and Dino Merlin, and the pop and rock bands Indexi, Bijelo dugme, Zabranjeno pušenje, Plavi orkestar, and Crvena jabuka. This Sarajevan scene essentially embodies the idea of a specific cultural milieu rather than a singular musical style: it spans several generations from the 1960s through to the 1990s with different aesthetic predispositions, although there are certain features that reflect both Sarajevo’s musical heritage and interactions within the wider Yugoslav music environment, such as melancholic lyricism and romance, uplifting energy, humor, brisk social commentary, and local patriotism. Moreover, following the tumultuous Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, which were acutely played out on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the separation of Yugoslavia into seven successor states, the Sarajevo pop-rock scene serves as an indispensable source for younger generations learning about popular music culture in Yugoslavia. For centuries, Sarajevo has been a melting pot of different religions, cultures, and traditions that had intermingled and left their marks on the city and its dwellers. The central thoroughfare, Ferhadija street, stretches between the old and the new town: secessionist buildings on the West side serve as a reminder of the Habsburg legacy that shaped Sarajevo as a central European city, albeit with a distinctly Slavic character; in the opposite direction, the Baščaršija panorama dominated by low-lying architecture and numerous minarets reflects the centuries of Ottoman rule in the city, with its very different cultural legacy. Furthermore, during the socialist Yugoslavia Sarajevo remained on the outskirts of the political, economic and cultural power concentrated along the Ljubljana-Zagreb-Belgrade axis. Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats, and Jews mingled and shaped Sarajevo into a multicultural hub – a micro-Yugoslavia – and it was this synergy, as well as the distance from the administrative centers of power (both culturally and politically), that shaped Sarajevo’s distinct environment in which popular music emerged in the early 1960s. Indexi and Sarajevo’s Rock Scene in the 1960s The ideological education of youth in socialist Yugoslavia greatly depended on participation in organized cultural and entertainment activities such as igranke (pl.) − Saturday and Sunday 36

The Sarajevo Pop-Rock Scene  •  37

matinee dances where youths gathered, danced, and had fun. This atmosphere, with an amateur band rehearsing for igranke in a local community center dom kulture (lit. home of culture) − an important venue for networking nascent popular music – is captured in Emir Kusturica’s film Do You Remember Dolly Bell (1981), in a scene where a local band practices Adriano Celentano’s 1961 song “24.000 Baci” (24,000 Kisses). Similarly, one of the earliest rock musicians in Sarajevo and the co-founder of the rock band Indexi, Ismet “Nuno” Arnautalić, highlighted the importance of teenage igranke held in school sports halls, recalling the Music Club within his highschool Druga Gimnazija.1 By some miraculous and fantastic decision, the Gimnazija management decided to create the club Eho 61 to enable pupils to engage in musical activities. . . . On Sundays, we held gigs at the sports hall of the school [which] used to get really crowded. . . . At that time there was only one man in Sarajevo who had an amplifier that he used to rent out, and since several igranke were held on Sundays, [the bands] who came first could use it while others had to wait. . . . There was no impatience, [not] a whistle; they were all simply fascinated by the fact that they could attend igranke. (I. Arnautalić, pers. comm., October 5, 2017)2 The first-generation bands that emerged in the early 1960s were the so-called vocal-instrumental ensembles (vokalno-instrumentalni sastavi, VIS). Among them, the most significant was the band Indexi (Altarac 1997, 144), who named themselves after the university grade logbook called indeks, following their enrollment at Sarajevo University in the summer of 1962. Early Indexi membership was in constant flux as many local musicians joined briefly, but the band’s permanent core was established in 1964 with the arrival of the singer Davorin Popović, the lead guitarist Slobodan “Bodo” Kovačević, and the bassist Fadil Redžić. The trio Popović-Kovačević-Redžić created the Indexi signature sound (Altarac 1997, 138–40), defined by Popović’s characteristic voice with distinctive nasal vibratos and wide melodic and timbral range, and the relaxed guitar phrasing and innovative songwriting and arrangements by Kovačević and Redžić. During Indexi’s formative years in the early 1960s, the Shadows had the greatest influence on the band. The main source of information for popular and rock music was Radio Luxembourg, which offered local bands access to the latest international hits, and an opportunity to learn this repertoire. As Arnautalić recalls: Radio Sarajevo used to rotate Mexican and Italian music, and local šlageri [Gr. Schlager]. When the Shadows first appeared, we could only hear them on Radio Luxembourg – we did not know the notes, we did not have tape recorders, we only had good ears and were willing [to learn]. We had to “catch” these songs by listening to the program the entire night, waiting for the Shadows, [and] they would usually play a song three to four times every evening. We split [our listening task] and each of us would remember one segment: for instance, I memorized the harmony, and Bodo and Fadil the solo parts. Then we’d meet the next day, put the whole thing together somehow, and rehearse for a gig in Sloga [club]. (I. Arnautalić, pers. comm., October 5, 2017) In 1964, Indexi had their first appearance outside Sarajevo, at the Gitarijada (local name for early rock festival/competitions, which were very popular in the mid-1960s) in Belgrade, where they won second place and an opportunity to record their first single for the Belgrade label PGP RTB,

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Figure 3.1  Indexi in 1964. Left to right: Fadil Redžic´, Đord¯e Kisic´, Ismet Arnautalic´, Davorin Popovic´, Slobodan Kovacˇevic´ Bodo. From Ismet Arnautalic´’s private collection.

featuring four instrumental tracks, including “Nikada” (Never) composed by Esad Arnautalić. Back in Sarajevo, Esad, who was a music producer at Radio Sarajevo and Ismet’s brother, proved immensely important for local musicians, and Indexi in particular. In the mid-1960s, Radio Sarajevo increasingly fostered rock music, both Western and local, but from the outset Esad objected to the copy-cat approach to Western music by local bands. Instead, he encouraged domestic production through Radio Sarajevo, recalling how one day he said “ ‘Stop!’ Fine to have the foreign music, but let’s create our own . . . pop-rock music. Sit down and write your own songs. If something is no good, we’ll fix it’ ” (Arnautalić 2015, 118). Thanks to Esad, Radio Sarajevo became the generator of the first original songs in Serbo-Croatian, with Vedo Hamšić’s 1964 song “Četiri mladića idu s Trebevića” (Four Young Men Descending from Trebević; composed by Kornelije Kovač, lyrics by Žarko Roje). The song, which describes four young men frolicking on the nearby Trebević hill on a sunny Sunday followed by an afternoon soccer match, became the first local zabavna-pop hit. Compared to pop, rock music remained indebted to foreign models until later on, although the global Beatlemania had ramifications on the local rock scene. As Ismet remembers: It was a musical shock for us – these weren’t naive songs. We worshiped the Shadows, but as soon as we heard the Beatles, we immediately started to learn their [songs], making prepjevi [covers]. We even recorded some [of their] songs, such as “Nowhere Man,” which in my cover version had the title “Jednom smo se svađali” [Once We Fought, 1967]. (I. Arnautalić interview, October 5, 2017) Patchy English aside, these prepjevi were hugely popular, and it was clear that the rock spirit they introduced mattered more than the poeticism of the original.

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Indexi’s breakthrough came in 1966 when Bodo Kovačević composed the first original song “Pružam ruke” (I Offer My Hands), to lyrics by Nikola Borota, which is considered one of the earliest original Yugoslav rock songs. Arranged by Esad, who was already a versed šlager arranger, the song had the typical zabavna-pop festival orchestration with prominent strings and brass section. In 1967, Indexi also represented Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest with this song, and released it on their second extended-play album Naše doba (Our Time). “Pružam ruke” features Kovačević’s asymmetrical poetic meter in the refrain (11-11-8 syllables) producing unexpected musical accents to the decasyllabic verses, which anticipated Indexi’s preference for experimentation within pop-rock song form, evident in the two subsequent masterpieces composed by Kovačević in 1969: “Negdje na kraju, u zatišju” (Somewhere at the End, in the Quiet) and “Plima” (Tide). “Negdje na kraju u zatišju” was penned by Sarajevo pioneering DJ and rock music promoter Želimir Altarac “Čičak” (Andree Zaimović 2005, 102), and even though the piece was broadcast on the radio in two parts (because of its duration of over eleven minutes), it became a favorite among the audience (Misirlić 2017, 18). Against the backdrop of complex compositional structure and varied instrumentation (including organ, flute, and ambient recordings of wind and rain, with episodes of distortion, noise, and dissonance), the reciter delivers the memorable poetic lines: Kada se kiše i oluje stišale budu/ I kreket žaba po blatnjavom putu bude utihao/ I kad raspjevani zvuk zvona sa katedralskog tornja nadjača i zaustavi bolnu pjesmu vjetra/ a aleje ponovo ožive životom proljeća/ Ja, kliktaću nestanku svom. When the rain and the storms die down/ and frogs croaking on the muddy road go quiet/ and when the singing tone of the cathedral tower overpowers the wind and ends its painful song/ and the alleys become alive with spring life once again/ I will cry out at my own disappearance. It was “Plima,” however, which Kovačević wrote simultaneously, that became the band’s signature song, which features his famous opening guitar solo and the anthem-like chorus: Ti dolaziš s njim/ osjećam da dolaziš ti/ To je znak da doći će dan/ s toplim vjetrom juga. You’re coming with him/ I feel you’re coming/ it’s a sign the new day will arrive/ with the warm southern wind. Due to its non-commercial nature, “Plima” was not released until 1972 (Janjatović 2007, 105). Alongside their musical leanings toward experimental forms and expanded harmonic language, Indexi maintained an equally successful festival career. Illustrative examples of their early festival songs, which enriched the šlager-festival conventions, include the songs “Jutro će promijeniti sve” (The Morning Will Change Everything, 1969), “Da sam ja netko” (If I Were Somebody, 1974; lyrics by Maja Perfiljeva, music by Hrvoje Hegedušić), and “Svijet u kojem živim” (The World in Which I Live, 1974). Indexi’s frequent turnover of musicians was sometimes due to the obligatory military service, but mostly to the rapid expansion of the pop scene, as other new bands offered different aesthetic directions. For instance, Ismet, who was a founding member of the band, left Indexi in 1969 for compulsory military service, and upon his return formed the group Jutro with Goran Bregović, who later founded Bijelo dugme. Drummers and the keyboardists had similar experiences. In

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1974 the drummer Milić Vukašinović left to form his hard rock band Vatreni poljubac, as Indexi’s former drummer Đorđe Kisić returned in 1976 and stayed with the band. The same was the case with keyboardists: following Kornelije Kovač’s early stint (until 1968), several other keyboardists took over the role (including Đorđe Novković, Ranko Rihtman, Enco Lesić and Vlado Pravdić), until Nenad Jurin joined in 1976, staying with Indexi until 1996. Given that many of its members were highly trained academic musicians, Indexi were dubbed the “Music Academy” by their contemporaries, as Jurin explained: During the sixties and seventies, piano was the most frequently taught instrument, and usually piano players were professionally trained while guitarists were self-taught. Even while I was a piano student, the Beatles and the Stones . . . hooked me on beat music. I had both the piano technique acquired at the Music Academy, and years of rock music experience. But Indexi had high demands, and there had to be great effort to meet those [demands]. I learned a huge deal about music with Indexi – they really were a school. (Jurin, pers. comm., October 22, 2017) For various reasons, Indexi’s songs were initially released either as singles or on compilation albums, and it was only in 1978 that they finally released the studio album Modra rijeka (Blue River), a concept album based on a poem by the Bosnian poet Mak Dizdar, from his 1966 collection Kameni spavač (Stone Sleeper). For this project, a number of leading artists from rock and classical music, and theater and art design were recruited: Tihomir “Pop” Asanović and Ranko Rihtman on keyboards, actor Fabijan Šovagović (narrator in “Zapis o zemlji” [Notes About the Land] and “Modra Rijeka”), and Dragan S. Stefanović as the cover designer, who included artwork by the renowned Bosnian painter Mersad Berber. The cycle of poetry set to music in Modra rijeka grounded Indexi firmly in the prog-rock idiom, which won them the best record title in 1978 based on the votes of many music critics, and the Sixth of April Award of the city of Sarajevo.3 The album includes eight multilayered tracks and settings of poetry characterized by an intricate interplay of metric shifts and changing rhythms over elaborated chorus and lead melody lines. Rihtman recalled the following about working on this album: Bodo and Fadil did a massive job with Mak Dizdar’s lyrics, which are, not to say hermetic, but communicativeness is not their strongest characteristic. . . . With Bodo and Fadil’s musicality, these texts get an additionally wonderful dimension. It was a great pleasure for me to work on the Modra rijeka arrangements, where I could do everything I was capable of, everything I wanted. (Rihtman, pers. comm., December 31, 2016) Many contemporaries and music lovers agree that Indexi were not only foundational in creating an accomplished and truly original local response to 1970s global rock, but that they also set high standards for other domestic musicians. Indexi had one of the longest careers in Yugoslav poprock history, which lasted almost forty years until 2001, when Davorin Popović, locally known as “The Singer,” passed away. As the rock critic Petar Popović concludes in the Afterward of the book U inat godinama (In Defiance of Age): With their songs and acumen, Indexi gathered the power to change young people’s affinities and habits; they partook in devising new rules within popular music; they opened up

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unknown vistas to the entertainment industry; they promoted a new cultural capital and they diminished geographic distances. (Popović, cited in Dujmović 2006, 325) Music Production at Radio Sarajevo: From Talent Incubator to a “Hit Factory” As Indexi established themselves on the Yugoslav scene as an arty progressive rock band also capable of zabavna-pop appeal, during the 1960s, the producer Esad Arnautalić invested huge energies in creating a Sarajevo annual festival of popular music − Vaš šlager sezone (Your Schlager [Hit] of the Season) − intended to showcase Sarajevo’s other talents to wider audiences. He recalled: At the time, the people at the Radio did not give in. The understanding was that all the classical music within the [Yugoslav] state would be produced in Ljubljana, all zabavna-pop in Zagreb, and all folk (narodna) in Belgrade. Young and optimistic, I realized that this was a colonial relationship, and through my cunning moves, Šlager started in 1967. (Arnautalić 2015, 119) The first woman of the Sarajevo pop rock scene, Ismeta Dervoz, recalled it was a matter of prestige to appear at the Festival: The entire city had a specific atmosphere for days before. We all saw Šlager as an opportunity [and] a commitment to the authors, the music producers and Eso Arnautalić, who shaped us as a generation, devised that system and maintained it. (Dervoz, pers. comm., November 11, 2017) The songs and performers were selected through a contest, although mostly the established singers from the region were invited to participate. The performances were live, accompanied by the large revijski (revue) orchestra, and songs were recorded for broadcast and released on compilation albums, first by Belgrade’s PGP RTB, then by Sarajevo’s Diskoton, and during the 1980s by Zagreb’s Jugoton. Dervoz has noted that the music production of RTV Sarajevo nurtured the Festival’s importance by virtue of how its system functioned, where up to six months before the Festival it was known who would sing which songs and who would be the arrangers (Ibid.). Dervoz’s career was largely founded on festival participation. As the vocalist of the group Ambasadori (1972–76), she was at the height of popularity when she represented Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Ne mogu skriti svoju bol” (I Can’t Hide My Pain, 1976). Ambasadori’s song “Zemljo moja” (My Land, 1975), penned by Kemal Monteno, is remembered as one of the greatest hits from that period. A šlager-style ballad in a major key, which conveys patriotic sentiment from the perspective of Yugoslavs living abroad, describes the beauties of the homeland and the shortcomings of the adopted country of residence; the theme “My Land,” climaxes with the refrain’s pleas to “Come [back], happiness waits for us there.” The prestige and importance of the Vaš šlager sezone was evident in the careers of many Sarajevobased musicians, including the renowned kantautor (from It. cantautore) Kemal Monteno, the pop singer Zdravko Čolić, the pop group Pro Arte and the pop-folk singer Neda Ukraden, among others. Monteno won the first festival in 1967 with his song “Lidija,” which introduced his Italianate wide-ranging melodies and cantabile choruses to the festival stage. His songs include the evergreens “Sarajevo ljubavi moja” (Sarajevo, My Love), “Napiši jednu ljubavnu” (Write One Love [Song]), “Jedne noći u decembru” (One Night in December), and “Vino i gitare” (Wine and Guitars).

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The Festival also played an important role for future national pop megastar Zdravko Čolić. Aged twenty-one, he had already sung with Ambasadori (1970–71) and the Belgrade-based Korni grupa (1971) before winning third place at the 1972 Festival with his song, “Sinoć nisi bila tu” (Last Night You Were Not Here). His charm, charisma, and rich vocals earned him the prestige of representing Yugoslavia at the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest, with Monteno’s song “Gori Vatra” (The Fire Burns [Within Us]). After a brief period of engagements in Germany, he returned with a series of hits, including “Zelena si rijeka bila” (You Were a Green River), “Ona spava” (She Sleeps), “April u Beogradu” (April in Belgrade), “Zvao sam je Emili” (I Called Her Emily), and “Loše vino” (Bad Wine). The peak of his career came with his 1978 album Ako priđeš bliže (If You Come Closer), which sold 700,000 copies (Janjatović 2007, 52). His subsequent Yugoslav tour titled “Traveling Earthquake,” accompanied by the dancing female troupe Lokice, was regarded as unprecedented spectacle of pop artistry and domestic estrada entertainment industry. The first Vaš šlager festival in 1967 also introduced the singer Neda Ukraden, who became known through her collaboration with the Sarajevo-based pioneering pop-folk music producer, Nikola Borota. On her 1976 album Ko me to odnekud doziva (Who’s That Calling Out To Me from Somewhere), she developed an effective use of folk idioms, especially those of Borota’s Montenegrin heritage. Borota also formed the pop band Kamen na kamen, which featured Ukraden in a series of hits from their 1975 album Srce u srcu (Heart in a Heart). She is perhaps best known for her 1980s mainstream pop style, including one of her greatest hits “Zora je” (It’s Dawn) from the 1985 album Hoću tebe (I Want You), co-written by the renowned lyricist Marina Tucaković and composer Đorđe Novković. Within the 1970s singer-songwriter acoustic niche, Jadranka Stojaković occupies a special place as a female singer-songwriter on the national scene. She accompanied herself on the guitar and harmonica, carving out a place alongside other artists inspired by Dylan, such as the Slovenian Ivica Percl and Croatian Drago Mlinarec. Her nuanced interpretation of poetic lyrics (both her own and those by other writers) are exemplified by her timeless songs: “Ti ne znaš dom gdje živi on” (You Don’t Know the Home Where He Lives), “Muzika je svirala” (Music Was Playing), “Sve smo mogli mi” (We Could Have [Had it] All), and the hauntingly elegiac “Što te nema” (Why Aren’t You Here?). A devoted painter and an incidental-music composer, she moved to Japan in 1988, where she continued to play music with Japanese artists, at times blending her subtle performing style and native language with those found in Japan (see Stojaković 2015). Rock ‘n’ Roll as a Lifestyle: Bijelo Dugme While Sarajevo pop gained ground through the support of the RTV production and domestic festivals, the aspiring rock musician Goran Bregović had his own ideas about making it on the rock scene. Along with his studies in philosophy at Sarajevo University, Bregović played with a few local bands, including a 1970 stint in Italy, with some of the future members of Bijelo dugme. Back in Sarajevo he reevaluated the Italian experience and joined the group Jutro. The pivotal moment was their release of the 1973 song “Kad bih bio bijelo dugme” (If I Were a White Button): following a stylistic disagreement with Jutro’s co-founder Ismet Arnautalić, Bregović left the band and created his group Bijelo dugme in 1974. This marked the beginning of the most successful career in domestic rock history. According to Bijelo dugme’s biographer, Dušan Vesić: Bijelo dugme is the most important cultural phenomenon in the culture of Yugoslavia in the last quarter of the twentieth century. . . . They promoted the necessity of talent, the requirement

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of authenticity, the importance of attitude, and the need for complete commitment, high level of professionalism, and modern packaging. . . . They set standards in the entertainment industry and continuously pushed them forward. They fulfilled all the dreams of the Yugoslav scene, except one: they did not stand equally on the world’s musical scene with the greatest stars of that time. Bijelo dugme is the only proof that a classic rock’n’roll career outside the realm of the English language is possible at all. (Vesić 2014, 305) Bregović, who is often described as intelligent and calculated by journalists, conscientiously studied all available music, which he skillfully absorbed to create his own aesthetic idiom. He was a fully invested performer, composer and strategist  – a commitment that he expected from the rest of the band, bassist Zoran Redžić, keyboardist Vlado Pravdić, drummer Ipe Ivandić, and the charismatic vocalist Željko Bebek. Rock critic Aleksandar Dragaš notes: Bregović knew how to skillfully borrow: the guitars were set up as if for [Led] Zeppelin, Prav­ dić ripped the organ as if he came from Deep Purple, the rhythm section rumbled as if they were from ZZ Top or Black Sabbath, the production was “as if [done] in London,” and Bebek, an expressive and powerful singer whose rasping vocals were capable of delivering “naughty” but actually naïve shepherd-rock poskočice [fast folk dance tunes], but also beautiful ballads in which he was gentle and melancholic. (Dragaš 2014) What remains the most recognizable about Bijelo dugme is their unique early style known as “pastirski rock” (shepherd rock), based on their blend of rock and folk idioms. Their first three albums from 1974, 1975, and 1976, and various singles from that time, are a treasure trove of pastirski-rock, including the songs “Da sam pekar” (If I Were a Baker), “Sve ću da ti dam samo da zaigram” (I’ll Give You Anything Just to Have a Dance), “Hop-cup” (Hop-Skip), “Požurite konji moji” (Hurry Up, My Horses), “Bekrija” (Tippler), “Dede bona sjeti se” (Come on Bona, Remember), “Slatko li je ljubit’ tajno” (How Sweet It Is to Kiss Secretly), and above all the panegyric to manhood, “Tako ti je mala moja kad ljubi Bosanac” (My Little One, That’s How It Is When a Bosnian Man Loves You). Bregović illustrated another side of his personality with his ballads, and Bijelo dugme is equally remembered for their symphonic rock masterpiece “Sve će to mila moja prekriti ruzmarin, snjegovi i šaš” (My Darling, All That Will Get Covered by Rosemary, Snow, and Reed, 1979), from their album Bitanga i princeza (A Brute and a Princess). A pivotal moment for both Bijelo dugme’s career, and for the concept of rock culture in Yugoslavia, was their large open-air concert in Belgrade on August 28, 1977, known as The Concert at Hajdučka česma. Estimates suggest that some 100,000 people attended the concert, which both visually and symbolically embodied the moment when rock became the “central force of a new Yugoslav urban youth culture” (Mišina 2013, 4). Today I think that rock ‘n’ roll, as a social phenomenon, was much more important in the communist world than in the West. . . . This was a time of high [political] temperature. Never after that would rock ‘n’ roll have the same importance. Because, even though I wrote better music afterwards . . . the social relevance [of music] was lesser. (Bregović, pers. comm., November 29, 2017; see full interview in Afterword of this book)

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The band’s biggest crisis came in 1984, when the singer Željko Bebek left the band. Mladen Vojičić Tifa replaced him, followed by Alen Islamović in 1986. With the collapse of Yugoslavia, the band officially ceased work, although they do occasionally perform for celebration concerts and promotional tours, and Bregović has continued performing Bijelo dugme songs with his Balkan ensembles over the past twenty years. New Primitives While Bijelo dugme perfected a musical language that appealed to the broadest cross-section of pop and rock audiences, a new generation of young musicians found their own inspiration within narrow local social frameworks often identified as “neighborhood quarter.” These seemingly limiting provincial social spaces were, in fact, a lively and culturally tolerant microcosm, colloquially known as the “Sarajevski duh” (Sarajevo spirit). Sociologist Dalibor Mišina points out that there is no exact answer as to what the Sarajevo mentalité signifies (Mišina 2013, 153), although selfeffacing humor is a distinct aspect of this. In Yugoslavia, jokes about Bosnians were often seen as funniest when told by Bosnians themselves, with their recognizable hard accent and “swallowed” syllables, typical of Sarajevo’s vernacular street speech. This Sarajevan humor gained traction when the Radio Sarajevo editor, Boro Kontić, offered a group of teenagers a fifteen-minute show in May 1981. Kontić recalled that they were not only responsible for increasing the audience for Radio Sarajevo, but they also compelled the radio employees to start broadcasting new wave instead of the pop šlageri (Kontić 2015, 426–28). Their radio show Top lista nadrealista (The Top List of Surrealists) soon became a hugely popular satirical television show, which launched the groups’ original music trend known as Novi primitivci (New Primitives). Top lista was based on sketches that had humorously lucid depictions of local culture and characters: black humor and self-irony criticize and satirize bourgeois society and the hypocrisy of the socialist order (Andree Zaimović 2005, 100). Some of the sketches were accompanied by intentionally “raw” and “primitive” songs, which they developed into a musical trend by forming three Sarajevo bands − Zabranjeno pušenje, Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors, and Crvena jabuka. The creative synergy that linked the protagonists of the Top lista inspired the New Primitives movement – a Sarajevo version of the punk movement, which was not primarily an attack on the establishment, but rather a self-ironic response to the artistic pretentiousness of new wave, and the condescending way in which Sarajevan and Bosnian culture was sometimes perceived and interpreted in Yugoslavia’s culture at large. As Mišina argues: Compared to the cultural parameters of Zagreb and Belgrade, Sarajevo’s cultural offerings were perceived as insufficiently sophisticated and as lacking the luster of “veritable culture.” In other words, they were seen as “primitive” and therefore as something that ought to be . . . hidden from Yugoslav cultural eyes. (Mišina 2013, 155) In 1984, Zabranjeno pušenje released their groundbreaking album Das ist Walter (This is Walter) and Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors released Mitovi i legende o kralju Elvisu (Myths and Legends about the King Elvis). Both albums had a Sarajevo-centric concept that mapped the narrative and musical principles of New Primitivism: stories about common people from the neighborhood, related with a good dose of irony and abundance of slang (“Kad se Babo vrati kući pijan” [When Dad Comes Back Home Drunk]); sometimes packaged in typical punk music format (“Neću

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Figure 3.2  Top lista nadrealista, a recording session at Radio Sarajevo (1983). Left to right. Boro Kontic´, Dražen Ric´l, Zlatko Arslanagic´, Zenit Đozic´, Nenad Jankovic´ (Nele Karajlic´). Photo by Šahin Šihic´.

da budem Švabo u dotiranom filmu” [I Don’t Want to be a Kraut in a Subsidized Movie]), and at other times in classic rock, as in “Baščarši hanumen” (Baščaršija Woman), a local take on the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman,” or “Čiza bliza Wizard,” after “Pinball Wizard” by the Who. These two albums became a sort of joint anthology of the New Primitive songs, and still remain highly popular today. As Davor Sučić Sula of Zabranjeno pušenje explains: In the simplest terms, we turned our telescope to that micro-world, not knowing the theories of American “storytelling.” . . . These were the subjects with which we felt more confident, we had the courage to talk about them with authority. . . . We stuck to small themes honestly and we never expected them to be of interest to some large Yugoslavia, and especially the picky Belgrade and Zagreb, which, with the exception of Bijelo dugme, were an unconquerable fortress for musicians from Sarajevo at that time. . . . New Sarajevo [music] names started popping like popcorn and god knows where it would have all ended if the war did not start. (Sučić, pers. comm., March 3, 2015) High Record Sales and the Spirit of the Winter Olympics The 1984 Winter Olympics hosted by the city of Sarajevo marked a time of exciting new opportunities for rock musicians. The state financed institutions of culture, including the performance venues Sloga, Trasa, CDA (Center for Youth Activities), and Dom mladih, with television taking the lead in pop music developments within the national Yugoslav Radio-Television (JRT)

46  •  Vesna Andree Zaimović

network. TV shows like Pop non stop, Crna ovca (Black Sheep) and Dobre vibracije (Good Vibrations), with their novel yet refined visual aesthetics adopted from MTV, gave ample airtime to pop and rock musicians. Plavi orkestar (created by high school students from the First Gimnazija) was the most popular teenage band to emerge in Yugoslavia in the mid-1980s. Comprised of Saša Lošić (vocal), Mladen Pavičić Pava (guitar), and the brothers Samir (bass) and Admir Ćeramida (drums), their debut album Soldatski bal (The Soldiers’ Ball) reportedly sold 500,000 copies in 1985. The group’s musical habitus ranged from retro ballads with fine vocal arrangements (“Good Bye Teens”) to deliberately folklorized pop kitsch (“Suada”). Their visual aesthetics drew on New Romanticism, which they combined with symbols of the WWII Partisan antifascist struggle, effectively becoming an emblem of the New Partisans movement (Mišina 2013, 209–16). In the meantime, in a metal-tools factory on the outskirts of the city, a young worker named Dino Dervišhalidović (aka Dino Merlin), was penning song lyrics. Within a short period of time, he assembled a group and recorded a debut album, Kokuzna vremena (Penniless Times 1985). The album title song became a hit, marking the beginning of a remarkable career that would place Dervišhalidović firmly at the top of Yugoslavia’s pop scene, where he remains to this day. Musically, he proved himself the master of Balkan pop with his easily memorable refrains, set to melodies mostly in minor keys and colored by recognizable sevdah (love, yearning, melancholy) sentiments. Although his narrative range comprises an appealing combination of love themes (romance, his city), his musical aesthetics exhibit the New Partisan values of Yugoslavism, delivered in the classic rock mode. Nowadays Dino Merlin is the most sought-after and best-paid star within the territory of former Yugoslavia. When he entertained the crowds at the 2017 New Year’s Eve concert at the Sarajevo downtown Square of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the organizers (the City of Sarajevo), he became the only artist to meet the attendance record set by Bijelo dugme in 1977 Hajdučka česma concert, estimated at 100,000. The War and After Almost thirty years after the siege and destruction of Sarajevo (1992–95), political ramifications continue to reverberate in the social and cultural life of this capital city, now in the sovereign country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The siege destroyed the city’s infrastructure along with 11,000 lives, and forced around 250,000 of its citizens to become refugees. Yet these most difficult events in the city’s recent history did not silence the artists who remained there and formed their own resistance, through band aid initiatives memorialized in songs such as “Sarajevo će biti, sve drugo će proći” (Sarajevo Will Remain, Everything Else Will Pass Away) and “Help Bosnia Now,” or Kemal Monteno’s song “Pismo prijatelju” (A Letter to a Friend), Dino Merlin’s “Vojnik sreće” (Soldier of Fortune), and Mladen Vojičić Tifa’s song about the “Grbavica” borough. Under the auspices of the independent urban Radio Zid (Radio Wall), the Rock Under the Siege scene emerged, with many garage bands, among them the refined alternative electro-rock band Sikter, still active today. The war was also played out within the musical scene, for instance with the splintering of the Zabranjeno pušenje band along ethnic lines (Serbian versus Croatian/Bosnian). One faction, led by Nenad Janković Nele, launched a new career in Belgrade as the No Smoking Orchestra, and another, led by Davor Sučić Sula, continued with the original name working in Sarajevo and Zagreb. Other bands fled Sarajevo, for instance Plavi orkestar, who continued their career in Ljubljana, and Crvena jabuka in Croatia.

The Sarajevo Pop-Rock Scene  •  47

Slowly, with the symbolic reintegration of former Yugoslav pop culture, Sarajevo’s music has gained new popularity. Thanks to social media, and YouTube in particular, songs from the Sarajevo pop-rock golden era are now available to all, enabling the older generations to regain a sense of identity within Yugoslavia’s cyber community, and the post-war generations’ discovery of a treasure-trove of pop culture under socialism. The most influential actors, such as Dino Merlin and Zdravko Čolić, are actively recording and touring, while Goran Bregović and Bijelo dugme occasionally offer reunion concerts. And although the three members of Indexi have passed away, their music lives on too, through tribute concerts by other popular performers. The most interesting developments in the post-war music scene are rapper Edo Majka originally from Brčko town, and Dubioza kolektiv band, founded in 2003 by young musicians from Sarajevo and Zenica. Combining dub, ska, hip-hop, punk, and rock music with references to Bosnian folklore and sharp social critique, they represent a new generation of political activists who resist nationalist divisions. Dubioza has garnered a significant following throughout Yugoslavia, partly by providing free downloads of their music. Their popularity reclaims the story of Sarajevo Pop-Rock School, placing it symbolically, and perhaps substantively, at a post-Yugoslavian crossroads. Translated by Danijela Š. Beard Notes 1. Gimnazija stands for academic college preparatory high school, as opposed to vocational high school. The Prva (First) and Druga (Second) Gimnazije (pl.) are renowned for high academic standards and distinguished contributions to the city’s public life by many of its alumni. In the area of popular music, there were important differences: New Primitives attended the Second Gimnazija, while trendy kids who preferred new wave went to the First Gimazija. 2. Unless otherwise stated, all interviews were undertaken by the author. 3. The Sixth of April Award has been awarded since 1956 by the City of Sarajevo to outstanding individuals, groups, and communities for the highest achievements and contributions to the society, marking the day of Sarajevo’s liberation from German occupation, April 6, 1945.

Bibliography Altarac, Želimir Čičak. 1997. “Significance and Development of the Sarajevo Pop Rock Scene.” Muzika 1 (4): 143–47. Andree Zaimović, Vesna. 2005. “Sarajevo.” In Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, edited by John Shepherd, David Horn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver, and Peter Wicke, Vol. 2, 98–101. London and New York: Continuum. Arnautalić, Esad. 2015. “Sve bilo je muzika.” In Radio Sarajevo, edited by Zija Dizdarević, Boro Kontić, and Ranko Mavrak, 117–20. Sarajevo: Media Centar. Dragaš, Aleksandar. 2014. “Bijelo dugme: Utemeljitelji i prvi trovači rock glazbe bivše Jugoslavije.” Jutarnji list, November  20. Accessed November  28, 2017. www.jutarnji.hr/kultura/glazba/bijelo-dugme-utemeljitelji-i-prvi-trovacirock-glazbe-bivse-jugoslavije/581563/ Dujmović, Josip. 2006. Indexi − U inat godinama. Sarajevo: Quattro Media. Janjatović, Petar. 2007. Ex-Yu Rock Enciklopedija 1960–2006. Belgrade: Author’s Publication. Kontić, Boro. 2015. “Negdje na kraju u zatišju.” In Radio Sarajevo, edited by Zija Dizdarević, Boro Kontić, and Ranko Mavrak, 423–38. Sarajevo: Media Centar. Mišina, Dalibor. 2013. Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the Poetics of Social Critique. Farnham: Ashgate. Misirlić, Amir. 2017. 50 godina bosansko-hercegovačkog pop-roka. Sarajevo: Šahinpašić. Popović, Petar. 2006. Afterword to Indexi – U inat godinama. Edited by Josip Dujmović, 323–27. Sarajevo: Quattro Media. Stojaković, Jadranka. 2015. Boje zvuka. Penned by Milka Čeremidžić. Belgrade: Color print. Vesić, Dušan. 2014. Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu – Bijelo dugme. Belgrade: Laguna.

Discography Bijelo dugme. Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu. Jugoton LSY 63046, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Eto! Baš hoću!. Jugoton LSVG 7, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Bitanga i princeza. Jugoton LSVG 10, 1979, 33⅓ rpm.

48  •  Vesna Andree Zaimović Čolić, Zdravko. Ako priđeš bliže. Jugoton LSY 68038, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Crvena jabuka. Crvena jabuka. Jugoton LSY 68111, 1986, 33⅓ rpm. Dubioza kolektiv. Apsurdistan. Menart 385601093612, 2013, compact disk. Hamšić, Vedo. “Četiri mladića idu s Trebevića.” In Tvoji kaprici, Diskos EDK 3038, 1964, 45 rpm. Edo Majka. No sikiriki. Fmjam Records 001, 2004, compact disk. Elvis J. Kurtovich & His Meteors. Mitovi i legende o kralju Elvisu. ZKP RTVLJ LD 0953, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. VIS Jutro. “Kad bih bio bijelo dugme”/ “U subotu mala.” PGP RTB S 51709, 1975, 45 rpm. Indexi. “Pružam ruke.” In Naše doba, PGP RTB EP 50114, 1967, 45 rpm. Indexi. “Negdje na kraju, u zatišju.” In Indexi, RTV Ljubljana 040, 1972, cassette. Indexi. “Plima.” In Indexi, Jugoton MCY 105, 1972, 33⅓ rpm. Indexi. Modra rijeka. Jugoton LSY 68042, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Merlin. Kokuzna vremena. Diskoton LP 8190, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Monteno, Kemal. Moje najdraže pjesme. Diskoton LP 8182, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Plavi orkestar. Soldatski bal. Jugoton LSY 63228, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Sikter. Now, Always, Never. Udruženje građana “Bock” Sarajevo 8074502, 2000, compact disc. Stojaković, Jadranka. Svitanje. Diskoton LP 8018, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Zabranjeno pušenje. Das Ist Walter. Jugoton LSY 63205, 1984, 33⅓ rpm.

Filmography Kusturica, Emir, dir. Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell? Kinema/Forum/Sutjeska Film/TV Sarajevo/SIZ za kinematografiju B-H (Sarajevo)/Union Film, 1981.

4

Yugoslav Film and Popular Culture Arsen Dedić’s Songs in Films Irena Paulus

The Artist at the Beginning Arsen Dedić (1938–2015) was a leading šansonjer (chanson singer-songwriter) in the Balkans active in the second half of the twentieth century. He was an accomplished composer, singersongwriter, poet, and painter, and his interest in different arts imbued his music with a distinctly lyrical and intimate style. He was praised for skillfully matching the simplicity of his texts and music, but his lyrics also provided sharp social commentary on Yugoslav politics, society, people, and religion – a topic largely censored in public life under the officially atheist Yugoslav regime. He often sang about the ordinary person and wrote about his own perception of the world around him. Irony and self-irony especially made Dedić’s poetic voice recognizable among other authors of the Zagreb Chanson School, but also with French and especially Italian proponents of similar genres. Yet the fact that he wrote in his native Croatian language, and addressed the themes specific to socialist Yugoslavia and the Balkans, precluded Dedić from becoming widely popular outside his homeland. Dedić pursued his diverse interests while staying committed to his literary aesthetics and unpretentious performance style. He released numerous and highly praised albums, beginning with Čovjek kao ja (A Man Like Me, 1969), and ending with his last studio album Rebus in 2008. Alongside music, his poetry was also highly regarded, although when his first book Brod u boci (The Ship in the Bottle) appeared in 1971, few anticipated Dedić would also become a notable literary figure. He received numerous domestic and foreign awards for his literary work, his šansone (pl.; chansons; sing. šansona) both as a composer and a performer, and for his music written for television, film, and theater. During his long career, he continued to publish, compose and perform, attracting the recognition of the regional cultural elites, including pop culture critics and audiences with diverse backgrounds. From the start of his career, films and film music played an important role in Dedić’s output. He passionately watched and studied movies, especially those with the music of the old masters, such as Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota, and keenly embraced opportunities to participate in a filmmaking process (Kleščić and Nenadić 2010; Polimac 2015).1 Initially this was as a supporting actor in feature films Ponedjeljak ili utorak (Monday or Tuesday, 1966), directed by Vatroslav Mimica, Kad golubovi polete (When Pigeons Take Off, 1968), directed by Vlastimir

49

50  •  Irena Paulus

Figure 4.1  Record sleeve of Arsen Dedic´’s album Cˇovjek kao ja (1970)

Radovanović, and Višnja na Tašmajdanu (The Girl in the Park, 1968), directed by Stole Janković, and he also contributed his own songs to these movies. Although singing and songwriting were his “first loves,” which ensured his popularity with critics and the wider public, film critics also recognized his flair for film music, and while initially his film compositions were not ranked highly in his overall output, over time they became a notable topic of conversation among film critics and scholars.2 His film and theater credits include scores for feature films, documentaries, animated movies, and works for television screen (films, dramas, and series), totaling almost a hundred scores. Most importantly, perhaps, Dedić himself regarded his film music as a crucial aspect of his entire oeuvre, which he saw as his link to both classical music and the films that he loved.

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The World of Šansone Born in the town of Šibenik on the Adriatic coast, Dedić moved inland to Zagreb to undertake music studies in 1957. There he joined a group of young intellectuals who closely followed artistic events in Yugoslavia, and particularly abroad. They expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of domestic popular music, namely with the Zagreb Festival of zabavna music and its prototype genre šlager (from Gr. Schlager), whose simple verses and easy-listening melodies were instantly popular among the broadest zabavna music audiences. By contrast, Dedić and his Zagreb circle – which assembled around the poet Zvonimir Golob, and included singer-songwriters Hrvoje Hegedušić and Zvonimir Špišić, and the writer Ivica Krajač – argued that both the text and the music had to offer more. At the time when foxtrots, tangos, waltzes, and other dance music from the 1930s still dominated Yugoslav entertainment circuits (see Lučić 2004), for them American rock ‘n’ roll and Bob Dylan were particularly refreshing. They immersed themselves in foreign films, music, and literature and listened to foreign radio stations, including the most popular Radio Luxembourg, learning about the Italian canzone and the French chanson. According to Golob, intellectual curiosity defined the group’s activities: they went beyond the prescribed socialist-realist and Soviet models, and spent hours discussing literature from Western and Mediterranean Europe. Krajač noted that they saw French chanson as the highest level of artistry in popular music (Takvim sjajem može sjati, Part 1). However, as Hegedušić recalled, their own translated renditions of these chansons were “terrible” and did not match the metrics of the original melodies, often spoiling the intended meaning and poetic mood (Ibid.). Golob suggested that the group should write their own verses to their own songs, and the Zagreb šansone singersongwriters began to pay close attention to the metric and rhythmic regularity of the verses, and composed accomplished albeit simple chansons. Špišić gained popularity with his humorous yet socially engaged šansone that were often written and sung in the form of mini-theater plays,3 while Golob was the first to write cantastorie – a theatrical form where the performer narrates or sings a story gesturing to series of images.4 However, in line with the French models, the singer’s interpretation remained of the utmost importance for them. The year 1964 looms large in Dedić’s early career. He completed his studies at the Zagreb Music Academy in flute performance; he translated and performed Gino Paoli’s famous song “Sapore di sale” (With the Taste of Salt); and he showcased his own song “Kuća pored mora” (The House Near the Sea) at the Split Festival, Melodije Jadrana (Adriatic Melodies). In the same year, the group led by Golob named themselves Studio ’64, and under the auspices of the Zagreb Festival they organized a concert on January 17, titled “The Evening of Chanson.” The concert, which was held at the theater Gavella, was an instant success, with songs that broke away from the conventional šlager format that dominated the festivals of zabavna music. Before long, they were proclaimed the “Zagreb School of Chanson.” One of the songs performed was Dedić’s early masterpiece “Moderato cantabile,” which he named after Peter Brook’s movie Moderato Cantabile (1960).5 From the second half of the sixties, Dedić became the leading šansonjer in the region. Inspired by Jacques Brel, Scott Walker and Charles Aznavour, as well as his colleagues and friends from the Genova school of Italian music – including Gino Paoli, Sergio Endrigo, and Bruno Lauzi – Dedić forged a distinct style of interpretation and vocal delivery imbued with both lyricism and directness that became immediately recognizable for his audiences. His interpretation of his own and other people’s chansons and canzone seemed simple and lyrical, but his performances were often satirical and acerbic. His repertoire also included bardic and humorous songs, often with

52  •  Irena Paulus

an autobiographical and confessional tone. Dedić translated not only French chansons and Italian canzoni, but also songs by the leading Russian singer-songwriters Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky, thus making them widely available for Yugoslav audiences. Into the World of Film When Dedić’s career was launched in Zagreb in the 1960s, the city was at the height of modernist developments: the Music Biennale international festival of contemporary music was founded in 1961, the Zagreb School of Animation was recognized through the work of Dušan Vukotić, who received an Oscar for his animated short film Surogat the same year, and the domestic jazz scene was firmly on the rise. The 1960s were also the decade of Yugoslav auteur cinema, influenced by French New Wave, American film noir and Italian neorealism. Yugoslav films gained international recognition, in part because of the political climate, in which state cinematography developed greater self-governance in line with the introduction of self-management (samoupravl­janje) in all spheres of economic life. For the film industry this meant that film production was no longer financed only by the state, and instead film studios were encouraged to manage their own funding. While the populism of Partisan films remained, as in the famous Bitka na Neretvi (The Battle of Neretva) directed by Veljko Bulajić in 1969,6 socialist realism gave way to regionally differentiated styles of contemporary filmmaking, with crni talas (Black Wave) in Serbia, discrete poetic modernism in Croatia, and črna serija (Black Series) in Slovenia (Udier 2014, 319–21). Modernist cinema gained a footing with Vatroslav Mimica’s 1966 film Ponedjeljak ili utorak (Monday or Tuesday), whose groundbreaking non-linear storytelling was inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s stream of consciousness. Mimica followed a day in the life of a Zagreb journalist, Marko Požgaj, whose life was presented as a collage of fragmented scenes. The film themes included a series of flashbacks and visual archetypes reminiscent of a dream, and Mimica approached sound and music in a similarly unstructured fashion. The film’s composer was Miljenko Prohaska, the long-term conductor of the Radio Zagreb Dance Orchestra (later known as the Big Band of Croatian Television), and a renowned jazz arranger and composer who authored numerous scores for screen and theater. Alongside Prohaska’s jazzy interpolations, Mimica used a variety of musical genres, including classical music, Balkan folk music, rock ‘n’ roll, children songs, and Zagreb šansone. He also used prerecorded music, including environmental sounds (street sounds, typewriter, and industrial noise), which reinforced the visual and aural disorientation in his film. Dedić contributed three songs to the film, all previously written for the concert stage. In the song “Sandra,” dedicated to Dedić’s newborn daughter Sandra, the verses tell a story about a married man who loves another woman. In the fragmented sequence where the main character, Marko, waits for a date with his colleague Rajka, the audience hears “Sandra” as nondiegetic music. The scene is long and interrupted with interpolations of other sequences that act as flashbacks or recollections (e.g.,  of Marko visiting the factory, WWII scenes, Marko’s wandering through the streets of Zagreb), or to comment on Marko’s inner feelings. There is even a strange interpolation of Marko’s own funeral. The function of the song is to reinforce the crude montage: the song stops as the interpolation with the flashback begins, and then picks up from the same spot when the visuals return to Marko’s waiting. Music and montage underscore the abrupt shifts between reality and Marko’s subconscious. Rajka ultimately never arrives, nor does Sandra from the song ever appear in the movie. Marko’s waiting seems endless and absurd, and the names that appear in the film seem random: as we hear Dedić’s “Sandra” we see Rajka (Marko’s lover), Milada Mila (Marko’s wife, whom he is

Yugoslav Film and Popular Culture  •  53

divorcing), and the unnamed girl Marko meets on a rainy day and whom he names after Jacques Prévert “Barbara.” The discord between the names on stage and Sandra from the soundtrack highlights the feeling of confusion in Marko’s mind, who seeks his true self, perhaps through symbolic investments in different women in his life.7 At another point, Marko’s waiting is interrupted by another song by Dedić, “Mora postojati to mjesto” (That Place Must Exist). The song covers Marko’s wandering through the streets of Zagreb, which appear gray and covered in industrial smog. Some verses ironically emphasize polluted air as “an idealistic landscape” and the smoggy sunset as “an old postcard.” The verse “That place must exist/ between me and my everyday” (mora postojati to mjesto/ između mene i moje svakidašnjice) suggests that Marko longs for something different from his daily routine. The visuals, however, hint that Marko’s ideal place was in front of a music shop, which again draws a link between Marko and Dedić. Dedić’s third song, “Generalni ugovor” (General Contract), appears in the film’s penultimate scene, overloaded with symbols, as Marko is shown as an adult in the presence of his own son Davor, but also as a little boy himself. Here Mimica does not use only Dedić’s voice over, but Dedić actually appears in the movie as a singer-commentator. The lines that Dedić sings/recites echo a political speech, delivered with utmost importance, which are then interrupted by his mocking delivery of the children’s song “En-ten-ti-ni.” This song serves as a musical caricature with open political allusions, highlighting the absurdity of politics by equating politics with children’s play, and Dedić’s role here is one of a troubadour. Indeed Dedić, who openly spoke against politics and politicians, was a fitting choice for Mimica’s film, where the whole penultimate scene acts as a political metaphor. Dedić’s lyrics “everything will get sorted as if in a picture book” (sve će se riješiti k’o u slikovnici) are delivered ironically as a sort of rhyming speech, and underscore the implicit criticism of how politicians easily deal with societal problems. Such political overtones were more in line with Dedić’s social criticism and satire inspired by the left-bank Parisian auteurs-interprètes rather than more actively engaged political artists. The Real Truth In the 1970s Dedić became increasingly interested in film composition and started to accept different offers to write music for screen and theater. He regarded his earlier songs for films as “non-filmic,” and claimed that his first real scores were two songs written for the movie Živa istina (The Real Truth, 1972), directed by Tomislav Radić.8 Similar to Mimica, Radić experimented with the genre, and his debut feature film resembles cinéma vérité, especially in its camera work and its documentary style of filmmaking. In cinéma vérité, the films portray real life as closely as possible; shooting is on location, with no interventions by directors or cinematographers; they use non-professional actors who appear unaware of the camera. While The Real Truth was conceived as a pseudo-documentary, it nonetheless featured the professional actress Božidarka Frajt as the main protagonist. The narrative follows Božidarka on a regular day as she eats, sleeps, spends time with her friends, fights with her husband, and searches for a job. Radić initially decided that he would not use music at all, since there is no nondiegetic music in real life, but during the editing sessions with the editor Maja Filjak-Bilandžija, he changed his mind and sought unconventional film music that would communicate with audiences more directly (Kleščić and Nenadić 2010). Given that Radić knew Dedić from his student days, he invited him to write two songs for the film, and Dedić composed “Takvim sjajem može sjati” ([Only the Past] Can Shine So Bright), used in the first half of the movie, and “Balada o prolaznosti” (A Ballad

54  •  Irena Paulus

About Transience), used near the end. Since there was no other music in the film, both songs critically highlight the scenes for which they were commissioned. “Takvim sjajem može sjati” appears in the sequence that shows Božidarka and her (possible) boyfriend watching her family movies, with Božidarka providing commentary on her grandma, her stepfather, her uncle who was an ustaša (a member of the extreme-right Croatian movement, which formed a fascist puppet state, the NDH, during WWII), and herself as a little girl. The director then stops the narration and switches to a montage of shots from the family movie, where the sound of the projector (which accompanied Božidarka’s recollections about the family movie), now suggests nostalgia for a bygone era. Dedić’s šansona, which is used in the montage sequence instead of the sound of the projector, goes beyond Božidarka’s memories recorded on film: the young woman watches herself and the world around her when she was a little girl; the old projector footage symbolizes something transcendental and timeless, highlighted by Dedić’s song. The musical and structural simplicity allude to the bygone times, especially in the first and the last strophe, when Dedić sings “only the past can now shine so bright/ that which cannot be returned/ which happened who knows when” (takvim sjajem može sjati/ ono što je prošlost sad/ što ne može da se vrati/ što je bilo ‘ko zna kad). When the visuals broach the subject of the NDH, in what otherwise appears an innocent family tape, Dedić’s sung text “afterwards, some lost war seems like a victory” (pobjedom se poslije čini/ izgubljeni neki rat) hints at complex political allusions. In the early seventies, the idealization of the Partisan movement was still an ideological norm, and any questioning of this norm was seen as politically unacceptable. In the context of the culling of liberal political and cultural figures in 1971, and the so-called Maspok (Croatian Spring) movement, the screening of The Real Truth in 1972 caused problems for Radić. The film was set to premiere at the prestigious Pula Film Festival (founded in 1953 as the Yugoslav equivalent to the American Academy Awards or the British BAFTA). The festival organizers decided to withdraw The Real Truth from the competition: although critics highly praised the film, according to the film’s producer, the jury felt that it was “different from what was ‘prescribed’ in [Yugoslav] cinematography” (Heidler, in Kleščić and Nenadić 2010). Nonetheless, following a petition from the filmmakers and film critics, Božidarka Frajt was awarded a Golden Arena for best actress, contrary to the festival’s regulation about excluding actors from films not shown in the main competition program. The other šansona, “Balada o prolaznosti,” was used for a sequence that shows Božidarka eating a popular Balkan dish ražnjići (kebab skewers). The sequence seems unimportant, almost bizarre, taking place in a steamy cantina in the center of Zagreb, and appears to be a scene from Božidarka’s everyday life. The song’s atmosphere, however, suggests something else, as the viewers suddenly realize that Božidarka is alone. This is the first time we see her without friends, not chatting or commenting on something, and her loneliness is reinforced by the music. Dedić plays with the textual meaning, for instance with the lines, “We shouted ‘the land!’/ While we watched the sea” (vikali smo “kopno!”/ dok gledali smo vodu). He also repeats the verses when delivering an important message. For example “we told each other ‘goodbye’/ while saying ‘see you’ ” (mi rekli smo si “zbogom”/ govoreć’ “doviđenja”) is repeated several times at the end of the song, which concludes the film’s scene, yet leaves a question mark over the implied conclusiveness. The atmosphere is further evoked by the piano accompaniment, which shifts from playful and elaborate rhythmic sections to a mounting sense of drama, before receding back into the more tranquil passages. The song implies the protagonist’s state of mind, juxtaposed by the simple visuals of Božidarka eating meat skewers, which underscores her loneliness and the banality of her daily routine against her inner psychological turmoil.

Yugoslav Film and Popular Culture  •  55

Film Scoring, Politics, and the Šansona Poetics In the context of Dedić’s film compositions, The Real Truth and Monday or Tuesday remain representative of his blend of visual and aural artistry that was firmly rooted in his šansonjer sensibility. Over time, Dedić also composed orchestral film scores, most notably his lush score for the eponymous film adaptation of Miroslav Krleža’s drama Glembajevi (The Glembays, 1988), directed by Antun Vrdoljak. Here Dedić showed an admirable knowledge of American film music, combining Hollywood conventions (such as the usage of leitmotivs and large orchestras) with idiomatic scoring derived from European art music, including atonality. Dedić later downplayed the political implications of his collaboration with Vrdoljak, who became a prominent politician in the 1990s,9 and clearly disenchanted with Vrdoljak’s political turn, Dedić refused to score Vrdoljak’s 2004 film Duga mračna noć (The Long Dark Night), which dealt with WWII in Croatia and its aftermath. At the same time, Dedić did not completely avoid collaborations with political undertones. In 1989 he scored the movie Donator (The Donor) directed by Veljko Bulajić – an establishment figure  who enjoyed significant state-sponsored commissions and was critical in cementing the Yugoslav socialist-realist aesthetic in the form of the Partisan film genre. Whether because of the more palatable political narrative or the story that traced a valuable collection of art works in the aftermath of WWII, Dedić’s collaboration with Bulajić generated an even more lavish score for The Donor, winning the Golden Arena Award at the Pula Film Festival in 1989. Conclusion Dedić chose to write for films which were about art, which were artistically made (such as Monday or Tuesday and The Real Truth), or which were adaptations of other works of art (like The Glembays). He clearly perceived them as art. Still, he was very much aware of the surrounding reality, and although he tried to turn his back on politics, he was prompted to make his opinions public. In the movies, he did this by using the texts of his songs as metaphors that were either “incidentally” linked to particular footage (such as cueing a specific verse of “Takvim sjajem može sjati” in Radić’s film), or openly alluded to something else (as with “Generalni ugovor” in Mimica’s movie). Dedić was also aware of modernistic leanings in film music. He liked symphonic scoring, but his primary mode of expression was the simple dialect of šansona, with which he easily matched the artistic trends in Yugoslav films of the 1970s and 1980s, making the imagined film world intrinsically lyrical. In some instances, his songs function like Brechtian plays, allowing the audience to experience the film from another perspective. Dedić’s successful work as a film composer attests to his musical versatility. The stylistic thumbprint of the chanson-inspired aesthetic to which he was devoted is recognizable across his oeuvre for screen and stage.10 His intellectual approach separated his work from what typical audiences expected in mainstream cinema. His songs became the perfect tool for a critical commentary that emphasized various subtexts and highlighted key narrative moments, and although Dedić’s irony and satire often surfaced in his movie scores, they were balanced by his expert understanding of conventional Hollywood scoring: combining his knowledge of popular film and art music, Dedić created sophisticated yet accessible scores for varied film genres. Beyond film music, Dedić stood out from other popular music performers, particularly those who sang šlageri.11 His intellectual approach to singing, composing, and writing verses, attracted collaborations with some leading pop and rock musicians, including Zdravko Čolić, Bora Đorđević (aka Bora Čorba), and Zoran Predin: Čolić named his album Priđi bliže (If You

56  •  Irena Paulus

Come Closer, 1977) after the first verse of Dedić’s song “Zagrli me” (Hug Me), which Dedić wrote for Čolić; collaboration with Bora Čorba was crowned with a joint unplugged concert in Belgrade in 1987;12 he recorded the collaborative album Svjedoci – Priče (Witnesses, Stories) with the Slovenian rock musician Predin in 1989. Dedić was also highly influential on prominent Yugoslav singer-songwriters of different generations, including Đorđe Balašević, Massimo Savić, and more recently, the younger Lea Dekleva (Bukovčan 2013) – a testament to his versatility and poetic sensibility, which continue to inspire older and younger musicians and audiences alike. Notes 1. For more on Dedić’s interest in films see Bukovčan 2013; Mandić 1983; Paulus 2002, 280−317; Rafaelić 2008. 2. In the late 1980s, the Yugoslav Filmska enciklopedija (Film Encyclopedia) included Dedić as a film music composer. Dedić himself wrote a number of articles about domestic and foreign film composers for the Encyclopedia’s two volumes, but his film music did not receive scholarly attention until my monograph (Paulus 2002) Glazba s ekrana (Music from the Screen). 3. The famous example of Špišić’s mini-theatre play is the song “Bicikl” (The Bicycle). The singer-songwriter develops an imagined humorous conversation with his friend, since he wants to borrow his friend’s bicycle. He is also famous for his socially engaged chansons, including “Milioner” (The Millionaire) and “Trešnjevačka balada” (Ballad about Trešnjevka). 4. For example, Golob’s poem “Mačka” (The Cat) was masterfully put to music and performed by another leading šansonjer Ibrica Jusić. The song won first prize at the Zagreb Festival of Zabavna Music in 1970. 5. Dedić often used films as an inspiration for narrative themes in his songs, and his album Kino Sloboda (Cinema Freedom, 1987), for example, was completely dedicated to the cinema that existed in Šibenik during his childhood. 6. The original score for the Yugoslav version of the Battle of Neretva was composed by Vladimir Kraus-Rajterić, while a score written by Bernard Herrmann was used in the version for the American market. 7. Suggestive of Marko’s relationships in Monday or Tuesday, Dedić’s song “Sandra,” which was released on the album Čovjek kao ja (1969) and re-released on Dedić’s album Imena žena (Women’s Names, 2003), bore an inscription by Dedić: “These songs are my modest dedication to women who showed me the way” (Dedić 2003). 8. From my personal communication with Dedić at the close of the 1990s, which informed my book Glazba s ekrana. 9. In the 1990s Vrdoljak became a prominent member of the nationalist political party HDZ (the Croatian Democratic Union), which led to his high-profile appointments as the director general of the Croatian Radio Television and the president of the Croatian Olympic Committee. 10. The exact number of Dedić’s television scores is unknown. Compare Paulus 2002, 315−16; Rafaelić 2008, 143−65. 11. Šlageri were also used in Yugoslav movies, for instance Ivo Robić’s song “Samo jednom se ljubi” (One Can Love Only Once, 1958), which became the title of the 1981 eponymous film Samo jednom se ljubi, directed by Rajko Grlić, and Robić appeared in a cameo role, singing the popular šlager. Compared to Dedić’s šansonjer aesthetic, these šlageri were for the most part simply appended onto movie scenes without deeper points of reference. 12. A bootleg edition of this concert, titled Unplugged ’87, is included in Bora Čorba’s official discography.

Bibliography Dedić, Arsen. 1978. Brod u boci. Zagreb: Znanje. Dedić, Arsen. 2008. Kino Sloboda. Zagreb: Hrvatski državni arhiv. Kleščić, Vladimir, and Diana Nenadić. 2010. Živa istina o Živoj istini. Documentary included in the DVD edition of Živa istina: Hrvatski filmski savez. Lučić, Kristina. 2004. “Popularna glazba u Zagrebu između dvaju svjetskih ratova.” Narodna umjetnost 41 (2): 123–40. Luković, Petar. 1989. Bolja prošlost. Pizori iz muzičkog života Jugoslavije 1940–1989. Belgrade: Mladost. Mandić, Igor. 1983. “Arsen Dedić ili pjesnik na pozornici.” Introduction to Arsen by Arsen Dedić, 9–42. Zagreb: Znanje. N1. 2009. “Cijela bivša Jugoslavija tuguje za velikim Arsenom.” Accessed April  3, 2016. http://hr.n1info.com/a66962/ Vijesti/Arsen-Dedic-Sansonijer-Balkana.html Paulus, Irena. 2002. Glazba s ekrana. Hrvatska filmska glazba od 1942. do 1990. godine. Zagreb: Hrvatsko muzikološko društvo and Hrvatski filmski savez. Paulus, Irena. 2013. “Bitka na Neretvi i četiri skladatelja.” In Nova nepoznata glazba – Svečani zbornik za Nikšu Gliga, edited by Nada Bezić and Dalibor Davidović, 329–38. Zagreb: DAF. Polimac, Nenad. 2010. Introduction to Živa istina DVD, by Tomislav Radić, 6–10. Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez, Hrvatska kinoteka – Hrvatski državni arhiv. Polimac, Nenad. 2015. “Nenad Polimac piše o jedinoj tajni Arsena Dedića. Jednom je rekao: ‘Ja se smrti ne bojim’.” Jutarnji list, August  19. Accessed March  24, 2016. www.jutarnji.hr/nenad-polimac-otkriva-jedinu-tajnu-arsenadedica- jednom-je-rekao-ja-se-ne-bojim-smrti-/1401380/

Yugoslav Film and Popular Culture  •  57 Rafaelić, Daniel. 2008. Introduction to Kino Sloboda. Edited by Arsen Dedić, ix–xii. Zagreb: Hrvatski državni arhiv. Škrabalo, Ivo. 1998. 101 godina filma u Hrvatskoj. Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Globus. Udier, Sanda Lucija, ed. 2014. Hrvatska na prvi pogled. Zagreb: Ff Press.

Discography Dedić, Arsen. Čovjek kao ja. Jugoton LPVSY 796, 1969, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Arsen 2. Jugoton LPYVS 50928, 1971, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Homo Volans. Jugoton LSY 61041 and LSY 61042, 1973, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Vraćam se. Jugoton LSY 61200, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Otisak autora. RTV Ljubljana LP 1097, 1976a, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Porodično stablo. Jugoton LSY 66013, 1976b, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Rimska ploča. PGP RTB LP 55 5338, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Pjevam pjesnike. PGP RTB 2520044, 1980a, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Naručene pjesme. Jugoton LSY 63092, 1980b, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Provincija. Jugoton LSY 63204, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Kantautor. Diskoton LP 8181 (double album), 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Kino sloboda. Jugoton LSY 63283, 1987, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Muzika za film i TV. Jugoton LP6S2 020942, 1989, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen. Tihi obrt. HRT Orfej CD 5045, 1993, compact disc. Dedić, Arsen. Ministarstvo straha. Koncept VD 888 180 022, 1997, compact disc. Dedić, Arsen. Kinoteka. Cantus 988 984 9678 2, 2002, compact disc. Dedić, Arsen. Imena žena. Croatia Records CD 5540595, 2003, compact disc. Dedić, Arsen. Na zlu putu. Croatia Records CD 5608141, 2004, compact disc. Dedić, Arsen. Rebus. Croatia Records CD 5767008, 2008, compact disc. Dedić, Arsen, and Zvonimir Golob. Dedić-Golob. Jugoton LSY 66032, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen, and Gabi Novak. Gabi i Arsen. RTV Ljubljana LD 0605, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Dedić, Arsen, and Krešimir Oblak. Kuća pored mora. RTV Ljubljana LD 0422, 1978, 33⅓ rpm.

Filmography Bulajić, Veljko, dir. Donator. Jadran film/Meteor film, 1989. Janković, Stole, dir. Višnja na Tašmajdanu. Avala film/ Hrvatski filmski savez, 1968. Mimica, Vatroslav, dir. Ponedjeljak ili utorak. Jadran film, 1966. Radić, Tomislav, dir. Živa istina. FAS/RTV Zagreb, 1972. Radić, Tomislav, dir. Živa istina. DVD. FAS/Hrvatski filmski savez, 2010. Radovanović, Vlastimir, dir. Kad golubovi polete. Avala Film/ Hrvatski filmski savez, 1968. Vrdoljak, Antun, dir. Glembajevi. Jadran film/Radio televizija Zagreb, 1988.

Television Programs Bukovčan, Miljenko, dir. Takvim sjajem može sjati. 2013. Zagreb: HRT1. Documentary series in seven episodes.

PART 

II

Rock, Punk, New Wave

As with most Eastern Bloc countries during communist rule, rock ‘n’ roll in Yugoslavia came to symbolize a divided allegiance: for young people it was an expression of individuality, modernity, and youthful rebellion, for communist authorities a powerful propaganda tool during the early years of the cultural Cold War. The cultural ideologues initially used rock ‘n’ roll (alongside jazz) against both American and Soviet influences, but as they steadily accommodated rock culture within the socialist framework, they won relative favor with Yugoslav youth. This in turn diminished rock ‘n’ roll’s subversive power and redirected potential youth rebellion, which had been a perennial concern since rock ‘n’ roll’s emergence in the 1960s through to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. Unlike in other Eastern Bloc countries, however, Yugoslavia’s political and cultural adaptability, combined with economic imperatives of self-managed socialism (samoupravljanje), generated a thriving rock music culture in the 1970s, complete with institutional support, from radio and television shows to record labels and a variety of press outlets. As rock music evolved into remarkable punk and new wave scenes by the early 1980s, the considerable aesthetic innovation, social rebellion, and relative freedom brought a degree of muchdesired international acclaim, which in turn preserved and mythologized the “urban legend” of Yugoslav rock at home. The often-evoked “contradiction” of Yugoslavia’s political system was apparent in the economy of popular culture, particularly in the work of record labels (diskografija). Like radio and television broadcasters, record labels were considered institutions of particular social importance, but unlike broadcasters, they were not subsidized by the state and therefore were economically self-sustainable. This meant that while the state ownership of mass media and publishing secured a considerable ideological control over cultural products, the economic independence of disko­ grafija allowed it to prosper and, in the process, weaken the state’s micromanagement of culture production. Part II investigates domestic (domaća) rock music culture, starting with historiographic accounts of major rock scenes in Belgrade and Zagreb, followed by three case studies addressing specific genres, artists, and visual media. To varying degrees, all authors argue for the oppositional dynamic of Yugoslav rock, invoking tropes of autonomy, subversion, negotiation, and conformity. They offer complementary analyses of rock as social and artistic practice from their respective regional perspectives, never losing sight of the broader East-West cultural dichotomy that frames any story of rock under socialism. Aleksandar Žikić outlines the rise of the Belgrade rock culture from the 1960s through the acclaimed new wave scene of the 1980s. His interpretative framework privileges the anti-­ commercial authenticity of 1960s Belgrade rock and the new wave scene of the 1980s over the Yugoslav rock mainstream that took shape in the 1970s. Writing from a similar insider/participant

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experience in the Zagreb scene, Branko Kostelnik explains the critical role that the Jugoton label had in producing and disseminating rock music across Yugoslavia. Richly illustrated by his review of the landmark new wave and punk albums of the 1980s, Kostelnik’s chapter documents the times and highlights the importance of rock journalism in the ethnography of Yugoslav rock. Together Žikić and Kostelnik reflect on the changing patterns in the production and consumption of popular music from the 1960s through to the 1990s, examining how new technologies and the changing sociocultural climate transformed the sounds and practices of rock music in Yugoslavia. Marko Zubak, on the other hand, brings to light the remarkable disco scene that developed in the 1970s, analyzing the intricacies of socialist disco culture as a cultural practice, while Ivana Medić investigates the art of music videos by three trailblazing artists – the pop-jazz singer Josipa Lisac, the new wave band Ekaterina Velika (EKV), and the folk-funk-rock maverick Rambo Amadeus. Ana Petrov’s final chapter on the Yugoslav rock group Bijelo dugme goes beyond the socialist times, considering audience reception of their post-Yugoslav reunion concerts as a means to assess the band’s enduring musical appeal and towering cultural significance. The chapters in this part map the varied worlds of Yugoslav rock scenes, foregrounding significant moments and key issues regarding the shared rock music culture of predominantly urban youth. Against a chronological trajectory, our authors investigate how the worldwide popularity of rock music impacted Yugoslav society; ways in which various local and regional scenes and artists mediated political expression and the subcultural potential of rock ‘n’ roll, punk, and new wave; and how Yugoslavia’s thriving record industry, consumerist culture, and contemporary design all shaped a socialist society whose urban centers – Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Ljubljana – were closer to London and Berlin than to Moscow or Bucharest.

5

Belgrade Rock Experience

From Sixties Innocence to Eighties Relevance Aleksandar Žikić

During the 1950s, the decade when Yugoslavia was in the process of heavy rebuilding and healing after WWII, Belgrade’s growing popular music scene was dominated by domestic hit-songs šlageri (pl., from Gr. Schlager) and Italian hits produced at the Sanremo Festival. In the mid1950s, the French star Tino Rossi packed the JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army) Stadium and the soccer club Partizan, Rocco Granata performed in Belgrade (his 1959 hit “Marina” is still well known today), and Rita Pavone was one of the most popular foreign singers. Alongside nascent zabavnapop music, a much smaller and exclusive jazz scene thrived in Belgrade, organized around Big Band music played by smaller jazz ensembles for dance events. It featured repertoire from Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Helmut Zacharias, Xavier Cugat, and Perez Prado to contemporary subgenres skiffle and twist. Vojislav Bubiša Simić, one of the first and most prominent Belgrade jazz musicians, offers great recollections of those times in his 2017 book Zvuci vremena (The Sounds of the Times). Following Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union in 1948, the Yugoslav regime developed its foreign policy within the context of both socialist and non-aligned internationalism. The formally neutral political position within the Non-Aligned block accommodated a more relaxed attitude toward both the United States and the United Kingdom, which ensured that certain Western musical influences were not only permitted but steadily encouraged. In time, select Belgrade rock ‘n’ roll performers were even invited to play for the members of the highest political elite. Probably specific to Yugoslavia, one thing proved of enormous significance for the initial development of rock ‘n’ roll in Belgrade: the lack of motivation for profit allowed for a higher degree of creative freedom within the genre. Especially in the early days, rock ‘n’ roll was not only safe but also welcomed in some official circles, as long as it did not provoke the political system or president Tito, and Belgrade, as the administrative seat of the nation, enjoyed a broader field of artistic operations, including rock music. The Sixties: The Age of Innocence In Yugoslavia, the interest in rock music was manifest early, accompanied by a strong desire to participate in, and eventually contribute to, global rock culture. Đorđe Marjanović was a pioneering figure whose outrageous moves on stage and unusual vocal escapades inspired by Elvis

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62  •  Aleksandar Žikić

Presley created quite a stir in the late 1950s. By the 1960s, there was also a new craze for rock ‘n’ roll bands, and Belgrade city streets were flooded with self-styled youths in tight trousers, bright shirts, and fashionable haircuts. As the conventional narratives on non Anglo-American rock go, they first fantasized, then imitated, and finally created the original music on their own. One of the earliest proponents of Belgrade rock ‘n’ roll music, Branislav Marušić Čutura, recalled the atmosphere of those early days, citing a series of events during the summer of 1958, when young people gathered at the banks of the river Sava to listen to his rendition of “Ain’t That a Shame” and other hits by Fats Domino, Ricky Nelson, and similar artists, which he had just learned from Radio Luxembourg. According to Čutura, one song cover was sufficient to achieve local fame: “At that time, you could sing one song for three years. . . . If the song was good, and you sung it well, the entire city demanded to hear it again and again. You loved that song for life” (in Žikić 1999, 21). By the turn of the 1960s, Čutura became a part of the Duo Kosovac, the original exponents of bit (beat) music in Belgrade, which offered local youths a glimpse of an exciting new sound world. Although he did not continue his career as a recording artist, his role in the earliest rock ‘n’ roll bands Albatrosi, Alasi, Džentlmeni, and later Dah, ensured his career longevity, complemented by his contribution to some of the most memorable songs he wrote for the leading rock band of the 1970s, Yu Grupa, such as “Noć je moja” (The Night is Mine) and “Šta će meni vatra” (Don’t Need That Fire). The 1960s were an era marked by the expansion of minds as well as the activism of the postWWII baby boomers in many parts of the world. It was the time when the demands for greater individual freedoms tore down the social norms and cultural constraints of the previous age. The change was reflected in the leading Western nations’ turn to the political left (the United States, United Kingdom, France, and West Germany), which accommodated the explosion of rock ‘n’ roll. “Political left,” of course, had a somewhat different meaning in communist Yugoslavia. As the historian Radina Vučetić argues in her book Koka-kola socijalizam (Coca-Cola Socialism, 2012), it was better and politically safer to allow the young people to escape into the world of rock ‘n’ roll than into the world of politics, which was burdened with problems during the 1960s. In Belgrade and other Yugoslav urban centers, rock ‘n’ roll swept the youth, who turned to rock musicians for guidance. Listening to songs by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, or Buddy Holly, and later the Shadows and a host of pioneering British bands, uplifted the spirit of a new generation unburdened by their parents’ memories of WWII and their ideological prejudices. Unlike the rest of communist Europe, Yugoslavs had relatively open access to information from the West, aided by the policy of free travel and engagement in Western cultural practices without government reprisals. Ultimately, rock ‘n’ roll was an exciting new thing for some or vulgar dance music for many others. It became the subject of numerous conspiracy charges, from the regime’s plot to manipulate young people, through an American strategy to conquer the political East with appealing jazz/dance music, to various radical groups who sought to destroy the political system from within. In other words, the music’s inherent subversive potential made it both alluring for subcultural youth and alarming for the political and cultural establishment. If rock ‘n’ roll was charged with the destruction of established social structures in the West, for the communist authorities in Yugoslavia it was initially threatening to the new socialist order because it affirmed Western capitalist values. Even though the Communist Party officials and their media sidekicks initially attacked rock ‘n’ roll as a culturally worthless and potentially harmful product of capitalism, by the 1970s rock music was accepted as the inevitable fact of social life.

Belgrade Rock Experience  •  63

The Musicians If keeping up with musical developments in the West was an exciting challenge, acquiring instruments and technical equipment was for most musicians nearly impossible. Some guitarists, such as Ika Stanić of Siluete, tried to build their own instruments, modeled on a Fender guitar pictured in Downbeat magazine. Others, like the brothers Jelić of Yu Grupa, received their first Eko guitars from their parents who purchased them while on a holiday in Rome. The first band to acquire a complete set of instruments and the equipment showcased in a live performance (1961) was Iskre. Zoran Simjanović, the Elipse keyboardist, and later a prolific film music composer, recalled the inaugural event at Belgrade’s Fifth Gymnasium (a college preparatory high school): The mother of Iskre’s bass player was working at a Yugoslav embassy, and thanks to her, they bought three genuine Binson amps, real guitars (a Framus and two Fenders), Hohner electric piano. Their show at the Fifth Gymnasium resembled a miracle: it was perhaps the most important gig of the day when it comes to the technical side of things. All the bands were there to see the real instruments for the first time . . . the curtain went up and only small amplifier lamps glowed in the dark. There is no way to describe the feeling! (in Žikić 1999, 48, emphasis mine) Iskre were the first rock ‘n’ roll band to record an extended play, on March 25, 1963, at Radio Belgrade’s Studio 6. It featured covers of Joey Dee & The Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist,” Little Eva’s “Locomotion,” and Gene Vincent’s “She She Little Sheila,” covered as “Mala Šejla.” Their original singer, Brankica Sučević, was replaced by the better known Ivanka Pavlović, although both are remembered as the first female rock singers in Belgrade. Another noteworthy rock persona of the 1960s was Mile Lojpur, a guitarist and singer who impersonated Elvis with a humorous twist, and sang hits like “Rock Around the Clock” in Serbian. The band with the greatest rock kudos of the time was Siluete, fronted by singer Zoran Miščević. Although enormously popular in the early 1960s, they did not release their first record until 1966, an extended play featuring covers of the Small Faces’ “Sha La La Lie” (covered as “Tvoj rođendan”) and Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” (covered as “Uhvati vetar”). Miščević was undoubtedly the most provocative musical personality of the time – living proof that it was possible, if not always pleasant or profitable, to live a genuine rock ‘n’ roll life in a communist country like Yugoslavia. If in the West rock was a form of revolt against a culturally conservative capitalist order, in Yugoslavia it was an intuitive rebellion against the ideological concept of culture. The state’s image of the youth, equipped with shovels and workmen outfits, engaged en masse in Voluntary Labor Actions (radne akcije), played a central role in the long and laborious years of the country’s rebuilding with narratives of ideologically committed socialist youth. By contrast, the growing rock culture, which essentially belonged to urban youth, placed an emphasis on city life and individualism, largely ignoring the gloomy realities of rural migrations and adjustments to modernity. The shovels were replaced by electric guitars, while the kozaračko circle dance,1 associated with the Partisans’ legacy and collectivist identity, gave way to individualistic “rocking and rolling.” Gradually, the youth whose parents and relatives were industry managers, embassy officials, or prominent members of the military and the Communist Party, began vying for the newest rock records. Specialty shops called komision – the only places where it was possible to get Western goods in Belgrade – began to stock records, and in a national poll held in 1966, 96% of

64  •  Aleksandar Žikić

the youth population claimed they were listening to rock ‘n’ roll, while this percentage was only slightly lower among working class youth, at 86% (Dragović and Mijatović 2016). A highly popular amateur contest of the times, Mikrofon je vaš (The Microphone is Yours), provided a platform for local Tommy Steele and Elvis imitators to the delight of enthusiastic audiences. No one could predict that, just a few years later, forty or more bands would play at the now legendary Gitarijada2 festivals with four stages, attended by tens of thousands of young people. Moreover, those who were in a position to acquire new products – be it records, magazines, instruments, or equipment – were eager to share them, which created new forms of communication and distinct communities in Belgrade, and elsewhere across Yugoslavia. The institution of Klub diskofila (The Discophile Club) was the most effective: since few people owned records and even fewer owned record players, such clubs became the prime places for young people to get

Figure 5.1   Gitarijada (1966), collage poster by Beograd 202 radio station

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together and socialize. The performance venues played an even more critical role in the creation and dissemination of rock music, and in Belgrade, most accounts lead to Molerova Street in the Vračar municipality as the home of the first real rock ‘n’ roll venue, Euridika (opened in 1962). Along with several other venues, such as Božidarac (founded in 1947, but involved in rock ‘n’ roll much later), Gradski podrum and Dom omladine, Euridika was a place where most Belgrade bands had their initiation. The long list includes major bands Alasi, Crni biseri, Elipse, and above all Zlatni dečaci. The Music Press and Media Since there was no reliable way to find information about recent releases in Western markets, principally from England, the information came randomly, through magazines, records brought from abroad, and most importantly through Radio Luxembourg. At the level of institutional organization, two individuals are of particular importance: Borislav “Buca” Mitrović, who was a premiere disc jockey and possibly the first Belgrade rock journalist, and Nikola Karaklajić, a distinguished radio personality, and music promoter and mentor, critical for developing the career of the pioneering rock band Zlatni dečaci. Radio shows such as Karaklajić’s Sastanak u devet i pet (Meeting at Five Past Nine, 1961, on Radio Beograd 2), Nikola Nešković’s Prijatelj zvezda (Friend of the Stars, 1966, on Radio Beograd 2) and Veče uz radio (An Evening by the Radio, 1968, on Radio Beograd 1) were critical mouthpieces for Belgrade and the broader Yugoslav musical scenes of the 1960s. They paved the way for the professional work of music journalists and media managers such as Slobodan Konjović at Radio Studio B, whose shows Diskomer (Disco-Count), Parada albuma (Parade of Albums) and Vibracije (Vibrations) would grow to become immensely important for promoting new and progressive music during the 1970s and 1980s. Belgrade was also a place where the first popular music magazine in Southeastern Europe, Džuboks, was published (1966–69, 1974–86). The first issue came out on May 3, 1966, featuring the Rolling Stones on the cover, and the initial circulation was an ambitious 100,000 copies, which according to Karaklajić, sold out within days. Karaklajić recalled the pivotal moment in the organization of the magazine: Džuboks caused a great stir at all levels. A representative of the City Committee came to a staff meeting and said something along these lines: “You see, we analyzed it all, and saw that the influence of the West is too strong [and] therefore we don’t think that it should go any further.” . . . We wanted to put the Beatles on the cover of the second issue, but I realized that something had to be done quickly, so I jumped in with a story that there are other interesting things, there are nice, decent guys who also can sing well, such as Adamo (a famous Belgian [singer] back then), so we could put him on the cover. . . . After taking a look at the picture [he conceded] “you may continue for a bit longer.” . . . Nothing would have been possible without a dash of diplomacy, and it was very important [for us] to be aware of that at the time. (in Žikić 1999, 109) The first editor-in-chief was Karaklajić, while Mitrović became the most prolific writer for the magazine. The important innovation that the monthly Džuboks brought to life were flexi discs which were included with the early issues of the magazine. International hits such as “Friday on My Mind” by Easybeats, “Snoopy vs The Red Baron” by the Royal Guardsmen, “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby (Standing in the Shadow)” by the Rolling Stones soon became an integral

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Figure 5.2  Cover page of Džuboks magazine featuring Siluete (November 3, 1967)

part of the magazine and pushed the sales through the roof. According to all insiders’ accounts (Mitrović, Karaklajić, and others), the highest circulation of Džuboks, which was distributed abroad as well, exceeded 300,000. Džuboks also introduced the first rock ‘n’ roll sweepstakes, on Mitrović’s initiative, who recalled that the 1967 winner’s prize was the Attendance at the New Musical Express Annual Awards [show] in London. I was a guest of Andy Gray,3 and the winners were seated in the front row as guests of honor. [I was introduced on stage] as “the first pop music journalist behind the Iron Curtain”; it was a great feeling, even though, technically, we were not behind the Iron Curtain. It was an important event and I got to meet Dusty Springfield, Lulu and many others. I spent most of the concert back stage, where Andy kindly introduced me to some of the biggest stars of the times. (in Žikić 2016, 95)

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The first incarnation of Džuboks ended in 1969 (after thirty-nine issues) only to re-emerge in 1974. The first issue of the new Džuboks came out in July of 1974 under the editorship of Milisav Ćirović, who was then temporarily replaced by one of the most prominent Serbian rock journalists, Petar Popović. This new Džuboks reached its pinnacle at the beginning of the 1980s when Branko Vukojević, arguably the most important Belgrade rock journalist and editor at the time, took over. The role of Džuboks during the punk and new wave revolution was crucial, because its editors and authors were able to recognize, explain and support new tendencies in music in real time; thanks to London correspondents, the journalist Saša Stojanović and photographer Branislav Brian Rašić, Yugoslav readers were able to learn about the newest trends as they were happening. Stojanović’s column “Pismo iz Londona” (A Letter from London) was the most widely read, and Rašić later grew to became the official photographer for the greatest rock stars, including the Rolling Stones. Unfortunately, due to pressure by the publisher to radically change their course, the entire staff of Džuboks left in the summer of 1983, marking the end of the most important regional rock music magazine. The magazine continued under the same name, but with completely different staff until 1986, when it ceased publication. A few months after the founding of Džuboks in 1966, Karaklajić, together with TV Belgrade’s Head of the Music Department, Slobodan Habić, decided that this new rock music also needed a TV platform. As the national media infrastructure already existed (Yugoslav Radio-Television, JRT), similar ideas emerged at other TV centers such as Zagreb and Sarajevo, but the initial spark came from TV Beograd (RTB). After several experienced TV directors rejected the invitation, a young and media savvy theater director Jovan Ristić, accepted the offer to do a TV show. Years later, Ristić described the encounter: I must admit, I knew nothing [about TV videos], but when the opportunity knocked, I grabbed it. They presented their project for a youth music show and we agreed on the title Koncert za ludi mladi svet (A Concert For Crazy Young People). . . . We did the actual shooting in December [1966], and the show premiered in January 1967. In that initial episode . . . the idea was to show Belgrade’s rock ‘n’ roll at the sites we felt were most suitable: from the atomic shelters used as rehearsal rooms to [private] cellars, sheds and apartments. [In one apartment] we found a whole band plugged into a [portable] radio. . . . I was not a television director, and that might have been my greatest advantage at the moment, as I knew exactly what I wanted to say [which is that] music was played, literally, everywhere. . . . On a locomotive, on a carousel, on a roof, in a basement, in a park . . . music [no longer] demanded a concert venue, absolute concentration, silence, but was an integral part of youths’ life. . . . At the very beginning, we only wanted to go against those three principles [we were taught at the Drama Faculty: the unity of time, action and space]. . . . That was the essential approach to rock ‘n’ roll – or beat music as it was called in those days – that our team had. Everything else was intuitive and came from musicians hanging out together. (in Žikić 1999, 112) An Early Success Story: Zlatni dečaci (The Golden Boys) The band Zlatni dečaci, which assembled as students in 1962 at the Fourteenth Belgrade Gymnasium, marked a significant moment in Belgrade’s rock history. By the end of 1963, after their triumph at Parada ritma (Rhythm Parade; a popular battle-of-the bands event organized by the Youth Department of Radio Belgrade), the headlines proclaimed that električari (lit. “electricians”; a slang word for musicians with electric guitars) put the venue on fire.

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Figure 5.3  Zlatni decˇaci (1963), promotional photo. Author’s private collection.

Zlatni dečaci had their first gig in later 1962 at Euridika as part of the program called Mladi za mlade (Youth for Youth). Soon after, Karaklajić took them under his wing, and helped them to articulate and realize their ideas, and Zlatni dečaci earned the multiple reputation as one of the earliest rock ‘n’ roll bands to produce rock covers of classical music (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Dvořák’s Humoresques) released a single on a European label Fontana in 1965, and played in England in 1966. Karaklajić, who was a successful chess master, took the band to Holland in 1965, where he attended a chess tournament. They intrigued people from the Fontana label, who released their debut single “Swan Lake,” first in England, then in Holland and other countries. Karaklajić also booked a few gigs in England, and organized their visas on the premise that they were chess prodigies who loved to play music in their spare time, which explained the presence of musical instruments. Zagreb’s Jugoton also released an extended play version of their Fontana single in the wake of their 1966 sojourn in England. According to the Yugoslav press, the band

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did very well, and the audiences, as Karaklajić recalled, particularly liked the version of a popular Macedonian-Yugoslav folk song featuring 7/8 meter, “Jovano Jovanke.” Following their stint in England, the group disbanded, but they remain the pivotal band in the history of Belgrade rock ‘n’ roll. The lead guitarist of Zlatni dečaci, Borko Kacl, continued with music, and joined Korni grupa in 1968, a premiere Yugoslav supergroup founded in 1968 by the classically trained keyboard player, songwriter, and arranger Kornelije Kovač. Alongside Kacl, Kovač brought together the bassist Bojan Hreljac and the drummer Vladimir Furduj from the influential R&B-styled group Elipse, which included the first African singer in a Yugoslavian rock band, Edi Dekeng from the Congo. Kacl left Korni grupa relatively soon, to be replaced by another great guitar player, Josip Boček, who joined Korni grupa with the legendary singer Dado Topić, both previously of the Croatian band Dinamiti. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, rock music in Belgrade grew into a more complex network of musical, institutional, and commercial interests. Besides the biggest Belgrade bands such as Korni grupa and YU grupa (as well as their Zagreb and Sarajevo equals, Time and Indexi, respectively), the most progressive band of the 1970s was Pop mašina (formed in 1972; later known as Rok mašina). Its debut 1973 album Kiselina (Acid), which echoed the global rock sound of the time, was followed by two more albums, Na izvoru svetlosti (At the Source of Light, 1975) and the gem live recording, Put ka suncu (A Path Towards the Sun, 1976). Pop mašina, which disbanded in 1978, brought a full-blooded uncompromising rock to the Belgrade scene, acutely conscious of its own time and role within Belgrade and Yugoslavia’s rock culture. Another important band of the 1970s was the acoustic quartet S vremena na vreme, which showcased an innovative rock approach to local folk music. Playing together, mostly informally since 1972, three years later they released a self-titled debut album, which showcased smooth harmonies and poetic lyrics, and proved to be one the most sophisticated records of the 1970s. The decade also saw the rise of Riblja čorba, probably the most popular Belgrade band of all times. Formed in 1978 by the former members of bands Suncokret and SOS, it quickly rose to fame, mostly due to the appeal of their charismatic singer and leader Bora Đorđević. Even though Đorđević later became a bit confused between his roles of rock ‘n’ roll singer, published poet, and populistic tribune with nationalist inclinations, Riblja čorba not only stayed active, but maintain its relevance until the present. The 1980s: The Belgrade Wave If the 1960s was the age of sincerity and rebellious passion, and if the 1970s brought rock and the establishment closer together by creating the mainstream, then 1980s punk and new wave reasserted the subversive rock core onto the scene. At the close of the 1970s, when bands like Šarlo akrobata, Električni orgazam, and Idoli galvanized the youth with unconventional attitudes toward rock culture itself, other cities such as Ljubljana, Rijeka, Zagreb, and Novi Sad were also waking up. Bands like Ljubljana’s Pankrti, Rijeka’s Paraf and Termiti, Zagreb’s Prljavo kazalište, Azra or Film, and Novi Sad’s Pekinška patka and others, were trying to transpose wild vibrations of punk into their own environments. The insolence of the Sex Pistols, the primal punch of the Ramones, and the rumble of the Clash may have sparked the action, but Yugoslav musicians sought their own creative response. The 1980s was also a decade that witnessed a decline in the cult of personalities and artificial social tranquility. With the demise of central authority following Tito’s death, young musicians

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raised energies in rehearsal rooms, preparing a breakthrough on stage venues such as Dadov (an amateur theater), SKC (Student Cultural Center), KST (Technical Students Club), and a little later Akademija (The Academy). Although uninterested in explicit political activism, they were keen to be on the frontline of musical activism. Šarlo akrobata, Idoli and Električni orgazam, although musically rather different, formed the rock avant-garde, at first dubbed BAS (The Belgrade Alternative Scene), and then just Beogradski talas (The Belgrade Wave). Those three bands appeared together on the cover of the March 1981 issue of Džuboks, featuring the main editorial “Hronika BG talasa” (Chronicles of the Belgrade Wave), entirely dedicated to them, which was a savvy promotion for their compilation album Paket aranžman (Package Deal, 1981) – a milestone in Yugoslav rock music historiography. Remarkably, the “Package” confirmed both that artistic integrity could win over commercial opportunism, with music that was initially deemed unprofitable (as was the case with the 1970s rock outlaws Ljubljana’s Buldožer and Belgrade’s Pop mašina), and that the wider punk and new wave movements could have been supported by the major record label. The fact that those bands first appeared on a compilation album showed that Jugoton, as the leading rock-pop label, was nonetheless cautious whether the project would take off. The three pillars of the Belgrade wave were united in their mission to create a new rock alternative, although they took any idea of a “movement” with benevolent irony. Momčilo Rajin wrote a review of the album in Džuboks (1981, 57): The release of this collaborative record of new Belgrade bands can be freely compared to the first albums by Grupa 220, Bijelo dugme, Buldožer, Prljavo kazalište and Pankrti; at specific moments, precisely those records created the foundations of our rock. . . . [The songs] “Ona se budi” (She’s Waking), “Mali čovek” (Little Man), “Plastika,” “Zlatni papagaj” (The Golden Parrot) and “Vi” ([Formally] You) [deal with] everyday topics, a cut-out of Belgrade streets, the grip of alienation, an attempt to situate those problems. . . . The story about a girl who will soon turn eighteen and who doesn’t know what to do with herself while surrounded by those who treat her like a sexual object, or about a man torn between desires and abilities, [about] the “plastic” life in an urban setting without major opportunities . . . realistic subjects in which the authors do not fall into the trap of caricature or unnecessary moralizing. In these few songs, their tendencies are very similar . . . best characterized as “new realism.” In the Yugoslav context, the “alternative” may be understood as a conscious effort to explore and create extreme art forms, aimed at dismantling the old and building new forms (for example, Šarlo akrobata), or rejuvenating existing ones with new individualistic content (for example, Idoli’s reinvention of the zabavna-pop model within a punk framework). A true “alternative” differs from a generic desire for change, producing instead tangible artistic and social forms of otpor (resistance). The remarkable publication that documented these efforts in the early 1980s was the 1983 illustrated book Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ (On the Other Side: The Almanac of New Wave in the SFRY). A valuable compilation of many new wave activities, including a Yugoslavian new wave discography, focused on music but also showcased other forms of art and publishing, from comics and graffiti to fashion and fanzines. It showed that both the pop culture and political establishment interests intersected in capturing the punk and new wave and the changes they espoused. When Šarlo akrobata released their 1981 debut album Bistriji ili tuplji čovek biva kad . . . (A Man is Smarter or Dumber When . . .), it was clear that something new and groundbreaking had emerged, not only in Belgrade but Yugoslavia as a whole. Musically, it was a highly individual

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Figure 5.4  Cover page of Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ (1983), featuring Idoli

blend of Hendrix, Jaco Pastorius, the Police, Gang of Four, punk, reggae, and dub. It won the title of the best album of 1981 (Džuboks critics’ poll), and is included at number eleven in the YU 100 list of the best rock and pop albums released in Yugoslavia (Antonić and Štrbac 1998, 15).4 By the time the album was out, the band was already in the process of disbanding (formed in April 1980, they split in October  1981), leading to two great new band formations: the lead guitarist and singer Milan Mladenović went back to some members of his former band Limunovo drvo, only to start the iconoclastic Ekatarina Velika (EKV, initially Katarina II) in 1982. Šarlo akrobata’s drummer, Ivan Vdović, re-joined Mladenović later as one of six drummers in EKV’s career. In the meantime, Šarlo’s bass player Koja created the duet Disciplina kičme (1981), with the drummer Nenad Krasavac Nele, which led to a striking bass-and-drum concept, later renamed as the Disciplin A Kitschme band, which remains at the heart of Belgrade’s pop-cultural offerings.

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Električni orgazam was the first Belgrade Wave band to release its eponymous Električni orgazam album with Jugoton (1981), a high-voltage punk mélange that came out a few months after Paket aranžman. Rock journalist, Chris Bohn (1981, 28), reviewed the album favorably in NME, commending its social critique and musical originality, which he partly attributed to the unique climate in Yugoslavia: “Yugoslav communism and new wave have proved to be reconcilable during the past few years, which have seen a flourishing of groups in Ljublijana [sic.], Riyeka [sic.], Zagreb and now the capital Beograd – where Electric Orgasm come from.” Električni orgazam subsequently went through numerous incarnations and produced nearly twenty albums. Nowadays, it is the only Belgrade new wave band still working under the same name, led by the maverick and the sole original member, Srđan Gojković Gile. In comparison to Šarlo and Električni orgazam, Idoli were a different case. They comprised a colorful combination of musicians and artists: the guitarist and singer Vlada Divljan, bassist Zdenko Kolar and drummer Kokan Popović, who were all former members of the jazz-rock band Zvuk ulice, and non-musicians Srđan Šaper and Nebojša Krstić. Under the creative guidance of Belgrade avant-garde photographer and media manipulator Dragan Papić, the embryo of future Idoli was initially called Dečaci (The Boys), who experimented with all forms of art – from photography, graffiti, and conceptual art to music. As Idoli, they released the first indie single in Belgrade’s rock history: “Pomoć, pomoć” (Help, help)/“Retko te vidjam sa devojkama” (I Rarely See You with Girls, 1980), powered by the youth magazine Vidici. Their subsequent eponymous mini-album (1981) comprised two originals and two covers, including Chuck Berry’s “Come On” (“Hajde” in Serbian) and the 1958 classic by the renowned šlager composer Darko Kraljić, “Devojko mala” (Hey Little Girl). The first full album by Idoli was released in 1982, titled Odbrana i poslednji dani (Defense and the Final Days), whose title was taken from a book by the renowned dissident writer Borislav Pekić. The album reflected a more sophisticated treatment of rock as an ideological statement: it referenced the controversial associations with religion and the figure of Tito himself, thus creating a stir even before the album was released. In several polls, including the YU 100 list of best rock albums, Odbrana i poslednji dani secured first position (Antonić and Štrbac 1998, 5), but despite their initial success and promise, Idoli split in 1984. Beyond the Paket trio, the high-energy quartet Partibrejkers, founded in 1982, continued to carry the banner of genuine Serbian rock along with Električni orgazam. With the distinctive vocals of singer Zoran Kostić Cane underpinned by the rhythm and blues guitar riffs of guitarist Nebojša Antonijević Anton, Partibrejkers have sustained the critical social and artistic influence of their music to this day. Their first album, Partibrejkers (1985), mixed British rhythm and blues with punk, earning a cult status in Yugoslavia with songs such as “Hiljadu godina” (A Thousand Years), “Ulični hodač” (Street Walker), “Ona živi na brdu” (She Lives Up on a Hill), and “Stoj Džoni” (Stop Johnny), polling at eighteen on the above mentioned YU 100 best list (Antonić and Štrbac 1998, 18). Conclusion The positive cultural impact made by Belgrade rock ‘n’ roll diminished with the turbulent turn of the 1990s, as Yugoslavia ended. Belgrade rock musicians faced an onslaught of commercial pop-folk music called turbo-folk (see Gordy 1999), heavily promoted by media enmeshed with the ruling nationalist government of the 1990s. Rather than associating itself with any form of compromised mainstream, Belgrade rock ‘n’ roll retreated into alternative and radical forms of

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urban culture, producing a number of notable bands and individuals within the rock arena, such as Kanda, Kodža i Nebojša, Eyesburn, Deca loših muzičara, Lutke, Qrve, Darkwood Dub, Blockout, Van Gogh, Jarboli, Orthodox Celts, and the genre-bending Rambo Amadeus. Today a new generation of artists (e.g., Ti, Stray Dogg, Artan Lili, Stuttgart Online, Škrtice, and individuals like Katarina Pejak, Ana Ćurčin, or Bojana Vunturišević), continue to demonstrate the artistic integrity that remains the core of the Belgrade rock experience. If Belgrade rock ‘n’ roll contributed anything substantive to Yugoslavian and even global rock culture, it was the spirit of creative freedom that was born and sustained under the considerable cultural and sociopolitical pressures specific to Yugoslavia. Most Belgrade bands started their careers as social outcasts who would have to work up a sweat to gain recognition as important carriers of youth culture. Initially driven by a particular form of fatalist worldview – “not much to lose” – they independently carved a sizable space for themselves in pop culture, proving in the process that artistically uncompromised success was possible to achieve. From Iskre and Siluete through Pop mašina to Šarlo akrobata, Disciplina kičme, and EKV, the greatest Belgrade bands tore down ideological and cultural barriers, and redefined the notions of youth culture, pop, and success within Yugoslavia’s socialist culture as a whole. Notes 1. A popular group round dance, named after mountain Kozara in Bosnia and Herzegovina, significant in the Yugoslavian revolutionary Partisans’ history. 2. The local name for early rock festivals/competitions, which were very popular in the mid-1960s. 3. The NME editor from 1957 to 1972. In England, the paper reached its peak circulation in 1964, with a figure of 306,881 (Long 2012, 23, 29), which only slightly exceeded the highest circulation of Džuboks. 4. The list was based on the compilers’ survey of one hundred Yugoslav music journalists and media personalities.

Bibliography Albahari, David, ed. 1983. Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ. Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO. Antonić, Duško, and Danilo Štrbac. 1998. YU 100: Najbolji albumi jugoslovenske rok i pop muzike. Belgrade: Yu Rock Express. Bohn, Chris. 1981. “Other Voices.” NME, August 8, 28. Booker, Christopher. 1970. The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties. London: Gambit Incorporated. Dragović, Rade, and Vuk Mijatović. 2016. “Pola veka od pojave rokenrola.” Večernje novosti, January 29. Gordy, Eric D. 1999. The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University. Long, Pat. 2012. The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World’s Most Famous Music Magazine. London: Portico Books. Rajin, Momčilo. 1981. “Šarlo akrobata, Idoli, Električni orgazam – Paket aranžman, Album Review.” Džuboks, March 13. Simić, Vojislav. 2017. Zvuci vremena. Belgrade: Author. Vučetić, Radina. 2012. Koka-kola socijalizam. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Žikić, Aleksandar. 1999. Fatalni ringišpil: Hronika beogradskog rokenrola 1959–1999. Belgrade: Geopoetika. Žikić, Aleksandar. 2016. Prvih pedeset godina rokenrola na Vračaru – Tajna vračarskog trougla. Belgrade: Gradska opština Vračar.

Discography Električni orgazam. Električni orgazam. Jugoton LSY 66130, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. The Golden Boys. “Swan Lake”/ “Humoresque.” Fontana YF278 088, 1965, 45 rpm. Idoli (and Slobodan Škerović). “Pomoć pomoć”/ “Retko te vidjam sa devojkama.” Vidici NS8, 1980, 45 rpm. Idoli. VIS Idoli. Jugoton LSY 61582, 1981, 45 rpm (mini album, EP). Idoli. Odbrana i poslednji dani. Jugoton LSY 10011, 1982, 33⅓.

74  •  Aleksandar Žikić Paket aranžman. Jugoton LSY 66118, 1981, 33⅓. Partibrejkers. Partibrejkers. Jugoton LSY 61979, 1985, 33⅓. Pavlović, Ivanka, and Iskre. Mala Šejla. Diskos, EDK 3010, 1963, 45 rpm. Pop mašina. Kiselina. PGP RTB LPV 5227, 1973, 33⅓ rpm. Pop mašina. Na izvoru svetlosti. RTV Ljubljana LP 1077, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Pop mašina. Put ka suncu (Live). 1974–75. RTV Ljubljana LP 1127, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. S vremena na vreme. S vremena na vreme. RTV Ljubljana LP 1083, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Šarlo akrobata. Bistriji ili tuplji čovek biva kad. . . . Jugoton LSY 66145, 1981, 33⅓ rpm.

6

Jugoton

From State Recording Giant to Alternative Producer of Yugoslav New Wave Branko Kostelnik

The record label Jugoton was the premiere pop and rock music producer in Yugoslavia and one of the pillars of domestic diskografija (the recording industry). In this chapter I provide a brief historical overview of Jugoton’s growth with its distinct phases of development, and assess the critical role it played in the rise of homegrown new wave. I will address seminal new wave albums and discuss Jugoton’s impact within the wider context of punk and new wave scenes then and now. Turning to the artistic documents of the new wave, I briefly discuss innovations in album designs, and then provide my own list of the most influential new wave albums produced by Jugoton and several other leading labels. The perspectives presented here reflect my involvement in the burgeoning punk and new wave scenes from the late 1970s through the 1980s, as publicist, multimedia professional, musician, and chronicler of the extraordinary times in domestic pop culture, but above all, as a fan of the music. The Jugoton Factor The Zagreb-based record label Jugoton (now Croatia Records), which by the 1970s had grown from a small state firm established in 1947 to the largest East European label outside the USSR, effectively charts the development of pop music in socialist Yugoslavia. Created from assets the communist government confiscated from Edison Bell Penkala and Elektroton – the two companies active in interwar Zagreb and Ljubljana (Bachrach-Krištofić and Krištofić 2014, 11)  – Jugoton’s forty-five-year activity is marked by several distinct phases of growth. Under the direct purview of the Yugoslav Communist Party, Jugoton’s formative programming (1947–53) centered on classical, revolutionary, and traditional folk music repertoires, reflecting the Soviet cultural policy of socialist realism. The second phase (c. 1955–60), when the institution opened up to the West, is marked by the 1956 “watershed year,” when Zagreb city authorities loaned 49 million dinars (c. 15 million euros) to Jugoton for the reconstruction of its factory, enabling the company to purchase new equipment and significantly increase its production (Vuletic 2014, 15). The same year, Jugoton also signed a contract with the American company RCA and soon after made licensing agreements with the Italian labels Italdisco, Sabrina, and Durium. These deals launched many top international performers in the nascent domestic market, including Elvis Presley, Paul

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Anka, Mario Lanza, and Mina. As Vuletic notes (Ibid., 17), the Party leaders recognized the social and political power of popular music, and recommended that the Opatija Festival of zabavna music should be formally included in the new cultural program, along with greater investment in film, radio, and television production. With the expansion of the new broadcast media, “music quickly became the greatest mass [medium], taking on proportions that were frequently equated with ‘Americanization’ ” (Galjer 2014, 27). The robust economic growth evident in Yugoslavia’s rapid industrialization and urbanization also stimulated the development of estrada (music industry) infrastructure, including the domestic record industry (diskografija). The influential zabavna-pop music festivals and the increasing availability of Western popular music were crucial aspects of this, aided primarily by Jugoton who also launched the first domestic pop stars, including Ivo Robić, Vice Vukov, Anica Zubović, Lola Novaković, Dušan Jakšić, Ivica Šerfezi, and Gabi Novak. Jugoton and its Belgrade counterpart, the label PGR RTB (founded in 1951–52 and affiliated to Serbia’s radio-television network), rapidly expanded Yugoslavia’s recording industry and spearheaded marketplace competition, which was encouraged by the Yugoslav economic doctrine of samoupravljanje (self-­management) introduced in the 1950s. The third phase started with the release of the first domestic album by Drago Mlinarec and Grupa 220, Naši dani (Our Days) in 1968. Jugoton became an associate of EMI, Decca and RCA, and signed international performers such as Ray Charles, Wilson Picket, Otis Redding, and Tom Jones (Škarica 2017, 382). Between 1968 and 1977, Yugoslavs enjoyed higher standards of living and consumerism increased along with the demands for entertainment and pop culture merchandise. By the early 1970s, Jugoton’s annual record output grew to nine million, and the label established a national retail network with shops in major cities across Yugoslavia, from Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Niš to Sarajevo, Priština, and Skopje. Jugoton’s releases became the defining measure of success for pop and rock artists, evident in a range of iconic albums, from the singer-songwriter Arsen Dedić’s Čovjek kao ja (A Man Like Me, 1970) to the debut eponymous album by the rock band Time (1972) and Dnevnik jedne ljubavi (Diary of One Love, 1973) by the pop-jazz singer Josipa Lisac. The rock floodgates opened nationwide in the mid-1970s with Jugoton’s releases of two albums by the rock band Bijelo dugme: Kad bi’ bio bijelo dugme (If I Were a White Button, 1974) and Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu (What Would You Give to Be in My Place? 1975). The latter sold over 200,000 copies (Janjatović 1998, 30), making a national record for rock album sales at the time. The dynamic cultural production in Zagreb coalesced around already established and new outlets, which provided a broader institutional backdrop for Jugoton’s activities. These included the Student Center (1959), the Zagreb Music Biennale and the Gallery of Contemporary Art (both founded in 1961), and the Festival of Animated and Experimental Film (1972). In the area of publishing, the newspapers Studentski list (1948) and Polet (1967) were particularly influential in youth cultures both in Zagreb and other major cities, while the short-lived and visually attractive Pop Express (1969–70) was a mix of music magazine and underground press. The fourth phase of Jugoton’s activity was the longest, which started with Yugoslav punk in 1977 and lasted until the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, marked by the pinnacle of punk and new wave production until the mid-1980s. This last phase also included the largest commercial successes in the music industry by zabavna-pop performers like Mišo Kovač, Zdravko Čolić, the groups Novi fosili, Magazin, and Hari Mata Hari, and the singers Kićo Slabinac, Neda Ukraden, Doris Dragović, Jasna Zlokić, and Meri Cetinić, many of whom collaborated with the hit-making

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songwriters  Rajko  Dujmić, Zrinko Tutić, and Tonči Huljić. The production figures for album releases by the best-selling performers reached up to 500,000 units per album (Bachrach-­Krištofić and Krištofić 2014, 12). The top-selling Jugoton singer was Daniel Popović, whose album Bio sam naivan (I Was Naïve, 1983) included his 1983 Eurovision Song Contest entry “Džuli” (Julie), which sold a record-breaking 717,166 copies (Ibid.). During the late 1980s, however, new poprock bands like Plavi orkestar and Crvena jabuka arrived on the scene and captured the next generation of fans, amid the political crisis, economic troubles, and growing anxiety about impending war. By the turn of the decade, the Yugoslav market all but disappeared, and in 1993 Jugoton became a public corporation (Hrvatska naklada zvuka i slike, HNZS), or Croatia Records – the largest record company in the newly independent state of Croatia.1 The New Wave While Jugoton’s many artists continued the legacy of mainstream zabavna-pop, the more experimental 1980s rock scene emerged in the form of artistically innovative and commercially viable new wave (novi val or novi talas). Along with local radio and youth press, and the smaller labels Suzy and Helidon, Jugoton was the crucial logistical institution that embraced new wave artists and ushered them into the mainstream. In Yugoslavia, the new wave was a small-scale youth revolution (Kostelnik 2011, 167) whose seeds, as elsewhere, were planted in the late 1970s. Thirty-­ five years later, novi val stands the test of time in terms of its aesthetic and musical innovations. Even external observers found the scene remarkable. Chris Bohn of Melody Maker recognized Yugoslavia’s punk and new wave at the time as one of the most exciting rock scenes in Europe (1980, 24–25), comparing their creative energy with the UK’s formative punk scene that had all but faded by 1980. Similarly, in his NME review of Električni orgazam’s debut album, Bohn (1981, 28) commended how “the dominant wheeze-vox organ sound grappled gamely with primal rhythms and treated cymbal rushes to come out as excited as The Velvet Underground circa ‘What Goes On’.” Other bands also secured exposure for Yugoslav rock music on the international stage: the band Idoli gained European chart visibility in 1983, when the jury of eight critics from leading European music magazines placed them fourth on the list of the ten best new European bands (pers. comm., Srđan Šaper, January 15, 2019); other bands enjoyed international concerts, such as Pankrti and Partibrejkers, bolstered by the continuing international success of Laibach (Zinaić and Novi Kolektivizam 1992), Darko Rundek, Vladimir “Vlada” Divljan, and Disciplina kičme (see Kostelnik 2004, 26–27, 46–54, 267–92, 360; Janjatović 1998, 54–56, 81–83, 105–06). At the turn of the decade, marked by Tito’s death in 1980, rock ‘n’ roll proved one of the best outlets for the younger generations (Rajin 2008, 19). Against the backdrop of increasing uncertainty about the country’s future, which permeated all aspects of social life, punk and new wave became the voices of joyous affliction and a triumph of youthful energy and creativity. Belgrade bands in particular – Šarlo akrobata, Idoli, and Električni orgazam – were the spark that lit the fuse for the new wave explosion. Accordingly, the communist youth organization toned down their criticism of outspoken rockers. For example, in 1979 Croatia’s Union of Socialist Youth (SSOH) rejected new wave band Prljavo kazalište as candidates for the Seven Secretaries of SKOJ official award (named after seven young communists who died during WWII, usually given to notable contributors to culture), only to award it to the pioneers of Yugoslav punk, Slovenian band Pankrti, in 1980. The event not only signaled that the establishment no longer opposed politically outspoken musicians, but that the youth organizations indirectly contributed to the development of the new wave culture. According to Srđan Sacher, a member of the Zagreb band

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Haustor (Sacher in Mirković 2004, 132), rock ‘n’ roll in Yugoslavia during the new wave movement attained the level of state-sponsored art, just like film, theater, and classical music. The chronicler of the times, Igor Mirković (Ibid., 133), commented pointedly: Only many years later did I realize all the subtle nuances of this twisted situation in which I  grew up: we were convinced that we were poking fun at the communist youth activists, laughing at their dogmatism, while all the while it was their financial support that allowed us – as benign as we were – to live with this delusion. They financed our “rebellion,” and [our] feeling that we were living in London. The New Wave Artistry Until new wave, rock album covers typically featured simple and unimaginative photographs of band members, but new wave designers approached cover design as an important element in communicating artistic meaning. Designers like Dejan Kršić, Mirko Ilić, Igor Kordej, the art group Aux Maniere (Momčilo Rajin, Goranka Matić, and Slobodan Šijan), and the husband and wife artistic duo Sanja Bachrach-Krištofić and Mario Krištofić raised the artistic standards in cover art designs and magnified their own roles in the production process. Early designers took cues from 1970s vanguard designs, as seen in two early examples of Slavko Furlan’s covers for Buldožer’s two concept albums: Pljuni istini u oči (Spit the Truth in its Eyes, 1975), which looked like newspapers/booklets with erotic photos, texts, and comic strips, and Zabranjeno plakatirati (No Placarding, 1977), which shows a man dressed in a boy’s sailor suit pointing to oversized posters of Buldožer with “no placarding” painted over the placards on the wall. Similarly provocative is the eroticized artwork for Bijelo dugme’s first two albums by Dragan S. Stefanović: Kad bi’ bio bijelo dugme, featured a girl’s svelte chest, partially revealed by her undone shirt, which bears the band’s signature white button (bijelo dugme) over her left breast; and Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu, which teases the viewer with an older man grabbing the buttock of a young woman in a skimpy bikini. Both covers conceal the women’s faces, and we only see their bodies. Given that the satirical anarchism of Buldožer/Furlan and the eroticism of Bijelo dugme/Stefanović were prohibitive themes in popular culture of the 1970s, Jugoton was a critical outlet that pushed the artistic boundaries of pop-art culture in Yugoslavia. Increased activity by a growing number of punk and new wave bands had a direct impact on Jugoton’s production and artwork, which rose from only eight rock albums in 1976 to twenty-five in 1981 (Kršić 2008, 99). The most active album cover designer of the era was Mirko Ilić, who worked with artists within a range of genres, from classic rock Bijelo dugme to new wave Prljavo kazilište and the androgynous pop novelty Oliver Mandić. From 1979 until his departure for the United States in 1988, Ilić designed around two hundred singles and albums for Jugoton, along with records for PGP RTB, Helidon, Suzy, and Diskoton (Ibid., 67–81). His cover for the Jugoton compilation album Svi marš na ples (Everybody Dance Now!, 1981) brings together twelve ska and reggae-style songs by the leading bands Bijelo dugme, Azra, Film, Idoli, Aerodrom, Haustor, Zana, Laboratorija zvuka, Električni orgazam, Šarlo akrobata, Pekinška patka, and Bulevar. The title Everybody Dance Now! is taken from a line from Bijelo dugme’s song “Ha, ha, ha” (1980), and the theme is reinforced by Ilić’s cover illustration: a pop-art drawing of twelve different leg and footwear designs ascribed to each band, and by extension their fan groups (e.g.,  the punk DIY aesthetic of Pekinška patka, Zana’s fishnets and stilettos, and the two-tone aesthetic of Laboratorija). As the art historian Dejan Kršić notes (2012, 75), if Jugoton’s landmark project  – the Belgrade new wave compilation album Paket aranžman (Package Deal) “marked a

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major breakthrough of new wave – the compilation Svi marš na ples represented its commercial inauguration.” In 2007, I asked Ilić how he came up with the idea for the cover for Prljavo kazalište’s debut album, which became the band’s logo. It featured bright red lips and a protruding tongue sliced in three parts, with the upper right lip pierced by a safety pin – an obvious allusion to the Rolling Stones tongue logo (Figure 6.1): At the time many punks declared that they were fighting against rock’n’roll dinosaurs like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones. Prljavo kazalište would’ve probably played like the Stones, if they were able to. They even prepared a song for an album entitled “Some Boys,” which was a direct pun on the Rolling Stones’ “Some Girls.” Logically, this led [me] to the cut tongue [and] the pin.

Figure 6.1  Record sleeve of Prljavo kazalište’s debut album, Prljavo kazalište (1979).

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I also asked Ilić to what extent did the spirit of the time influence his design ideas for the many new wave cover albums he created. Of course, the spirit of the time was important – no one works in a vacuum. [But it was] my work in comic strip that strongly influenced my design, firstly, in terms of the angle of the photo shoots [and also] since album covers had two to four sides, I would often try to tell a story through them, like two or four panels in a strip. Heroj ulice (The Street Hero) by Prljavo kazalište is a good example of that. (pers. comm., September 30, 2007) The influence of punk and new wave was much greater than some of its originators could have ever imagined. Gregor Tomc, the leader and manager of Slovenian punk band Panktri, was certain that after a few gigs and the initial impact, the band would be suppressed (Kostelnik 2004, 19). Years later, I asked Tomc how he came up with the idea for the album cover for Panktri’s second album, Državni ljubimci (State Darlings 1982; see Chapter 16). If our first album Dolgcajt [Boredom] was a spontaneous expression of what we lived at the time, Državni ljubimci was our more ambitious concept album, the famous challenge of the second record (although we were not aware of that at the time). We wanted to add some deeper social message to the spontaneity of punk [a kind of] alter-art rock. Half of us were students, middle-class kids who wanted to produce art in public, and the other half were people with authentic working-class pedigrees who couldn’t care less about all that. The album was to have some connecting text [and] I wrote some Stalinist-like speech that was supposed to be read between the songs. That didn’t pass with the editor at [Ljubljana’s] ZKP [label, part of the national radio and television network]. From today’s perspective, it’s clear to me why: it is one thing to have songs that function as the parallel world of punk, which despite everything, is still part and parcel of the arts; it’s quite another to have political speech that has just one interpretation: “Here, here’s a mirror. See for yourself how foolish you are.” . . . The idea for the cover came at the very end. We were thinking of a photo at Ljubljana’s cemetery Žale [but] if it was just an image of the cemetery that might be associated with the “death of the state.” Our idea was just the opposite. The state was feeling quite good, at least that’s how it looked to us at the time, even though in reality it was dying. We decided on a picture of a young man at the cemetery. I was quite young, and to reduce the expenses, that man turned out to be me. We went to the cemetery looking for a motif. We came to the statue of the soldier from WWI, and liked him from the start. I also asked about the reactions of the label and the editor. Were there any demands for revisions, any threats, considering it was 1982, only two years after Tito’s death? There were lots of negotiations about this album (song lyrics, connecting narrative, the title), so we kind of got bored. The negotiations were friendly, but it was clear who the boss was. As I recall, regarding the cover photo, there was only one question: why is this soldier in the photo? When we said that it was a soldier from WWI, everything seemed OK. . . . We were sufficiently educated, not stupid enough to profane some partisan’s statue. We knew very well that all authorial rights were in the hands of the Party. This all just illustrates how well self-censorship worked within the band. It is not by coincidence that we survived ten years of socialism without major injuries . . . [we became] the avant-garde of YU punk. (pers. comm., October 15, 2007)

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Punk and New Wave Essential Albums Yugoslavia’s new wave shaped the collective consciousness and worldview of an entire generation. The following list of the most illustrative punk/new wave albums reflects my own personal experiences, informed by the views of many rock practitioners, visual artists, critics and fans alike. The fifteen albums, nine of which were produced by Jugoton, are listed by the bands in alphabetical order.  1. Azra: Sunčana strana ulice (The Sunny Side of the Street). Jugoton, Zagreb (1981). Released as a double vinyl, this is the most noteworthy (second) album by Azra and its frontman Branimir Johnny Štulić who introduced social and political themes into domestic rock (“Poljska u mom srcu” [Poland in my heart], “Kurvini sinovi” [Sons of a Whore]), and remained faithful to the basic tenets of rock aesthetics throughout his career. With songs of social engagement and of love interpreted with subtlety and imbued with rock energy, Štulić influenced the 1980s generation and went on to become its spokesperson. As Bagić puts it: “Štulić writes in the field of popular culture but he is a poet of the elites” (2015, 77–78). Azra’s first six albums (two of them double and one triple) are regarded among the greatest studio albums in Yugoslav rock historiography.   2. Disciplina kičme: Sviđa mi se da ti ne bude prijatno (I Like the Fact that You Won’t Be Comfortable). Helidon, Ljubljana (1983). The debut album by Dušan Kojić Koja and Nenad Krasavac, a two-member bass-and-drum team, is strong on rhythm, short on words. Koja’s talent and attitude of playful madness is on a par with two earlier YU-rock personae: Marko Brecelj of Buldožer, known for his Zappaesque satirical style, and Štulić of Azra. In “Pečati” (Seals), Koja references Yugoslavia’s anthem on his finely distorted bass, in honor of his idol Jimi Hendrix. His minimalist approach to rock impressed even the most radical art and rock minds, and combined with his own DIY designs, put him on the roster of uncompromisingly committed Balkan rock ‘n’ rollers.   3. Električni orgazam: Električni orgazam (Electric Orgasm). Jugoton, Zagreb (1981). Operating on the principle “less is more,” the leader, author and singer Gile and his bandmates applied not only the essential tools of reduction and repetition but also substantive choruses of expressive power (“Krokodili dolaze” [Crocodiles are Coming]; “Nebo” [Sky]). Their debut album received fine reviews even in the few select English-language rock publications, including the New Musical Express – a rare feat indeed.  4. Film, Novo! Novo! Novo! Još samo večeras na filmu a sutra i u vašoj glavi (New! New! New! Tonight Only on the Screen and Tomorrow in Your Head). Helidon, Ljubljana (1981). This album celebrates urban life. On the album’s cover photo, the band’s singer-songwriter Jura Stublić, has his arm wrapped around the modern, model-like city girl who is the subject of every song on the album; he carries a radio on his left shoulder to indulge the listener in the themes of love, dancing, and city culture. In “Neprilagođen” (Unadjusted), rudimentary ska and a few opening rap-like reciting lines that praise “radio” are combined with a generic pop chorus, while in “Dijete ulice” (Street Kid), the aspirational street outcast is musically underscored with typical punk gusto, albeit in a moderate Film mode.   5. Katarina II, Katarina II. ZKP RTV, Ljubljana (1984). One of the most important debut albums of the new wave generation transports the listener to the wild and magical world of music and spirituality that is the realm of five strong individuals who recorded as Katarina II (later renamed Ekaterina Velika). Led by Milan Mladenović (lead guitar and vocals) and Margita Stefanović (keyboards), this unique debut

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referenced African American music and their heroes like Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. Stylistically, it bridges the quirky experimental approach of Mladenović’s previous band Šarlo akrobata (“Ja znam” [I know]), with a more melodic and synth-driven rock aesthetic (“Geto” [Ghetto]), a sound that was foundational for their subsequent albums released under the EKV name. Their musical proficiency was exceptional, although the overall feel was one of improvisatory experimentalism (“Treba da se čisti” [Cleaning Required]).  6. Haustor, Treći svijet (Third World). Jugoton, Zagreb (1981). The band Haustor led by Darko Rundek (vocals) emerged from jam sessions at parties thrown by the informal group Komuna, which were social events where copious amounts of wine and marijuana were consumed at cabins on the foothills of Medvednica mountain (north of Zagreb) and in the Zagorje region. Much later, the recognizable brass sound of the unforgettable alternative theater Kugla glumište, along with intelligent lyrics, defined the originality of the Sacher-Rundek songwriting duo. This album is a strange and inviting mix of global and local themes with warm reggae and Latino rhythms, pop refrains, cool brass and fascinating lyrics.   7. Lačni Franz: Adijo pamet (Goodbye Reason). Helidon, Ljubljana (1982). This album introduced Slovenian Zoran Predin’s poetics and black humor and established him as a rare rocker who sang in his native Slovenian. He attracted rock audiences across the country, on a par with Azra’s Štulić and EKV’s Mladenović. The contributions of Predin’s songwriting style and Oto Rimele’s lead guitar to the band’s unusual heterogeneous musical style are illustrated with a few hits on this album: “Vaterpolisti” (The Water Polo Player), “Lent 1980” and “Miss Evrope.”  8. Laibach, Laibach, ŠKUC Ropot, Ljubljana (1985). This was a banned album by a banned band with a banned name. From the start, Laibach’s intent was to play with forbidden symbols and taboo themes, and to smartly manipulate the political regime. The album was released on an independent Slovenian label run by a statefounded student organization. Leaving the band’s name unlisted, the black and white cover featured the band’s future trademark logo – the black cross styled after Kazimir Malevich, here with a Christ-like suffering image of a naked man spread on the cross. The cover art established the signature style of Laibach’s Gesamtkunstwerk concept, combining elements of Nazi art, socialist realism and the Russian avant-garde, organized around its multimedia NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) collective. Laibach’s entire opus is a thrill, not only for its musical following, but also for any discerning visual arts connoisseur. Laibach’s recognizable industrial sound reflects the artists’ explorations of the “logic of massive, totalitarian, industrial production” (“Perspektive,” 1984).  9. Paket aranžman (Package Deal), Jugoton, Zagreb (1981). This album, which has historical importance for both Jugoton and YU-rock diskografija, features three bands − Električni orgazam, Šarlo akrobata, and Idoli. Jugoton was the first to publish the three new wave bands from Belgrade, which highlights the fact that in socialist Yugoslavia, inter-republican artistic exchanges were not only possible but common: Belgrade audiences warmly embraced Zagreb’s Azra, Haustor, Film, and Prljavo kazalište, in the same way that Belgrade’s EKV, Idoli, Električni orgazam, and Partibrejkers were admired by Zagreb rock audiences. 10. Pankrti, Dolgacajt (Boredom), ZKP RTV Ljubljana (1980). This debut album by the pioneers of punk in the Balkans paved the way for the second and third generations of Slovenian punks and Yugoslav rockers, including the radical Laibach. As pretentious as this may sound, Pankrti helped to launch freedom of expression, tear down

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Figure 6.2  Record sleeve of Laibach’s album Laibach (1985)

stereotypes, and loosen the tight reins of Yugoslavia’s political system. Preceding this album, their first single (1978), “Ljubljana je bulana” (Ljubljana is Sick)/“Lepi in prazni” (Beautiful and Empty) received due attention from the NME and Melody Maker. 11. Partibrejkers, Partibrejkers (Party-breakers). Jugoton, Zagreb (1985). Partibrejkers arrived somewhat later on the Yugoslav new wave scene, and were one of the few major bands to sustain rock culture sanity across the disintegrating country. Their mid1980s album resonated widely with the public. Anton’s guitar riffs and Cane’s slap-backdelay vocal on the memorable “Hiljadu godina” (A Thousand Years) hit the listener with a punch: Mississippi Delta blues meets the Ramones on the hot asphalt of the Belgrade streets. 12. Prljavo kazalište, Prljavo kazalište (Dirty Theater). Suzy, Zagreb (1979). This debut album by kids from Zagreb’s Dubrava suburb was preceded by their breakthrough 1978 single “Televizori”/ “Moj otac je bio u ratu” (Television Sets/My Father Was in the War),

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Figure 6.3  Record sleeve of Paket aranžman (1981)

arguably the first punk single released in Yugoslavia by the label Suzy. Relying on accessible social commentary and refrains (“Sretno dijete” [Happy Child]; “U mojoj općini nema problema” [No Problems in My Borough]), the band explored aspects of adolescence and growing up through socialist pop culture, and created a recognizable upbeat new wave style that turned their shortcomings (a modest ability to play instruments) into assets. This was best illustrated with their follow-up album Crno bijeli svijet (Black and White World, 1980), which solidified their pop rock standing. 13. Šarlo akrobata, Bistriji ili tuplji čovjek biva kad . . . (A Man is Wiser or Dumber When . . .). Jugoton, Zagreb (1981). This album, created by Milan Mladenović (vocals-guitar), Ivan Vdović (drums) and Dušan Kojić Koja (bass), is best described as madness, power, energy, irony, and innovation. A

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Man is Wiser  .  .  . is “punk incarnate” in the Belgrade vernacular, and a fine example of sonic theater, realized in semantically multipurpose cacophony that offers something for everyone, from spoken parental/societal commands (“Čuvajte nam decu” [Take Care of the Kids]), to atonal masses of sound enriched by distortion, screams, shouts and an occasional touch of Mladenović’s David Byrnesque Sprechstimme. The sonic re-enactment of chaos is made intelligible by sustained, rapid flow on guitars and drums (“Rano izjutra” [Early in the Morning]; “Fenomen” [Phenomenon]; “Ljubavna priča” [Love Story]). Musically, this is a finely executed example of the Serbian punk idiom, with occasional respites of ska and easy listening. When Šarlo crumbled after this debut, two fantastic new bands rose from its ashes: EKV and Disciplina kičme. 14. VIS Idoli, Odbrana i poslednji dani (The Defense and the Last Days). Jugoton, Zagreb (1982). A masterpiece of conceptual art pop, this album skyrocketed Idoli to the top of the pop rock scene. In 1982, Džuboks magazine critics voted it the best Yugoslav rock album of the time (Janjatović 1998, 86); thirty years later, a special May 2015 issue of the Croatian Rolling Stones magazine polled it as the greatest Yugoslav rock album since 1955. Their idiom was a smooth punk turned into an appealing new wave, which cleverly referenced Serbia’s cultural tropes. The opening “Kenozik” sets the tone: it is a hopeful, melodic tune set against the angst of the band’s steady post-punk new wave groove. In “Moja si” (You’re Mine), Serbian Orthodox Church chants echo the repetitively recited vocals of similarly narrow range, set against the marching band accompaniment in counterpoint with haphazard synth sounds, guitar dialogue, and speech insertions. The album was controversial because of its religious and potentially nationalistic references, ruffling feathers in domestic media and semi-political circles, but one thing is certain: it remains a courageous and authentic work of pop music art. 15. Zabranjeno pušenje: Das ist Walter (This is Walter). Jugoton, Zagreb (1984). With Das ist Walter, one of the best debut albums in YU-rock, Zabranjeno pušenje spearheaded the New Primitives, Sarajevo’s response to Yugoslav new wave (see Chapter 5). Witty songs (the famous “Sarajevo spirit”) work as miniature stories about street life and its working class anti-heros, musically told with punk-rock gusto and quotations from such greats as the Rolling Stones and Johnny Cash. The album opens with a theme from the partisan cult movie Walter Defends Sarajevo, and other notable songs include a paean to the New Primitives in “Anarchy All Over Baščaršija,” a prisoner’s plight in an upbeat Madness-like “Zenica Blues” (a comic narrative about a man who gets twenty years in Zenica prison after killing a guy with a penknife because he was having sex with his wife), and the bluesy new wave “Šeki is on the Road Again,” a gritty realist picture of a taxi driver’s night shift. On their third album, the band was joined by renowned film director and bass player Emir Kusturica, who formed the splinter group the No Smoking Orchestra in Belgrade with the singer Nenad Nele Karajlić in the 1990s, while the other members continued the original Zabranjeno pušenje band, active in Sarajevo and Zagreb. Assessing the New Wave Commercial Success In contrast to short-lived punk, new wave in Yugoslavia enjoyed exceptional commercial success, shattering one of the most important unwritten rules of the domestic rock scene that reaching a wider audience was only possible through an artistic mutation from rock to neo-folk pop music (Glavan 1983, 15). This symbolizes the historic role of Yugoslav punks and new wavers, the

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“third” generation who made rock ‘n’ roll an everyday routine and a part of everyday life (Ibid., 16). While punk in England seemed to reject the existing social and cultural values, Yugoslav new wave was about creating a new rock ‘n’ roll order. According to the visual artist Vinko Barić (2011, 7), with the new sociopolitical conditions created in the 1980s, the socialist authorities allowed young people to creatively express themselves through rock, and in the process, forge the first authentic domestic rock subculture. But as the rock critic Dragan Kremer (1983, 8) pointedly asked in his response to new wave songs released in 1983: “What is really new and different than before?” Put simply, the new wave emerged within the specific social context of early 1980s Yugoslavia, characterized by greater liberalization in society, particularly evident in mass media broadcast policies. In addition to rock music, new ideas resonated in fine and performance arts, photography, journalism and literature. Urban centers like Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Rijeka, and other smaller cities spawned talented new artists, giving them and their fans a participatory platform. This networking of worldview and lifestyle in the early 1980s engendered ideas of individual, sexual and identity freedoms. In short, the Yugoslav new wave scene of the 1980s echoed many of the values synonymous with the youth movements of the 1960s, except that the hippie vibe gave way to the sleeker 1980s cool. Jugoton may have led the way by releasing the work of new wave artists, but as Dejan Kršić notes critically, This course of action was not driven by any kind of ideology or a great awareness of the value of the scene, but by the publishing license crisis brought on by foreign currency trade restrictions. Simply put, there was not enough foreign currency at the beginning of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia to pay foreign labels for copyrights, so they shifted focus onto releases from the domestic scene. (Kršić 2008, 99) After the rise and decline of the new wave, domestic record labels released fewer albums by new and talented groups of the third wave of Yugoslav pop-rock like Sexa, Grč, Miladojka Youned, Grad, Mizar, SCH, and Roderick, which suggests that commercial motivation has always been the primary factor determining what albums were chosen for release by record companies. My own experience attests to this. I waited for seven years for the release of the debut album of my band Roderick, only to see it issued in a small run by an independent label, just before the war broke out. Had Yugoslavia’s record labels been guided by artistic rather than primarily commercial pop-folk (novokomponovana narodna) interests, the later 1980s might have produced a whole new generation of rock bands ready to capitalize on the legacy of YU-rock, and even bring it onto the international scene. Conclusion In the fall of 2014, the Technical Museum in Zagreb hosted an event-project titled Istočno od raja (East of Paradise), which included an exhibit of a large collection of Jugoton’s album covers and photographs of the many actors in the company history as well as record production equipment. In the accompanying book-catalogue (Bachrach-Krištofić and Krištofić, 2014), a group of art historians, designers, and popular culture commentators presented the results of their research on the history and cultural significance of Jugoton. Of particular value are the interviews and testimonials of many insiders and associates of Jugoton published in the book.

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The project offered a nostalgic experience of times past, and the exhibit and book generated wide public interest in Croatia and major cities of the former Yugoslavia. Importantly, it was not just a symbolic retrospective. The exhibit was a tangible representation of the development of pop culture during state socialism in Croatia, Yugoslavia, and Central/Eastern Europe, a documentation of the distinctly urban culture that the city of Zagreb in the 1960s had already cultivated, and the unique brand of modernism that bridged the East/West divide. In such an environment, punk and new wave’s development in Zagreb and other cities such as Ljubljana and Belgrade, was almost synchronous with the English and American models. It is no overstatement to say that the happy marriage between Jugoton and the new wave actors, aided by a favorable cultural climate, produced a great catalogue of songs and albums. This music is the testament of the 1980s generation, and it can stand, along with the Zagreb School of Animated Film and the Musical Biennale, among the greatest artistic achievements of twentieth-century Croatia and Yugoslavia. Acknowledgments I wish to thank Ljerka V. Rasmussen and Danijela Š. Beard for their valued editorial input, especially their assistance with musical analysis. Note 1. In the annals of Jugoton’s management history, several names loom large: Pero Gotovac (music editor and producer, 1953–73), Ivan Ivezić (designer, 1967–91), Đorđe Kekić (promotion and sales, 1972–82 and 1989–91), Veljko Despot (international editor, 1974–91), Siniša Škarica (editor, 1974–91), Vojno Kundić (editor, 1973–91), Dubravko Majnarić (editor and director, 1974–85), and Mirko Bošnjak (director, 1982–91).

Bibliography Bachrach-Krištofić, Sanja, and Mario Krištofić, eds. 2014. Jugoton: Istočno od raja. Zagreb: Kultura umjetnosti. Bagić, Krešimir. 2015. “Filigranski pločnici, sretne ulice i SL.” In Osamdesete! Slatka dekadencija postmoderne, edited by Branko Kostelnik and Feđa Vukić, 58–87. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo likovnih umjetnika and Društvo za istraživanje popularne kulture. Barić, Vinko. 2011. Hrvatski punk i novi val 1976–1987. Solin: Author’s Edition. Bohn, Chris. 1980. “Non-Aligned Punk.” Melody Maker, March 22, 24–25. Bohn, Chris. 1981. “Other Voices.” NME, August 8, 28. Brlek, Tomislav. 2015. “Sjećanje na budućnost (197?−1984–199?).” In Osamdesete! Slatka dekadencija postmoderne, edited by Branko Kostelnik and Feđa Vukić, 257–89. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo likovnih umjetnika and Društvo za istraživanje popularne kulture. Ćurko, Bruno, and Ivana Greguric, eds. 2012. Novi val i filozofija. Zagreb: Naklada Jesenski and Turk. Galjer, Jasna. 2014. “Jugoton: Masovni medij popularne kulture.” In Istočno od raja, edited by Sanja Bachrach-Krištofić and Mario Krištofić, 27–38. Zagreb: Kultura umjetnosti. Glavan, Darko. 1983. “Na koncertu lekcije iz sociologije.” In Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ, edited by David Albahari, 15–19. Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije. Janjatović, Petar. 1998. Ilustrovana YU rock enciklopedija 1960–1997. Belgrade: Geopoetika. Kostelnik, Branko. 2004. Moj život je novi val. Zagreb: Fraktura. Kostelnik, Branko. 2011a. Eros, laži i pop rok pjesme. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo pisaca and Fraktura. Kostelnik, Branko. 2011b. Popkalčr. Zaprešić: Fraktura. Kremer, Dragan. 1983. “To nije poezija, a ovo je uvod.” In Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ, edited by David Albahari, 7–8. Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije. Kršić, Dejan. 2008. Mirko Ilić: Strip, ilustracija, dizajn, multimedija. Zagreb: Profil and AGM. Kršić, Dejan. 2012. Mirko Ilić: Fist to Face. New York: Print Media. Mirković, Igor. 2004. Sretno dijete. Zagreb: Fraktura. Radaković, Siniša. 1994. Mala enciklopedija pop i rock glazbe. Rijeka: Nema problema. Rajin, Momčilo. 1983. “Estetika pakovanja.” In Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ, edited by David Albahari, 71. Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije. Rajin, Momčilo. 2008. “Drugo vreme, drugo mesto.” 15 dana – Ilustrirani časopis za umjetnost i kulturu 5 (6): 14–19.

88  •  Branko Kostelnik Škarica, Siniša. 2017. Tvornica glazbe: Priče iz Dubrave. Bilješke za biografiju ili Various Artists, Knjiga prva: 1947−1969. Zagreb: Croatia records d.d. Tomc, Gregor. 2008. “Sociologija punka u socijalizmu.” 15 dana – Ilustrirani časopis za umjetnost i kulturu 5 (6): 6–13. Vukić, Feđa, ed. 2014. Savska 25 – Arheologija modernosti u prostoru Studentskog centra Zagreb: Sveučilište Zagreb, Studenski centar. Vuletic, Dean. 2014. “Politički početak Jugotona.” In Istočno od raja, edited by Sanja Bachrach-Krištofić and Mario Krištofić, 15–17. Zagreb: Kultura umjetnosti. Zinaić, Milan, and Novi kolektivizam. 1992. Neue Slowenische Kunst. Zagreb: AMOK Press and Grafički zavod Hrvatske.

Discography Azra. Sunčana strana ulice. Jugoton. LSY 69029 and LSY 69030, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Kad bi’ bio bijelo dugme. Jugoton. LSY 63016, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu. Jugoton, LSY 63046, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Buldožer. Pljuni istini u oči. PGP RTB and Alta, ATLP 109, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Buldožer. Zabranjeno plakatirati. Helidon FLP 05013, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Disciplina kičme. Sviđa mi se da ti ne bude prijatno. Helidon FLP 05039, 1983, 33⅓ rpm. Električni orgazam. Električni orgazam. Jugoton, LSY 66130, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Film. Novo! Novo! Novo! Još samo večeras na filmu a sutra i u vašoj glavi. Helidon FLP 05025, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Haustor. Treći svijet. Jugoton LSY 63193, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Katarina II. Katarina II. ZKP RTVL LD 0954, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Lačni Franz. Adijo pamet. Helidon FLP 05029, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Laibach. Laibach, ŠKUC ULP 1600, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Lisac, Josipa. Dnevnik jedne ljubavi. Jugoton LPYS 60956, 1973, 33⅓ rpm. Mlinarec, Drago, and Grupa 220. Naši dani. Jugoton LPSYV 753, 1968, 33⅓ rpm. Paket aranžman, Jugoton LSY 66118, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Pankrti. Dolgcajt. ZKP RTL LD 0581, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Partibrejkers. Partibrejkers. Jugoton LSY 61979, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Prljavo kazalište. Prljavo kazalište. Suzy LP 332, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Šarlo akrobata. Bistriji ili tuplji čovjek biva kad. . . . Jugoton LSY 66145, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Svi marš na ples! Jugoton LSY 61588, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Time. Time. Jugoton LPYVS 60978, 1972, 33⅓ rpm. VIS Idoli. Odbrana i poslednji dani. Jugoton LSY 10011, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Zabranjeno pušenje. Das ist Walter. Jugoton LSY 63205, 1984, 33⅓ rpm.

7

“Absolutely Yours”

Yugoslav Disco Under Late Socialism

Marko Zubak

Disco is a complex term comprising three interrelated meanings. It is a music genre based on a four-on-the-floor beat pattern; it is a dance space designed specifically around the playback of recorded music; and it is the practice of freestyle dancing developed in that space (Lawrence 2006, 128). This chapter  looks at the remarkable yet unexplored disco culture that thrived in Yugoslavia from the second half of the 1970s until the early 1980s.1 My aim is to shed light on this exciting episode in Yugoslav popular music and its significant cultural and social ramifications. I will first trace Yugoslav disco as a Western pop import and then examine various practices of its appropriation within diverse musical and cultural milieus that gave rise to its indigenous Yugoslav form. I approach Yugoslav disco as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, both as a pop music niche with constituent stylistic and visual codes, and as a cultural practice. All of these, I argue, are indicative of the sociocultural context in which disco appeared, reflecting the complicated realities of the country’s late socialist landscape. The Mistreatment of Socialist Disco Disco is absent from accounts on Yugoslav popular music for two primary reasons. The first relates to the rise of Yugoslav punk and new wave in the late 1970s. New wave, which is commonly regarded as a peak in the Yugoslav pop-rock market, combined social critique with innovative artistry, synchronizing domestic rock music with Western trends (Glavan 1983, 15). Local rock critics tended to mythologize the new wave, viewing it as an updated, reformulated continuation of the 1960s political activism and disillusioned youth subculture. But while new wave spurred research into homegrown rock, it tended to marginalize other aspects of local pop-rock scenes, some of which were subsumed under the new wave umbrella term. The second reason relates to the more general disregard for disco. Since it emerged in the early 1970s, in the multiethnic gay dance clubs of urban America, disco has received limited scholarly attention in comparison to other musical genres. Western scholars, quick to appraise punk as the authentic zeitgeist of 1970s youth, largely failed to acknowledge disco’s emancipating provenance, seen by most academics as little more than a dance fad, unsuitable for semantic interpretations. Evaluation of disco fell to the mercy of progressive rock critics who, equally indifferent to its merits, failed to recognize disco’s long-term cultural impact. Hence cultural commentators perpetuated the image of disco as an exploitative pop industry product, devoid of artistic ambition or subversive meaning.

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Richard Dyer was a rare cultural critic who early on defended disco’s liberating sexual transgressions (Dyer 1979, 20–23). Not until the 1990s’ resurgence of dance club cultures, however, did academics begin to recognize disco as a formative precursor (Thornton 1995). Almost a decade later, Tim Lawrence (2003) fully reclaimed disco’s progressive core, presenting the image of a close-knit community of experimental disc jockeys and sexually uninhibited dancers who were ready to cross racial, cultural, and musical boundaries. The fact that Lawrence’s pioneering study ends around the time when disco moved into the mainstream globally, acquiring strong commercial overtones in the process, is indicative of his praise for disco’s underground features and his relative indifference toward its commercial evolution. Along with Lawrence, commentators persuasively argued that the blockbuster success of Saturday Night Fever (1977) altered disco culture for good, and that the film, like the famed nightclub Studio 54, misrepresented disco’s early queer and participatory qualities. Thus a mediated and “normalized” (heterosexual) culture with schematic beats and glamorous discotheques came to stand for disco. When this form of mainstream disco emerged in Yugoslavia in the late 1970s, it mesmerized audiences. Unaware of disco’s queer origins, they readily accepted its aura of escapism, apparently at odds with egalitarian and grassroots socialist values. Indeed, the emergence and subsequent popularity of disco in Yugoslavia should have been ideologically problematic: unlike rock ‘n’ roll or punk, disco lacked any sort of progressive social agenda that could justify its acceptance. The hedonistic and consumerist aspects of disco negated the egalitarian socialist ethos, yet disco was swiftly embraced and domesticated in Yugoslavia. This speaks of the country’s developed entertainment and media infrastructure, which provided the necessary conditions for disco’s rise as a commercially viable style. In other words, disco was both a reflection and a product of the continued Westernization, ideological transformation, and major economic, social, and political reforms that shaped socialist Yugoslavia. The split with the Soviet Union (1948) led to a considerably greater exposure to the West, compared with the rest of Eastern Europe. The subsequent advent of the economic doctrine of workers’ self-management (samoupravljanje) legitimized Yugoslavia’s unprecedented detour within the communist world, proving its considerable democratic potential in later periods of economic and social liberalization (Mezei 1976, 55). The confederal state framework, on the other hand, triggered a decentralization that fragmented cultural production, making it more difficult to control. These processes helped produce an extraordinarily rich domestic popular culture, reinforced by the early influx of free market elements within the planned economy. By the late 1970s, the infrastructure for popular culture was already firmly in place, comprising various strands of Western pop and rock music, a lively estrada (music entertainment ­industry) with many star singers, and a number of regional music scenes supported by record labels (Ška­ rica 2005; Vuletic 2011). Within the array of local media outlets, which operated through the centralized media networks and catered to popular interests, disco proved an unlikely favorite. A  variety of media narratives, from serious newspaper articles to radio and television shows, chronicled local disco culture and constitute a major source for this chapter. The New Sound When disco reached Europe, local record labels were ready to exploit it, releasing a number of disco compilations (for example, Disko Hitovi 1, 1979). By the early 1980s, their catalogues included a variety of licensed dance-oriented artists, covering the entire subgenre spectrum, from the early Philadelphia sound (Philly Sound, 1975) to electronic space disco (Magic Fly, 1978).

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Ljubljana’s label ZKP RTVL specifically catered to the demand for this new sound by signing an exclusive contract with the specialized American disco label Casablanca (Studio 1979a, 65). Their decision to tailor more closely to popular tastes was part of the company’s turn to more commercialized programs. The release of Donna Summer’s double album did not concern cultural censors, nor did it generate the kind of moral panic that surrounded the promotion of certain punk bands. Along with record companies, radio was an important source of dissemination, and radio disc jockeys were not limited to records produced at home, but could promote the repertoire from abroad, and the increasing number of radio entertainment programs now broadcast a greater variety of global dance hits. By the mid-1970s, international disco stars came to Yugoslavia to perform live. In the predisco days, Earth, Wind & Fire and Osibisa showcased their eclectic beats at packed venues in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana in 1975 and 1976, respectively. ABBA’s eagerly awaited concert in 1979 turned out to be a hoax that exposed the irregularities in the country’s growing music business (Kovačić 1979, 13). However, a European disco act that made the greatest impact was the German-based sensation Boney M, who first performed in Zagreb for the popular entertainment show Svjetla pozornice (Stage Lights) in 1977. This led to five sold-out shows the following year in major Yugoslav cities as part of their East European tour (Konjović 1978, 4–5). To the indignation of rock critics, who remained sceptical about Boney M’s brand of disco schlager, popular magazines and tabloids competed in the promotion of the group with attractive covers and centerfolds. Perhaps the greatest testament to the group’s enormous popularity came in 1981, when its frontman Bobby Farrell married the young Macedonian Romani Jasmina Šaban, in her home city of Skopje – an event with over a thousand attendees dubbed “the wedding of the century” (Trajković 1981, 17). Somewhat earlier, another media favorite, alleged transgender disco queen Amanda Lear, held two concerts in Zagreb and Split, performing in concert halls normally reserved for classical music (Vrdoljak 1980, 40). By this time, disco had left its mark on the Yugoslav music scene. The genre’s diffuse influence partially explains its poor coverage in Yugoslav pop historiography. Besides only a few true disco albums, there are a number of crossover tunes and individual disco tracks scattered on non-disco albums or B-sides of singles. Yugoslav disco united various and often unrelated musical streams and artists from diverse backgrounds. As such, it cut across established musical categories (zabavnapop, rock, folk, even jazz), evading stylistic definition. The following are illustrative examples. Proponents of Yu-disco The Zagreb band Clan was one of the disco acts who used funk to update their rock repertoire, as in their 1978 album Motor hoću mama (Mum, I Want a Motorbike). The funk lineage of Yugoslav disco is, arguably, most prominent in the Belgrade-based band Zdravo, led by their leader and club manager, Boban Petrović. In an effort to document the atmosphere of wild parties he hosted, Petrović produced the most stylistically coherent disco record of the period, suitably titled Žur (The Party, 1981). He also released a 12-inch single, rare in Yugoslavia at the time, which featured an extended version of his biggest hit “Meteorology” (Meteorology, 1981), mastered in the United States. In the same year, Arian Kerliu released a less known bilingual (Croatian/English) disco-boogie album (Arian, 1981), featuring tracks in English recorded with the help of renowned American musicians Hubert Eaves and Sinclair Acey in New York (where Kerliu lived at the time). Other disco inroads came from the world of jazz. After training at the Berklee College of Music, distinguished jazz trombonist Kire Mitrev assembled a group of professional musicians

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as the KIM Band and produced the excellent debut disco-funk album Ne, zaista žurim (No, I’m Really in a Hurry 1981). Academic musicians such as Igor Savin (Yu Disco Express, 1979), Zoran Simjanović, and Alfi Kabiljo used disco grooves to compose instrumental albums and to modernize their studio productions and television scores. This includes the funkiest soundtrack of the era for Goran Marković’s cult film about the young racing driver Floyd, Nacionalna klasa (National Class, 1979), supplied by Simjanović and featuring singers Dado Topić and Slađana Milošević. At the height of its popularity, disco also permeated the estrada. The biggest pop star of the period, Zdravko Čolić, owed much of his growing fame to the fact that he adopted modern dance beats in some of his songs (e.g., “Pusti, pusti modu” [Forget about Fashion], 1980). In an earlier attempt to break through internationally, Čolić released the disco single in English “Light me” (1979) under the awkward pseudonym Dravco, deemed easier to pronounce for the targeted German market. Čolić was not alone in his disco excursion, and around the turn of the decade, many pop singers traded their melodious zabavna-pop for energetic disco tunes. The list is extensive, from newcomers like female duo Snoli (“U dvadeset i osmom redu” [In the Twenty-eighth Row], 1980) to Eurovision song contestants such as Pepel in kri (“Disko zvezda” [Disco Star], 1980), showcased at the major Slovenian music festival Slovenska popevka. Tereza Kesovija, the internationally known prima donna of Yugoslavia’s zabavna-pop music, compiled dance versions of her famous hits for an album simply titled Disco ’79. Zabavna-folk star Neda Ukraden’s synthetic detour in the song “Ljubav me čudno dira” (Love Touches Me in a Strange Way, 1978) was inspired, somewhat bizarrely, by the godfather of Euro-disco, Giorgio Moroder. Some non-music celebrities also followed suit, most notably the former captain of Split’s football club Hajduk, Ivica Šurjak, who released a minor disco track on the B-side of his only single “Julija” (1980). The album was the brainchild of Nenad Vilović, a prolific producer and arranger of Yugoslav disco. Alongside Sanja Ilić and Slobodan Marković, who worked closely with Belgrade PGP RTB’s artists, Vilović infused šlager-pop hits with repetitive beats and lush string orchestrations, reminiscent of disco-pop arrangements. The vocal trio Mirzino jato, who were Boney M wannabes from Sarajevo, had the most successful disco career in Yugoslavia. Its frontman, the opera-trained singer Mirza Alijagić, could easily emulate bass vocals concocted by Boney M’s producer Frank Farian, and almost overnight became the main Yugoslav pop star linked to disco sound. Their producer, Sead Lipovača (the lead guitarist of the metal band Divlje jagode) contributed to their success, composing all of their tracks, including the ultimate Yugoslav disco hit “Apsolutno tvoj” (Absolutely Yours) on the 1979 album Šećer i med (Sugar and Honey). The catchy lyrics were written by Marina Tucaković, the most prolific Yugoslav pop lyricist. As the disco beat pervaded all musical spheres, it strongly influenced later trends, including 1980s synth-pop. In the end, however, only a few disco tracks survived the test of time. Yugoslav disco versions failed to compete with foreign models, leaving the public and DJs unimpressed. Rock critics, never receptive to disco, demonized it for poor quality. For them, Yugoslav disco was an ill-­advised attempt to imitate the Western formula, incapable even to emulate the genre’s sole redeeming value of getting people on the dance floor. A writer in the major music magazine, Džuboks, summarized the reigning mood: “Last year, Yugoslav disco sound was born [but] the result was a miscarriage. Filling local šlageri with a certain number of bass beats  per minute, scrambling with synthesizers and that inevitable ‘piu, piuuu’ [sound], our disco masters proved they do not understand what disco is” (Vukojević 1980, 44). Ultimately seen as “trash,” local disco fell into oblivion, with occasional quality songs scattered under various genre labels.

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Figure 7.1  Mirza Alijagić of Mirzino jato (1979)

Yu-disco Images and Movements Local commentators observed the distinct visual language created around disco actors, from the shiny dress code to “cheesy” record covers: “Disco aesthetics thrived in disco-hairstyle, disco-­ shoes, disco-behaviour, disco-thinking” (D.G.C. 1981, 5). Glossy magazines used this recognizable code with a heavy dose of colorful glitter (Duga 1980, 1), mirroring popular television shows which featured performers who danced in tinselled studios dressed in shiny overalls under flashy light effects (e.g., Sedam plus sedam, 1978). The glitziness tapped into the established visual expression of estrada and gradually spread to other musical forms and non-musical realms of design. In a humorous incident, Slađana Milošević labeled her lavish garments as punk, yet short of suitable accessories, she used what was available from the disco treasure chest for her provocative style (Popović 1978, 23). Folk heroines, such as Lepa Brena, sported sequined outfits to

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complement their folk-disco crossover tunes. Whereas in the West such fashion choices might be dismissed as kitsch, in Yugoslavia they revealed deep consumerist desires. Disco’s imagery also facilitated certain transgressions, mostly through transparent sexualization. Rarely addressed by contemporary commentators, disco’s proposition of uninhibited sex was the culture’s subversive element. Sex was, simply, available: tantalizing and exciting, and ready for visual and physical consumption through images and movements. Machismo, in the male chauvinist mode of Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero, remained prevalent in the Yugoslav disco scene. A few individual actors also pushed the boundaries, for instance Oliver Mandić, who probed traditional gender norms in the highly stylized television broadcast Beograd noću (Belgrade at Night, 1981). Directed by Stanko Crnobrnja, Mandić delivered his early disco-ish tunes cross-dressed as a female, introducing the first serious camp gesture on the estrada. Slovenian film director Boštjan Hladnik, in his film Ubij me nežno (Kill Me Softly, 1979), co-opted the queer origins of disco with a surreal comic scene where a group of motorcyclers in leather suits suggestively dance in front of a life-size image of Travolta. Similarly, the orgasmic sighs of black disco divas like Donna Summer were echoed by up-and-coming young female singers like Slađana Milošević and Alma Ekmečić, who incited more liberal attitudes toward the body and expressed their sexuality by walking a thin line between objectification and empowerment (Tirnanić 1978, 13). While music critics dismissed disco’s focus on dancing, the activity caused a widespread frenzy that introduced new actors onto the disco scene. Choreographer Vesna Mimica released audio-tapes with instructions on how to do aerobic workouts to disco soundtracks (Yu Aerobic br. 1, 1983), and magazines published step-by-step photo tutorials describing new dance moves (Zdravo 1978, 34). But disco was all about being seen in public. The pioneer of Yugoslav free-style dancing, Lokica Stefanović, formed her first dance troupe in the early 1970s, following a dancing reputation she earned at the first Belgrade discotheques. Her rise to stardom, however, coincided with the start of the disco era in the mid-1970s, with a group of dancers named after her, Lokice. In 1978, they joined Zdravko Čolić for his high-profile nationwide tour, which instantly launched Lokice as attractive celebrities to be emulated. Their success led entertainers to introduce dance entourages as a regular complement to live and televised performances. Reports from the principal zabavna music festival in Opatija in 1979 commented on the sudden rush of female dance troupes that accompanied singers on stage (Studio 1979b, 10). Unlike Lokice, groups like Avone or DC-10 were typically presided over by male managers, keen to monopolize the new fad (Start 1981, 48–51). In a showcase of estrada entrepreneurship, Politika’s photo-reporter Dragan Timotijević obtained a special parental permission to gather four teenage girls dressed in mini-shorts and roller skates, who formed the Cice Mace (Kitty-Cats). Just like Lokice, they eventually jumped on the disco bandwagon and recorded the disco single “Disko-baba” (Disco-Granny 1980). Socialist Discotheques While these established disco actors sought to adapt disco to the Yugoslav environment, disco also emerged “from below.” As with other forms of popular music, it shaped new lifestyles that centered on dancing, which evolved into the mythical space of diskoteka (dischoteque). Screenings of Saturday Night Fever (and the many disco-flicks that followed) created a broader context for disco culture, aligning music with new patterns of behavior. The iconic film conquered Yugoslav movie theaters, turning the charismatic John Travolta into a youth idol, but also into the

“Absolutely Yours”  •  95

subject of sociological analysis. “Would you allow your daughter to go out with Travolta,” tabloids asked, dwelling on the lifestyle choices and social environment of the Travolta character Manero (Aćimović 1978, 65). Though Yugoslav cinematography never produced its own disco feature, a number of film directors used disco scenes to highlight social issues such as the urban-rural divide, gray economy, and mounting inequalities. Discomania seeds were planted with the first Yugoslav discotheques, which appeared as early as the late 1960s. Ranging from refurbished youth clubs to semi-private cafes built for business, these venues mushroomed across the urban and semi-urban environments and became the “hottest” new places for socializing. For every youth club open to all, there was a venue that prided itself on exclusivity with pricey entrance fees and dress codes. Indeed, local discotheques provided an ideal setting for the emerging affluent strata to exhibit their improved life standards. For many, especially mainstream media, Studio 54 seemed like the official discotheque blueprint, the model to transform an improvised dance venue into a fully-fledged private business (Milinković 1978, 27–9). In reality, midtown Manhattan was thousands of miles away: licenses were sometimes obtained through dubious means and sophisticated equipment from abroad was acquired outside legal channels. This period also witnessed the rise of specialized disc jockeys. Zagreb’s Slavin Balen and Belgrade’s Dragan Kozlica became promoters of dance music and laid the foundations for the local clubbing scene. On the whole, however, club disc jockeys were defined by their specific working venues rather than their playlists, combining their roles as bodyguards, talk hosts, and DIY engineers who modified their equipment to create the required technical standards (Zubak 2016, 195–214). Their eclectic mixes were divided into different sets that cut across different genres. The inclusive repertoires reflected the diversity of Yugoslav youth in the late 1970s: even if they preferred different types of music, clubbers were typically a diverse bunch who inhabited the shared social space, largely unfamiliar with the bifurcated social worlds of their Western peers. Moreover, disco offered unprecedented visibility to marginal social groups by generating a series of popular dance competitions. Commonly known as Travoltiadas, these allowed accomplished dancers from underprivileged backgrounds to demonstrate their slick moves learned from the big screens (Janjatović 1979, 32–33). The young Belgrade Roma Hamit Đogani is exemplary in this regard. A regular at Belgrade clubs, Đogani made his name as a dancer, and in 1980 he won the first state disco-dancing contest organized in Zagreb by the major TV weekly Studio. Three months later, an eighteen-year-old Đogani found himself representing Yugoslavia at the World Disco Dancing Championship held at London’s Leicester Square Ballroom (Stojsavljević 1981, 18–21). He was not a finalist, but he qualified for several other international competitions. His remarkable story illustrates the close link between disco culture and the urban proletariat, which identified with dance venues rather than new wave. Roma in particular frequented places that featured varied forms of dance music, and as regular contestants of disco competitions, they came to dominate the podiums at dance clubs throughout the 1980s. Đogani’s story and working-class background stand in stark contrast to the stereotype of decadent affluence that would later become the basis of attacks on disco by punk and new wave adversaries in youth and music journals. Taking their cue from writers at the New Musical Express, Yugoslav music critics increasingly focused their criticism toward sociological profiling, associating the genre’s banal lyrics with self-indulgent audiences, which created a polarized profile of youth culture that pitted affluent and idle disco fans against creative and self-consciously provocative new wave crowds (Stojanović 1979, 6–7; compare to a related discussion on zabavna-pop in Chapter 15). In 1979, the Zagreb youth journal Polet, a devoted advocate of the new wave,

96  •  Marko Zubak

Figure 7.2  Yugoslav disco dancing championship at Zagreb’s Štrukla club (1981)

engaged in a campaign against disco(theques) as a response to Zagreb’s Big Ben Club’s policy of denying entrance to longhaired rockers in favor of the sleek šminkeri (fashion-conscious wellto-do youths), presumed to be disco’s audience (Perasović 2001; Figenwald 1979, 2). Conclusion: A Window Into Late Socialism I have argued that disco’s complex musical trajectory of sources and influences contributed to its exclusion from conventional narratives on Yugoslav pop-rock music. As a genre, YU-disco was only recently rediscovered by a community of avid record collectors and DJs, known as “crate diggers,” who have become DIY researchers in a quest to retrieve lost pop-musical heritage. They rummage through flea markets, digging through used vinyl records in search of great, forgotten tracks that have slipped under the radar, but could now be used for samples. They reinstated the importance of this music and helped to redefine the existing pop-cultural canon (Vályi 2010). With the rise of online music platforms, their findings have reached wider audiences and broken established categorizations created by historical gatekeepers. As a result, newly coined genre labels like “YU-disco” have come into use, comprising a coherent body of work that is easily accessed through databases such as Discogs and Mixcloud. Disco emerged at a time when the consumption gap between East and West was increasingly closing in the late 1970s, and served as a prime manifestation of the explosion of market socialism. Yugoslav disco both revealed and partook in ideological and cultural relaxation, greater cross-border travel, and private entrepreneurship. Though mainstream media remained fascinated with disco, rock critics viewed it as antithetical to punk and new wave subcultures.

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Moreover, Yugoslav disco culture points to the many issues and dilemmas at the heart of late socialism. Its eclectic style and design, target audiences, and ambiguous cultural status all elude simplistic Cold War binaries insensitive to complex everyday realities. With funk pioneers and estrada emulators, gender transgressors and male chauvinists, affluent clubbers and Roma dancers, mainstream promoters and hostile critics, disco resists the polarizing definitions of conformist or progressive, official or subcultural, repression or dissent. Operating within the gray zones, disco highlights the inadequacy of the dated binary matrix typically used for the interpretation of popular culture under socialism. The case of socialist disco was not limited to Yugoslavia. Disco fever crossed the Iron Curtain with ease and acquired different meanings across the Eastern Bloc. Hungarian disco kings Neoton Familia perfectly embodied Kadar’s “goulash communism” (Hammer 2017, 61–66); Latvian electronic space beats had a strong avant-garde flavor, while socialist glamour received its finest interpretation in the theme song for the Moscow 1980 Olympics. From this perspective, Yugoslav disco proved to be not only a product of the country’s unique Cold War geopolitical position but also an expression of the general transformation of the socialist world as a whole. Acknowledgments A number of musicians, disc jockeys, dancers, and film directors kindly shared their experiences and testimonies with me, and they are at the heart of this text. These include (in alphabetical order): Mirza Alijagić, Slavin Balen, David Blažević, Nebojša Bogdanović, Vladimir Crvenković, Duško Cvetojević, Hamit Đogani, Dejan Gavrilović, Željko Kerleta, Janoš Kern, Dragan Kozlica, Kire Mitrev, Boban Petrović, Milena Savić, Mirko Sobota, Lokica Stefanović, Dragan Timotijević, Igor Večerić, Dušan Velkaverh, Predrag Vukčević, and Mihajlo Vukobratović. In addition, the writing of this chapter was helped by the Croatian Science Foundation’s project Croatia in the 20th Century: Modernization in the Context of Pluralism and Monism and by the COST Action NEP4DISSENT (CA 16213). Note 1. This chapter builds on my ongoing research on Yugoslav and wider socialist disco culture, so far exhibited as a gallery project in Zagreb and Belgrade (Stayin’ Alive: Socialist Disco Culture, Zubak 2015).

Bibliography Aćimović, Draško. 1978. “Da li biste dozvolili svojoj kćerki da se zabavlja s Travoltom.” Duga 129, February 3. Cover. 1980. Duga 173, October 11. Đekić, Velid. 2013. Red! River! Rock! Rijeka: Kud Baklje. D.G.C. 1981. “Disko štrukla.” Studio 911, September 19–25. Dyer, Richard. 1979. “In Defense of Disco.” Gay Left 8 (Summer), 20–22. Figenwald, Predrag. 1979. “Šminkeri su otuđeni, hašomani simpatični.” Polet 91, February 27. Glavan, Darko. 1983. “Na koncertu lekcije iz sociologije.” In Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ, edited by David Albahari, 15–17. Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije. Hammer, Ferenc. 2017. “The Song Remains the Same: Structures of Cultural Politics of Retro in Hungarian Pop Music.” In Made in Hungary: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Emília Barna and Tamás Tófalvy, 61–68. New York: Routledge. Janjatović, Petar. 1979. “Naši Travoltaši.” Zdravo 70, January 8. Konjović, Sloba. 1978. “Nema posla kao što je zabavljački.” Džuboks 48, July. Kovačić, Zvonko. 1979. “ ‘Abba’ na turneji ali. . . .” Studio 776, February 17–23. Milinković, Zoran. 1978. “Bio sam u Studiju 54.” Zdravo 66, November 13. Mezei, Stevan. 1976. Samoupravni socijalizam: Prilog proučavanju teorije i prakse. Belgrade: Savremena administracija.

98  •  Marko Zubak Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lawrence, Tim. 2006. “In Defence of Disco (Again).” New Formations 58: 128–46. Perasović, Benjamin. 2001. Urbana plemena: Sociologija subkultura u Hrvatskoj. Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada. Popović, Petar. 1978. “Ni crno ni belo.” Zdravo 61, September 4. Start. 1981. “Zvjezdarije: Hopa cupa po estradi.” Start 317, March 3. Stojanović, Saša. 1979. “Punkerton: Disco otuđenje življenja.” Džuboks 74, October 26. Stojsavljević, Dubravko. 1981. “Ludnica s okusom valcera.” Studio 874, January 3–9. Studio. 1979a. “Midem.” Studio 775, February 10–16. Studio. 1979b. “Ima li novosti.” Studio 779, March 3–9. Škarica, Siniša. 2005. Kad je rock bio mlad. Priča s istočne strane (1956–1970). Zagreb: VBZ. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. London: Polity Press. Tirnanić, Bogdan. 1978. “O nogama i ostalom.” Zdravo 53, May 15. Trajković, Jovica. 1981. “Skopska svadba stoljeća.” Arena 1077, August 12. Vályi, Gábor. 2010. “Digging in the Crates: Practices of Identity and Belonging in a Translocal Record Collecting Scene.” PhD diss., University of London. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 1980. “Disko kraljica Lear.” Start 300 (July 23): 40–42. Vuletic, Dean. 2011. “The Making of a Yugoslav Popular Music Industry.” Popular Music History 6: 269–85. Vukojević, Branko. 1980. “Decenija ukopčavanja.” Džuboks 81 (February 1): 44–45. Zdravo. 1978. “Čudo zvano Travolta.” Zdravo 60, August 21. Zubak, Marko. 2016. “The Birth of Socialist Disc Jockey: Between Music Guru, DIY Ethos and Market Socialism.” In Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm, edited by Ewa Mazierska, 195–214. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zubak, Marko. 2015. Ostati živ. Socijalistička disko kultura/Stayin’ Alive. Socialist Disco Culture. Izdavač: Zagreb.

Discography Arian. Arian. PGP RTB 2120453, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Cice-Mace. “Disko-baba”/“Što se to događa.” Jugoton SY 23755, 1980, 45rpm. Clan. Motor hoću mama. PGP RTB LP 5327, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Čolić, Zdravko. “Pusti, pusti modu.” in Zbog tebe. Jugoton LSY 68071, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Dravco. “Light Me”/“I’m Not a Robot Man.” Atlantic ATL 11 194, 1978, 45rpm. Kesovija, Tereza. Disco ’79. Jugoton SY 23456, 1978, 45rpm. KIM Band. Ne, zaista žurim. PGP RTB 2320096, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Milošević, Slađana. Sexy Dama. PGP RTB S 51839, 1978, 45 rpm. Mimica, Vesna. Yu Aerobic br.1. Jugoton CAY 1333, 1983, cassette. Mirzino Jato. Šećer i med, PGP RTB LP55–5383, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Lokice. “Dodirni me”/“Disco Lady.” PGP TRB 1120018, 1980, 45rpm. Pepel in kri. “Disko zvezda.” in Ljubljana ’80: Dnevi slovenske zabavne glasbe, ZKP RTVL LD 0646, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Petrović, Boban. Žur. ZKP RTVL LD 0722, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Petrović, Boban. “Meteorology.” ZKP RTVL SD 8001, 1981, 45rpm. Savin, Igor i orkestar Stanka Selaka. Yu Disco Express. Jugoton LSY 61437, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Snoli. “U dvadeset i osmom redu”/“Diši duboko.” Jugoton SY 23697, 1980, 45rpm. Space. Magic Fly. Jugoton SV 88948, 1978, 45rpm. Summer, Donna. Bad Girls. ZKP RTVL LL 0611 / Casablanca LL 0611, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Šurjak, Ivica. “Nije ljubav što je bila”/“Julija.” Jugoton SY-23641, 1980, 45rpm. Ukraden, Neda. “Pisma ljubavi”/“Ljubav me čudno dira.” PGP RTB ALS 52 784, 1978, 45rpm. Various. Philly Sound: The Fantastic Sound of Philadelphia. Suzy PIR 80281 / Philadelphia International Records PIR 80 281, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Disko Hitovi 1. Diskos LPL 738, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Originalna muzika iz filma Nacionalna klasa. PGP RTB LP 55–5343, 1979, 33⅓ rpm.

Filmography Crnobrnja, Stanko, dir. Beograd noću. 1981. RTV Beograd. (TV program). Hladnik, Boštjan, dir. Ubij me nežno. Vesna film/ Viba film, 1979. Marković, Goran, dir. Nacionalna klasa do 785 cm. Centar film, 1979. Ristić, Jovan, dir. Sedam plus sedam (RTV Beograd, 1978). (TV series).

8

The Aesthetics of Music Videos in Yugoslav Rock Music Josipa Lisac, EKV, Rambo Amadeus Ivana Medić

Music video, although inextricably linked to the rise of television broadcasting and the recording industry in the 1960s, has received only cursory attention in Yugoslav pop music historiography, mainly because it lacked the discursive power of song lyrics privileged by rock journalists.1 More recently, a few pop culture commentators, straddling the socialist/post-socialist periods, have addressed the importance of television in shaping youth culture, most notably the music journalist Aleksandar Žikić, in his 1999 book Fatalni ringišpil (The Fatal Carousel). Following a brief overview of music video on Yugoslavia’s television, I focus on three leading artists who stood out in terms of their visual identity, self-presentation, and engagement with the format: the jazzpop-rock singer from Zagreb, Josipa Lisac; the new wave/alt-rock band from Belgrade, Ekaterina Velika (EKV); and Montenegrin, Belgrade-based singer/songwriter Rambo Amadeus, reputed for his eclectic rock-pop, jazz, hip-hop, and folk style. My analysis explores how Lisac’s image of a powerful and artistically liberated woman challenged the conventional visual presentation of female performers; how EKV developed from the underground into a mainstream act while maintaining their signature cryptic narratives and distinctive iconography; and how Rambo Amadeus’s critical satire of the Balkan cultural codes earned him the distinction of oppositional voice within the context of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. The Origins and Development of Yu Music Video As regular television broadcasts started in Yugoslavia in 1958, through the national radio-­ television broadcasting network (JRT),2 television developed entertainment shows with musical numbers that foreshadowed later music videos.3 Although the state-owned radio stations were initially resistant to rock ‘n’ roll, they succumbed to the strategic perseverance of forward-looking radio music producers, particularly Nikola Karaklajić, who is widely credited for the breakthrough of new youth music on Radio Belgrade (Ivačković 2013, 48–49). In April 1961, Karaklajić started hosting a radio show on Radio Belgrade dedicated solely to rock ‘n’ roll music. Initially called Muzički automat (Music Automaton) and then Sastanak u 9 i 5 (Meeting at Five Past Nine), the show aired after the evening nine o’clock news and featured ten records chosen by the listeners.4 A few years later, Karaklajić and the theater director Jovan Ristić co-created the groundbreaking

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show on TV Belgrade, Koncert za ludi mladi svet (The Concert for Crazy Young People, 1967; Koncert hereinafter). Filmed in black and white, the show is widely regarded as the flagship rock TV show in Yugoslav pop music history, and featured bands from across the country. The three hosts – Dušan Golumbovski, Bane Cvetković, and Svetlana Bajić – visited various concert and rehearsal venues in the city, filming bands “at work,” and introduced musical numbers with short skits written by Karaklajić and the actor-director Milan Bulatović (Šoškić 1967). At that time, Yugoslavia had a single television channel that broadcast up to eight hours of TV programs every day. All viewers watched whatever was broadcast at any given time, and the majority of performers who appeared on the screen were guaranteed instant popularity. As a result, the pioneering rock ‘n’ roll program Koncert was watched by  millions of viewers in a country where the majority of households did not even own TV sets,5 although as Maruša Pušnik notes, in 1965 TV sets were selling better in Yugoslavia than vacuum cleaners and heaters (Pušnik 2010, 238–39). Moreover, she emphasizes that the rapid expansion and massive diffusion of television since the 1960s was a consequence of steady political relaxation, economic reforms, and shortening of the working hours (Ibid., 231). The director Ristić has recalled that Yugoslav television was, from the outset, open to experimentation and allowed young people to create something new: “[The idea for the show was] that rock ‘n’ roll music was played, literally, everywhere. . . . On a locomotive, on a carousel, on a roof, in a basement, in a park, everywhere; . . . music was an integral part of young people’s lives” (cited in Žikić 1999, 112). Despite the scarcity of modern equipment, Ristić and his team introduced an innovative approach to camera work, using techniques of short cuts and “dirty” unfocused frames, and filming at unusual locations, outside the confines of a studio. He recalled: “Quite unaware of what we were doing . . . we practically [had to] invent the form of a music video. I think that we were among the first in Europe to introduce it” (Ibid., 115). Within a few years, the Koncert penetrated most layers of Yugoslav society due to its innovative programming. The third broadcast in 1967, for instance, featured the Croatian band Žeteoci comprised of Catholic priests who sang zabavna spiritual and beat-styled songs. The televised show had a pivotal role in disseminating rock ‘n’ roll to the widest audiences, creating a touchstone between the youth and the more conservative factions of Yugoslav society, who otherwise may not have listened to this type of music. The media breakthrough of the new music was also evident in feature films of the era, such as the cult film noir Kad budem mrtav i beo (When I Am Dead and Gone, 1967; directed by Živojin Pavlović). Along with popular radio and TV shows, early forms of music videos also emerged through other platforms. These comprised live broadcasts of zabavna pop-music festivals, including the national pre-selection for the Eurovision Song Contest, Jugovizija; musical numbers performed in popular entertainment shows, such as Obraz uz obraz (Cheek to Cheek), either live or prerecorded; popular songs from musical films that celebrated youth culture and urban life, notably the two 1960 movies Ljubav i moda (Love and Fashion), which had the smash hit “Devojko mala” (Little Girl) written by Darko Kraljić and sung by the actor Vlastimir Đuza Stojiljković; and Zvižduk u osam (A Whistle at 8 pm), with the eponymous hit song (also written by Kraljić), sung by Đorđe Marjanović; there were also special TV broadcasts organized to celebrate public holidays such as the May Day/Youth Day celebrations (on May 25, celebrating President Tito’s birthday) or the Day of the Republic (November 29, marking the founding of socialist Yugoslavia). Importantly, TV specials featuring nationally popular artists were often produced to coincide with releases of their new albums.

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After Belgrade, Sarajevo was the second city to have a rock music TV show in 1970, called Na ti (Let’s Be Informal), which helped create Sarajevo’s pop music scene by launching the careers of leading artists from Bosnia and Hercegovina, including Neda Ukraden, Zdravko Čolić, Kemal Monteno, and Jadranka Stojaković, and the bands Bijelo dugme, Ambasadori, and Teška industrija (Mandić 1976). The challenge for rock music promoters, however, was to break away from the specialized TV shows such as Koncert. A new show called Maksimetar, started in 1970, was important in this regard, because it featured a mix of musical styles in the form of top-of the-charts songs. Directed by Mita Stančulović and hosted by the emerging film actor Dragan Nikolić, the show was broadcast live from the studio, with prerecorded film inserts. Individual musical numbers functioned as freestanding music videos that could be extracted for other purposes, mainly due to innovative camera techniques such as blending, zooming, and wide and close-up frames. In the 1980s, prime-time popular TV shows, such as Hit meseca (TV Belgrade) and Stereovizija (TV Zagreb), gradually introduced music videos proper, and turned them into mainstream promotional outlets of pop songs and visual art.6 From its modest experimental beginnings in the latter 1960s, music video on Yugoslavia’s television developed into an artistically and socially significant media outlet for pop culture of the 1980s, as the following cases illustrate. Josipa Lisac In her 1980s song “Hir, hir, hir” (Capricious), Josipa Lisac self-ironically addressed her public image of an extravagant, capricious, even sinister stage persona. Lisac’s vocal delivery, remarkable for her wide timbral spectrum (from low nasal alto to coloratura soprano), precise intonation, impeccable yet exaggerated pronunciation, complemented by fine instrumental arrangements all contributed toward such a public perception. Nonetheless, as argued by Robyn Stilwell, even when women in rock achieve notable careers, they are often excluded from rock histories and mythologies (Stilwell 2004, 446). While in recent years several Yugoslav authors have addressed the role of female singers in popular music more broadly (Hofman 2010; Dumnić 2013; Nenić 2015), histories of Yugoslav rock music, written invariably by men, neglect remarkable female rock and pop-rock artists, such as Aleksandra Slađana Milošević, Bebi Dol (Dragana Šarić), Zana Nimani, and Marina Perazić. For example, in Ivan Ivačković’s (2013, 73) history of Yugoslavia’s popular music, Lisac is only mentioned as the wife of Karlo Metikoš (alias Matt Collins), yet several female zabavna-pop and novokomponovana narodna (newly composed folk music or NCFM) singers, such as Lepa Lukić, Hanka Paldum, and Lepa Brena, get individual chapters. Ivačković also notes, correctly, that women in zabavna-pop and narodna-folk were more numerous, popular, and had greater media visibility than women in rock. While Lisac achieved her greatest success after becoming professionally and personally involved with Metikoš, she was nonetheless already an emerging star. In 1967, aged seventeen, Lisac was noticed by the television director Nikola Nešković, who was scouting for new talents for the Koncert. Nešković visited a plesnjak (dance party) in Zagreb, where Lisac performed with the band O’Hara for the first time. Impressed, Nešković immediately arranged the filming for the Koncert the next day, and Lisac and O’Hara performed two songs, “You’ll Lose a Precious Love” (1965) by the Temptations and “I Can’t See Nobody” (1967) by the Bee Gees. Vocally, Lisac was already a powerhouse, but visually she appeared demure, far from her latter-day eccentric image. In the first black-and-white clip, the camera often shows a close-up of the singer, who is the only female member of the band and standing (others are seated), while the second clip shows only

102  •  Ivana Medić

Figure 8.1  Record sleeve of Josipa Lisac’s album Hir, hir, hir (1980)

Lisac walking in the park. She was clearly visually attractive for the producers, although this separation also reflects a common practice in music videos where lead singers had greater exposure. The songs and the videos proved an overnight success, launching her career in the 1970s, first through zabavna festivals and TV shows, which reflect her transformation from a reticent to more assertive solo act. In 1973 she released her debut album Dnevnik jedne ljubavi (The Diary of One Love) in collaboration with Metikoš, who was the composer and the producer, and the lyricist Ivica Krajač. The album introduced a highly original fusion of rock, pop, and jazz: it was the first full-length album by a female singer, and one of the earliest concept albums in Yugoslav rock, conceived as a diary of a woman who falls in love with a man, who then betrays and leaves her before eventually returning. The following year, Lisac recorded the Bosnian folk song “Omer Beže” (Omer the Bay, 1974) with the Folk Orchestra of Radio Sarajevo, led by the premier ­accordionist-arranger Ratomir Petković, which demonstrated her interpretative versatility by tackling one of the most difficult songs from the traditional sevdalinka repertoire. A video clip

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filmed for TV Sarajevo shows Josipa wearing a shiny three-piece trouser suit, with a white shirt, bow tie, white gloves and bushy orange hair – a far cry from the traditional image of sevdalinka singers. As a jazz pop-rock singer, with a bold stage presence and commanding vocal abilities, her excursion into the venerated folk music genre further solidified her unique position in Yugoslav pop culture. Moreover, in 1975 she was cast in the leading role of Jana in the rock opera Gubec Beg (composed by Metikoš and Miljenko Prohaska, on a libretto by Krajač), which dealt with the sixteenth-century Croatian-Slovenian peasant uprising. Written and released on an album several years after the success of Tommy by the Who and Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Gubec Beg joined the line of the earliest rock operas. Lisac’s powerful rendition of Jana’s madness scene, as well as her prayer “Ave Maria,” stand out as exceptionally nuanced performances to this day. In the 1980s, Lisac’s image became more daring and androgynous, with futuristic gowns, men’s suits and an assortment of wacky headwear. Her videos for “Hir, hir, hir” (from the eponymous album, 1980), “Hazarder” (The Gambler, from the 1982 album Lisica [The Fox]), “Danas sam luda” (Today I’m Crazy), and “Gdje Dunav ljubi nebo” (Where the Danube Kisses the Sky, from the 1987 album Boginja [The Goddess]) are stripped down, focused on Lisac, who now represents the sole point of interest. Her image was never sexualized, but rather she was perceived as an independent, eccentric, even “crazy” artist who challenged the conventional notions of beauty, femininity, and vocal expression. Even today, in her late sixties, Lisac maintains her striking visual style and continues to perform; and while the new generation of millennial fans may regard her eccentric image as whimsical, she has long secured her status as a Croatian and Yugoslav pop-cultural treasure. Ekatarina Velika As with Lisac, the younger cult band Ekatarina Velika created an artistic aesthetic greatly aided by the feminine energy of their charismatic keyboardist Margita Stefanović. After the dissolution of new wave band Šarlo akrobata in 1982, the lead singer and guitarist Milan Mladenović formed a new band called Katarina II, renamed Ekatarina Velika (EKV) in 1984. Although most members of EKV were active on the Belgrade rock scene since the late 1970s, they started out as an alternative art-rock band that gradually gained mainstream popularity. They set themselves apart from other new wave cohorts when they recruited the classically trained pianist Stefanović, who radiated sex appeal among the urban youth who were a part of the alternative music scene. Their career, however, was plagued by stories of heavy drug use, leading to the untimely deaths of all core band members by 2002 (see Arsenije 2006; Ilić 2008; Nikolić 2014). Given that Stefanović’s father was the acclaimed television director Slavoljub Stefanović Ravasi, she and other members of EKV showed a natural kinship with the medium of music video. The cryptic lyrics of their songs and self-projected mystery of the band’s personalities were emphasized in their unconventional TV appearances and music videos. The band also supplied music for, and appeared in, feature films Tajvanska kanasta (Taiwan Canasta, 1985, directed by Goran Marković) and Crna Marija (Black Maria, 1986, directed by Milan Živković). The band’s music videos, produced in collaboration with the directors Stanko Crnobrnja, Predrag Perišić and Milutin Petrović, introduced a novel visual aesthetic in the 1980s. For instance, in an early video for their song “Aut” (Out), filmed for the show Petkom u 22 (Friday at Ten), Mladenović, Stefanović, and the bassist Bojan Pečar are filmed in a white studio with mirrors, sitting on the floor, talking and laughing. The viewers, however, can only hear their song, and

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this “unheard” conversation contributed to the public perception of a cool in-group aloofness counterbalanced by their childlike playfulness. In 1984, the art historian Dunja Blažević produced a short film that featured a medley of EKV’s songs for the show TV Galerija (TV Gallery, 1984–91). Blažević’s work on TV Galerija was regarded as an important “document of the interdisciplinary, socially engaged, artistic, custodian and production practice – a paramount model for the concept of public television and the role of contemporary art in it” (Pantelić 2008). By showcasing EKV in her TV Galerija, Blažević helped codify their public perception as an artistic band. The video begins with the song “A Message to You Rudy” (1979) by the Specials playing in the background; we see Stefanović sitting at a table with a text projected over her face, stating that “We were supposed to talk here about ourselves, our work and plans . . . but it turned out that we’re okay. So now we are looking for an audience.” In the next ten minutes, the band members are shown in a series of bizarre, dream-like scenes with Stefanović playing the piano along with the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem, in a spooky house with a nicely dressed boy. Pečar, Stefanović, and the boy then eat dinner to bird noises; the “Dies Irae” returns, with the boy wearing a spotty shirt and a hat with a red star, pointing a gun at the similarly dressed Pečar, with the caption: “I will kill you, filthy capitalist!” Stefanović and Pečar make love behind a glass panel, with the boy watching, and eventually the boy’s face morphs into Mladenović’s. As EKV’s song “Radostan dan” (A Joyous Day, from their debut album Katarina II) begins to play, black-and-white scenes from WWII are mixed with color shots of Mladenović and Stefanović acting as members of a resistance army, in a room saturated with communist iconography; the episode transitions into a scene in which Stefanović is beaten up and covered in blood, while the song changes to EKV’s “Treba da se čisti” (Cleaning Required), before we see Mladenović alone in a basement, contemplating what had happened there. This short, almost mini-surrealist film documented an entirely new approach to visual reinterpretation of recorded music, contributing to the band’s multilayered narrative and artistic mystique. Moreover, despite the open questioning of communist iconography, the video did not arouse political concerns with TV producers, editors or the majority of viewers, suggesting that Yugoslav television in the mid-1980s was much less restrictive than is commonly assumed. Another video for EKV’s 1985 song “Oči boje meda” (Eyes the Color of Honey) from their second album, directed by Miljenko Dereta, gained cult status in Belgrade’s media community. Perceived as overtly eroticized, not only because it exploited Stefanović’s sultry allure but also that of Mladenović, the drummer Ivan Fece Firči, and particularly the bass player, Pečar. “Oči boje meda” is a seductive ballad in 4/4 meter, marked by a prominent use of synthesizers, especially in the instrumental buildup toward the end. Mladenović sings the first two verses in his low baritone register, while the third verse (the repeated first) is sung in a high tenor range, following a synthesizer solo. The video begins with a voyeuristic camera shot, through a dimly lit flat, accompanied by Mladenović’s sexual cries, before we enter the red-lit bedroom where Stefanović rolls in a bed, apparently dreaming of all three men. She gets dressed, and we see a sequence of events where she drives through the city and encounters different band members, until she finally seduces Pečar. The entire video has palpable S&M overtones (red lights, black leather, phallic props, steel nets, mirrors), reinforced by the lyrics “I will lower a drop of my water on your meat-colored lips, I will release a voice from my throat: Ouch, ouch, ouch!” The melancholic black-and-white video shot for the ballad “Par godina za nas” (A Few Years for Us) from their eponymous 1989 album turned out to be prophetic. Directed by Vladimir Aleksić, this was their last major hit before the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The video, set against the bass-heavy, repetitive guitar riff, and austere arrangement, shows Mladenović, Stefanović,

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Figure 8.2  Record sleeve of EKV’s album Ekatarina Velika (1985)

Pečar, and the drummer Srđan Todorović walking down the rainy streets of Belgrade. The on-site video is interspersed with scenes from John Huston’s film Across the Pacific (1942) and of randomly selected documentary clips from Yugoslavia and the world, of military raids and arrests, broken homes, poverty and slums, refugee camps and workers’ marches. In hindsight, the video may have foreshadowed not only the war in Yugoslavia and its horrific effects, but also the subsequent tragic demise of all members of EKV: the band leader Mladenović passed away in 1994, having already lost his drummer Vdović in 1992, followed by Pečar in 1998, the drummer Dušan Dejanović in 2000, and finally Stefanović in 2002. Although their quest for authenticity, achieved by merging rock ‘n’ roll with poetry, film, and video art, was often mistaken for pretentiousness, EKV remains immensely influential, both as an object of cult devotion and as one of the best examples of late Yugoslav art-rock mainstream.

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Rambo Amadeus While EKV became a cult symbol among cool urban youth in the 1980s, Rambo Amadeus brought an entirely different aesthetic onto the Yugoslav scene. His real name, Antonije Pušić, already had potential for a pun: the posh-sounding Antonije belied the suggested diminutive for “smoking” or “blowing” of his surname, Pušić. Similarly, his alias Rambo Amadeus obviously conflates Sylvester Stallone’s character Rambo with the composer Mozart – creating a hybrid that perfectly captured his combination of unabashedly vulgar yet hilarious sociopolitical satire, both self-consciously ironic and musically eclectic. From the outset, Rambo Amadeus used music video effectively to highlight his witty lyrics and incompatible musical concoctions. He burst onto the Yugoslav scene in 1988 with the debut album O tugo jesenja (Oh, Autumn Sorrow), and his first music video for the song “Fala ti, majko” (Thank You, Mother) was a remarkable public stunt that quickly established Rambo’s peculiar anti-aesthetics. The lyrics praise Rambo’s parents for giving birth to him and raising him to be a normal guy who loves women. The music is based on the famous riff from Deep Purple’s song “Smoke on the Water”: Rambo raps his verses, and then switches to a nasal, quasi-Oriental style of singing that parodies commercial folk singers, accompanied by a children’s choir who sing a slightly modified version of the popular children’s song “Kad bi svi ljudi na svijetu” (If All People in the World [Would]). The video is suitably humorous, showing Rambo in a dual role as a television presenter who reads the lyrics and in a variety of everyday situations (e.g., as a waiter at a holiday resort, a Rambo-clad guy, and a lad trying to win over girls on the beach). He mockingly described his own style as “turbo-folk” − an oxymoron that soon labeled a whole new pop-folk genre in the 1990s, much to Rambo’s dismay. In an interview for the web portal Lupiga, he explained that he coined the term “turbo-folk” as a label for his style of auto-irony, to capture the “phenomenon that occurs when a primitive man conquers technology” (Fuka, Benačić, and Tomičić 2015). While his first album mostly dealt with Rambo’s sexual exploits and parodied stereotypical Balkan men, his second album Hoćemo gusle! (We Want the Gusle!, 1989) is replete with satirical, political, and social commentaries. The title of this album humorously referenced the 1989 protests as “anti-bureaucratic revolution” in Montenegro. As reported by Dejan Jović (2004, 301): A public scandal broke out when the then Zagreb Television (now Croatian Television) reported that, at a rally in Podgorica (then Titograd) in 1989, Milošević supporters had demanded help from the Russians. Allegedly, they chanted: “We want the Russians” (Hoćemo Ruse). The organizers denied this, saying that Milošević’s supporters chanted Hoćemo gusle (not Ruse) [We want gusle, not Russians]. Rambo’s music videos at the time solidified his status as Yugoslavia’s resident jester. In the autoironic song “Balkan Boy” (from Hoćemo gusle!), Rambo reflects on his newfound success. The video shows him with a male buddy, seated next to a boiling caldron evocative of an outdoor peasant activity, narrating his own story of becoming a pop star; he raps over a funk-rock instrumental matrix, combined with the gusle (a one-string bowed Balkan fiddle used to accompany the singing of epic songs). In the refrain he declares, “I’m a Balkan boy, because I stink of sweat, sooner or later, I’ll be yours,” which musically breaks into the Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Another song “Samit u buregdžinici Lajbah” (A Summit at the Pie-Shop Laibach), from the same album, mocks the Slovenian band Laibach, whose heavy industrial sound and provocative lyrics were part of the dissident artistic collective the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).

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Figure 8.3  Cassette sleeve of Rambo Amadeus’s album O tugo jesenja (1988)

Laibach’s art was based on symbols drawn from totalitarian or extreme nationalist movements, often re-appropriating totalitarian kitsch for parodies of the cult of Tito and communist ideology. Rambo, in turn, parodies Laibach, as well as the Montenegrin stereotyped folk-national traditions. Rambo and his cohort are clad in traditional Montenegrin folk costumes, slowly marching to the mausoleum on the Lovćen mountain  – the site of Montengrin national pride and patriotism. Shot in black-and-white, the video parodies Laibach’s morbid iconography, but also echoes Laibach’s military sound and deep, growling vocals, for a solemn performance in front of the mausoleum: he juxtaposes lyrics that combine the poetry of Serbian Romantic poets Laza Kostić and Desanka Maksimović with the kafana-style folk song “Čaše lomim, ruke mi krvave” (I’m Breaking Glasses, My Hands are Bloody, 1972), originally sung by the Roma singer Nezir Eminovski. Another song, “Amerika i Engleska (biće zemlja proleterska)” (America and England

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[Will Be Proletarian Countries]) is a duet between Rambo and Bora Đorđević, the leader of the Belgrade hard rock band Riblja čorba. As Rasmussen observes, in this song, “based on a rap-style delivery of lyrics and a repetitive bass line . . . [t]he motives of one-string, bowed gusle (old peasantry), newly composed folk music (urban peasantry), Schlager-pop (bourgeois class), and Partisan marches and cartoon characters (revolutionary class), are all juxtaposed to create a highly readable critique-parody of the communist rhetoric lingering over Yugoslavia’s disintegration and socialist/capitalist relations at the end of the decade” (Rasmussen 2007, 67). The song is accompanied by an appropriately cacophonous low-resolution video that mixes typical communist imagery with scenes of agricultural work, Partisan children’s comics, Karl Marx in a Warholian pop-art collage, military personnel dancing, and images of Tito and Lenin transformed into capitalist brand logos. The Hoćemo gusle! album was released only nine days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which coincidentally foreshadowed not only the fall of communism but also the breakup of Yugoslavia. Rambo’s 1991 album Psihološko-propagandni komplet M-91 (Psychological Propaganda Set M-91), which parodied the military rhetoric that saturated the public and media discourse in the country, was his last album released just before the onset of the Yugoslav wars. Rambo’s ominous commentary is full of profanities and samples from the existing cultural repertory. In a song with a title borrowed from the Partisan song, “Hej vojnici, vazduhoplovci” (Hey Soldiers, Aviators), he samples a prototype turbo-folk song “Izdali me prijatelji” (My Friends Betrayed Me, 1991), performed by Bosnian neofolk singer Šemsa Suljaković and Serbian Južni Vetar band, appropriating the original lyrics to effect political commentary: “I was betrayed by friends and my brother, I have lost all my battles, but I’m still fighting the war.” At the other end of the low-high culture spectrum, his song “Smrt popa Mila Jovovića” (The Death of Reverend Milo Jovović) is based on an obscure poem by the Montenegrin poet Božo Đuranović, which depicts Montenegrin heroism against the Ottoman invaders: the rap/hip hop matrix is complemented again by the sound of the gusle while the video, shot in sepia, embeds scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, depicting another historical battle. The viewers, once again, are left with the sense of warning about the inevitability of impeding war, but also the futility of ethnonationalism underscored by Rambo’s tireless satire and parody of the Balkans. Conclusion From the 1960s to the 1980s, music videos in Yugoslavia progressed from simple black-and-white clips with limited narrative to fully developed formats, and even experimental short films, that offered layers of musical meanings and challenged audience reception of pop-rock music. My three chosen examples demonstrate just some of the possibilities that existed for creating music videos within the technical and financial constraints of Yugoslavia’s national television network. Without such music videos, Yugoslav audiences would not have experienced Lisac as a vocally and visually unique female artist who defied patriarchal notions of femininity, while gradually establishing the status of a respected and admired artist; EKV’s transition from an underground band to media-driven popularity accompanied by increasingly pretentious, provocative and cryptic videos might not have been so successful without the videos, which not only helped cement their public perception as a distinctly urban visionary band but also helped transform the genre from a mere illustration of the song into a self-contained art form of short films; and Rambo Amadeus’s parody of Montenegrin, Yugoslav, and Balkan national myths, and his self-branding as the country’s resident jester greatly depended on videos, which were used not only to demystify

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the artistic pretensions of Yugoslav popular culture but also to highlight the social and political schism that soon led to Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Music videos are therefore a testament to the development of technical possibilities and changes in visual aesthetics within the institutional framework of the Yugoslav national television, and they also reflect the transformation of Yugoslav society and its media culture from the early rock ‘n’ roll days in the late 1960s through to its final chapter at the turn of the 1990s. Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was financed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.

Notes 1. See Janjatović 2001; Arsenije 2006; Bjelica 2007; Ilić 2008; Vrdoljak 2008; Rigonat 2011; Raković 2012; Ivačković 2013; Vesić 2014; Nikolić 2014; Pogačar 2015; Petrov 2016. 2. TV Zagreb was the first Yugoslav TV studio, which began on September 3, 1956, followed by TV Belgrade (August 23, 1958) and TV Ljubljana (October 11, 1958). In late 1958 transmitters were built that enabled the introduction of a joint TV program for the entire country, called Yugoslav Radio Television (JRT). The first joint program was broadcast on November 28, 1958. 3. For a comprehensive overview of the development of music videos and other similar television formats see Šentevska 2014, esp. 495–516; Austerlitz 2007; Keazor and Wübbena 2010. 4. A conversation between Nikola Karaklajić and Zoran Modli, Radio show Zakon akcije i reakcije (The Law of Action and Reaction), No. 854, aired on March 4, 2017. Full audio available at www.prviprvinaskali.com/clanci/radion/zair/ zakon-akcije-i-reakcije-854.html (the conversation begins at 46'30", in Serbian). 5. Ivačković 2013, 113. See also Perić 2017. 6. The following are the most representative shows, according to the date they were first broadcast: Rokenroler (Rocknroller) JRT, 1980; directed by Boris Miljković and Branimir Dimitrijević, a.k.a. Boris & Tucko; editor Radoslav Graić. Beograd noću (Belgrade by Night); TV Belgrade, 1981; directed by Stanko Crnobrnja; starring Oliver Mandić; visual concept Kosta Bunuševac. Petkom u 22 (Friday at 10pm), TV Belgrade, 1981; directed by Stanko Crnobrnja and Predrag Perišić; editor Zora Korać. Nedjeljni zabavnik (Sunday Entertainer), TV Sarajevo, 1983; edited and directed by Slobodan Svrzo, Slobodan Terzić, and Ubavka Jakšić. Hit meseca (the Hit of the Month), TV Belgrade, 1985; music videos and skits written by Milutin Petrović, Zlatan Fazlagić, and Vladimir Đurić; directed by Mihajlo Vukobratović, Stanko Crnobrnja, Milutin Petrović, Dušan Ristić, Zoran Fezo, Vladimir Slavica, Goran Gajić et al.; editor Mladen Popović; presented by Dubravka Marković. Stereovizija (Stereovision), TV Zagreb, 1985; directed by Pjer Žardin; screenplay by Milan Trenc; editor Žarko Černjul; hosted by Silvester Vrbanac. Dobre vibracije (Good Vibrations), TV Sarajevo, 1985; directed by Slobodan Svrzo. Formula 1, TV Belgrade, 1985; editor Jelica Zupanc; directed by Stanko Crnobrnja, Jugoslav Đorđević, Vojkan Borisavljević and Predrag Perišić. Rock oko (Rock Eye), TV Sarajevo, 1985; directed by Vuk Janjić and Ibrahim Ganović. Crna ovca (Black Sheep), TV Sarajevo, 1986; directed by Slobodan Svrzo.

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Discography Amadeus, Rambo. O tugo jesenja. PGP RTB 210196, 1988, 33⅓ rpm. Amadeus, Rambo. Hoćemo gusle! PGP RTB 210803, 1989, 33⅓ rpm. Amadeus, Rambo. Psihološko propagandni komplet M-91. PGP RTB 211257, 1991, 33⅓ rpm. Ekatarina Velika. Ekatarina Velika. ZKP RTVLj LD 1257, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Ekatarina Velika. Samo par godina za nas. PGP RTB 210595, 1989, 33⅓ rpm. Katarina II. Katarina II. ZKP RTVLj LD 0954, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Lisac, Josipa. Dnevnik jedne ljubavi. Jugoton LPYS 60956, 1973, 33⅓ rpm. Lisac, Josipa. “Omer beže”/“Niz polje idu, babo.” Jugoton SY 22524, 1974, 45 rpm. Lisac, Josipa. Hir, hir, hir. Jugoton LSY 68066, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Lisac, Josipa. Lisica. Jugoton LSY 63136, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Lisac, Josipa. “Danas sam luda”/“Lažeš da si moj.” Jugoton SY 24235, 1987, 45 rpm. Lisac, Josipa. Boginja. Jugoton LSY 10029, 1987, 33⅓ rpm. Metikoš, Karlo, Ivica Krajač and Miljenko Prohaska. Gubec Beg, Jugoton LSY63037, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Žeteoci. To nije tajna. Jugoton/Glas Koncila ULPV S 7, 1969, 33⅓.

Filmography Marković, Goran, dir. Tajvanska kanasta (Taiwan Canasta). Centar Film/Belgrade, 1985. Pavlović, Živojin, dir. Kad budem mrtav i beo (When I’m Dead and Gone). Filmska radna zajednica/Belgrade, 1967. Živković, Milan, dir. Crna Marija (Black Maria). Film danas/Belgrade, 1986.

9

Bijelo Dugme

The Politics of Remembrance Within the Post-Yugoslav Popular Music Scene Ana Petrov

In his reminiscences on Yugoslavia, a former Portuguese ambassador in Yugoslavia, Alvaro Guerra, asked “What does it mean when someone declares that he/she is an ex Yugoslav?” (Gera 2015, 7). If a country is labeled “ex” or “former,” does that suggest that its people and their experiences, memories, and shared culture are also “former”? Given that Yugoslavia is conventionally regarded as “departed” (Perković 2011) and “late” (Velikonja 2015, 366–98), how do we deal with its cultural legacy? While Yugoslavia has ceased to exist, the experience of being Yugoslav is still deeply felt by many, and Yugoslav popular music especially demonstrates the ongoing currency of the “Yugoslav idea.” In particular, the rock band Bijelo dugme from Sarajevo (active 1974–89), were not only regarded as the most popular band in socialist Yugoslavia, but remain a powerful Yugoslav symbol even after the country’s dissolution. The band’s discography includes nine studio albums, four live albums, four video albums, three box sets, and numerous compilations that were created more or less continuously from 1974 until the present day. In this chapter I examine how Bijelo dugme’s enduring popularity, embedded in their career during the socialist period, became emblematic for Yugoslavia’s pop culture, past and present. Following an overview of Bijelo dugme’s rise to fame during the 1970s and 1980s, the focus of my chapter will be on how their post-Yugoslav reunion concerts engage audiences in sentimental remembrance of the shared Yugoslav past. The principal question addressed through the lens of Bijelo dugme is: do we in fact love that past, do we escape from it, or do we make some new collectivities through our love of the music from the past? Bijelo Dugme as a Yugoslav Phenomenon According to many writers, even in the late 1960s, Yugoslav music still “blindly mimicked” the American and British rock artists of the late 1950s and 1960s (Tomc 2003, 447) – a situation that made Bijelo dugme’s impact all the greater in 1974. Their blend of hard rock and recognizable folk patterns created a new soundworld that was no longer an Anglo-American derivative but rather an authentic local response to the spirit of rock music. It was this new soundworld that led the music critic Dražen Vrdoljak to coin the term “pastirski rock” (shepherd rock), as a label for Bijelo Dugme’s blend of rock music and Yugoslav folk/peasant sensibilities introduced in 111

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their first album Kad bi’ bio bijelo dugme (If I Were a White Button, 1974).1 The band’s unprecedented popularity also generated frequent references to “Dugmemania,” a Yugoslav equivalent to Beatlemania. The scale of their fame is perhaps best reflected by the 1977 concert at Hajdučka česma, held at Topčider Park in Belgrade. The concert, which had free admission, was attended by an estimated 100,000 spectators – a phenomenon never before seen in the history of Yugoslav rock (Janjatović 2007, 33). The concert, which was organized in only five days (Vesić 2014b, 135), was enthusiastically received by the audience, and described as “therapeutic” and “magical” (Luković 1989, 312), remains one of the greatest spectacles in Yugoslavia’s rock history.2 For the leading music journalist Petar Luković and music producer Hrvoje Markulj, it was the combination of folk-infused musical appeal and the image of rock stars who promoted socialist values that made Bijelo dugme attractive for a broad section of Yugoslav society (Luković 1989, 305; Markulj 2014, 94–98). Following a stint of early gigging days in Italy, the band, adorned in glam-rock outfits, emerged on the Yugoslav scene in 1974 through the leading Yugoslav rock festival BOOM, held in Ljubljana (1972–78). They performed the song “Ove ću noći naći bluz” (Tonight I’m Going to Find the Blues), a slow bluesy number with no local folk influences. It was the hard-rock song “Top,” however, featured on the A-side of the band’s first single released months earlier that introduced unmistakably Bosnian folkloric motifs, an idea replicated on their third single “Da sam pekar,” and subsequently their first album Kad bi’ bio bijelo dugme (If I Were a White Button), all released in 1974. In the eponymous album, the opening recording of birds and animals evokes a rural setting, reinforced by the folk-inflected vocal delivery and lyrics, combined with guitar riffs that remind of galloping horses, prog-rock inspired organ, and distorted guitar solos. With this album, the pastirski-rock idiom functioned as a symbolic referent for multiple identities, foregrounding Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian traditions. It helped shape the pop mainstream that reflected the core Yugoslav ideal of “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo) (see Dobrivojević 2010, 119–32). Moreover, the band leader Bregović often declared his own pro-Yugoslav orientation in numerous interviews, and the band clearly capitalized on this artistically. In the first critical review of the band’s early single releases, Sarajevo rock critic Ognjen Tvrtković was the first to praise Bregović for tastefully using motives from Bosnian folk music, and for forging the band’s “original sound” through combining Yugoslav folk traditions and hard-rock (Tvrtković 1974, 29); Vrdoljak and Glavan further elaborated on the concept of “pastirski rock” in their 1981 interview-based monograph Ništa mudro (Nothing Wise). It is not clear why this fusion of folk and rock music later proved controversial, because other Yugoslav bands and musicians preceding Bijelo dugme effectively used folk sources, notably Belgrade-based YU Grupa in their 1972 song “Kosovski božuri” (Kosovo Peonies), and the Sarajevo-based producer Nikola Borota Radovan (Jovanović 2014, 173–92), who had a penchant for simple folk-tinged pop songs (e.g., early Neda Ukraden songs), and with whom Bijelo dugme collaborated in their early days (Vesić 2014b, 47). An answer may partly lie in Bijelo dugme’s extraordinary commercial success, which elevated folk music to a position of pop-cultural relevance. By the late 1970s, however, Bijelo dugme went from the first domestic rock stars to subjects of scandal and censorship. For instance, their fourth studio album Bitanga i princeza (A Brute and a Princess, 1979), produced by the British Neil Harrison and mastered in Abbey Road Studios in London, initially had a cover featuring a female leg kicking a male’s genital area, which was rejected by Jugoton as “vulgar” (Janjatović 2007, 33), possibly due to the more conservative cultural climate in the late 1970s. Certain verses were also considered unacceptable by the recording house, and were either excluded (e.g., “what the [fuck] is wrong with me” [koji mi je moj]),

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Figure 9.1  Record sleeve of Bijelo dugme’s single Ne gledaj me tako i ne ljubi me više (1975)

or changed (e.g., “Christ was a bastard and a wretch” [Hrist je bio kopile i jad] became “he was a bastard and a wretch” [on je bio kopile i jad]) (Ibid., 33). According to Bijelo dugme’s biographer Dušan Vesić (2014b), the rock-folk hybrid has remained the band’s signature aesthetic, even though shepherd rock was just one phase in the band’s several stylistic transformations. The second phase began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the emergence of the Yugoslav new wave (novi val or novi talas). Bregović was influenced by the trend, especially by the works of Croatian bands Azra and Prljavo kazalište (Vesić 2014b, 183). The band shed their hard-rock image in favor of a sleeker 1980s vogue, but their songs also became more political, as evidenced in their 1980 album Doživjeti stotu (To Live to Be a Hundred), which reflected the changing political climate after Tito’s death in 1980. According to a commentator in the 1994 documentary on Bijelo dugme, Tito died, and the new wave spread

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from Zagreb and Belgrade, addressing political topics and bringing innovative stylistic solutions. Musically, the album Doživjeti stotu introduced the characteristic 2-Tone style and ska themes, for instance in the song “Ha, ha, ha” (see Chapter 6, p. 78).3 The band’s political engagement became more pronounced with the rise of nationalism in the 1980s. After the 1981 Albanian riots in Serbia’s province of Kosovo,4 the band made a love song in the Albanian language, simply titled “Kosovska” (Kosovo Song), for their 1984 album Bijelo dugme: since the protests were organized by Kosovo Albanians, the act of recording a song in Albanian was a clear act in support of the Albanian people in Kosovo. Bregović saw this song as “a logical statement” on inclusion, given that Albanians were an integral part of Yugoslavia’s culture (Vesić 2014a, 119–33). Even though “Kosovska” was a love song, it was widely perceived as a political statement simply because it was written and sung in Albanian – a rare gesture in mainstream rock dominated by the Serbo-Croatian language of the majority. Even though the band promoted an inclusive Yugoslavism, the authorities did not see it that way. In fact, “Kosovska” aligned with other symbolic acts of resistance, such as the band hoisting black and red colors in their concerts, was seen to satirically imply links between Nazism and communism, according to Bregović (in Ramet 1994, 135). Against the backdrop of escalating ethnonationalism, however, “Kosovska” became perceived as an anti-communist and anti-Serbian statement. The Kosovo song influenced a number of bands from Sarajevo, who became known as the New Partisans, which is also identified with Bijelo dugme’s final stylistic phase. The New Partisans used music to comment on the deepening political crisis in the country, highlighting the disconnect between the WWII Partisan ideals and the fraught ethnonational tensions in the 1980s (see Mišina 2010, 265–89). The 1986 song “Pljuni i zapjevaj, moja Jugoslavijo” (Spit and Sing, My Yugoslavia) epitomizes Bijelo dugme’s New Partisan phase by evoking the Partisan revolutionary struggle for shared nationhood. It borrows parts from the Partisan song “Padaj silo i nepravdo” (Fall [Yee] Force and Injustice) and retains the anthem-like delivery sharpened by the husky vocals of the new lead singer, Alen Islamović, who makes emotionally charged calls to Yugoslavia as his mother, his heart, his old house, his bride, his beauty, his poor queen, his “Juga” (often an endearing nickname for Yugoslavia) and “Jugica” (the diminutive of Juga).5 The song is a plea for Yugoslav people to listen to the warning about the impending breakup and that “those who do not listen to the song will listen to the storm.” During Bijelo dugme’s final concert appearances in 1988 and 1989, the band members reportedly noticed the heated nationalist atmosphere among the audience. For example, during certain concerts in Croatia, the audience booed and protested when the band performed their pro-­ Yugoslav songs. Also, separate national flags for secessionist republics started to appear at their performances (Vesić 2014b, 291; see also full interview with Bregović in the Afterword of this book). It became clear that despite the New Partisan attempts to engage with the Yugoslav crisis through music, the ethnonationalist forces had taken a stronger hold, which spiraled into Yugoslav wars during the 1990s: the country disintegrated, and it seemed, so did Bijelo dugme. Bijelo Dugme Deluxe: (Re)constructing Popular Music After Yugoslavia With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the music markets quickly responded to the new circumstances, where musicians now began to promote separate national identities against their communist and ethnic “others” (Baker 2010, 175). Some musicians continued to give concerts across former Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s (including the war years, 1991–95), provoking both

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intense emotional reactions among the audience and conflicting opinions in the media. Most controversial in this regard were those musicians who became politically engaged during the war, or were somehow politically “marked,” namely for performing in support of soldiers or their newly elected leaders. Some of the notable examples in Croatia were Tereza Kesovija and Doris Dragović, in Serbia Svetlana Ražnatović Ceca, and in Bosnia Dino Merlin. Given Serbia’s military campaigns in Croatia and Bosnia, many musicians refused to perform in Serbia after the cessation of the war in Bosnia in 1995, most notably the distinguished Croatian zabavna-pop singer Oliver Dragojević. Even though his refusal to perform in Serbia led to a negative appraisal of his political stance in Serbia’s public discourses, he remains a hugely popular artist among Serbian audiences to this day (Petrov 2015, 192). Notwithstanding the war challenges, the pan-Yugoslav music market did not disintegrate completely. Instead, the continued consumption of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cultural products, including concerts by former Yugoslav stars, challenged the borders between the new national cultural practices and markets. Even during the 1990s, despite the cessation of official relations and artist collaborations, newly produced music was widely distributed through illegal markets. Both during the 1990s, and especially after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended in 1995, a renewed interest in Bijelo dugme was evident in a host of journalistic texts, books, and documentaries, which must have influenced the band to reform and play again. In 1994 Radio Television Serbia (RTS) produced a multi-part documentary about the band titled Nakon svih ovih godina (After All These Years), and in 2010 Igor Stoimenov directed the well-received documentary Bijelo dugme. There were also numerous TV shows featuring the band, usually to plug their forthcoming concerts. The RTS documentary clearly partook in the myth-making of Bijelo dugme, including statements by prominent Yugoslav public figures, such as music journalists, directors of music publishing houses, famous actors, and musicians. The most illustrative revivalist example is the luxurious Bijelo dugme Box Set Deluxe released in 2014 by Croatia Records (formerly Jugoton), priced around 200 euros, which is out of reach for many casual buyers. It contains all of the band’s albums, both on CDs and records, a documentary, a book, and numerous original documents, such as copies of their contracts with Jugoton, as well as a calendar with the album covers. It promotes Bijelo dugme as one of the greatest successes of Yugoslav popular culture – a critical appraisal complemented by the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of the band to date by Dušan Vesić (2014b), published in both Zagreb and Belgrade with wide regional distribution. The Concerts, Remembrance, and Producing Collectivities For some critics, the post-Yugoslav phase of “Dugmemania” is seen as a logical continuation of the band’s popularity (Janjatović 2014). Since late 1990s, Bregović performs in concerts all over the world with his Weddings and Funerals Orchestra – a large ensemble of musicians consisting of a brass band, bagpipes, string ensemble, a tuxedo-clad all-male choir, folk singers wearing traditional Bulgarian costumes, and Roma musicians. He also gathered some former members of Bijelo dugme to give concerts periodically across the territories of former Yugoslavia. The big comeback concerts started in 2005, and even though Bregović has stated on numerous occasions that he did not plan to officially reunite Bijelo dugme, the 2005 comeback was an ambitious reunion tour that brought together most current and former members of the band: Bregović on lead guitar; the singers Željko Bebek, Mladen Vojičić Tifa, and Alen Islamović; Zoran Redžić

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on bass guitar; Milić Vukašinović and Điđi Jankelić on drums; and Vlado Pravdić and Laza Ristovski on keyboards. They held three concerts in the largest concert venues, in Sarajevo’s Koševo stadium, in Zagreb’s Maksimir stadium, and in Belgrade’s Hippodrome. While the Sarajevo and Zagreb concerts attracted around 60,000 and 70,000 spectators, respectively, the Belgrade concert had over 200,000 attendees. The live album Turneja 2005: Sarajevo, Zagreb, Beograd (The 2005 Tour – Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade) was recorded on tour and released in 2006, which was the band’s first release since their last 1988 studio album Ćiribiribela (excluding compilation albums). During 2014/15, Bregović marked forty years since the formation of the band, re-releasing their first album Kad bi’ bio Bijelo dugme, and gave a series of concerts with his Weddings and Funerals Orchestra featuring Islamović as the vocalist. Although this was announced as a Bijelo dugme event, only a few original members performed the music vaguely reminiscent of the band’s style. Nonetheless, all these concerts were perceived as important for both the band members and the audiences, as a way of reconnecting collectivities after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. People who used to live together in Yugoslavia were now reunited in a shared physical space, listening to the same music. Moreover, fans from Serbia went to the Zagreb concert, and Zagreb youth traveled to Belgrade to see the band perform live. On numerous occasions (both in 2005 and later) Bregović highlighted how audiences with different national backgrounds sang together at these concerts, despite the recent turmoil. In 2014, announcing one of the upcoming concerts in Novi Sad, he stated: “We are together because we sing certain songs together, not as Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Muslims, but as us who sing those songs together [even] after everything [that has happened].”6 Similar statements were commonly made by audiences that I  interviewed at the Bijelo dugme concerts in Belgrade in 2005 and 2016, and on internet sites dedicated to Yugoslav popular music. The numerous concerts held by different artists from Yugoslavia’s successor states in Belgrade during the 2000s inspired nostalgic narratives, and music was invested with the huge power of continuing the “golden Yugoslav past.” All concerts triggered the memories of the losses – their shared country, people, one’s youth, and the old way of life. Moreover, my research based on participant observation and the press media (Petrov 2016) shows that, in some concerts, Yugonostalgia recalled other shared experiences, such as romantic relationships, friendships, and travels; even when concerts themselves were poorly executed, positive recollections of the past were invoked merely through the act of listening to live music from the Yugoslav era.7 Despite the extensive preparation and great expectations for Bijelo dugme’s 2005 Belgrade concert, it generated conflicting opinions, both in the media and among the audience. The event was promoted as a reunion, and also a farewell concert of sorts, since the band never officially split up, but rather stopped performing and recording just before the war.8 The press probed the three-hour concert “spectacle” with enormous crowds, while among the audiences the reception varied. Some spectators complained about the concert space and the patchy acoustics at the Belgrade Hippodrome, where some could hardly hear the music. Others enjoyed the concert, despite the actual performance, most likely because it was enough to merely be there, regardless of the quality. For others, the poor concert organization and sound quality, as well as the actual performances, were symptomatic of the failed idea of Yugoslavia.9 The bad sound was seen as a reflection of the bad times (“loša vremena”) and the fact that Bijelo dugme’s music could not survive its country’s demise. As another online commentator (username Lane sa korane) put it: “With this concert, the last illusion of remaking some new Yuga disappeared . . . I said good bye to my homeland during that evening with dignity, I shed a few tears . . . Good bye, Yuga, good bye

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Dugme, and good bye my youth.”10 This comment was part of an online discussion on whether the concert was genuinely “Dugme-like” or a reflection of Bregović’s post-Dugme career path, which for some represents a radical departure from the heyday of the band’s rock aesthetics. Others rebuffed such criticism, in favor of love, enjoyment, and recognition of the band’s legacy. Username Hush 1987 wrote: Laza is lost, Bregović can’t play, Milić doesn’t count, Tifa is falling apart, but to me, it is all natural and honest, the way it should be and the way it is today. . . . Bijelo dugme is history, a phenomenon, and the concert is a farewell concert to the past. I was there; I loved, I jumped, I cried. . . . It is Bijelo dugme.11 The concert generated further discussions online, via YouTube video uploads of full concert performances, which became another key platform for producing post-Yugoslav collectivities, in which internet users challenge the physical and symbolic borders enacted after Yugoslavia’s dissolution, and express resistance to nationalist agendas of successor governments. For instance, their responses commonly suggest that the band remains both a cultural institution and a potent metaphor for “good music” loved by “all” in socialist times – opinions prevalent among younger generations who were not born in Yugoslavia, and who often claim they are apolitical.12 For them, music serves as a measure of the quality of life in socialist Yugoslavia, as a form of Hirsch’s “post-memory” (Hirsch 2008, 103; see also Hirsch 2012): they learn from other peoples’ memories (usually from parents), often embracing both positive recollections and intentional ignorance of the past. In the case of Bijelo dugme, they almost exclusively express positive attitudes toward the Yugoslav past. According to another commentator, Nikola, listening to Bijelo dugme is “an escape, at least for two or three hours to have some rest from the present,” a reminder for many that the Yugoslav times were marked by “true friendship and love, without borders” (username tweety tweety tweety). Nikola also noted that “the reason we look to the past instead of the present and the future [is because] those qualities do not exist anymore.” The Yugonostalgic narratives often endorse love centered on enjoyment of certain products (physical or virtual), which illustrate love for the former country (Hofman 2009; Petrov 2016), while consciously forgetting or ignoring the war. Responses in these Yugo-nostalgic threads do contain occasional nationalist intolerance. On the whole, however, the strong affection for Bijelo dugme testifies to fans’ affirmative attitude toward the Yugoslav past. As Martin Pogačar (2016, 105–6) observes, the internet offers conditions for “enhanced immediacy of remembering,” where people can quickly and easily share and reconstruct collective memories. Arguably, internet and social media have proved the greatest platforms for former Yugoslavs, many displaced since the 1990s, to re-connect and communicate in a more relaxed fashion than is possible in their countries of origin since the 1990s. Conclusion The phenomenon of Bijelo dugme highlights the complex ways in which the post-Yugoslav music scene continues its afterlife. As my research indicates, the band’s music fulfilled varied roles in its re-enactment of the past. Love and forgiveness shape Yugonostalgia to a large degree, as a framework for re-experiencing the socialist past, while mediating the traumatic war period. The concerts evoke the utopian image of the “better past,” but also share and network their

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alternative narratives. In November 2016, Bijelo dugme organized another reunion concert in Belgrade Arena, and with 20,000 tickets sold, they offered two additional concerts. Although the sold-out concerts were once again labeled as both “spectacles” and “Yugonostalgic,”13 they suggest that Bijelo dugme is here to stay. As the press headlines put it: “Everything changes, only Dugme lasts.”14 Yugoslav popular music appears to be one of the strongest bonds between the various generations and communities who now live in neighboring but separate countries. By 2016, large segments of the old Yugoslav music scene have been revitalized. Musicians who were popular before the war continue to perform regularly across the former Yugoslavia, including Boris Novković, Goran Karan, Massimo Savić, and Josipa Lisac (all from Croatia), as well as the groups Crvena jabuka and Hari Mata Hari (from Bosnia and Herzegovina), to name a few. One of first singers to do this was the Serbian Đorđe Balašević, who gave concerts in Slovenia in the early 1990s, and in Sarajevo in 1998, and who is generally recognized as a “transnational” musical figure (Baker 2006, 275), along with Momčilo Bajagić Bajaga (Serbia) and Zdravko Čolić (a Belgrade-based singer, originally from Sarajevo). Čolić even had concerts in Priština (Kosovo) in the late 1990s, at a time when hardly anyone from Serbia performed there due to the highly strained relations between Serbia and the Albanian majority. Nowadays, most former Yugoslav stars perform across the region, even those who insisted they would not perform in Serbia, most notably Tereza Kesovija (from Croatia) and Dino Merlin (from Bosnia and Herzegovina), who now regularly perform in Belgrade. All this points to the fact that Yugoslav music has not only survived the dissolution of the country in which it was made, but also serves as one of the strongest forms of post-conflict resolution in the region. Notes 1. Vrdoljak first referred to “pastirski” in his introduction of the song “Kad bi’ bio Bijelo dugme,” in his album review for Studio (November 30, 1974), and then coined the term “pastirski rock” for their style more broadly in the magazine Tina (see article “Pastirski rock za svakodnevnu upotrebu” [Shepherd Rock for Everyday Use], Tina, December 25, 1974). The term subsequently became commonly used in relation to Bijelo dugme’s music. 2. N. A. “Koncert kod Hajdučke Česme: Samopotvrda jednog mita” [Concert at Hajdučka Česma: Self-Confirmation of a Myth]. Džuboks 39, 1977, 2–3. 3. In addition to the stylistic changes, Bijelo dugme also changed their members frequently. The core members were Goran Bregović, guitar (active from the beginning to the present day), Željko Bebek, vocals (1974–84, also active in the 2005 reunion), Goran Ipe Ivandić, drums (active in the periods 1974–78 and 1982–89), Vlado Pravdić, keyboards (1974–76, 1978–87, 2005), Zoran Redžić, bass guitar (1974–75, 1977–89, 2005), Laza Ristovski, keyboards (1976–78, 1984–88, 2005), Mladen Tifa Vojičić, vocals (1984–85, 2005), and Alen Islamović, vocals (1986–89, 2005). Other members included Jadranko Stanković, bass guitar (1974), Milić Vukašinović, drums (1976–77, 2005), and Dragan Điđi Jankelić, drums (1978–82, 2005). 4. In 1981, a student protest in Priština, the capital of the then Autonomous Province of Kosovo, led to widespread protests by Kosovo Albanians demanding more autonomy within Yugoslavia. A state of emergency was declared in Priština and Kosovska Mitrovica, which led to riots. 5. I would like to thank the editors, Danijela Š. Beard and Ljerka V. Rasmussen, for drawing my attention to several important music examples and for their help with the music analysis. 6. N. А. “Intervju sa Goranom Bregovićem.” December 26, 2014, Radio Television of Vojvodina, broadcast December 26, 2014. 7. For more on audience research in the concerts on the territory of former Yugoslavia, see Petrov 2016. 8. “Oproštajni concert “Dugmeta.” B92. www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2005&mm=06&dd=29&nav_cate gory=12&nav_id=171579. Accessed September 1, 2017. 9. The same applied to concerts in Zagreb and Sarajevo. For videos see links: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYP1X ERnjA and www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPMiGupmrgc. Accessed September 3, 2016. 10. Bijelo Dugme—Hipodrom concert, 2005. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJwLcsU9lOA. Accessed June 15, 2016. 11. Bijelo Dugme—Hipodrom concert, 2005. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJwLcsU9lOA. Accessed June 15, 2016. 12. All of the comments mentioned in the text were available at the time when the author conducted the research.

Bijelo Dugme  •  119 13. D. Ivanović. “Pljuni i zapjevaj, Beograde! Evo kako je bilo na koncertu Bijelog dugmeta.” Blic. www.blic.rs/zabava/ vesti/pljuni-i-zapjevaj-beograde-evo-kako-je-bilo-na-koncertu-bijelog-dugmeta/1hv1t9e. Accessed August 28, 2017. 14. S. Konjović. “Sve se menja, Dugme ostaje,” Kurir, November  20, 2016. www.kurir.rs/stars/uzivo-na-kuriru-kon cert-bijelog-dugmeta-arena-krcata-fanovi-i-poznati-ne-prestaju-da-pristizu-clanak-2549989. Accessed December 17, 2016.

Bibliography Baker, Catherine. 2006. “The Politics of Performance: Transnationalism and Its Limits in Former Yugoslav Popular Music, 1999–2004.” Ethnopolitics 5 (3): 275–93. Baker, Catherine. 2010. Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia Since 1991. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Dobrivojević, Ivana. 2010. “Između ideologije i pop-kulture: Život omladine u FNRJ 1945–1955.” Istorija 20. veka 1: 119–32. Gera, Alvaro. 2015. Jugoslovenske hronike. Belgrade: Paidea. Glavan, Darko, and Dražen Vrdoljak. 1981. Ništa mudro: Bijelo dugme – autorizirana biografija. Zagreb: Polet Rock. Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29 (1): 103–28. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Hofman, Ana. 2009. “Yugomania: Music and Nostalgic Practice on the Internet.” In Voices of the Weak: Music and Minorities, edited by Zuzana Jurkova and Lee Bidgood, 216–25. Praha: NGO Slovo 21 and Faculty of Humanities of Charles University. Janjatović, Petar. 2007. Ex Yu rock enciklopedija 1960–2006. Belgrade: Author’s Publication. Janjatović, Petar. 2014. “Dugmemanija nije bila preterivanje.” Politika, November 14. Accessed September 1, 2017. www. politika.rs/sr/clanak/310777/Dugmemanija-nije-bila-preterivanje. Jovanović, Jelena. 2014. “Folklorni motivi u ranim kompozicijama Nikole Borote Radovana.” Muzikologija 16: 173–92. Luković, Petar. 1989. Bolja prošlost: Prizori iz muzičkog života Jugoslavije 1940–1989. Belgrade: Mladost. Markulj, Hrvoje, ed. 2014. Bijelo dugme 1974–1988. Zagreb: Croatia Records. Mišina, Dalibor. 2010. “Spit and Sing, My Yugoslavia: New Partisans, Social Critique and Bosnian Poetics of the Patriotic.” Nationalities Papers 38: 265–89. Perković, Ante. 2011. Sedma republika. Pop kultura u Yu raspadu. Belgrade and Zagreb: Službeni glasnik and Novi liber. Petrov, Ana. 2015. “The Songs We Love to Sing and the History We Like to Remember: Tereza Kesovija’s Come Back in Serbia.” Southeastern Europe 39: 192–214. Petrov, Ana. 2016. Jugoslovenska muzika bez Jugoslavije. Koncerti kao mesta sećanja. Belgrade: FMK and Orion Art. Pogačar, Martin. 2016. Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-Presencing the Past. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramet, Sabrina P. 1994. “Goran Bregović: Whoever Doesn’t Hear This Song Will Hear a Storm.” Interview with Goran Bregović. In Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Sabrina P. Ramet, 133–39. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Škarica, Siniša. 2014. “Galopirajuća senzacija.” In Bijelo dugme 1974–1988, edited by Hrvoje Markulj, 11–16. Zagreb: Croatia Records. Tomc, Gregor. 2003. “We Will Rock YU: Popular Music in the Second Yugoslavia.” In Impossible Histories. Historical Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, edited by Dubravka Đurić and Miško Šuvaković, 442–65. London: MIT Press. Tvrtković, Ognjen. 1974. “Predstavljamo vam pop grupu Bijelo dugme.” Džuboks 1: 29. Velikonja, Mitja. 2015. “Povratak otpisanih: Emancipatorski potencijali jugonostalgije.” In Zid je mrtav, živeli zidovi: Pad Berlinskog zida i raspad Jugoslavije, edited by Ivan Čolović, 366–98. Belgrade: XX vek. Vesić, Dušan. 2014a. “Bijelo dugme: Mit koji raste.” In Bijelo dugme 1974–1988, edited by Hrvoje Markulj, 119–33. Zagreb: Croatia Records. Vesić, Dušan. 2014b. Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu. Zagreb: Ljevak, 2014.

Discography Bijelo dugme. Kad bi’ bio Bijelo dugme. Jugoton LSY 63016, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu. Jugoton LSY 63046, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Eto! Baš hoću! Jugoton LSVG 7, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Koncert kod Hajdučke česme. Jugoton LSVG 9, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Bitanga i princeza. Jugoton LSVG 10, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Doživjeti stotu. Jugoton LSY 10003, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. 5. April ’81. Jugoton LSY 61581, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Uspavanka za Radmilu M. Jugoton LSY 10017, 1983, 33⅓ rpm.

120  •  Ana Petrov Bijelo dugme. Bijelo dugme. Jugoton LP 8155, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Pljuni i zapjevaj moja Jugoslavijo. Jugoton LP 8244, 1986, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Mramor, kamen i željezo. Diskoton and Kamarad LP 8282, 1987, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Ćiribiribela. Jugoton LP 8333, 1988, 33⅓ rpm. Bijelo dugme. Bijelo dugme. Prvih šest studijskih albuma. Croatia Records 6 CD 5637509, 2005, compact disc. Bijelo dugme. Turneja 2005: Sarajevo, Zagreb, Beograd. Music Star Production and Kamarad CD 0055, 2006, compact disc. Bijelo dugme. Bijelo dugme. Original Album Collection. Croatia Records 6 CD BOX 6042715, 2013, compact disc. Bijelo dugme. Bijelo dugme. Box Set Deluxe. Croatia Records 6063055, 2014, 33⅓ rpm and compact disc.

Filmography Bijelo dugme. Nakon svih ovih godina, documentary TV series, RTS, 1994. Stoimenov, Igor, dir. Bijelo Dugme. Absinthe Production: DVD, 2010. Volurić, Toni, dir. Bijelo Dugme. Box Set Deluxe. Croatia Records, CMC TV: DVD, 2014.

PART 

III

Narodna (Folk) and Neofolk Music

Yugoslavia’s extensive post-1945 transformation from an essentially agrarian to an industrialized society offered incentives for socioeconomic and artistic mobility to all sorts of cultural actors, including folk musicians. In contrast to its neighbors to the east, Yugoslavia’s institutions of normative culture, including the mass media, were joined early on by record producers investing in folk music sustainability through modernization, and commercialization. The venerated narodna (folk; lit. people’s music) steadily grew into a homegrown “popular” music on par with Western pop models (locally zabavna), giving rise to the myriad of regionally distinct styles, performance practices, and song repertories that made up the broad, exceptionally diverse field of narodnafolk music: village and semi-urban (“traditional”), and urban and mass-mediated (“neofolk”). As this volume demonstrates, the symbolic value of folk music ran deeply through the everyday lives of people, becoming structurally entrenched in early radio and television broadcasts and, later, in the folk sector of estrada entertainment. The social significance of folk music manifested itself in varied contexts, from the kafana joints ubiquitous in both villages and cities, through folk festivals and amateur folklore clubs celebrating national unity in ethnic diversity. Mass-mediated neofolk songs embodied the socialist concept of “newly composed” (novokomponovana) folk music (NCFM), itself a primer in self-managed market socialism. Around the time of its market peak in the mid-1980s, novokomponovana became a lightning rod as SerbCroat political divisiveness was projected onto the conflict of genres – folk vs. pop/rock – and the alleged clash between Eastern (Ottoman) and Western (European) civilizations. The vitriol of identity politics went only as far as the nationalists in power could sustain it. The four chapters in Part III offer a balanced ethnographically-based appraisal of novokomponovana and the other folk genres that are part of the narodna complex. Marija Dumnić Vilotijević sets the stage by addressing starogradska (old urban) song  – a historical precursor for localized popular music – pointing out the key elements of this genre’s enduring appeal: its middle-class origin, its tradition of acoustic performance in taverns, and its romantic lyrics and vocal styles imbued with sentiments of nostalgia. Other narodna genres and associated geographic locales had the symbolic power to represent the entire county, and Velika Stojkova Serafimovska argues for this quality in her chapter on Macedonian music: with its pastoral images, melodiousness, and signature asymmetric meters, Macedonian music continues to frame the notion of a Yugoslav music shared by consensus. By contrast, Iva Nenić revisits novokomponovana as a field of study and argues for the legacy value of this once controversial genre, examining the role of radio broadcasters in the socialist redefinition of narodna music, which was fraught with the notions of backwardness and progress. Nenić’s back-to-basics approach is particularly welcome in light of the prevailing turbo-folk discourse, which tends to eclipse the socialist legacy of this important form of Yugoslavia’s popular culture. Lastly, the folk-pop star Lepa Brena receives a fresh feminist treatment by Zlatan Delić, who sympathetically and 121

122  •  Narodna (Folk) and Neofolk Music

critically examines her persona as a prime text for reading gender and power in novokomponovana and neofolk, with implications for contemporary cultural studies in the region. To invoke Ivan Čolović, the bard of Serbian ethnology, the narod (“people”) are at the center of Yugoslav folk music story: their various ethnicities, locales, languages, genders, classes, their dances and their musical instruments are all elements in contention for distinction within the complicated interplay of Yugoslavia’s folk and pop.

10

Starogradska Muzika

An Ethnography of Musical Nostalgia Marija Dumnić Vilotijević

Nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time . . . the slower rhythm of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. (Boym 2001, xv)

The present-day starogradska muzika (old urban music; hereafter starogradska) is commonly seen as glorifying romantic imagery and the idea of the “good old” times. The genre reflects diverse regional and local music practices from across former Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans, especially Serbia and Croatia which have shared repertoires. With origins in diverse types of urban folk music, it developed during the interwar period around the specific social environment of kafane (pl., tavern), popular for their live performances associated with its urban, middle-class core audience. In the broadest terms, starogradska repertoire includes other popular song types: varoška (“small-town” songs that originated in Vojvodina and Slavonija), romansa (romances, similar to Hungarian and Russian forms), and sevdalinka (lyrical song genre cultivated as part of the Ottoman urban culture, today most widespread in Bosnia and Herzegovina). As a form of urban entertainment music that retains artful folk music aesthetics, starogradska is commonly held in opposition to the hugely popular novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music or NCFM). In the simplest terms, starogradska transcends the rural connotations of narodna (lit. of the folk) and the commercialism of novokomponovana folk music. Tracing the earliest forms of starogradska music in the monarchist Yugoslavia (1918–41), I examine how the genre was subsequently marketed in socialist Yugoslavia (1945–92), especially by the broadcasters and recording industry (diskografija) since the 1960s, and then consider its position and impact in Serbia today. My study focuses on Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and the former Yugoslavia and historically the major center of starogradska music performance and publishing. Belgrade’s old-town Skadarlija quarter, renowned for live music and local cuisine in the bohemian settings of numerous taverns, offers a perfect case for examining the microcosm of the cherished starogradska tradition and its socialist and post-socialist transformations (Dumnić 2016a).

123

124  •  Marija Dumnić Vilotijević

Stylistic Characteristics of Old Urban Songs Though it is frequently grouped with, and performed alongside, sevdalinka and romansa songs, the core of the old urban repertoire differs from those types in terms of poetic content and vocal delivery. Sevdalinka is typically a slow-paced love song, characterized by a wide melodic range, melismatic articulation, augmented seconds, parlando rubato tempo, and Turkish loanwords such as aman (an emphatic term to express pain, wonder, admiration). Romanse (pl.) songs, often translations from Hungarian or Russian, are rubato cantilenas with a wide melodic range and nuanced dynamics, articulation, and harmonic support. Examples of sevdalinka include “A što ćemo ljubav kriti” (Why Should We Hide Our Love) and “Moj dilbere” (My Pretty Boy); examples of romanse are “Jesen stiže, dunjo moja” (Autumn Comes, My Quince) and “Ne jurite, konji, u kas” (Don’t Trot, Horses). The core of the starogradska repertoire, by comparison, constitutes a more varied thematic range: from lyric poetry addressing love in a variety of ways (courtship, beauty, waiting, regret) to drinking, and, to a lesser extent, patriotism. For example, in “Jedna cura mala” (One Little Girl) the singer, having traded his entire life and possessions for ašikovanje (courting), playfully celebrates courting and the girls he has loved. “Kad te vidim na sokaku” (When I See You in the Street) is a lively love song that calls his darling to come to him, because whenever he sees her in the street, at her window or on the balcony, his heart breaks pining for her; “Na kraj sela čađava mehana” (A Smokey Inn at the End of a Village), is a humorous recollection of the protagonist’s return from a pub after an entire night of drinking, listing his struggles to find his way home (he blames the streets and the moon for playing tricks on him), ending with his morning-­after headache, exacerbated as his friends wake him up loudly knocking on the window.1 Starogradske songs are performed either by an instrumental ensemble with a solo singer, or by instrumental ensembles in which all the players also sing. Typically, starogradska ensembles include either a group of tamburitza plucked string instruments (three or more players), or mixed ensembles that include double bass, guitar, accordion, clarinet, and/or violin, sometimes doubling or “borrowing” an instrument from the tamburitza ensemble. The standard accompaniment is unobtrusive, combining bright and brittle tamburiza tremolos, with plucked accompaniment on strings with a walking bass. The tempo is usually moderate, rhythms are even, and the meter is either common (2/4, 4/4) or triple (3/4, 6/8), although songs from Southern Serbia occasionally use aksak rhythms (5/8, 7/8, 9/8). This musical simplicity is offset by a highly expressive performance style, with nuanced dynamics, articulation, timbre, and ornamentation. Zvonko Bogdan remains the most renowned starogradska performer/singer, who is also a composer and song collector, and his extensive output (including lyrics, music, and translations from Hungarian) has become synonymous with the genre itself. His approach is summed up by his concert catchphrase: “Tonight, for a while, I will take you back to some distant times that will never again be repeated” (Perhoč 2016, 6). He is accompanied by his tamburitza ensemble, which balances the subtle accompaniment with understated virtuosic passages. In performance, Bogdan creates medleys by joining songs that have related thematic ideas and similar harmonies and related keys, shaping the programmatic and musical narratives of the entire cycle (Dumnić 2017a). The medley of his vivacious songs in 2/4 illustrates this: It starts with “Kraj jezera jedna kuća mala” (The Small House Next to the Lake), about a girl waiting at the lake for her boyfriend, who does not arrive because he is with another girl. After this song in A major, he moves into D major for “Fijaker stari” (Old Fiacre); set in his hometown Sombor (in Vojvodina, in the Northern Serbian province), it evokes the idyllic memory of a horse-drawn carriage carrying a couple in love through the town while it snows.

Starogradska Muzika  •  125

The song “Govori se da me varaš” (There Are Rumors That You Are Cheating on Me) is sung from the perspective of an ailing man whose beloved has found another man, and he begs her to wait until he dies before finding new happiness. Some of Bogdan’s standout interpretations include the songs “Ej, salaši na severu Bačke” (Hey Ranches in the North of Bačka) and “Nema lepše devojke” (There Is No Prettier Girl). Since the 1970s, starogradska muzika has been popularized through TV and radio shows aimed mostly at older and emigrant audiences. Recent TV shows, such as Leti, leti, pesmo moja mila (Fly, Fly, My Dear Song, started in 1995), often stage performances in earlier contexts, in which soloists wear costumes that evoke pre-socialist bourgeois society, and also within a tavern ambience. These re-enactments were greatly popularized by actor-singers and operatic singers, most notably the actress Olivera Marković and the opera singer Živan Saramandić, who were acclaimed interpreters of old urban songs and romances. Starogradska was also promoted by the educational system as artful “middle-brow” folk music. Many Serbian singers and bands also achieved recording success with the old urban repertoire (Dubravka Nešović, Žarko Dančuo, Miodrag Bogdanović, Tamburica 5, and Narakord), especially at the festivals of popular and folk music, which encouraged composition of new starogradska songs. These included Beogradsko proleće (Belgrade Spring), the Opatija Festival in Opatija, the Ilidža Festival in Sarajevo, Niška jesen (Autumn in Niš), Zvuci Panonije (Panonian Sounds) in Osijek, and Zlatna tamburica (The Golden Tamburitza) in Novi Sad. Starogradska muzika: From Bourgeois Practice to Commercialized Nostalgia Starogradske songs were modeled on urban folk songs popular throughout Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman towns during the nineteenth century. Leading composers of the day, such as Isidor Bajić, Stanislav Binički, and Davorin Jenko, contributed considerably to the early development of popular song usually based on lyrical love poetry (and also patriotic poetry), which shared similarities with the German Lied. These influenced many starogradske songs, including the highly popular “Tiho, noći” (Silently, Night, by Jovan Jovanović Zmaj), “Devojka na studencu” (Girl at a Fountain, by Branko Radičević) and “Emina” (by Aleksa Šantić). The last of these, “Emina,” is a poet’s love letter about the imam’s beautiful daughter, who spurs his love and tragically dies young: the harmonic minor scale with a wide melodic range is performed with a pronounced rubato which underscores the ominous nature of her beauty, unrequited love, and the poet’s suffering: Last night, returning from the warm hamam I passed by the garden of the old Imam And lo in the garden, in the shade of jasmine Emina stood there with a pitcher in her hand. . . . I offered her salaam, but by my dīn [creed] Emina wouldn’t even hear it Instead scooping water in her silver pitcher She went down the garden to water the roses. Historiographic evidence from the early twentieth century reveals the cultural life of old Belgrade and its dynamic transformation from an Ottoman to a European city (see Yovitchitch 1926).

126  •  Marija Dumnić Vilotijević

Accounts of kafana (sing.) and private salon performances, broadcasts of music on Radio Belgrade, rare gramophone records (published by Edison Bell Penkala, Columbia, and Odeon) and musicians’ memoirs and periodicals (especially the Radio Belgrade Illustrated Weekly) reveal the important role music played in this process. Archival sources from the first half of the twentieth century suggest that many Belgrade venues had live music. Concerts and ball events were held in Bajlonijeva pivnica (Bajloni’s Alehouse), Građanska kasina (Urban Casino), hotel Njujork (New York), Oficirski dom (The Officers’ House), and hotel Slavija, while performances of Stefano Western-style light music (tango, foxtrot, waltz, jazz) took place in hotels Excelsior, Moskva, and Palace. The Tavern Dardanel featured female dancers performing “oriental” dances such as čoček; there were social gatherings for Russian émigrés in taverns Balalaika and Lira, and famous “wild” nightlife performances with celebrity folk musicians and Romani orchestras in taverns like Vardar and Venecija, or the Grand Hotel; and prominent artists gathered to eat, drink and socialize to live music in kafane Zlatni bokal, Dva jelena, and Tri šešira in the Skadarlija quarter (Dumnić 2016b, 190–229). The contexts of this live music and its repertoires were foundational in shaping the starogradska genre. Radio Belgrade’s initial broadcasts of urban folk music influenced the creation of two professional radio orchestras in the mid-1930s, the Folk Orchestra and the Tamburitza Orchestra. Mijat Mijatović, Edo Ljubić, and the female Sofka Nikolić were among the early singers who shaped the performing styles of old urban songs.2 In Belgrade taverns, the singing of Mijatović (a lawyer by profession) was so popular that Binički wrote a collection of songs for him simply titled Mijatovke (lit. “After Mijat”); Sofka, criticized in academic circles for introducing conversational accentuation to lyrics and adding shouts and melismas (Milošević 1964), was nonetheless recognized as a “queen of sevdah (a term denoting enjoyment of sevdalinke)”; Ljubić became a Yugoslav star in the 1930s, and later had an international career with tamburitza orchestras in the United States. The legendary violinist Vlastimir Pavlović Carevac, most likely the conductor of the Radio Folk Orchestra, became the leading instrumentalist at the Radio, renowned for his subtle ornamentation and his advocacy of the “folk performing style,” which followed locally specific diction and ornamentation. In the aftermath of WWII, many urban folk music artists experienced a career boom, most notably Carevac, who was an active communist even before WWII; others, such as the tamburitza player Aleksandar Aranicki, suffered because of their collaboration with the occupiers during the Tito-led partisan resistance. In 1971 Jugoton issued the landmark album Starogradski biseri (Old-Town Jewels; see Figure 1 on page 129), produced and arranged by Žarko Petrović, a composer from Serbia’s western town of Užice. Around the same time Petrović published thirteen volumes of edited sheet music of starogradske songs, prefacing editions with a marketing pitch common at the time: These “evergreen” songs – which are often present on the radio, television, concerts and gramophone records  – capture us immediately with their sincerity, romanticism and profound emotionality. Their texts about roses, dark eyes, wine, deserted places, steppes, streets, a sad violin or a runaway darling are often pure poetry. . . . For many of them the authorship is unknown. Many were written by violin players  .  .  . singers, wanderers, Gypsies.  .  .  . Some authors of these “eternal songs” are probably still alive and they will certainly be glad that their songs will be rescued from oblivion. . . . I believe that any composer would want to have songs such as “Tužna je nedelja” (Gloomy Sunday), “Sonja,” “Zlatan prsten” (Golden Ring) and many others within their own [performing] oeuvre. (Petrović 1971)

Starogradska Muzika  •  127

Petrović framed starogradska music as essentially folk music in contemporary zabavna-pop arrangements, aimed to appeal to younger people (Petrović, pers. comm., January  24, 2016).3 His arrangements were characterized by full orchestration, harmonic underpinnings typical of zabavna music (with greater chromaticism than in standard folk song arrangement), and frequently, dance rhythms such as tango (“Sve moje jeseni su tužne” [All My Autumns Are Sad]) and waltz (“Serenada Beogradu” [A Serenade for Belgrade]). Thus Petrović contributed greatly to shaping starogradska as folk music with zabavna-pop overtones. Petrović’s recorded and printed collections of starogradska music also included Serbian patriotic songs from WWI, the so-called solunske pesme (songs from Thessaloniki). His marketing of these songs reveals much about the broader political climate in socialist Yugoslavia, and the obstacles in the production of an “ideologically tarnished” cultural legacy, as well as the market competition facilitated by the two national labels PGP RTB (Belgrade) and Jugoton (Zagreb). Petrović recalled that the Belgrade cultural institutions censored solunske songs in the early 1970s, because the communist ideology was founded on a rejection of Yugoslavia’s interwar monarchy: “The PGP [RTB] refused the solunske pesme and the director said: ‘Žarko, what do you need them for? They mention the [former] King’ ” (Ibid). Petrović, who did not share the regime’s objection to the monarchy, turned to PGP RTB’s rival producer, Jugoton. Slavko Kopun, Jugoton’s director and a former Partisan soldier himself, responded favorably: “Listen, Žarko, if you say that this is the right thing to do, you’re welcome in our studio, I will sign the approval tomorrow.” Petrović clarified: “I recorded music and won at [zabavna] festivals [and] these people opened their doors for me” (Ibid.). Petrović’s claims suggest that Jugoton supported him primarily because he worked with folk genres that were closer to popular zabavna styles (e.g., old urban and romance genres). He profiled starogradska muzika as the niche genre that combined the two major categories of the Yugoslav popular music market – narodna (folk), specifically old urban folk melodies, with zabavna (pop) in terms of rhythmic and harmonic arrangements. Some of his renowned examples of folk-zabavna fusions are arrangements from the aforementioned 1971 record, including the songs “Zvezde su s neba sjale” (Stars Were Shining from the Sky) and “Kada jesen opet dođe” (When Autumn Comes Again). In short, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital, the genre was regarded as pro-monarchistic and nationalist, by default anti-communist, and judged as politically and ideologically unsuitable, while in Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, the genre was judged solely on grounds of aesthetics and its potential for commercial success. Along with Petrović’s efforts, available print records suggests that the genre had mass media exposure in Belgrade in the 1960s, when the radio editor Đorđe Karaklajić produced the earliest starogradska records for PGP RTB, featuring several vocal soloists and the Big Folk Orchestra of RTB (Various 1962). Karaklajić’s influential position at Radio Belgrade enabled him to produce these records, but he was also savvy and chose songs devoid of controversial content. Like Petrović, Karaklajić framed starogradske songs within more acceptable and desirable cultural codes. In 1970, a year of huge promotion of starogradske, he published sheet music editions of old urban songs. Stare gradske pesme i romanse (Old Urban Songs and Romances), which conflated two genres: The development of cities after the liberation from Ottoman rule gave birth to a new song, mostly based upon traditional melos [a regionally and culturally specific soundworld/melody]. . . . It was predominantly sentimental music of the bourgeois class, which was embraced by our new citizens, just like any other fad. . . . Urban songs are a special genre. They are, actually our romances. Their interpretation is quite different from our folk songs. (Karaklajić 1973, emphasis mine)

128  •  Marija Dumnić Vilotijević

Around the same time, Julije Njikoš, another composer active in Croatia, worked on records of old urban music released by Jugoton, most notably with the singer Vera Svoboda accompanied by a tamburitza orchestra. Her repertoire included songs like “Kad bi ove ruže male” (If These Little Roses) and “Crven fesić” (Red Fez), but most notably, she focused on songs thematically related to the Croatian northern province of Slavonia: “Aj, pitaju me iz koga sam sela” (Ah, They Ask Me Which Village Am I From) and “Gori lampa nasrid Vinkovaca” (A Lamp Burns in the Middle of Vinkovci). In addition, the publication of starogradska sheet music collections by the Association of Estrada Workers (Udruženje radnika estradne umetnosti), a workers’ union for music performers from Croatia, produced a landmark collection (see Filipčić at al.) used by semi-­professional and amateur musicians across Yugoslavia. The Croatian ethnomusicologist Jerko Bezić made seminal contributions in the 1970s to the study of old urban music (Bezić 1973, 1977). And despite recent efforts to delineate the genre along ethnonational lines, especially by Croatian scholars (see Hadžihusejnović Valašek 2003), I argue that urban folk music, as an early cosmopolitan practice steeped largely in the lyricism of romantic poetry, not only transcends national markers, but in fact demonstrates an increasingly cohesive impact on regional cultures, with songs that remain popular across the newly established national borders. The Life of Starogradska Music at Belgrade’s Skadarlija With the 1966 revitalization of the social function of kafane in Skadarlija (according to the original plan by the architect Uglješa Bogunović) and contemporary fascination with the cultural heritage of monarchist Yugoslavia in Serbia, starogradska music lives on today as a practice that recreates a bygone era and expresses a culture of nostalgia. Bound up with the discourse of nostalgia, starogradska music flourishes among other tourist offerings at the many taverns in Belgrade’s cobbled street of Skadarlija (Skadarska Street) in the Old Town (Stari grad). Initially a Romani settlement, Skadarlija acquired a bohemian character in the early twentieth century, with the rise of local artisans and caterers. Until WWII, Radio Belgrade aired the folk music show Skadarlijsko veče (An Evening in Skadarlija), showcasing the nightlife and musical offerings of this city quarter. Today, Skadarlija retains many restaurants – Dva bela goluba (Two White Pigeons), Zlatni bokal (Golden Jar), Skadarlijski boem (The Bohemian of Skadarlija), Dva jelena (Two Deers), Šešir moj (My Hat), Putujući glumac (Traveling Actor), Tri šešira (Three Hats) and Velika Skadarlija (Great Skadarlija) – which have attracted prominent artists and writers from across Yugoslavia, from local writer Đura Jakšić and Croatian poet Tin Ujević in the 1910s and 1920s to the more recent writer Momo Kapor. Many folk singers, including Divna Kostić and novokomponovana singer Toma Zdravković, became synonymous with Skadarlija during the socialist period. Skadarlija’s taverns offer prime performance sites where musicians and clientele interact, and performances may last an entire evening. Clients nowadays often pay for desired songs, altering the standard repertoire and promoting novokomponovana genres over starogradska (Dumnić 2017b). Orchestras are also valued according to their ethnic composition: Romani musicians are considered “special” by the musicians themselves as well as the audiences, because of the perceived authenticity of their performance. Tamburica 5, which has performed at Skadarlija since 1971, is the most important ensemble working today. Currently performing at the Dva jelena tavern, they also perform at promenades in Skadarlija, at festivals of starogradska, on radio and TV shows, and on international tours; they even performed at an event that marked the twinning of Skadarija and Montmartre in 1978. Today, because they do not rely on tips from the audience, Tamburica 5 perform starogradska more than other ensembles. They perceive themselves as the

Starogradska Muzika  •  129

guardians of “real folk music,” which is starogradska rather than novokomponovana, though they also perform songs from the latter repertoire. Conclusion The idea of nostalgia in starogradska music has multiple connotations. In the simplest terms, it implies longing, usually by elder audiences, for the past as an alternative to present-day life and music. Media narratives about old urban music present the genre as a means of returning to the past, an escape from the pressures and pace of contemporary life, clearly evident in the iconography of starogradska record covers featuring landscapes of old towns and photographs with old clothes and antique watches – echoes of the “old” way of life (see Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1  Record Sleeve of Starogradski biseri. Vol. 3, Jugoton (1971)

130  •  Marija Dumnić Vilotijević

Another dimension is the longing for pre-WWII bohemian and monarchist culture, although nowadays old urban music in Serbia does not have the subversive character once associated with the urban culture of Yugoslavia’s monarchy. Finally, there is the romanticized nostalgia for old towns and distant communities described in some lyrics. Audience diversity is bolstered by the fact that along with the core older audience, the main guardians of starogradska nostalgia today are Serbian and ex-Yugoslav emigrants of mixed generational and ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, nostalgia is present as a mechanism in the processes of musical (and cultural) production of “good old” songs, especially from the 1970s, and in marketing strategies related to music and tourism industries. Pre-WWII urban folk music, which did not necessarily have the same nostalgic themes, was concurrently enjoyed as tavern and folk music and criticized as distant from “real” folk music. After WWII and the emergence of novokomponovana in the 1960s, urban folk music was recodified into a new historic layer of folk music. In Serbia, several years after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, songs from various parts of the former country were gradually reintroduced into the starogradska repertoire (including mostly Bosnian, then Dalmatian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian ones). A  similar undercurrent is the patination of the commercial novokomponovana folk songs: once considered “bad,” these songs are nowadays performed in the acoustic ambience of Skadarlija instrumental ensembles, and have become as “good” as old urban music. Starogradska muzika will ultimately remain, as long as the acoustic performances survive in taverns. The nostalgia inherent to this genre feeds its further life. It is precisely the unpretentiousness of starogradska, bound up with its promotion as an urban ­middle-class alternative to commercialized and rural working-class associations of novokomponovana that sustains its popularity and longevity. Acknowledgments This chapter  was written as a part of the project Serbian Musical Identities between Local and Global Frameworks: Traditions, Changes, Challenges (ON 177004), funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technical Development of the Republic of Serbia. I am also thankful to Ivana Medić for the translation from Serbian to English, and to the volume editors Danijela Š. Beard and Ljerka V. Rasmussen for their thought-provoking comments and detailed editorial assistance. Notes 1. There are also newer songs dedicated to Belgrade and Skadarlija, and to Novi Sad, and several characteristic instrumental dance tunes, such as the “Kraljevo kolo” (King’s Dance). The illustrative examples of the repertoire of lyrical old urban songs are “Bledi mesec” (Pale Moon), “Kad čujem tambure” (When I Hear Tamburitzas), “Kad sam sinoć ovde bila” (When I Was Here Last Night) and “Tišina nema vlada svud” (Total Silence Is Everywhere). See Dumnić 2016b, 385–88 for a comprehensive list. 2. The most prominent music publisher in Belgrade during the interwar period was Jovan Frajt, who issued a special edition of urban folk songbooks Narodna izdanja—Edition populaire. These contain song lyrics with top-voice melodies (marked for violin), sometimes with piano accompaniment (e.g., “Zračak viri” [Gleam Protrudes]). Like the melodies, the arrangements were simple, with little or no ornamentation; it is most likely that the more elaborate performances we have today originated as ornaments and varied harmonies added during oral transmission, like the richer instrumentation and sonorities created for orchestral arrangements. 3. In addition, although he did publish those songs together in sheet music editions, he released them on separate records to distinguish the romance genre from old urban music on the basis of its Hungarian and Russian origins.

Bibliography [n.d]. “Zračak viri” – 5 narodnih pesama. Belgrade: Jovan Frajt. Held by The Institute of Musicology SASA: Belgrade (JF xiii/8). Belobrk, Branko, Dimitrije Panić, and Mihajlo Jaćimović, eds. 2010a. Svilen konac: Zbirka narodnih pesama A – D. Vol. 1. Belgrade: Savez amatera Srbije.

Starogradska Muzika  •  131 Belobrk, Branko, Dimitrije Panić, and Mihajlo Jaćimović, eds. 2010b. Svilen konac: Zbirka narodnih pesama Đ – K. Vol. 2. Belgrade: Savez amatera Srbije. Belobrk, Branko, Dimitrije Panić, and Mihajlo Jaćimović, eds. 2010c. Svilen konac: Zbirka narodnih pesama L – O. Vol. 3. Belgrade: Savez amatera Srbije. Belobrk, Branko, Dimitrije Panić, and Mihajlo Jaćimović, eds. 2012. Svilen konac: Zbirka narodnih pesama P – S. Vol. 4. Belgrade: Savez amatera Srbije. Belobrk, Branko, Dimitrije Panić, and Mihajlo Jaćimović, eds. 2013. Svilen konac: Zbirka narodnih pesama T – Š. Vol. 5. Belgrade: Savez amatera Srbije. Bezić, Jerko. 1973. “Dalmatinska folklorna gradska pjesma kao predmet etnomuzikološkog istraživanja.” Narodna umjetnost 14: 23–54. Bezić, Jerko. 1977. “Varoška pjesma.” In Muzička enciklopedija, Vol. 3, second ed., 643. Zagreb: Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Dumnić, Marija. 2013. “The Creation of Folk Music Program on Radio Belgrade Before World War Two: Editorial Policies and Performing Ensembles.” Muzikologija 14: 9–29. Dumnić, Marija. 2016a. “Defining Nostalgic Musicscape: Starogradska Muzika in Skadarlija (Belgrade) as Sound Environment.” Muzikološki zbornik/ Musicological Annual 52 (2): 55–70. Dumnić, Marija. 2016b. “Istorijski aspekti i savremene prakse izvođenja starogradske muzike u Beogradu.” PhD diss., University of Belgrade. Dumnić, Marija. 2017a. “Teorijski spoj etnomuzikologije i studija performansa: Izvođenje kao oblikotvorni proces starogradske muzike.” Zbornik Matice srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku 56: 137–52. Dumnić, Marija. 2017b. “How Music Affects Soundscape: Musical Preferences in Skadarlija.” Muzikologija 22: 75–88. Filipčić, Krešimir, ed. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 7. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Filipčić, Krešimir, and Ivan Ivić, eds. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 10. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Filipčić, Krešimir, Đelo Jusić, Laszlo Horvat, and Milenko Parabućski, eds. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 4. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Filipčić, Krešimir, and Zvonko Palošek, eds. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 8. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Filipčić, Krešimir, and Zvonko Palošek, eds. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 9. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Filipčić, Krešimir, and Milenko Parabućski, eds. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 6. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Filipčić, Krešimir, and Marika Pec Galer, eds. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 5. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Filipčić, Krešimir, and Josip Šaban, eds. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 11. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Hadžihusejnović Valašek, Mirjana. 2003. “Starogradska pjesma u Slavoniji.” In Hrvatska glazba u dvadesetom stoljeću, edited by Jelena Hekman, 311–61. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska. Jeličić, Mladen, ed. [n.d]. 50 najpopularnijih starogradskih i narodnih pjesama, romansi i šlagera. Vol. 3. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičko-estradnih radnika Hrvatske. Karaklajić, Đorđe, ed. 1973. Stare gradske pesme i romanse. Vol. 1–6. Knjaževac: Nota. Kinel, Mario, ed. [n.d]. 100 najpopularnijih starogradskih pjesama i romansi. Vol. 1. Zagreb: Savez organizacija muzičkoestradnih radnika Hrvatske. Knežev, Dimitrije. 1987. Beograd naše mladosti: Zapisi o Beogradu 1918–1941. Chicago: George Radonich. Kokanović Marković, Marijana. 2014. Društvena uloga salonske muzike u životu i sistemu vrednosti srpskog građanstva u devetnaestom veku. Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA. Milošević, Vlado. 1964. Sevdalinka. Banja Luka: Muzej Bosanske Krajine. Pavković, Ljubiša, ed. 2011. Antologija srpske narodne muzike: Pesme komponovane u narodnom duhu. Knjaževac: Nota. Perhoč, Karlo. 2016. “Aranžiranje i glazbena produkcija pjesme ‘Ne vredi plakati.’ ” UG diss., Sveučilište Sjever, Varaždin, Croatia. Petrović, Žarko, ed. 1971. Pesme koje večno žive. Vol. 2. Knjaževac: Nota. Yovitchitch, Lena. 1926. Pages from Here and There in Serbia. Belgrade: State Printing Works.

Discography Bogdan, Zvonko. Uspomena na vreme koje se sigurno ponoviti neće: Tamburaški evergreen. Vojvodina music CD001/ CD002, 2003, compact disc. Bogdanović, Mile. Beograd stari, Beograd novi: Gradske pesme. PGP RTB 2122120, 1986, 33⅓ rpm. Dančuo, Žarko. Romanse i starogradske pjesme. Sarajevo disk LP 7777, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Marković, Olivera. Romanse. Jugoton LPY V 846, 1971, 33⅓ rpm. Mijatović, Mijat. “Tamo daleko”/ “Sve se kunem i preklinjem.” Columbia Records D8671, [n.d.], 78 rpm. Nešović, Dubravka. Dubravka Nešović. PGP RTB LPV 1245, 1973, 33⅓ rpm.

132  •  Marija Dumnić Vilotijević Nikolić, Sofka. “Sagradit ću šajku”/ “Ja nabacih udicu.” Edison Bell Radio SZ 1472, [n.d.], 78 rpm. Sekstet Skadarlija. Kreće se lađa francuska/Tamo daleko. Jugodisk LPD 0260, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Svoboda, Vera. Vera Svoboda pjeva varoške i slavonske narodne pjesme uz tamburaški orkestar Julija Njikoša. Jugoton LPSVY 749, 1971, 33⅓ rpm. Tamburica 5. Ansambl Tamburica 5. PGP RTB LP 1467, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Idem kući, a već zora: Starogradski biseri. Vol. 2. PGP RTS CD 405297, 2001, compact disc. Various. Noć u Skadarliji: Starogradski biseri. Vol. 1. PGP RTS CD 405280, 2001, compact disc. Various. Stare gradske pesme. PGP RTB EP 11700, 1962, 45 rpm. Various. Starogradske pesme: Najbolje od Narakorda. Biveco CD 206, 2009, compact disc. Various. Starogradski biseri. Jugoton LPY 50854, 1971, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Veče u Skadarliji – Skadarlija at Night (Souvenir). PGP RTB LP 1409, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Zlatne uspomene: Izbor starogradskih pesama – lirske i ljubavne pesme. PGP RTB LP 1427, 1977, 33⅓ rpm.

11

“My Juga, My Dearest Flower”

The Yugoslav Legacy of Newly Composed Folk Music Revisited Iva Nenić

Novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music or NCFM; hereafter novokomponovana) is a commercial folk music genre that emerged in the mid-1960s. Rooted in Yugoslavia’s narodna (folk; lit. people’s) music, it developed into a commercially successful genre in the 1970s, while retaining its grassroots, working-class associations with kafana (drinking joint/ tavern) entertainment. Through an intersection with different Balkan musics and international pop trends in the 1980s, it began to dominate both Yugoslav estrada (entertainment industry) and the music market. The novokomponovana label was commonly used pejoratively by urban audiences, who sought to distinguish their aspirational middle-class values constructed around zabavna-pop and rock music from the negatively referenced peasant (seljačko) connotations frequently ascribed to novokomponovana music audiences. At the turn of the 1990s, a time of political turmoil, novokomponovana evolved into turbo-folk – an early form of contemporary pop-folk music within Belgrade’s powerful pop music scene. During the 1960s, novokomponovana blossomed with the development of mass media, the advent of the folk music market and mass migrations from rural to urban areas. As a modernized form of traditional folk music, novokomponovana evolved from folk song arrangements into a commercial pop-folk genre; it undermined institutionally maintained boundaries between vernacular folk and Western pop, and created a discourse in which the relative values of folk authenticity and commercialism were hotly debated. In this chapter I outline the development of novokompovana music since the 1960s, highlighting the roles of early broadcasters and radioaffiliated musicians, the music’s cross-regional appeal in the 1970s, and its dominance in popular music and estrada industries in the 1980s. More specifically, I will examine the concept of neofolk music in official discourse, and the ways in which socio-musical practices associated with traditional music were selected and employed in the process of becoming newly composed music culture. Modernizing Folk: Radio, Arrangers, and Music in a “Folk Spirit” Against the backdrop of extensive post-1945 industrialization and urbanization, Yugoslav cultural policy-makers had to rethink the venerated concept of narodna music to account for a rich variety of rural, urban, local and regional musical traditions. Radio, as the institution of 133

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particular social importance, accurately reflected changes in attitude and ideology regarding the concept of tradition: many components of rural culture – including “crude” village music – were rejected as socially regressive remnants of the past, while others were retained and artistically “elevated” to fit larger societal goals of progress and modernization. Radio broadcasters were the first to devise a system for the classification of narodna music, based on the degree of perceived authenticity. Initially, Radio Belgrade used izvorna music (lit. music stemming “from the source”; autochthonous), the oldest and most authentic form of folk music; later “folk song arrangement” (narodna pesma/pjesma u obradi) became the focus, followed by “music composed in a folk spirit.” Yugoslav Radio’s elaborated system of categorization also recognized distinct compositional methods such as improvisation, harmonization and stylization. “Music composed in a folk spirit” became a euphemistic code word for latter-day commercial novokomponovana, developed largely outside the radio system by the growing folk-music recording industry. This practice of “distancing-by-arrangement” from izvorna sources reveals the dual processes of folk music’s standardization and diversification. During the 1950s, folk music arrangements became the standard method for “updating” narodna music, with radio broadcasters leading the way. Village songs, sung solo, unison, or in two parts, were amplified with harmonic accompaniment by modern radio orchestras, while instrumental music, largely based on the kolo (circle dance) repertoire, was similarly arranged for studio ensembles. State radio broadcasters employed notable folk artists (violinists, accordionists) to compose new kolo tunes and engaged classically trained composers and folklore researchers to train the singers, select musical material and produce carefully arranged and aesthetically pleasing arrangements of well-known melodies and songs. Two supervisory protocols effectively ensured the orderly process of modernization: ethnomusicologists meticulously collected and classified folk repertories in a quest to preserve authenticity; professionally trained musicians, arrangers-­ composers, and broadcasting policy makers channeled the transformation to suit the new cultural needs of their citizenry. Prominent musicians like Vlastimir Pavlović Carevac, a famous violinist, arranger and the leader of the Folk Orchestra of Radio Belgrade (1945–65), helped reshape various folk music styles into a distinct form of radio folk music. Carevac insisted on the systematic cultivation of “good” singers and folk material: a song or a kolo dance tune should be delivered in a refined, moderate manner and retain its authentic stylistic features such as locally specific melody and ornamentation. He was quick to correct “deviations,” such as nasal singing, poor accentuation, or the so-called Oriental elements that he considered unsuitable to the character of Serbian music. Carevac also took great care to professionalize folk song performance on radio, but his teaching was more impromptu, based on aural techniques (Cenerić 1988, 171). This approach was closer to the aesthetic of popular old-town songs (starovaroške or starogradske pesme, old urban songs) from the interwar period, often popularized in kafane rather than the practice of “classicization” later championed by the influential music editor at Radio Belgrade, Đorđe Karaklajić. Notwithstanding these efforts to “polish” narodna music source material – the actual folk songs/tunes circulating in the community – according to Radio Belgrade’s poll from 1952, the majority of listeners disliked folk songs arranged by classically trained composers or performed by operatic singers, criticizing them as “foreign” in character to “their” music, and asked instead for more old-time starovaroške songs (Anketa Radio Beograda o muzičkom programu 1952, 46–47). While traditional folk songs had been largely performed a capella in Yugoslavia’s villages, ka­fana musicians in the early twentieth century increasingly added instrumental accompaniment to widely known local tunes, and created new songs they popularized as “narodna” music. The institution of kafana as the principal setting for music dissemination, and the key public space for socialization, entertainment and, at times, political debates (Stojanović 2012, 43–48), dates

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back to the mid-nineteenth-century urbanized areas in the Balkans. With the advent of radio and recording technology, kafana became increasingly associated with the image of working-class entertainment, bawdy male patrons and female singers of ill repute. Hence singers who initially performed in kafanas often had to prove themselves both artistically and socially reputable in order to gain access to radio. Notable kafana ensembles of the interwar period employed lead melodic instruments (violin, prim [a small long-necked tamburitza], and occasionally flute or clarinet) along with instruments providing harmonic accompaniment (guitar, tambura, zither, piano, or accordion) and the double bass (Dumnić 2016, 128). “Gypsy” (ciganski) ensembles were especially important, and the early recordings of famous vocalist Sofka Nikolić, backed by husband Paja Nikolić’s 25-member Romani orchestra, influenced interwar radio folk music and early forms of modernized folk music.1 In the late 1960s, Karaklajić introduced arrangements of folk songs by classically trained composers with large-scale orchestras for recording and radio broadcast,2 thereby effectively marginalizing the work of the previous generation of radio-affiliated musicians. He even proposed the idea of a law obliging estrada musicians to become musically literate in order to improve the quality of “new folk music” (Karaklajić 1971, 2). However, the music envisioned by Karaklajić was not received well by listeners: denied the enjoyment of listening to well-loved songs in the recognizable Carevac-era style, anecdotal reports indicate that some listeners angrily threw their valuable radio receivers out of the window (Janoš 2008). Generations of successful folk music performers after WWII honed their artistic skills primarily through radio. In most cases, they had informal musical training, singing in local kafanas and appearing at communal music events. Nevertheless, radio was a venue in which songs were approved for performance, singing was polished, pronunciation was corrected, and new local styles were learned, all under the watchful eyes of music editors and orchestra leaders. Radio soloists, carefully selected through auditions, were expected to contribute to radio repertoire with folk songs from their villages or hometowns, in order to promote local and regional musical diversity. Accordingly, the 1960s saw a significant policy change in the status of folk song authorship, from semi-anonymity to full recognition of song lyricists, composers, and arrangers. The idea that folk singers and writers should be legally recognized as professional musicians and artists was central for the establishment of the Association of Estrada Workers (Udruženje radnika estradnih umetnosti; Hofman 2010, 151; see also Chapter 17). Novokomponovana music challenged not only the radio broadcasters’ monopoly over the definition and perception of folk music but also facilitated folk musicians’ social mobility and a degree of economic stability (see Hofman 2016). The Rise of Novokomponovana in the 1960s and the 1970s Significant political and economic changes in Yugoslavia of the 1960s were clearly manifested in popular culture, where music as a social arena had great importance.3 A major economic reform introduced market socialism in Yugoslavia in 1965, paving the way for the growth of Yugoslav consumer society (Vučetić 2012, 280–81). A market for novokomponovana emerged through the tension between the state-controlled model of cultural governance and the spontaneous reworking of everyday culture, a rift that became especially pronounced after 1958, when the new orientation toward pluralism and the aesthetization of culture was declared at the Eighth Congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party in Ljubljana (Doknić 2013, 153–55). The liberalization of culture that relied on consumer spending and the development of culture industries followed soon (Vujadinović 1988, 121).

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During the 1960s, the newly established recording market and growing estrada scene, aided by folk music festivals such as Beogradski sabor (Belgrade) and Ilidža (Sarajevo), played major roles in the mass dissemination of novokomponovana. A  few receptive academics questioned its mass appeal under the banner of narodna music. Croatian musicologist Koraljka Kos, for example, was one of the first to write about the harmful effects of folk music commercialization: “This process of destroying the original musical structures is aided by the great number of local radio stations that play nothing but the current products of gramophone record manufacturers, and by the widespread use and popularity of the juke-box” (Kos 1972, 63). Kos underscored the fact that peasant folk music and stylized “music in the folk spirit” were both losing ground to the alternative concept of mass-mediated folk music. The attitudes toward novokomponovana, as reflected in the broadcast policies of radio and television networks, were ambivalent at best. Although the music was seldom directly censored, certain recordings, mostly on the basis of poor song lyrics, were considered šund (trash, kitsch) and taxed according to a 1971 law,4 which imposed the additional tax approximately half the retail value on records judged as šund (Hofman 2013, 295–96). The increased importance of local radio stations5 and specialist labels, and the formation of estrada revues (joint concert performances of stars and young aspiring singers) and “caravans of song” (touring teams of singers supported by concert agencies), allowed for the market breakthrough of novokomponovana in the 1970s. The founding of record labels, like Diskos in the Serbian town of Aleksandrovac (1962), Sarajevo-based Diskoton (1972) and Belgrade-based Jugodisk (1974), spurred an increase in the production of novokomponovana, with a rapidly growing audience. It also elevated novokomponovana to pop culture prominence, on a par with culturally privileged zabavna-pop music. In academic discourse, a few forward-thinking observers suggested that the neofolk musical culture was a countercultural response to the repressive outlook of official culture: “The answer of the People (the cunning folk) to the enlightenment concept of boring culture offered by bureaucratic and sterile cultural policies” (Dragićević Šešić 1988, 115). The intense, almost obsessive media and press coverage of new releases, biographies, and lifestyles of novokomponovana stars mirrored models from the West. Pop journalism proliferated with popular magazines like Jugoslovenska estrada, Sabor, and TV revija, and readers’ letters, stars’ gossip columns, and beauty contests became an integral part of Yugoslavs’ daily consumption of pop culture (Janjetović 2011, 254). Cultural theorists saw the novokomponovana core audience as a blueprint for the class structure of Yugoslav society, identifying villagers and the working-class as the principal consumers of the “populist, newly composed cultural model” (Dragićević Šešić 1988, 95-6). Commentators unabashedly used the term “halfling” for people who had recently migrated to the cities from the countryside or were the children of earlier migrants. They held the view that the diverse audience for folk and mainstream pop music comprised a social cohort that had lost its immediate connection to rural life, attempting to adapt to urban culture without fully embracing it. Despite the claims of culturally enlightened commentators on socialism, I would argue that the attraction to novokomponovana was a result of people’s own self-definition of their culture and identity, rather than their failure to “belong.” Radio Folk Singer Versus Novokomponovana Star Lepa Lukić’s 1964 single recording of “Od izvora dva putića” (Two Paths Leading from the Water Spring) is frequently cited as the start of the commercial rise of “new folk” music. An aspiring young singer, Lukić recorded the song for the state-run PGP RTB, and it may well be the first

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best-selling folk hit, generating anywhere from 100,000 up to 260,000 copies sold, according to many estimates (Luković 1989, 207). “It was the only song that chose me,” Lukić said later, “I chose all others” (Trošelj 2009). Personal mythopoetic aside, Lukić’s statement hints at her transformation as a folk singer, from respectful apprentice in the state-supported system of arranged folk music to career-wise future star of commercial folk. The lyrics develop around the central poetic figure of “two paths,” told from the perspective of a young woman who nostalgically recalls an early love back in her village. The lovers’ diverging paths within the tranquil setting of village life is a subtle allusion to the pressures of rural-to-urban migration that could suggest to the listener the idea of Yugoslavia’s “third way”: between free-market capitalism and centrally planned communism. A later video of this song, made for Radio Television Belgrade’s 1970 New Year’s Eve entertainment program, shows the elegantly dressed Lukić on the streets of Paris and Montreal, signing records for enthusiastic – presumably Yugoslav – fans. The foreign locations suggest an aspirational lifestyle of travel and leisure, as well as an appeal to Yugoslav audiences in the growing diaspora communities in Europe and elsewhere. Although Lukić faced complaints because of her previous work in kafana, this song allowed her to occasionally record for Radio Belgrade and eventually become a prominent figure within the novokomponovana scene. Another singer, Silvana Armenulić, was among the leading singers of novokomponovana in the 1970s, whose career similarly started in kafana and quickly blossomed into stardom, while her tragic death in a car accident in 1976 added to the mystique of her youth, sex appeal and fine voice. Lukić and Armenulić were often portrayed in the media as fierce rivals, and both sang and acted as kafana singers in television shows: Armenulić was given the role of the singer Rada in the popular show Ljubav na seoski način (A Village-Style Love, 1970), and Lukić in the drama movie I bog stvori kafansku pevačicu (And God Created a Kafana Singer, 1972) directed by Jovan Živanović. Armenulić’s collaboration with singer Kruna Janković (1965) is illustrative of the continuing transformation of arranged folk music into novokomponovana. Janković was a Belgrade radio singer who sang in duets, which were popular in the 1960s, and appeared in various television shows that combined radio soloists and orchestras with village amateur groups in studio portrayals of local customs. In the popular show Mesta znana, a vremena davna (Known Places, Ancient Times, 1972), she appeared dressed as a peasant, singing na bas (“over the bass”) style.6 Her delivery is characterized by the polished vocal style of radio-trained singing, with a soft vibrato at the end of phrases, moderate dynamics and the use of characteristic glissandi typical for radio and pop-styled evergreen songs, which is in stark contrast to louder, dynamically uniform, rural singing “na bas.” Janković was also versed in early zabavna-styled songs (šlager, šansona, romances variety), as illustrated in her album Prošle su godine te (Those Years Have Passed, 1965), and her partaking in several genres suggests that zabavna-pop and folk were not mutually exclusive, and that audiences embraced the variety. Armenulić similarly started with a mixed repertoire of traditional and early neofolk songs, frequently sung in duets and hardly distinguishable from radio arrangements. Her first extended play record “Da li čuješ, dragi” (Darling, Do You Hear, 1965), made in collaboration with Janković, contained four songs in the folk manner with simple portrayals of amorous affairs between young people. The lyrics are organized in couplets and quatrains without a chorus; the melodic line is sung in parallel thirds with a harmonic closure on the second degree of the scale (typical of rural traditional music, but also early songs created “in the folk spirit”). The steady instrumental accompaniment, including intro and interludes between the sung couplets, is typical of folk acoustic ensembles of that time, featuring the accordion, violins, and guitar. Only a couple of years later, Armenulić’s songs underwent considerable changes, reflecting both her personal evolution

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as a singer and the genre’s absorption of styles from the zabavna-pop and Balkan musics. For example, her entire extended play album from 1968 Silvana Armenulić featured cover versions of four Greek songs, and by the mid-1970s her repertoire expanded to include a mix of traditional Serbian songs in the 2/4 dvojka idiom (“Ludujem za tobom” [Going Crazy for You], 1976), ­Spanish-flavored “Šta će mi život” (I Don’t Need Life, 1970), and memorable kafana hit “Rane moje” (My Wounds, 1971). Silvana’s voice had a unique timbre described as warm and rich by her fans, and with a measured use of ornamentation and a blend of radio folk and light pop styles, she introduced a Yugoslav folk-šlager – “a middle of the road” variant of the new folk music (Matoš 1981). This zabavna-pop mode of performance, amplified by the introduction of electric guitars and drum set in band’s accompaniment, set the standard for novokomponovana in the 1980s.7 From Novokomponovana to Pop-Folk During Late Socialism During the 1980s, novokomponovana gradually shifted from a neofolk concept toward an eclectic approach to narodna music treasure, supported by a powerful folk music market consisting of “interactive and shifting layers of dominance within the loosely defined vertical structure of the Yugoslav music industry” (Rasmussen 1995, 246). Young pop-rock audiences were drawn to contemporary folk music, adding to the already-sizable core of novokomponovana followers. Every successful singer was expected to experiment with new trends, but also to earn the respect of fans as a rite of passage, proving they could sing older repertoires. Thus many performers strove to include folk “oldies” in their repertoire, especially during their early careers. For singers active in folk estrada, the 1980s provided unprecedented platforms, including specialized TV shows and local radio stations, relentless promotion, major and minor record labels, press, concert promoters, best selling records, international tours, and  millions of followers. A  twotiered system evolved: mainstream media stars like Zorica Brunclik, Lepa Brena, Miroslav Ilić, Vesna Zmijanac, Halid Bešlić, Šaban Bajramović, and an “alternative” to the mainstream, with stars like Šemsa Suljaković, Sinan Sakić, and (early) Dragana Mirković, led by multiethnic production/performance venture Južni vetar (Southern Wind). Typical bands accompanying singers included synthesizer, accordion, acoustic and electric lead and bass guitars, and drum set. Songs featured conventional chord progressions in major/minor keys, peppered with diminished, augmented, and modal inflections. Singing styles were marked by profuse ornamentation, glissandi, and a somewhat harsh timbre and nasal tone, especially by the recording singers acclaimed on the kafana performance circuit. Sometimes a playful attitude toward old-fashioned folk music helped a song “stick” with audiences. Lepa Brena’s hit “Mile voli disko” (Mile Loves Disco, 1982) is about a young couple from a village near the Serbian river Morava, whose cultural preferences are in discord. Boyfriend Mile prefers disco music but his girlfriend loves to dance the Šumadija kolo (circle dance). In the last stanza of the chorus, harmony between the lovers is restored when the accordion starts to play disco, resolving their cultural differences and musical tastes. Brena’s song “Sanjam” (I Dream, 1987) also “resolves” another internally complicated cultural conflict, this time between the East, the West, and the local culture. In the video, Brena magically enters a video game she is playing, in which she fights her way through many obstacles and dangers before she meets her imagined lover, who then vanishes, replaced by the smiling male members of her band Slatki greh (Sweet Sin). The synthesizer intro emulates a local string instrument, and its short tetrachordal motive ends on the second degree of the scale – a closure transferred from village songs to new folk music. The first two verses are in another major key, while the

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last two verses suggest oriental overtones due to Phrygian modal inflections. The chorus, predominantly in a major key, flows in a common soft pop style. The sequence of intro/verse/ chorus embodies the transformation of novokomponovana of the 1980s, linking a fragment of an imagined folk tune with an exotic, lightly Orientalized musical statement, culminating in a conventional I – V – IV chord progression of the catchy chorus. The narrative, in contrasts with video images, is about a girl who promises to follow her beloved to the end of the world, including the faraway planets; its quasi-folk lyrics declare that she would alight on his pillow and fly “as a white bird, up to the Sun, Mashallah”8 (k’o ptica bela/pa sve do sunca, mašala). (See Chapter 13 for more on Lepa Brena.) Throughout the 1980s, localized novokomponovana scenes engendered elements of Yugoslavia’s Ottoman legacy, best represented by the Južni vetar production team and five singing collaborators of Bosnian, Roma, and Serbian backgrounds. Their style differed in many respects from the mainstream: nasal and melismatic singing, male unison backing vocals, asymmetric meters common in south Serbia, Macedonia, and Turkey (7/8, 9/8), heavily ornamented and improvised rubato instrumental preludes, and maqam-like scales. Their “Orientalized” music provoked fear of the “Islamization” of Yugoslav music culture, and the mainstream media boycotted their music. However, full control over the creative and production process allowed the group to prosper outside mass media structures, earning them a cult-like status and mass following in southeast parts of the country and in the Yugoslav diaspora (Rasmussen 2002, 123–26). Songs like “Kockar” (Gambler 1986) by Mile Kitić, “Sklonite čaše sa stola” (Put Away Glasses From the Table, 1988) by Sinan Sakić, or “Svako me proleće na tebe seti” (Every Spring Brings Back the Memories of You, 1986) by Šemsa Suljaković, combined the exaggerated expressiveness of novokomponovana performance style with pop arrangements, and synth lines resembling folk instruments enhanced by various sound effects. This brand of locally rooted yet innovative and experimental novokomponovana paved the way for turbo-folk in the nineties. The late 1980s also saw a rise in patriotic songs praising particular republics and the national characteristics of their peoples. Revivals of songs along distinct ethnonational lines signaled the new current of musical nationalism. Singer Predrag Gojković Cune, a bard of the post-1950s generation, claimed that during early estrada days, any overt expression of Serbian or Croatian identity, even with symbols of regionalism, was politically risky: There was one rule: don’t mention Croatia and all things Croatian, don’t mention Serbia and all things Serbian; do mention [Croatia’s] Zagorje [region] and [Serbia’s] Šumadija [region]. I don’t know why, but all editors were bothered by this. Once, while touring, I was advised by the editor at Radio Belgrade to avoid even Šumadija, so I sang about the Morava river! My colleague from Croatia also avoided even Zagorje; [instead] he sang about Zagreb! (Luković 1989, 76) The suggestion of potentially divisive political identities ascribed to folk songs proved true. While novokomponovana originated mainly from music found in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia, throughout history these musics crisscrossed, traversing intra-national and wider Balkan and European musical spaces. Though this music was mostly about love, it held a tremendous power in promoting the new cultural values inherent in Yugoslavia’s vision of modern socialist society. Novokomponovana endowed individualism with a culturally appropriate nostalgia for an idealized village, promoting the idea of class mobility and more flexible gender roles while capitalizing on the provocative staging of female sexuality. Above all, it

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promoted the experience of supranational identity, an identity rooted in consumerism rather than a particular ethnicity. Conclusion With the commodification of novokomponovana during the 1980s and its transformation into a pop culture spectacle, the genre laid the groundwork for a powerful post-socialist music industry concentrated in Belgrade. During the 1990s, novokomponovana branched off into Serbian turbo-folk, a modern post-folk genre and urban youth culture, influenced by MTV aesthetics and musical fads from Eurodance to hip hop. Western-looking and sometimes Eastern-sounding turbo-folk outpaced other popular music genres during the violent demise of Yugoslavia, and became associated with the ruling Serbian regime, its leader Slobodan Milošević, and war-related social elites. At the time, it was commonly criticized for glorifying crime, moral corruption and nationalist xenophobia by Serbian cultural commentators and especially outside observers (see Monroe 2000; Kronja 2001; Archer 2009; for a more positive assessment of turbo-folk see Nenić 2011; Višnjić 2011; Čvoro 2014; Uehata 2018). After the mid-1990s, it evolved into a transregional pop-folk musical culture, redefining novokomponovana as an authentic cultural resource to be remastered aesthetically and technologically into a global (Balkan) pop music genre. As contemporary pop-folk, the lingua franca of post-Yugoslav cultural space, turbo-folk has thus maintained a link with the socialist novokomponovana music. The latter now has a tradition of its own: it has become a cultural resource, the very standard for contemporary commercial folk music. Novokomponovana even serves as a form of resistance to the troubled present, an evocative conduit to the formally absent but sonically powerful space of belonging to the nation of Yugoslavia. Notes 1. In 1925 Sofka Nikolić recorded two songs in Belgrade for the British record label His Master’s Voice: “Kolika je Javorina planina” (How High Is the Javorina Mountain) and “Kad bi znala, dilber Stano” (If You Could Know, Darling Stana). Soon afterwards her records reached high sales on both local and international music markets. During her successful career, Nikolić made around one hundred records, and her approach to singing and repertoire strongly influenced the next generation of modern folk singers. 2. The idea that folk music should be altered, modernized, or improved was not a new one. Composers of Romantic national schools such as Serbians Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac and Josif Marinković, the Croatian Jakov Gotovac, and those of the interwar generation in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, such as Stevan Hristić and Josip Slavenski, drew heavily on folk material as a source of inspiration for their work. 3. Yugoslavia’s radio-television broadcast system (JRT) started in 1958, in an era when the sonic space of popular culture was largely defined by state-sponsored radio stations, with their own choices and versions of popular music for a general audience. The rise of local radio stations and restructuring of the music market began in the 1970s and contributed to a loosening of the monopoly of the republics’ radio networks and the decentralization of music broadcast (Rasmussen 2002, 145). 4. The Law on Amendments to the Republican Tax on Retail Goods (Zakon o izmenama i dopunama o republičkom porezu na promet robe na malo) was popularly labeled the “Law Against Šund” (trash, kitsch). 5. In 1949 there were sixteen radio stations nationwide; by 1963, the number had risen to forty-three (Doknić 2013, 47). 6. “Na bas” is a newer form of village singing tradition, widespread in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Songs in this style feature two-part singing: the lead singer has the melody in the top voice, with a group of vocalists accompanying in thirds, characteristically ending a verse on a perfect fifth. 7. Some radio singers wanted no part of the new folk music scene as it began to favor the untrained “rough” voices of charismatic amateurs. A new generation of performers from the 1970s, however, appreciated their predecessors. Bosnian singer Meho Puzić, for example, emphasized in an interview that under the new market conditions in the 1970s, notable performers of the post-war generation did not receive proper attention. “The highest ranking artists like Nada

“My Juga, My Dearest Flower”  •  141 Mamula, Zaim Imamović, Radmila Dimić, Danica Obrenić and many others are neglected. They simply aren’t interesting to [novokomponovana] managers” (Puzić cited in Borojević 1971, 7). 8 . Mašala is an exclamation word of Arabic origin (lit. God willing) used in BCS languages to express wonder, admiration, and excitement.

Bibliography Archer, Rory. 2009. “ ‘Paint Me Black and Gold and Put Me in a Frame’: Turbofolk and Balkanist Discourse in (Post) Yugoslav Cultural Space.” MA diss., Central European University, Budapest. Anketa Radio Beograda o muzičkom programu. October 1952. Belgrade: Arhiva Radio Beograda. Borojević, Rade. 1971. “Da li su estradni umetnici obična roba.” Jugoslovenska estrada, January–February: 4–5. Cenerić, Ivo. 1988. “Moj trinaestogodišnji rad sa Carevcem.” In Carevčeva lira: Repertoar Vlastimira Pavlovića Carevca, edited by Ivo Cenerić, 177–81. Knjaževac: Nota. Čvoro, Uroš. 2014. Turbo-Folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia. Farnham: Ashgate. Doknić, Branka. 2013. Kulturna politika Jugoslavije 1946–1963. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Dragićević Šešić, Milena. 1988. “Publika nove narodne muzike.” Kultura 80–81: 94–116. Dumnić, Marija. 2013. “The Creation of Folk Music Program on Radio Belgrade Before World War Two: Editorial Policies and Performing Ensembles.” Muzikologija 14: 9–30. Dumnić, Marija. 2016. “The Establishing of a Professional Folk Orchestra in the Interwar Period in Belgrade.” In Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe: New Scopes of Research and Action, edited by Liz Mellish, Nick Green, and Mirjana Zakić, 127–33. Belgrade: ICTM Study Group on Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe and Faculty of Music, University of Arts. Gordy, Eric. 1999. The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Hofman, Ana. 2010. “Kafana Singers: Popular Music, Gender and Subjectivity in the Cultural Space of Socialist Yugoslavia.” Narodna umjetnost 47 (1): 141–61. Hofman, Ana. 2013. “Ko se boji šunda još? Muzička cenzura u Jugoslaviji.” In Socijalizam na klupi: Jugoslovensko društvo očima postjugoslovenske humanistike, edited by Lada Duraković and Andrea Matošević, 280–316. Pula and Zagreb: Srednja Evropa. Hofman, Ana, and Polona Sitar. 2016. “ ‘Buy Me a Silk Skirt Mile!’ Celebrity Culture, Gender and Social Positioning in Socialist Yugoslavia.” In Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Rory Archer, Igor Duda and Paul Stubbs, 155–72. London: Routledge. Janjetović, Zoran. 2011. Od internacionale do komercijale: Popularna kultura u Jugoslaviji 1945–1991. Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije. Janoš, Saša. 2008. “Istorija radijskog pevanja narodne muzike od 1935. do 1975. godine.” Sa starog gramofona – Old Gramophone Blog. Accessed April 21, 2018. https://starigramofon.wordpress.com/feljton/ Karaklajić, Đorđe. 1971. “Estradni umetnik.” Jugoslovenska estrada, January–February: 2. Kos, Koraljka. 1972. “New Dimensions in Folk Music: A Contribution to the Study of Musical Tastes in Contemporary Yugoslav Society.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 3 (1): 61–73. Kronja, Ivana. 2001. Smrtonosni sjaj: Masovna psihologija i estetika turbo-folka. Belgrade: Tehnokratia. Luković, Petar. 1989. Bolja prošlost: Prizori iz muzičkog života Jugoslavije 1940–1989. Belgrade: Mladost. Matoš, Darko. 1981. “Primitivno protiv narodnjaka.” Vjesnik, March 21, n.p. Obtained from Radio Belgrade’s archives. Monroe, Alexei. 2000. “Balkan Hardcore: Pop Culture and Paramilitarism.” Central Europe Review 2 (24). Accessed July 1, 2017. www.pecina.cz/files/www.ce-review.org/00/24/monroe24.html Nenić, Iva. 2011. “Roze kiborzi i /de/centrirane ideološke mašine: Preobražaji muzičke kulture (turbo)folka.” Genero: Časopis za feminističku teoriju i studije kulture 13: 63–80. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 1995. “From Source to Commodity: Newly-Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia.” Popular Music 14 (2): 241–56. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 2002. Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. New York: Routledge. Stojanović, Dubravka. 2012. “Kafane kao temelj civilnog društva u Srbiji krajem 19. i početkom 20. veka.” In Kafanologija, edited by Dragoljub Đorđević, 43–54. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Trošelj, Slavko. 2009. “Prvi put sam zapevala kad sam zaplakala.” Politika, December 19. Accessed June 9, 2018. www. politika.rs/scc/clanak/116462/Prvi-put-sam-zapevala-kad-sam-zaplakala Uehata, Fumi. 2018. “Serbian ‘Turbo-Folk’ Music and the Music Industry.” Philokalia: The Journal of the Science of Arts 35: 27–48. Višnjić, Jelena. 2011. “ ‘Idealno loša’: Politike rekonstrukcije identiteta turbo-folka u savremenoj Srbiji.” Genero: Časopis za feminističku teoriju i studije kulture 13: 43–61. Vučetić, Radina. 2012. “Potrošačko društvo po američkom modelu (jedan pogled na jugoslavensku svakodnevicu šezdesetih).” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 2: 277–98. Vujadinović, Dimitrije. 1988. “Ekonomija u masovnoj kulturi.” Kultura – časopis za teoriju i sociologiju kulture i kulturnu politiku 80–81: 117–46.

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Discography Armenulić, Silvana. “Silvana Armenulić.” Jugoton EPY 4034, 1968, 45 rpm. Armenulić, Silvana. “Šta će mi život.” Jugoton EPY 4352, 1970, 45 rpm. Armenulić, Silvana. “Ja molim za ljubav”/“Rane moje.” Jugoton SY 11826, 1971, 45 rpm. Armenulić, Silvana. “Ludujem za tobom”/“Ne sjećaj se više mene.” Jugoton SY 23155, 1976, 45 rpm. Bajramović, Šaban and Ansambl NAISSUS braće Petrović. Mesium čavelja tari Jugoslavija. ZKP RTVL LD 0747, 1983, 33⅓ rpm. Bešlić, Halid. Dijamanti. Diskoton LP 8102, 1984, 33⅓. Brunclik, Zorica. “Da li si sada još onako lep”/“Tecite suze moje.” Diskos NDK 4924, 1979, 45 rpm. Gojković, Predrag Cune. “Ljubav mi srce mori”/ “Te oči tvoje plave.” PGP RTB EP 12530, 1969, 45 rpm. Ilić, Miroslav. Sreli smo se bilo je davno. PGP RTB LP 1512, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Janković, Kruna, and Zilha Silvana Armenulić. Da li čuješ, dragi. Diskos EDK 5089, 1965, 45 rpm. Kitić, Mile. Kockar. Diskos KD 30001299, 1986, cassette. Lukić, Lepa. Od izvora vode dva putića. PGP RTB EP 12285, 1967, 45 rpm. Lukić, Lepa et al. Autobus kolo. PGP RTB S 10054, 1971, 45 rpm. Mirković, Dragana. Imam dečka nemirnog. Diskos KD 1180, 1984, cassette. Lepa Brena. Lepa Brena and Slatki Greh. PGP RTB 2111500, 1982, 33⅓ Lepa Brena. Hajde da se volimo. Diskoton DTK 9460, 1987, cassette. Nikolić, Sofka. “Kad bi znala dilber Stano”/“Kolika je Javorina planina.” Victor V 3043, 1925, 78 rpm. Sakić, Sinan and “Južni vetar.” Čaša po čaša. Diskos KD 30001447, 1988, cassette. Suljaković, Šemsa and the Ansambl “Južni vetar.” Pristajem na sve. Diskos LPD 20001202, 1986, 33⅓. Zmijanac, Vesna. Istina. PGP RTB 500739, 1988, cassette.

Filmography Lazić, Dragoslav, dir. Ljubav na seoski način. TV series. Radio televizija Beograd, 1970. Miljković, Ljubinko, dir. Mesta znana, a vremena davna. TV series. Radio televizija Beograd, 1972. Živanović, Jovan, dir. I bog stvori kafansku pevačicu. Filmska radna zajednica, 1972.

12

Music in Macedonia

At the Source of Yugoslavia’s Balkans Velika Stojkova Serafimovska

A small country in the Western Balkans, the Republic of North Macedonia (hereinafter Macedonia)1 became an independent nation state through its peaceful separation from Yugoslavia in 1991. As the southernmost republic in Yugoslavia, located in the center of the Balkan Peninsula, Macedonia fostered an exceptionally rich variety of archaic and contemporary forms of music. With a population of approximately two million, it consists of an ethnic Macedonian majority, with sizable Albanian, Turkish, Roma, Vlach, and Serbian populations, and several other ethnic minorities. Historically, the region was part of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires (until 1912); in 1918, the territory that constitutes the present-day Macedonia became part of the Yugoslav Kingdom, and following WWII, the Macedonian nation and language were officially recognized within Yugoslavia’s socialist constitution (1945–91). In this chapter I address several distinct musical practices that broadly constitute the field of popular music, through three main contexts: traditional folk music, which reflects the broader socialist policy of identity representation; Macedonian “source” material (both music and musicians) that contributed to the national neofolk and pop-rock scenes; and current music production in Macedonia as part of the Balkan pop music networks. Specifically, I  argue for the cohesive impact of Macedonian music on Yugoslavia’s culture. Given its proximity to the Eastern Mediterranean, Macedonia has served as an “oriental” inspiration for many Yugoslav musicians, and nowadays it provides the common musical core widely shared within the pan-Yugoslav and Balkan music scenes worldwide. Traditional Folk Music According to Dave Wilson, a specific form of Macedonian musical nationalism was fostered in the context of socialist Yugoslavia, connected to a Slavic political history and its associated cultural traditions identified as uniquely Macedonian (Wilson 2015, 19). After WWII, the Yugoslav state invested significant resources in developing a nationwide network of cultural institutions, organized around cultural-artistic societies – kulturno-umjetničko društvo (sing.) or KUD. According to the Croatian musicologist Vinko Žganec (1962, 15), at the first related event Smotra Folklora (Folklore Review) in Zagreb, on September 22, 1947, even president Tito highlighted the importance of preserving folk heritage as crucial to the development of Yugoslav society. Folk music ensembles in particular served as melting pots that symbolically united people of all backgrounds

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through song and dance, and fostered a sense of pan-Yugoslav community and identity. In this early post-1945 period, three leading national professional ensembles laid the foundations for Yugoslav folklore groups: the Serbian Kolo (founded in 1948), and the Macedonian Tanec and Croatian Lado, both founded in 1949. Typically, each ensemble would conclude their concerts with a potpourri of “Songs and Dances from Yugoslavia” (Pjesme i igre iz Jugoslavije), comprised of short fragments of folk dances symbolizing distinctive traditions of the constituent nationalities and ethnic groups within the Federation. At the local level, young people learned to sing and dance repertories from all nationalities and ethnic groups through various folklore groups, which encouraged respect for cultural differences. Over time, however, the folk pieces performed by amateur and semi-professional ensembles became more polished and technically perfected, and increasingly estranged from their original “authentic” (izvorna) performance practice (Laušević 1996, 119). As noted by Dunin and Višinski (1995, 19), Tanec’s repertoire included ethnic Turkish (e.g., “Osman Paša” and “Anadolka”) and Albanian (e.g., “Jeni Jol”) dances in the early years, but in 1953 Macedonian sources became the focus of the repertoire, when the ensemble was scaled down from over ninety to fifty members. Some Turkish dances remained a part of the general repertoire, illustrating “oriental influences” commonly found in the Balkans (Wilson 2015, 20–21). In line with the ideological turn toward Macedonian heritage, during the 1960s and 1970s, Radio Television Skopje also promoted vocal groups made up of the Macedonian community from the contested region of northern Greece (known in Macedonia as Aegean Macedonia), including groups like Bapčorki, Kosturčanki, and Vodenki. Tanec’s repertoire also included dances from the Aegean region, including “Egejsko oro” (Aegean Dance) and “Solunka” (Dance from Thessaloniki), which the ensemble started performing in 1973 and still performs today. By the 1960s, Macedonian traditional music and dance were recognized as one of the most diverse and colorful in the whole of Yugoslavia, and a popular saying captured the sentiment: “When you go to Macedonia, do not sing, do not play and do not dance, because you will be outsung, out-played and out-danced.” This diversity is evident in both the archaic peasant musical practices and in those absorbed through the perennial influence of the Byzantine and Ottoman cultures that flourished in the wider region. Indeed, music has always existed as an essential part of Macedonian everyday life in both rural and urban environments, and singing has been a constituent part of the rituals with pre-Christian origins. These include Kolede (Christmas Eve), Pročka (Lent), Lazarica (the week before Easter), Easter, Gjurgjovden (May 6), Dodole (a summer rain invocation rite), and harvesting rituals. Many families also celebrate the slava (family patron saint day) with St. Michael the Archangel (November 21) and St. Nikola (December 19), where traditional music is spontaneously performed. Musically, the melodic structure of most ritual songs typically focuses on several pitches within a narrow ambitus (2–5 tones), with dense texture, while the non-ritual songs are usually well developed with a wider ambitus (6–8 tones) and a heavy use of melisma and ornamentation; the songs are either performed rubato, in regular 2/4 duple meter, or in steady additive meters such as 7/8, 7/16, 5/16, 9/8 or 11/16, but most commonly 7/8 (3 + 2 + 2). Their texture varies according to the geographical area: in eastern and northeastern Macedonia, two-part drone singing prevails, while in the central and Western parts of the country, unison singing dominates. Additionally, ritual songs are typically unaccompanied, while dance-based songs and some ritual dances are accompanied by traditional instruments such as the gajda (bagpipe), šupelka (end-blown flute), and kjemene (bowed fiddle). Ritual dances, such as “Teškoto” and “Nevestinsko” (popular oro semi-circle dances) and “Rusajliski Dances,” are performed exclusively with an instrumental accompaniment of zurla (double reed

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pipe, typically played in pairs) and tapani (large double-headed drum). Topics range from epic and historical narratives to amorous and humorous subjects inspired by everyday events within a community, while social occasions, such as family and communal events, call for a predominantly lyrical song repertoire. Alongside the village-based musical practices, around the turn of the nineteenth century the starogradska muzika (old urban music) emerged in Macedonian urban centers through two forms: the troubadour-style vocal-instrumental groups made up of accordion, violin, guitar, and clarinet, which illustrate the Central European/Habsburg sphere of influence; chalgija ensembles (from Turkish, denoting “instrument playing”), which comprised instruments found throughout the Arab world and Turkey, such as ut (oud), kanon (zither), tarabuka (goblet drum), and dajre (tambourine), demonstrating the widespread Turkish influence on urban music during the Ottoman rule (see Džimrevski 1985). In Macedonia, chalgija also refers to instrumental performance characteristics that feature elements such as the augmented second, additive meters, and the style of playing “a la Turk,” or “a la Frank,” the latter denoting Western musical influences. In short, Macedonian music, imbued with many archaic layers combined with contemporized practices, offered not only a wealth of material for researchers, but also great appeal for local pop and rock musicians, as well as those within the wider Yugoslav popular music scene. Macedonian Folk Music Within the Yugoslav Estrada Prominent singers from the Tanec ensemble (Aleksandar Sarijevski, Kiril Mančevski, Vaska Ilieva, Vanja Lazarovska, Atanas Badev, and Anka Gieva) and other folk singers who gradually embraced popular styles contributed to the nascent commercial market for “new folk music.” The Selimova-Želčeski duo (formed in 1961) were the first singers who reached national popularity by recording a number of Macedonian folk song albums with the Serbian PGP RTB label since 1962, while Nina Spirova and Violeta Tomovska came to prominence with a wider repertoire of Macedonian folk and starogradske songs, and later pop and jazz. Spirova, in particular, became a nationally recognized singer who skillfully mastered a diverse repertoire, recognized by her song “Eden baknež” (One Kiss), which won the First Prize at the prestigious Opatija Festival in 1962. Similarly, Tomovska’s 1968 duet with Kiril Mančevski, “Makedonsko Devojče” (Macedonian Girl) became an all-Yugoslav hit. The 1960s was also the decade when the Roma singer Esma Redžepova, together with the Stevo Teodosievski Ensemble, began a remarkable career, first in Yugoslavia, then internationally. After Redžepova won a school talent competition in Skopje in 1957, she was noticed by the locally renowned musician Teodosievski, who soon become her manager, and in 1968 her husband. Although initially her singing aspirations were not supported by her parents and the Roma community, in 1961, at eighteen, she recorded her first extended play album with the Stevo Teodosievki Ensemble, Abre Babi Sokerdžan (Oh Father, What Have You Done). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s they recorded around forty albums with the two biggest labels, Croatian Jugoton and PGP RTB, pioneering Balkan folk fusions and creating the Romani music niche within the World Music market. Drawing heavily on her Roma musical background, shaped within the decorum and aesthetics of the early pop-style singers in socialist Yugoslavia, Redžepova’s beauty, charm, striking voice, and stage presence fed the Western imaginary for Gypsy female performers on a par with Carmen and early Balkan version immortalized in the character of Koštana (see Beard-Špirić 2017), soon making her well-known across Europe. As noted in the Guardian obituary for Redžepova, she was the first Yugoslav artist to appear at the Olympia Theatre in Paris

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in 1962 (Cartwright 2016). While most of the songs performed by Redžepova were traditional Roma songs, or inspired by Roma music, she excelled in varied repertoire including Macedonian songs, notably her duet performance with Nikola Badev, “Ajde, slušaj kaleš bre Anđo” (Come on, Listen You Beautiful Anđa, 1966). Redžepova rose from poverty into an eloquent spokesperson for Europe’s Roma people, a confidante of the Yugoslav president Tito, and a cultural ambassador for the Republic of Macedonia. She released eighty-five records and performed thousands of concerts, forging a style with cross-generational appeal that eventually took her to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2013. Notwithstanding her international career, it was her highly original and nuanced interpretation of the traditional Roma song “Čaje Šukarije” (Beautiful Girl; on Abre Babi Sokerdžan album, 1961), with the Stevo Teodosievksi Folk Ensemble, that brought her fame and the title of the “Queen of Gypsy Music” (Silverman 2012, 201). Redžepova and most Macedonian folk singers pursued their recording careers with either the Serbian PGP RTB label or Croatian Jugoton. Even though Macedonia had no homegrown recording industry, Radio Television Skopje steadily recorded local performers from the 1960s onwards, under the supervision of folklorist Zhivko Firfov. Still, with greater Yugoslav exposure via PGP RTB and Jugoton, Macedonian music was appropriated by the mainstream pop and rock artists to great effect, who created a string of Yugoslav hits in the 1970s. For instance, Croatian rock singer Dado Topić and his band Time released an original rock song titled “Makedonija” in 1973, in which the opening repeated intoning of “je’n, dva, tri, je’n, dva, je’n, dva” (One-TwoThree, One-Two, One-Two) sets up the rhythmic thrust of the song in the characteristic 7/8 meter. The song, which describes the beauty of the Macedonian landscape and spirit, instantly became a hit in Yugoslavia, and is considered in the top hundred Yugoslav songs according to many radio stations’ top lists and pop magazines. Likewise, the melodiousness and infectious rhythms of Macedonian traditional music inspired the patriotic song “Od Vardara pa do Triglava” (From Vardar to Triglav, 1978), also known as “Jugoslavijo,” which was based on a Macedonian folk tune: the lyrics by the leading commercial folk songwriter Milutin Popović Zahar praised Yugoslavia from the low-lands Macedonian river Vardar to the northern-most Alpine mountain in Slovenia, Triglav, which made the song hugely popular in the 1980s, as one of the unofficial Yugoslav anthems. Similarly, the leading Yugoslav rock band Bijelo dugme paid homage to Macedonian folk music at the height of their career in 1984, with the love song “Lipe cvatu, sve je isto k’o i lani” (Linden Trees are in Bloom, Everything’s Just As it Was Last Year; from their seventh studio album Bijelo dugme), which featured Pece Atanasovski’s memorable bagpipe opening in characteristic 7/8 rhythm, as well as the Folk Instruments Orchestra of Radio Television Skopje. Macedonian Pop, Rock, and Jazz Alongside its sizeable folk scene, a more modest zabavna-pop scene also emerged in Macedonia in the 1960s, when singers Zafir Hadžimanov, Dragan Mijalkovski, and Verica Ristevska appeared on the Yugoslav circuit. Following the trend of zabavna-pop music festivals initiated in Croatia in the late 1950s, similar major festivals were established in Macedonia, first the Skopje Fest (1968) and later Makfest in Štip (1986). Due to a lack of music production infrastructure, the Macedonian rock scene developed later, in the 1970s, when the first rock bands such as Leb i sol, Pu, and Leva patika emerged. As with their counterparts elsewhere in Yugoslavia, these bands drew variously on pop, rock, jazz, and funk, although most of them also included elements of Macedonian folk music. The greatest affirmation of Macedonian rock music came with Leb i sol, arguably

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the most original band, musically, to emerge in socialist Yugoslavia. Formed in 1976, the band featured Vlatko Stefanovski on lead guitar and vocals, Bodan Arsovski on bass, Nikola Kokan Dimuševski on keyboards, and Garabet Tavitjan (from 1977) on drums. Ingeniously combining rock, improvisational jazz, and Macedonian folk music with Stefanovski’s virtuoso guitar playing, the group recorded thirteen albums between 1978 and 1991 (Janjatović 1998, 109), and gave numerous concerts to great acclaim across Yugoslavia. Their unique treatment of Macedonian folk music within an improvisational jazz-rock idiom was praised early on, at the Rock Night of the 1978 Opatija Festival, where Leb i Sol were awarded the prize for the best artistic rendition of a folk song “Aber dojde Donke” (Donka, A Voice that Carries the News Has Arrived). Besides early influences by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, according to the group leader Stefanovski, all of their albums drew on Macedonian material, evident in the sophisticated treatment of melodies and complex asymmetric meters. Other notable folk-based renditions include “Jovano, Jovanke” (Jovano Jovanke, 1978), “Ajde sonce zajde” (Come On, the Sun Has Set, 1981), “Bistra voda” (Clear Water, 1983), and “Uči me majko, karaj me” (Teach Me Mother, Tell Me Off, 1991). Reformed as a trio in the early 1980s, the band embraced more compact sound and song forms (Sledovanje [Ration], 1982), a songwriting style that would culminate in a string of collaborative hits on their 1987 album Kao kakao (Like Cocoa). The group disbanded in 1995, but Stefanovski continued a solo carrier, promoting Macedonian music, both in his solo albums and through frequent collaborations with film and theater directors, as well as musicians from the region and abroad. In 2006, thirty years after their last concert, the group’s founding members reunited for an anniversary tour, with sold-out concerts across major cities of former Yugoslavia. In contrast to Leb i Sol’s nation-wide success, the Macedonian Rock Fest (founded in 1982) offered a regional platform for the next generation of alternative rock and pop acts. During the late 1980s new bands like Mizar, Arhangel, Padot na Vizantia (The Fall of Byzantine), and Anastasija created the Macedonian alternative rock scene, in which folk music and the Byzantine chants of the Macedonian church became hallmarks of their darker esoteric sound. Mizar, managed by the Slovenian producer Goran Lisica “Fox,” was particularly successful in performing at the main rock venues and festivals in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana. In interviews, the leader of Mizar Gorazd Čapovski emphasized that the group’s distinctiveness was indebted to Macedonian sacred and folk music, and the fact that they were a first group from Macedonia to sing exclusively in the Macedonian language. But during the politically volatile early 1990s, such artistic decisions were played out in the political arena, and the group was considered too alternative and even nationalistic in some parts of the Yugoslav rock scene. For instance, with their 1990s song “Veligden” (Easter), the band was required to sing the song in Serbo-Croatian, as their Serbian PGP RTB label would not record it otherwise (Zhabeva 2012, 144). Ultimately, however, the popularity of Mizar, Arhangel, Anastasija, and Leb i sol was great enough that the musicians did not worry about the political implications of their music. While Macedonian pop and rock music emerged in the 1970s and created a distinct Macedonian scene in the 1980s, jazz music had made earlier inroads in Macedonia. In 1955 the Voice of America radio show Music USA, also known as the Jazz Hour, introduced local audiences to American jazz. Radio Skopje (Macedonian Radio Television, MRT since 1964) was the key local institution to foster jazz, and under its auspices, the composer-arranger and conductor Dragan Đakonovski Špato led several ensembles that laid the foundations for jazz in Macedonia. Considered part of zabavna music production, these ensembles included the Ritmički Sekstet (Rhythmic Sextet, founded in 1951), the Zabaven Ansambl (Entertainment Ensemble, founded in 1956), and the Tancov Orkestar (Dance Orchestra, founded in 1961). Known colloquially as

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the Radio Big-Bend, Tancov Orkestar continues to function as part of the MRT today (see Wilson 2015; Novakovska 2004). Špato was regarded as a founding figure of jazz in Macedonia, having mentored and worked alongside many musicians involved in jazz during his lifetime, including nationally known jazzpop composer and arrangers Ilija Pejovski and Kire Kostov, and composer-guitarist Toni Kitanovski, who is arguably the most prominent jazz musician in Macedonia today. Though jazz in Macedonia has occasionally exhibited influences of Macedonian traditional music (e.g., Špato’s composition “Sinteza” [Synthesis]), jazz musicians and composers for the most part have drawn inspiration from American jazz, and jazz from other parts of Europe. The Skopje Jazz Festival was established in 1982 and continues to play host annually to leading artists from Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world (see Wilson 2015). Post-Yugoslav Developments: Ethno-renaissance and the Balkan Scene With the transition from socialism to a capitalist political and economic system since the 1990s, the Yugoslav successor-states have opted for complete independence from each other, despite their similarities and common history (see Laušević 1996; Rasmussen 1996; Rice 2002; Buchanan 2006; Ceribašić 2006; Stojkova Serafimovska 2014; Hofman 2015). Consequently, these new nation states sought to assert their cultural distinctiveness and developed new cultural policies and industries to support them. Since 1991, the Macedonian state has gone through several transitional processes, exacerbated by tensions with neighboring Greece, and the political struggle for international recognition of Macedonian independence. Within the cultural projects intended to strengthen Macedonian national identity, some seek to promote the cultures of Macedonia’s minority groups, with the Ministry of Culture financing almost all music festivals of Albanian, Turkish, and Romani traditional music. Moreover, the state’s investment in cultural developments is demonstrated by the Ethno-renaissance movement that began in 1989, generating a proliferation of festivals and events related to traditional culture. This revival was boosted with several important initiatives. The first was the campaign to revitalize the “pure” forms of Macedonian traditional music, albeit in the modern garb of World Music. Over the past two decades, groups such as the Dragan Dautovski (DD) Quartet, Sintezis, Baklava, Ljubojna, Monistra, and Chalgia Sound System developed followings among ethnically diverse audiences, especially among urban youth. Second, a new state broadcasting policy restricted the broadcast of Serbian turbo-folk and Bulgarian chalga on all national TV and radio stations in 2007, in an effort to limit the influence of these highly commercialized styles on Macedonian music. In 2008, the government Agency of Youth and Sport organized and financed a large concert event, in which artists were encouraged to perform their pop-rock versions of Macedonian traditional songs. Lastly, in 2012 the government promoted and fully funded a new project that spurred production of new songs that reflected the “spirit” of Macedonian folk music. This inspired additional activities, such as Macedonian traditional singers rerecording songs made during the 1960s and 1970s at Radio Skopje, and dance groups staging or restaging old Macedonian dances. Exposed to this increasing popularization of Macedonian traditional music, the Macedonian population began to identify certain musical characteristics as “purely” Macedonian, becoming potent symbols of Macedonian nationalism, nowadays promoted at most public occasions. An excellent example of this trend is the album The Macedonian Heart Beats in 7/8 by the Tavitjan Brothers (2009), renowned for their skillful blend of jazz, pop, and Macedonian traditional

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music. For this project, the Tavitjans brought together a number of leading artists from across former Yugoslavia (including Oliver Dragojević, Josipa Lisac, Tereza Kesovija, and Aki Rahimovski) to sing Macedonian folk songs in pop arrangements. With the first pressing of 120,000 copies, the album was distributed by Zagreb’s Croatia Records and Belgrade’s City Records in twenty-two countries, targeting the Yugoslav diaspora. The Tavitjans explained the rationale succinctly: “The ideology of this project is to promote Macedonian music all over the world” (www. tavitjanbrothers.net/makedonsko-srce-cuka-vo-78). On September 8, 2012, a concert featuring the album’s songs marked the celebration of Macedonia’s Independence Day, attended by 70,000 people, which amply demonstrated how a single musical element – the 7/8 meter in this case – became intertwined with national identity and commercial success. Furthermore, traditional music instruments such as kaval, gajda, zurla, and tapan are used at many official occasions, often in combination with pop, classical, jazz, and ethno-pop. The most interesting phenomenon is the revival of traditional music from the Aegean part of Macedonia, which has brought little-known songs to a national level of recognition. For example, “Tvojte oči, Leno mori” (Your Eyes, Leno), a Macedonian folk song originating in the Voden region (today Edessa in Greece) was resurrected from archival recordings by the group Bapčorki housed at MRT in Skopje. Since 2001, this song has been reproduced in many versions, from “authentic” reconstruction to World Music, pop, and even turbo-folk styles, and recorded by local “ethno” groups like Baklava (Kalemar, 2008) and Ljubojna (Brass Fantasy, 2012) in kafani pubs/taverns (pl., Macedonian), and by singers from other Balkan countries like Bosnian Amira Medunjanin (Damar, 2016). Today it is one of the most popular songs performed at weddings, in kafani, and at various indoor and outdoor celebrations. Conclusion In contrast to the more inward-looking cultural programs that promote Macedonian national identity, several other Macedonian pop singers looked outward to the ex-Yugoslav markets, and developed successful careers throughout the Balkans since the late 1990s. The most notable case is Toše Proeski, who captured a massive audience with his beautiful singing in Macedonian and Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian during his short but productive life (1981–2007). One of his largest projects, the album Bozhilak (Rainbow, 2006), comprises fourteen traditional Macedonian songs sung in new arrangements with a symphonic orchestra. The album was released first in Macedonia and subsequently in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia. Proeski’s tragic death was a loss not only for Macedonians but also for his many fans throughout the region, who still organize concerts in his honor. Leb i sol’s Stefanovski, and the singers Kaliopi and Karolina Gočeva, stand out as other Macedonian artists who are popular in the ex-Yugoslavia pop space, and like Proeski, they owe their popularity, in great part, to Macedonian folk music. Despite the breakdown of socialist Yugoslavia, the cultural and musical connections between the former republics never ceased. The pop music industry has allowed exchanges and collaboration to continue between Macedonian and Serbian and Croatian musicians, especially as the previously established professional relations provide many artistic and financial advantages. The Macedonian music idiom is “in” again, adding to the vibrancy of the regional pop music production and live performance scenes. Macedonian folk songs can be heard on many ex-Yugoslav television shows, in Emir Kusturica’s movies, and other related media outlets, such as Zvezde Granda, X Factor Adria, I’ve Got Talent! and similar music show competitions in the Balkans. One such example is the famous song “Zajdi, zajdi jasno sonce” (Set, Set, Bright Sun), whose

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melody became a sonic shorthand for Macedonian and foreign movies associated with the Balkans. The song was originally popularized by Aleksandar Sarievski in 1965 and performed more recently by many Macedonian pop singers including Proeski and Kaliopi, as well as Redžepova, who added a specific Roma interpretation to the melody using the portamento slides between the notes that end with ornaments and a rich vibrato typical for Esma’s style. The Yugoslav policy of multiculturalism fostered the sense of shared musical culture between Macedonians and other Yugoslav communities. Macedonian music has always embodied the warmth, emotional investment, and identification with a culture capable of uniting disparate groups regardless of their ethnic, religious or linguistic background. With their lyrical melodies and texts, Macedonian songs are still widely performed today, as illustrated by the song “Makedonsko devojče” (Macedonian Girl, 1964). Coming from the Balkan source of Yugoslavia to the new generations, this song truly represents the communal spirit of Yugoslavia’s shared culture. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Dave Wilson for his extensive and thoughtful comments, contributions, and editorial assistance on this chapter, especially with regard to the section on jazz in Macedonia. Though I draw on his suggestions and his own work (Wilson 2015), I alone am responsible for the interpretations and the narrative presented here. Note 1. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, the Socialist Republic of Macedonia declared independence and changed its official name to the “Republic of Macedonia.” The ensuing dispute with the Greek government about the name “Macedonia” led to the adoption of “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM) and the current denomination, “Republic of North Macedonia,” which was formally ratified in 2019 by both governments under the Prespa Agreement. Despite the renaming, the country is still unofficially referred to as “Macedonia” by its citizens, including myself, and most of the local media. My use of “Macedonia” indicates the Yugoslav context for my chapter.

Bibliography Beard-Špirić, Danijela. 2017. “Locating Carmen in the Balkans: From Petar Konjović’s Koštana (1931) to Goran Bregović’s Karmen with a Happy End (2004).” Paper presented at the Carmen Singer of the World Conference, Cardiff, June 2017. Buchanan, Donna A. 2006. Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cartwright, Garth. 2016. “Esma Redžepova Obituary.” The Guardian, December  14. Accessed March  30, 2018. www. theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/14/esma-redzepova-obituary Ceribašić, Naila. 2006. “Shared Musics and Minority Identities: An Introduction.” In Shared Musics and Minority Identities: Papers from the Third Meeting of the ‘Music and Minorities’ Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), Roč, Croatia, 2004, edited by Naila Ceribašić and Erica Haskell, ix–xviii. Zagreb and Roč: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research and Cultural-Artistic Society “Istarski željezničar.” Dunin Ivančić, Elsie, and Stanimir Višinski. 1995. Dances in Macedonia: Performance Genre, Tanec. Skopje: Open Society Institute Macedonia. Džimrevski, Borivoje. 1985. Chalgiskata tradicija vo Makedonija (Чалгиската традиција во Македонија). Skopje: Macedonian Book and Institute for folklore “Marko Cepenkov.” Hofman, Ana. 2015. “ ‘Introduction’ to Special Issue on Music, Affect and Memory Politics in Post-Yugoslav Space.” Southeastern Europe 39: 145–64. Janjatović, Petar. 1998. Ilustrovana Yu Rock Enciklopedija: 1950–1997. Belgrade: Geopoetika. Laušević, Mirjana. 1996. “The Ilahiya as a Symbol of Bosnian Muslim National Identity.” In Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Slobin, 117–35. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Novakovska, Eleni. 2004. “Za pochetocite i razvojot na zabavnata i dzez muzika vo Makedonija” (“За почетоците и развојот на забавната и џез музика во Македонија”). In Muzikata na pochvata na Makedonija od Atanas Badev do denes. Prilozi za istrazhuvanjeto na istorijata na kulturata na pochvata na Makedonija (Музиката на почвата на Македонија од Атанас Бадев до денес. Прилози за истражувањето на историјата на културата на

Music in Macedonia  •  151 почвата на Македонија), edited by Georgi Stardelov, Dragoslav Ortakov, and Dimitrije Bužarovki, 241–51. Skopje: Macedonian Academy of Science and Arts. Rasmussen Vidić, Ljerka. 1996. “The Southern Wind of Change: Style and the Politics of Identity in Prewar Yugoslavia.” In Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Slobin, 99–116. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rice, Timothy. 2002. “Bulgaria or Chalgaria: The Attenuation of Bulgarian Nationalism in a Mass-Mediated Popular Music.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 34: 25–46. Silverman, Carol. 2012. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stojkova Serafimovska, Velika. 2014. “Makedonskata vokalna muzichka tradicija vo procesot na opshtestvenata tranzicija” (The Macedonian Vocal Music Tradition in the Process of Social Transition). PhD diss., University of Skopje. Tavitjan Brothers International. “Makedonskoto Srce Cuka Vo 7/8.” Accessed March 30, 2018. www.tavitjanbrothers.net/ makedonsko-srce-cuka-vo-78. Wilson, Dave. 2015. “Music Making Space: Musicians, Scenes, and Belonging in the Republic of Macedonia.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Žganec, Vinko. 1962. Muzički folklor I: Uvodne teme i tonske osnove. Zagreb: Self-Published. Zhabeva, Julijana. 2012. “Alternativnata rok muzika v Yugoslavija prez perioda 1980–1991 g. i neynoto vliyanie vrhu dneshniya muzikalnokulturen zhivot v republikite Makedoniya, Srbiya i Hrvatiya.” PhD diss., Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Discography Baklava. Kalemar. SJF Records SJF 124, 2008, compact disc. Bijelo dugme. Bijelo dugme. Diskoton and Kamarad LP 8155, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Duet Selimova-Želčeski. Duet Selimova-Želčeski. PGP RTB LP 1306, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Duet Tomovska-Mančevski. Makedonsko devojče, kitka šarena. PGP RTB EP 12747, 1968, 45 rpm. Esma. Chaje Shukarije. World Connection WC 43016, 2000, compact disc. Esma Redžepova. Abre babi sokerdžan. Jugoton EPY3112, 1961, 45 rpm. Esma Redžepova i Nikola Badev. Ajde slušaj kaleš bre Anđo. Jugoton EPY 3567, 1966, 45 rpm. Esma and Ansambl Teodosievski. Kroz Jugoslaviju. PGP RTB LP 1440, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Esma and Ansambl Teodosievski. Makedonske pesme i ora − Ciganske pesme i čočeci. PGP RTB LP 1441, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Leb i sol. Leb i sol 2. PGP RTB LP 555335, 1978, 33⅓ rpm. Leb i sol. Beskonačno. PGP RTB LP 2320118, 1981, 33⅓ rpm. Leb i sol. Sledovanje. PGP RTB LP 2120682, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Leb i sol. Kao kakao. Jugoton LSY 63264, 1987, 33⅓ rpm. Leb i sol. Live In New York. Third Ear Music 00013, 1991, compact disc. Ljubojna. Brass Fantasy. Бајро Закон Корпорејшн BZC 005, 2012, compact disc. Garbaret Tavitjan so brakjata Tavitjan i najgolemite balkanski pejachi (Гарабет Тавитјан со браќата Тавитјан и најголемите балкански пејачи). Makedonskoto srce chukka vo 7/8. (Македонското Cрце Чука Во 7/8). Paramecium Production ПП 08/09, 2009, compact disc. Medunjanin, Amira. Damar. Aquarius Records (2) CD57816, 2016, compact disc. Mizar. Свјат Dreams (Svjat Dreams) 1762–1991. Amarkord Records, 1991, 33⅓ rpm. Proeski, Toše (Тоше Проески). Bozhilak. (Божилак) Award Entertainment 004AW, 2006, compact disc. Spirova, Nina. Makedonska pop klasika. (Македонска поп класика). MRT MP 42050, 2002, compact disc. Time. “Reci ciganko, što mi u dlanu piše”/“Makedonija.” Jugoton MCY 119, 1973, 33⅓ rpm. Zhenska vokalna grupa Bapchorki (Женска вокална група Бапчорки). РТС УК 0116, 1981, cassette. Živković, Danilo and Orkestar Slavomira Kovandžića. “Jugoslavijo”/ “Radimo složno.” Jugoton SY 23471, 1978, 45 rpm. www.discogs.com/label/74887-Aquarius-Records-2Ansamblot Čalgii RTS i vokalna grupa Filigrani. Makedonski starogradski pesni. Jugoton LSY 61633, 1982, 33⅓ rpm.

13

Fantasy, Sexuality, and Yugoslavism in Lepa Brena’s Music Zlatan Delić

Lepa Brena (lit. pretty Brena; née Fahreta Jahić) was a Yugoslav folk-pop sensation and the top-selling female recording artist in socialist Yugoslavia. Born into a working-class Bosnian family, she moved to Belgrade to attend university, but her studies were soon interrupted as her performing career skyrocketed after her appearance on a Belgrade TV show in 1982. Within a few years she became an undisputed folk star with sell-out concerts, bestselling albums, and an acting career in the series of film/musical comedies Hajde da se volimo (Let’s Fall in Love), which showcased her latest albums. Lepa Brena’s carefully crafted image of naughty playfulness and tongue-in-cheek humor, offset by revealing clothes and sexual innuendos, ensured a large fan base that included both adults and children. At the same time, her pro-Yugoslav orientation, expressed in both her songs and videos, and public pronouncements on Yugoslav society, augmented her cross-ethnic musical appeal, and made her a harbinger of Yugoslav unity following Tito’s death in 1980. Her image of an empowered and financially successful woman offered an aspirational ideal of economic mobility, as well as an escape from the accelerating economic and political crisis. If Tito embodied the Yugoslav ideology of “brotherhood and unity” in the decades past, this symbolic investment arguably shifted from Tito to Lepa Brena in the influential 1980s pop culture. Musically, Brena’s blend of disco, pop, and Yugoslav folk music, introduced with her 1982 albums Čačak, Čačak and Mile voli disko (Mile Loves Disco), could be considered a prototype of the commercially most influential style that emerged from the Balkans in the 1990s, called turbo-folk – a hybrid of regional novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music or NCFM) and Eurodance, which peaked during the Yugoslav wars. The leading singers of contemporary turbo-folk music are women, and their enactments of gender roles and depictions of desired femaleness help explain, retrospectively, Brena’s lasting impact on Yugoslav popular culture. Her career both consolidated and questioned gendered social norms, with song lyrics that lend themselves to a feminist interpretation – which I frame in terms of Eva Bahovec’s definition of oppositional, potentially subversive, knowledge that opposes the “ruling ideas” while questioning literary, philosophical, and historical canons (Bahovec 2002, 1). I  adopt the view that all texts can be interpreted in multiple ways, and no literary, audio, or visual work has a singular meaning. As Catherine Belsey (2003, 240) argues: “Composed of contradictions, the text is no longer restricted to a single, harmonious and authoritative reading. Instead it becomes plural, open to rereading, no longer an object for passive consumption but an object of work by the reader to produce meaning.” In the context of contemporary feminist 152

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discourse, my chapter explores several questions: Did Lepa Brena use sexuality in her songs and music videos as a tool for political narratives? To what extent did she reject or subvert the heteronormative forms of power? And, perhaps more importantly, did she use her music, and her position as a woman, to counter the essentialist, misogynist and often nationalistic renderings of folk music, thus problematizing the discourse on women in Yugoslav popular music as a whole? “Harmonika svira disko” (The Accordion Plays Disco) When Lepa Brena first appeared on Belgrade TV in 1982 on the hugely popular TV show Pretežno vedro (Predominantly Bright), the host “Minimaks” introduced the singer and her band Slatki greh with a view to satirize their performance of a song “Čačak, Čačak,” unaware that he actually launched their career. The audiences overlooked the implicit parody of her stage name Lepa (lit. pretty) Brena, her band’s name “Slatki greh” (sweet sin), and the exaggerated simplicity of their “folk” performance. Like most aspiring singers, prior to this TV appearance Lepa Brena had gained some experience in kafana (tavern) venues – a quintessential “in-group social space” (Rasmussen 2002, 70, 187–89), where mostly female singers lead inebriated male patrons to the depths of despair with heart-tugging renditions of sentimental songs. As cultural theorist Milena Dragićević-Šešić notes (1994, 173), from the outset of her recording career Brena’s songs did not fit the overtly emotional kafanska prototype but were rather playfully romantic and humorous, with appropriate stage choreography that would develop as Brena’s performance career advanced to concert stages. Similarly, even though her early song repertoire featured Serbian, Macedonian, and Bosnian folk music, the arrangements increasingly adopted the conventions of zabavna-pop music. In particular, Lepa Brena’s collaboration with songwriters, notably with the folk-hit maker Milutin Popović Zahar, who skilfully adapted folk music for the entertainment purposes, singled her out from many aspiring folk singers and ensured her early mainstream appeal. Lepa Brena’s first album Čačak, Čačak (1982) reflected the band’s general approach of blending folk idioms with urban popular music styles. Rich in elements of rural discourse, this album pointed to important stylistic changes in the development of NCFM: it adopted the contemporary Euro-pop sound to articulate familiar themes of village life and social pressures rendered by modernization. For example, the hit song “Mile voli disko” (Mile Loves Disco), penned by Zahar, describes a rural-urban schism between a village girl who loves the country kolo (circle) dance, and her boyfriend who prefers disco: “Mile loves disco/ and I prefer the Šumadija circle dance/ for us to feel close/ disco is played on the accordion” (Mile voli disko/ a ja kolo šumadijsko/ da budemo blisko/ harmonika svira disko). As the Western pop (disco) is played on the quintessentially folk instrument (the accordion), accompanying the fast kolo-turned-disco dance, the rural-urban divide is symbolically bridged. The song affirms broader gendered projections of these genre differences, culturally ingrained among audiences who identified with either folk (narodna) or pop-rock (zabavna) music: rock music is identified with the male, and folk music with the female subject. The playwright Olga Dimitrijević points out that the “rock scene in Yugoslavia was highly gendered, and that the mostly male bands fostered a strong image of masculinity . . . the position of high culture,” adding that “it is hard not to notice that their position is haunted by misogyny” (Dimitrijević 2009, 12). Brena and Slatki greh, however, played on those boundaries for greatest musical and entertainment appeal rather than addressing them directly. Generally, the representations of female subjects in Brena’s songs contain sexual innuendos, where intimate or sexual proposals are delivered as sassy suggestive rhymes. At times, stereotypical representations of gender roles are reversed, as in the song “Dečko mi je školarac” (My

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Boyfriend Is a Scholar, 1984), where the female subject sends pocket money to her boyfriend who is studying away, so he can go for a night out at the movies. As Dragićević-Šešić (1994, 143) notes, Brena’s characters also tries to break away from rural stereotypes of a peasant girl by coupling her beauty and humble social origin to create an aspirational image of an urban girl. In “Dama iz Londona” (A Lady from London, 1983) she sings: “Mile, if you were to buy me a silk skirt/ I would be like that lady from London” (Da mi kupiš Mile suknjicu od svile/ bila bi k’o ona dama iz Londona.) While the female subject goes beyond the confines of her countryside upbringing to please the male who favors city girls – a “stepping out” of cultural norms that allows a degree of female emancipation – her primary goal is ultimately to keep her man. The themes of longing, suffering, and disappointment in relationships receive a light-hearted treatment, ranging from romance to satire and parody. Female subjects usually voice their sexual

Figure 13.1  Record sleeve of Lepa Brena and Slatki greh’s Mile voli disko (1982)

Yugoslavism in Lepa Brena’s Music  •  155

Figure 13.1  (Continued)

advances through humorous quips: she may ask her lad Cile to do it “subtly” and to teach her only the most important and urgent stuff (“Sitnije, Cile, sitnije” [Easy Cile, Easy, 1983]); she may tell her grandmother that her beau took it all the way to her blouse, and that it felt oh so sweet (“Boc, Boc” [Prick, Prick], 1984); or she imagines Budapest and dancing to czardas, wishing for her lover to hit the G string and tickle everything in her (“Janoš,” 1985). But as her career developed, Brena’s songs became less frivolous, although at times with more explicit sexual content, as in “Mače moje” (My Kitten, 1985): “My kitten . . . I don’t know what I’d do without yours/ without your smile in your eyes . . . Come on, knock down the doors . . . Put me through hundreds of sweet pains” (Mače moje . . . ne znam šta bih ja bez tvog/ bez tvog osmeha u očima . . . Hajde vrata razvali . . . ma stavi me na sto slatkih muka). Here the invitation to sexual intercourse is less guarded compared to earlier songs, although somewhat evocative of the humorously lascivious

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folk poetry commonly found in village singing traditions of the Balkans. The male sex organ is referred to as “yours,” heightened with the double entendre of “yours, smile in your eyes,” while the act of penetration is captured with “knocking the doors down” and “hundreds of sweet pains.” The female subject clearly voices her libidinal desires and her expectations, and flips the subordinate female position, which now takes center stage, as in “Miki, Mićo” (1986): “The entire village is saying/ you’re a handyman for ladies/ Why don’t you then Mićo swing by my place” (Po selu se priča/ majstor si za žene/ zašto onda Mićo ne svratiš do mene). Nevertheless, the singer’s character does not alter the conventional gender roles and their archetypal social structuring. In most songs, the female subject not only wants a macho-man and a player (commonly referred to as muškarčina and mangupčina), but longs to marry such a man and to be accepted by his family. As with the patriarchal representations of the female subject in NCFM, such constructions of narrative subjectivity fit “a scopic regime thoroughly oppressive to women rendering them . . . victims of a dominant male gaze” (Mulvey 2003, 345). Through juxtaposing and fusing rural-urban lifestyles and musical idioms, Brena mediated the lingering antagonism between rural and urban cultures, and in that process influenced the conceptions of middle-class cultural identities. Brena also provided the recognisable template for turbo-folk music to emerge in the latter 1980s. Again, the iconography was the key ingredient in her transformation: true to her stage name “pretty,” she highlighted her attractiveness with hot pants and alluring dancing, while singing about the desired female physical attributes, as in the 1983 “Duge noge” (Long Legs). She also started making references to Hollywood and London rather than the Balkans, and recorded songs in French and English (the French version of her song “Okrećeš mi leđa” was “Je suis une Femme” in 1987, and the English version of “Hajde da se volimo” was “Let’s Fall in Love,” with the video shot in London in 1989). In the 1986 song “Disko urnebes” (Disco Madness) she suggests leaving aside the “plough and hoe” because “the folk prefer erotica,” adding that if she was styled in a skimpy nylon skirt, she and her beau could create disco madness, and the “dosh” (lova) would roll in. The fantasies of the female subject in the 1983 song “Lady from London” have now become Brena’s reality: modern liberated women who enjoy sex and openly voice their desires, which indicates a degree of female emancipation in folk-pop culture, and wider society as a whole. “Hajde da se volimo” (Let’s Fall in Love) With the 1987 release of her seventh studio album Hajde da se volimo (Let’s Fall in Love), Lepa Brena became the ultimate Yugoslav folk star, and the only female performer who commanded the entire Yugoslav mediascape – print, television, radio, music video, and film – right until the breakup of the country in 1991. During those four years, Brena released two other top-selling albums, Četiri godine (Four Years, 1989) and Boli me uvo za sve (I Don’t Give a Hoot about Anything, 1990), three films, and numerous big-budget music videos. Filmed across Yugoslavia, her music videos also served as tourism advertisements for a socialist country that looked like it was living the Western capitalist dream. She traveled abroad to produce music videos, in Europe (London, Madrid, Istanbul), North America (Miami), and Africa (Kenya). Her stadium concerts broke all records for attendance, not only in Yugoslavia but also in Bulgaria and Romania. For instance, her famous concert in Sofia’s Levinski stadium (1990) was a huge spectacle, which reinforced her stature as a regional super star beyond Yugoslavia: she was lowered on to the stage in a helicopter, and entertained an audience of more than 80,000 visitors. Although Brena always presented herself as a professed egalitarian, somebody who is “from the people” and “for the people”

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(Grujić 2009, 115), her helicopter performance nonetheless hinted at her status as a “goddess” leading her “followers.” As Dragićević-Šešić (1994, 146) astutely observes, the politics of representation in Brena’s image construct a fairy tale about a beautiful Yugoslav girl who can be anything, “from a perky girl to a serene, elegant [and] mature woman, from a witty athlete to an irresistible seductress: a multitude of images at once, all that you ever wanted to be.” The singer also had a special relationship with young audiences, and managed to build a lasting relationship with children. They saw her as “a real-life Barbie who sang and danced, someone they could kiss and who would kiss them back” (Ibid., 150). Indeed, children were Brena’s target audience, and she recorded a number of songs with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck themes, and produced music videos in Africa featuring tigers, lions, and elephants. However, the fact that some “children” songs contain references to sex – slippery puzzles that straddle elementaryschool scrapbook romance and open invitations to sex – only underscores the problematic nature of “strategic frivolity” in her work. Her last three albums reflect a more varied representation of female subjectivity, which at times affirm Brena’s power in overcoming gendered social positions, but also reinstate earlier patriarchal tropes. In the video for the song “Sanjam” (I Dream, 1987), for instance, Brena becomes the heroine of a computer game who has to complete a series of tasks to reunite with her band: she rides a motorcycle, drives a sports car, rides a speed boat, jumps and swims like a professional athlete, rides a horse, and partakes in martial arts fights with the male protagonists, all the while appearing sexually enticing. At the end of this video, instead of “the chosen one,” she is reunited with her band members; no longer desperate to be with her lover, the message she sends out is loyalty to her band – the most important men in her life. Another hit, “Čuvala me mama” (My Mom Kept an Eye on Me, 1989), has a contemporary MTV look, with a high-energy performance. She is dressed in red leotard-style swimsuit and a biker leather jacket, sporting fashionable Wayfarer sunglasses. The simple and lively pop melody, and the feel-good choreography of a street party, soften the more serious message of the lyrics: “You’d want me for one night, and then bye-bye baby . . . my mom was so right” (Ti bi me hteo za jednu noć/ a onda mala ćao . . . mama je imala pravo). Arranged by the pop-rock trailblazer Kornelije Kovač, the song criticizes male chauvinism and reaffirms the role of a mother as the guardian who protects her daughter’s chastity from prying men. The song was the local prototype of “girl power”: smart girls follow their mothers’ advice and prefer to have a good time with their friends rather than fall for bad boys. By contrast, the video for “Robinja” (A Slave Girl, 1989), shot in Istanbul, appears to reaffirm the stereotypical image of a subservient woman, through the combined effect of the chosen location and the storyline featuring a “captured” woman. In the opening scenes, Brena is portrayed as a European, elegantly dressed tourist who walks the streets of Istanbul, intrigued by exotic objects, with clear Orientalist overtones; as she enters the famous Istanbul mosques and markets, she becomes an object of intrigue and desire for the local onlookers; later, she is portrayed as an enslaved woman, lying half-naked and chained in a tower guarded by a muscular male. The lyrics and the video suggest this is a memory, the recollection of a relationship in which she was willingly submissive, and she still yearns to be loved by her tormentor. Throughout the song she proclaims that she loves the man and would remain his slave even if he were to kill her. Although the lyrics and visuals do not promote the enslavement of women, they do highlight female subservience to men through the metaphor of submission. Following Belsey’s notion of multiple textual meanings, the slave imagery suggests a variety of literal and implied meanings: an exotic fantasy of a strong, independent woman on a holiday; the willing subservience of a woman in love; an

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intrinsic critique of women prepared to subjugate themselves to fit the societal norms of womanhood and relationships. In other words, Brena does not directly challenge stereotypical gendered roles, but she does tacitly tease them out and question them – an approach arguably determined by the NCFM genre codes, with their origins in male-dominated social spaces. In short, Brena’s strategy of subtle innuendo and suggestive eroticism are her tools, used to highlight, and at times critique, the prevailing patriarchal codes of a Balkan society. “Jugoslovenka”: A Yugoslav Woman Although sexuality was the primary vehicle for crafting her image, Brena also used her popularity and attractiveness to bolster the political cause. She symbolically merged her image with the established socialist myths and imagery, centered on “brotherhood and unity” and president Tito. This union provided the much needed cohesive imagery endorsed both by mainstream politicians and audiences, especially during the growing ideological crises triggered by Tito’s death in 1980. The sentiment was best illustrated in the duet performance of the 1985 song, “Živela Jugoslavija” (Long Live Yugoslavia) with the leading neofolk singer Miroslav Ilić. The song refers to Yugoslavia as the brave and proud land, noting that the entire world knows about this land of peace and the land of Tito: “We love you our mother/ We won’t give you up to anybody/ Marshal Tito was born here/ Long live Yugoslavia” (Volimo te naša mati/ nećemo te nikom dati/ Tu je rođen maršal Tito/ Živela Jugoslavija). Even though Brena successfully represented and constructed Yugoslavism through her songs, I argue that she actually embodied the “phantasm” of Yugoslavism. Following Lacanian psychoanalysis, the prominent Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl (2006, 11) points out how phantasm is the ground for the construction of a subject and its identity. Phantasm is not synonymous with illusion, but rather a scenario that helps to create a subject and hide its deficiency – the Lacanian Real – which disturbs the subject’s existence. According to Lacan (1986, 66), phantasm is always just a screen that conceals something quite primary. I argue that this was how Brena held onto the Yugoslav dream amid the erosion of communal ties and the impeding carnage at the turn of the 1990s. The 1989 song “Jugoslovenka” (A Yugoslav Woman), which Brena recorded with three then popular male singers – the Montenegrin Daniel Popović, the Croatian Vlado Kalember, and the Bosnian Alen Islamović  – became another pop hymn to Yugoslavism. The song carried a reassuring and hopeful message about the country, celebrating the diversity and the unity of its peoples, reinforced by the presence of her male co-singers from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The song’s optimistic vision of Yugoslav nationhood was graphically mapped through Brena’s physical body: the singer identifies her eyes with the Adriatic Sea, her blonde tresses with the wheat fields of Pannonia (northern Croatia and Serbia), her heart as the Slavic soul, triumphantly declaring that she is a Yugoslav girl. In the video, Brena is portrayed as both a sex symbol and the “bearer” of the nation, perched on the boat deck holding a Yugoslav flag. Indeed, women and women’s bodies are often used for transmitting messages about nationalistic projects. As feminist activist and theorist Valsala Kumari (2003, 198) argues, while men are the representatives and spokesmen of the nation, reflecting the “common” interests of the people, women are the symbols of the nation, often incarnated in the image of a mother. In Brena’s “Jugoslovenka” video, both the lyrics and visuals directly determine the value of the female subject in the national metanarrative  – her beauty (blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin) and her sexuality (tantalizing dancing, lips that sip the honeyed wine, a fiery spirit), all converged around

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the idea that she is a natural representation of being a Yugoslav. Yuval-Davis (2003, 216) suggests that women are often required to carry the “burden of representation,” and when women are constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivist identity, they represent a lineage, family, nation, race, or religion, and as such they function as symbolic social capital. Rada Iveković (2000, 9–10) highlights how this capital does not belong to the women themselves, arguing that an image of a woman in an advertisement, such as a political propaganda leaflet, is an image that a society wishes to represent to us rather than what we actually (think we) see. With the breakup of Yugoslavia and the civil wars of the 1990s, the socialist epoch of Yugoslavism ended tragically, and with it the Lepa Brena fairy tale. Her media and concert career practically ended overnight, her legacy seemingly obliterated amid the collective paranoia of nationalism and ensuing violence. In Lacanian terms, after the phantasm of Yugoslavism collapsed, she was faced with the traumatic encounter with the Real: no longer a suitable poster girl, she was stripped of her country, her megastar status, and her audiences who either fled the region or became divided by the brutal ethnic conflict. Suddenly, the singer became synonymous with the past, and she was politically discredited because, as a prominent public figure, she did not speak publically against the killings of the Yugoslav peoples. Most controversially, she remained silent about the atrocities committed against the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) communities in her native Bosnia. Moreover, she was publically castigated over the “Brčko affair,” when, reportedly, the Serbian Army allowed her to rescue her parents from her hometown of Brčko, and Brena, as a trade-off, performed for the Serbian soldiers on the frontlines dressed in a military outfit. For many, this event represented the ultimate betrayal of her Yugoslavism, particularly in her native Bosnia. One thing is for sure: the populist groundswell that hoisted her as a Yugoslav icon soon resurfaced in the overwhelming readiness to annihilate her, indifferent to the ethical intricacies of wartime. Conclusion The appeal of Brena’s songs, and more broadly of contemporary turbo-folk narratives, reside in the essentialized subjectivities that seek to “undo” the preconditioned gender roles. But what kind of undoing is at work here? In the entertainment industry, the female subject is typically construed to represent desirable and acceptable appearance and behavior. In Brena’s songs and videos, female sexuality tailors to the male voyeuristic gaze, but since it does not transgress into vulgarity, it is also appealing to women and men alike, even children. As Marija Grujić (2009, 115) argues, Lepa Brena was introduced as a provincial, chaste, and attractive young woman, acceptably provocative because of her humorous and moderately lascivious behavior. She particularly attracted professional men of higher social standing, drawn to the pastoral fantasy of a village girl’s beauty and innocence. This perspective may suggest that because Brena never estranged herself from her patriarchical community and its core values, she was able to achieve what most singers or entertainers (male or female) could not: her message resonated truthfully with the public, allowing her to become the “people’s” star, an achievement that brought her professional prestige, public respect, and personal wealth. In the 1990s, Lepa Brena transformed from a star singer of socialist pedigree to one of the most successful pop music industry businesswomen and managers in the Balkans. Based in Belgrade, at the inception of the military breakup of Yugoslavia, she played a role in the rise of turbofolk, along with other media outlets, most notably Pink TV (generally considered the top of the pop-culture infrastructure support for the Milošević regime in Serbia of the 1990s). In 1998

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she co-founded (with Saša Popović, the accordionist of her band Slatki greh), the record label and production company Grand produkcija (Grand Production), which aired on the RTV Pink network until 2014, when Grand launched its own cable channel Grand Narodna Televizija. In addition to producing folk records and videos, the television channel features a popular weekly television show/singing competition, Zvezde Granda (Stars of Grand [TV]), which promoted pop-folk contestants from across the former Yugoslavia. Lepa Brena’s wartime controversies notwithstanding, she seems to be intrinsically committed to the idea of Yugoslavism, as evidenced in her well-received post-war return to the concert stages in Croatia (Zagreb) and Bosnia (Sarajevo) in 2009, and her playing an active role in networking the interethnic cooperation through her Grand Production venture. The singer’s artistic commitment appears unwavered. One of her recently produced songs, titled “Zar je važno da l’ se peva ili pjeva” (Does it Matter in Which Dialect We Sing?, 2017), features her former Hajde da se volimo film collaborators, and references their past experiences of friendships. A verse line “If we were once the same love, one soul, does it matter in which dialect we sing?” (Ako smo nekad bili/ jedna ljubav, duša jedna/ zar je važno da’l se peva ili pjeva) poignantly captures the song’s message, with a reminder that life is too short, and a plea for people to let go and reinstate love and friendship, because it will be too late once they “close their eyes.” Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Danijela Š. Beard and Ljerka V. Rasmussen, for their invaluable editorial advice and assistance with this chapter. Bibliography Bahovec, Eva. 2002. “Feminizam kao epistemologijski projekt.” Zarez 4 (80): 23. Accessed November 11, 2016. https://bib. irb.hr/datoteka/838442.080.pdf. Belsey, Catherine. 2003. “Konstruiranje subjekta – dekonstruiranje teksta.” In Nova čitanja, poststrukturalistička čitanka, edited by Zdenko Lešić, 231–52. Sarajevo: Buybook. Delić, Zlatan. 2013. Turbo-folk zvijezda: Konstruiranje ženskog subjekta u tekstovima/pjesmama Lepe Brene, Svetlane Cece Ražnatović, Severine Vučković i Jelene Karleuše. Sarajevo: Šahinpašić. Dimitrijević, Olga. 2009. “The Body of a Female Folk Singer: Construction of National Identities in Serbia After 2000.” Genero 13: 5–43. Dragićević-Šešić, Milena. 1994. Neofolk kultura: Publika i njene zvezde. Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića. Grujić, Marija. 2009. “Community and the Popular: Women, Nation and Turbo-Folk in Post- Yugoslav Serbia.” PhD diss., Central European University, Budapest. Accessed July 18, 2017. www.etd.ceu.hu/2011/gphgrm01 Iveković, Rada. 2000. “(Ne)predstavljivost ženskog u simboličkoj ekonomiji: Žene, nacija i rat nakon 1989.” In Žene, slike, izmišljaji, edited by Branka Arsić, 9–31. Belgrade: Centar za ženske studije. Kumari, Valsala. 2003. “Nacionalni projekti i rodni odnosi.” Treća 5 (1–2): 196–208. Lacan, Jacques. 1986. Četiri temeljna pojma psihoanalize. Zagreb: Naprijed. Mulvey, Laura. 2003. “Vizuelno zadovoljstvo i narativni film.” Razlika/Difference 3–4: 331–47. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 2002. Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. New York and London: Routledge. Salecl, Renata. 2006. “Tjelorez: Od kliteroktomije do body arta.” In Rodne teorije, edited by Nirman Moranjak Bamburać, 1–12. Sarajevo: Rodne studije. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2003. “Rod i nacija: Tradicija i tranzicija.” Treća 5 (1–2): 208–34.

Discography Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Čačak, Čačak. PGP RTB 2110873, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Mile voli disko. PGP RTB 2111500, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. “Sitnije, Cile, sitnije”/“Hej, najluđe moje.” PGP RTB 1520016, 1983, 45 rpm. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Bato, bato. PGP RTB 2112760, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Pile moje. PGP RTB 2113473, 1984, 33⅓ rpm.

Yugoslavism in Lepa Brena’s Music  •  161 Lepa Brena, Miroslav Ilić, and Slatki greh. Jedan dan života. RTB 2113856, 1985, 45 rpm. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Voli me, voli. PGP RTB 2114321, 1986, 33⅓ rpm. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Uske pantalone. RTB 2115107, 1986, 33⅓ rpm. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Hajde da se volimo. Diskoton DTK 9460, 1987, cassette. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Četiri godine. Diskoton DTK 9577,1989, cassette. Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. Boli me uvo za sve. Diskoton LP 8414, 1990, 33⅓ rpm.

Filmography Crnobrnja, Stanko, dir. Hajde da se volimo 2. FIT/TRZT Ton i film, 1989. Crnobrnja, Stanko, dir. Hajde da se volimo 3. D.P. FIVET, Kikinda, 1990. Đorđević, Aleksandar, dir. Hajde da se volimo. Morava Film/TRZT Ton i film, 1987. Milošević, Miša, dir. Tesna koža. Film danas, Union Film, 1982. Milošević, Miša, dir. Nema problema. Union Film, 1984.

PART 

IV

The Politics of Popular Music Under Socialism

The subject of popular music in Yugoslavia evokes tangible political connotations, from the vast repertoire of WWII Partisan songs through to unorthodox forms of communist censorship in later periods. The official acceptance of Western pop culture, and tolerance of rock and punk, went hand in hand with the suppression of religious and nationalist expression in all forms of artistic production. As mass media accelerated the loosening of these ideological restrictions in the 1980s, it reflected the sweeping political changes in Eastern Europe. Serbian turbo-folk became the most audible and visible “soundworld” during the wars in the 1990s, serving as a metaphor for the contentious cultural shifts across the region, which once again brought popular music into the fold of the dominant ideology, this time – ethnonationalism. In the past, scholars of popular music in Eastern Europe have sought to define how the communist government either supported or prohibited popular music – a dominant Cold War narrative that frequently defaults to the countercultural impact of rock music. Although such bifurcation overlooks the dynamic, varied, and complex relations through which popular music and politics interacted and functioned in this part of the world, it remains common in much writing on Yugoslav popular and rock cultures. Consequently, the chapters in this section offer an insider understanding of music and politics, addressing the intricate questions of national politics, identity, political control, and the complex challenges they posed within the socialist system. Dean Vuletic examines the political role of Yugoslav participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, and how those politics were played out both on the European stage and at home during the wars in the 1990s. Danijela Š. Beard and Gregor Tomc present two contrasting accounts of how youth branches of the Yugoslav Communist Party were involved in shaping the respective zabavna-pop, rock and punk cultures in Croatia and Slovenia in the 1970s and 1980s. Naila Ceribašić and Jelka Vukobratović frame their analysis of the “Youth Day Central Ceremony” in the 1980s as a reflection of the decline of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. And Ana Hofman reconsiders the concept of Yugoslav self-­management (­ samoupravljanje) in music, through an investigation of music labor, class, and socialist entrepreneurship. Together these chapters speak of the political importance of music, and advance a more nuanced insight into Yugoslav socialism and the paradoxes that Yugoslavs experienced through popular culture. At the heart of these chapters there are fundamental shared questions: What was the political significance of diverse forms of popular music, including zabavna-pop, rock, and narodna (neofolk) genres? What were the roles of individuals in shaping institutions and policies on popular music, and in what ways were musicians involved in moderating political debates, struggles, and contradictions of the popular music industry under state socialism? And in debunking the binary understanding of the Yugoslav system, how was “living socialism” part of a system of human values that were often different from the ideological interpretations of the “official culture”, and more in tune with perennial quest for a democratic reform socialism? 163

14

Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest Dean Vuletic

In a contest otherwise dominated by Western European participants, Yugoslavia was the only communist state that during the Cold War joined the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), in which the state was represented by its national broadcasting organization, Yugoslav Radio and Television (Jugoslovenska radiotelevizija, JRT).1 Yugoslavia’s anomalous standing in the ESC was magnified by its foreign policy of nonalignment, which was developed after the state’s defection from the Eastern Bloc in 1948. Nonalignment meant that Yugoslavia was more open to cultural, economic, and military cooperation with Western European states than were other communist states of Eastern Europe. That openness was also reflected in Yugoslavia’s tourism industry, whose biggest markets were in the states of Western Europe. Indeed, Yugoslavia’s participation in the ESC was also beneficial for the state’s cultural diplomacy: the contest provided an opportunity for Yugoslavia to be promoted as a Mediterranean tourist destination to one of the biggest audiences in Western Europe for any television show. While Yugoslavia’s participation in the ESC reflected the state’s exceptionalism in the context of Cold War geopolitics, its participation in the contest was not particularly remarkable. A string of poor results in the 1960s and 1970s spurred criticism of the ESC by JRT officials and Yugoslav journalists, who accused Western European participants of commercializing and politicizing the ESC and, in the process, marginalizing Yugoslavia in the contest for cultural, economic, and political reasons. JRT even withdrew from the ESC in the late 1970s and instead entered the Intervision Song Contest (ISC), which was organized by broadcasting organizations from the communist states in Eastern Europe. Given that JRT regarded Yugoslavia as disadvantaged in the ESC, due to the cultural and political prejudices of Western Europeans, it hoped to benefit in the ISC from the image that Yugoslavia had among Eastern Europeans as the communist state that was most open to Western cultural influences. However, the history of the ESC has shown that for every state represented in the contest, some combination of cultural, economic, historical, political, or religious differences has been invoked to “explain” the poor results of its entries. Commonly, the national media in all states that participated in the ESC during the Cold War tended to exaggerate the political significance of voting results, even though the contest was always presented as “apolitical” by its organizer, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).2 Furthermore, the voting results were also determined by national juries that were not necessarily appointed on political grounds but rather included a combination of experts from the popular music and television industries, as well as representatives of the general public. 165

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In the post–Cold War narratives of the history of communist Yugoslavia, which are often teleologically framed by the disintegration of the state in 1991, Yugoslavia appears as an aberration or even a masterstroke because of its non-aligned foreign policy. Rather than focusing on Yugoslavia’s participation in the ESC as something that reflected its exceptional geopolitical position during the Cold War, I argue that the state’s experience in the contest tells us more about the commonalities between Yugoslav and other European citizens. Both Yugoslavia’s cultural elites and citizens themselves viewed Yugoslavia’s standing in the contest in terms of their state’s “exceptionality,” yet local reactions to Yugoslavia’s experience in the ESC demonstrated that this exceptionality made Yugoslavia similar to other participating states, and therefore largely unexceptional. Joining Eurovision After the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) – renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) in 1952 – came to power at the end of WWII, it promoted economic, military, and political cooperation with other communist Eastern European states and modeled its cultural policy on that of the USSR. As tensions between the Eastern and Western blocs intensified in the first years of the Cold War, the Party censored music from Western Europe and the United States. The alliance between the USSR and Yugoslavia was severed in 1948 as the CPY, led by Josip Broz Tito, refused to submit to Soviet domination, and Yugoslavia was consequently isolated by other communist Eastern European states. As a result, the CPY turned to Western states for economic, military, and political support as well as cultural cooperation, all without ever bringing into question the Party’s hegemonic role in Yugoslavia’s political system. An early manifestation of Yugoslavia’s geopolitical reorientation toward the West was JRT’s joining of the EBU in 1950 as a founding member. JRT did this in the context of the Cold War split in the international broadcasting organization, the International Broadcasting Union, which had been established in the interwar era for national broadcasting organizations from all European states. The EBU brought together national broadcasting organizations from Western Europe and the Mediterranean rim, while the International Broadcasting Organization (renamed the International Organization for Radio and Television, or OIRT,3 in 1960) was created for the national broadcasting organizations of communist states from both Eastern Europe and other world regions (Eugster 1983, 44, 55 [n107]). The EBU’s early stance against the Eastern Bloc was articulated in one of the first editions of its official publication, the E.B.U. Bulletin, in an article that criticized the Eastern European propagandist radio broadcasts that were critical of Yugoslavia (“Foreign Language Broadcasts of Central and Eastern Europe” 1950, 317). Inspired by the Sanremo Italian Song Festival, which had been staged by Italian Radio and Television since 1951, the EBU decided in 1955 to create the ESC in order to promote cultural exchange and technical cooperation between the national television services that were then emerging in Western Europe. The EBU developed the ESC as part of its early experiments with live transnational broadcasts through the Eurovision Network, the EBU’s facility for programme cooperation and exchange, and the contest became an annual event from 1956 onwards. From its inception, the ESC was based on a system in which national broadcasting organizations submitted artists and songs as representatives of their respective states. The reason for JRT not entering the first ESC was not because of any political obstacles but because television services in Yugoslavia only began in 1956. Throughout the 1950s, high rates of economic growth prompted the LCY to invest more into the development of consumer goods and entertainment, including radio and television services and a popular music industry (Vuletic 2008, 861–79). Popular music festivals

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were established in Yugoslavia as early as 1953, when the Zagreb Festival was founded, modeled on the Sanremo Italian Song Festival. By the late 1950s, the LCY recognized the importance of popular music for its cultural diplomacy, as popular music could serve as a powerful medium for promoting Yugoslavia’s modernity, nonalignment, and openness. Following Stalin’s death in 1953 and the advent of de-Stalinization across the Eastern Bloc from 1956, relations between Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe greatly improved: Yugoslavia’s popular music artists were sent to Eastern Europe as cultural ambassadors and to develop new commercial opportunities for Yugoslavia’s growing popular music industry (Vuletic 2012, 121–30). The normalization of relations between Yugoslavia and Eastern European states also permitted JRT to join the OIRT as an observer member in 1963 – a status that the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (Österreichischer Rundfunk, ORF) also had due to Austria’s neutrality, while the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio Oy, YLE) was the only national broadcasting organization that was a full member of both the EBU and the OIRT, due to Finland’s neutrality. Throughout the Cold War, the Austrian and Finnish national broadcasting organizations played important bridging roles in programmatic and technological transfers between the Eastern and Western blocs’ international broadcasting organizations (Eugster 1983, 107–08, 187–88, 194). After Yugoslavia’s television services had developed enough for it to join the Eurovision Network, JRT debuted in the ESC in 1961. A JRT official, Miroslav Vilček, even served as the EBU’s scrutineer for the contest in the mid-1960s, which is indicative of JRT’s standing in the EBU at the time. 1961 was also the year in which the Non-Aligned Movement – which brought together states not formally allied with either the Eastern or Western blocs – was founded in Belgrade. Interpreting Eurovision Finland also first entered the ESC in 1961, the same year that Spanish Television (Televisión Española, TVE) did, at a time when Spain was governed by the rightist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Notwithstanding Franco’s anticommunism, Yugoslavia had more in common with Spain in the ESC than with the neutral Finland, although Belgrade and Madrid did not have diplomatic relations with each other because of their political differences.4 In the early 1960s, both Spain and Yugoslavia sought to improve their economic ties with Western Europe, albeit without changing their political systems – the reason why both were excluded from Western European organizations such as the Council of Europe and the European Communities. Yet, through the themes and promotional materials for their ESC entries, and in the case of Spain its hosting of the competition in 1969 (Gutiérrez Lozano 2012, 14), both Spain and Yugoslavia used the ESC to promote their burgeoning Mediterranean tourist industries that were critical for these states’ economic growth in the 1960s. Indeed, a Western European perception of Yugoslavia as a desirable tourist destination was already suggested in the 1960 ESC by the winning song “Tom Pillibi,” performed by France’s Jacqueline Boyer, which mentioned a man who supposedly owned a castle in Montenegro. The promotion of tourism also partly motivated the participation in the ESC of two other authoritarian states: Portugal, which was governed by the right-wing dictator António de Oliveira Salazar from 1932 to 1968, followed by Marcelo Caetano until 1974, and which first entered the ESC in 1964; and Greece, which entered the contest in 1974, in the last year of the military dictatorship that had governed that state since 1967. In songs, the Mediterranean identity of Yugoslavia was highlighted in the ESC through maritime motifs and Adriatic associations, as illustrated by Vice Vukov’s respective 1963 and 1965 entries “Brodovi” (Boats) and “Čežnja” (Yearning), and in the 1968 entry “Jedan dan” (One Day)

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by the Dubrovački trubaduri (Dubrovnik Troubadours) (Buhin 2015, 5 and 13; see also Chapter  2). By using the ESC as a platform to promote its Mediterranean identity, Yugoslavia also aligned itself with the Western European cultural sphere and distanced itself from the Eastern European political one. Internally, however, the limits of the LCY’s openness was betrayed by its censorship of artists, intellectuals, and politicians who criticized the Yugoslav political system, which actually reinforced the Party’s commonalities with the authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe, Greece, Portugal, and Spain.5 A notable case was that of Vukov, whose Croatian patriotic songs turned him into a bard of the Croatian Spring movement that started gathering momentum from 1966, seeking greater autonomy for Croatia within Yugoslavia. When the LCY came to fear that the Croatian Spring threatened the integrity of the Yugoslav federation, the movement was quashed in 1971 (see Chapter 15). In order to avoid imprisonment for his role in the Croatian Spring, Vukov went into exile in Paris, and his songs were subsequently censored in the Yugoslav media until 1989 (Vukov 2003, 79–80, 102). Despite this, Yugoslavia never faced political protests in the ESC, and was seemingly tolerated as the most liberal part of Eastern Europe, a state that Western European states wanted to keep onside in Cold War politics. However, other states, such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain, faced scrutiny in the ESC as the most illiberal states in Western Europe.6 Besides their maritime themes, Yugoslavia’s entries mostly featured the innocuous theme of love that was also commonplace in the entries of other participating states in the ESC. There were only two Yugoslav entries with explicitly political messages. The first was about the futility of war and a protest against the Vietnam War at the time, “Vse rože sveta” (All the Flowers of the World), sung by the Slovenian Lado Leskovar in 1967. The second was the 1974 entry “Moja generacija” (My Generation) by Korni grupa, which recounted the wartime struggles and improvement of life in Yugoslavia in the post-WWII period – part of a rock repertoire produced in Yugoslavia in the 1970s that glorified Tito, the Partisan movement, and a pan-Yugoslav identity. The commentator of ORF’s relay of the contest at the time, Ernst Grissemann, recognized that this was “a highly programmatic” and “political song.” The songs of this repertoire reflected the LCY’s promotion of conservative values after the quashing of the Croatian Spring and the removal of liberal elements from the political leaderships of other republics, notably in Serbia and Slovenia. The seriousness of “Moja generacija” stood in contrast to the winning entry of the 1974 ESC, ABBA’s “Waterloo,” which used a past military conflict as a metaphor for a love story. The Yugoslav media interpreted Yugoslavia’s ESC failures and relative successes in highly political terms. The greatest Yugoslav achievement in the ESC throughout the 1960s and 1970s was the 1962 entry, Lola Novaković’s “Ne pali svetla u sumrak” (Don’t Turn on the Lights at Twilight), which came fourth. By contrast, in 1964 Yugoslavia came last with zero points when Sabahudin Kurt sang “Život je sklopio krug” (Life Has Come Full Circle), and until the late 1970s Yugoslav entries tended to finish in the bottom half of the scoreboard. This was the case even when Yugoslavia sent its leading and even internationally renowned artists, such as Tereza Kesovija, who had first represented Monaco in the 1966 ESC and came last, while her Yugoslav entry in 1972, “Muzika i ti” (Music and You), came ninth, halfway on the scoreboard. Yugoslavia’s poor scores in the ESC prompted questions within JRT and the state’s press as to whether Yugoslavia was just too culturally and politically different from other participating states to succeed in the contest. As the only communist, Eastern European, and Slavic participant, it appeared to have no “natural” allies in the competition.7 The Yugoslav entries that were infused with folk elements apparently did not appeal to Western European audiences. JRT and Yugoslav record companies seemed either unable to match the resources invested by their wealthier Western European

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counterparts or unwilling to follow Western European trends dictated by the contemporary pop industry, evident in the winning songs such as “Waterloo” or the British entry in 1976 “Save Your Kisses for Me” by Brotherhood of Man. Nonetheless, the Yugoslav journalist Maroje Mihovilović noted, with a typically political pretext: We are a proud nation, we know that some geographical and historical circumstances have apparently pushed us into the background of the European cultural and pseudocultural community, and that bothers us. But we know that some neopolitical events nonetheless have a major significance for national self-affirmation. (Mihovilović 1976) Still, none of this criticism made Yugoslavia’s experience in the ESC justifiably exceptional. The Finnish media similarly explained the poor scores of Finnish entries in the ESC through their state’s geographical, linguistic, and political peripherality (Pajala 2007, 71–76). Other Nordic national broadcasting organizations complained about the contest’s commercialization by record companies, leading to the withdrawal of Denmark for most of the 1960s and 1970s and Sweden in 1976. The disappointing effect of the ESC for Yugoslavia’s cultural diplomacy was highlighted by the group Ambasadori (The Ambassadors), which came penultimate in 1976 with the aptly named love song “Ne mogu skriti svoju bol” (I Can’t Hide My Pain). After discussions which had been taking place in JRT since the early 1970s on whether Yugoslavia should continue to participate in the ESC, JRT decided after Ambasadori’s result to withdraw from the contest due to a perception among its officials that the voting was politicized and negatively influenced by record companies (the Administrative Committee of JRT 1976, 183–89). JRT also maintained that the contest had lost the support of the Yugoslav public, even though in 1978 entertainment magazines from across the state conducted a poll of 107,181 readers on whether Yugoslavia should return to the ESC, in which 97.5% voted affirmatively (“Većina, ili 97,53%, rekla je DA!” 1978). In the meantime, in 1977 and 1979, JRT sent two entries to the ISC that was staged in Sopot in Poland from 1977 to 1980, but these songs were also not very successful. This Eastern European attempt to create an alternative to the ESC was not as attractive to the Yugoslav public: as the poll by the entertainment magazines showed, the Western European event was more enticing for the Yugoslav audience, who perceived Western European, as well as American, artists as the real trendsetters in popular music. In response to public pressure, the JRT decided to return to the ESC, although it could not do so in 1979 when the competition was held in Jerusalem because Belgrade maintained a pro-Palestinian stance in its non-aligned foreign policy and had no diplomatic relations with Israel. Likewise, Yugoslavia did not enter the competition in 1980 when it was held in The Hague, because the contest was staged while Tito was hospitalized; he died on May 4, just over a fortnight after the contest was broadcast. An anti-Israeli foreign policy and the personality cult of the leader were also commonalities shared by the political systems of Yugoslavia and other Eastern European states. Rocking Eurovision With Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia faced new political challenges. First, there was unrest in the autonomous province of Kosovo, where the majority Albanian population sought greater self-government. Yugoslavia, as its name underlined (literally meaning “the land of the south

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Slavs”) was unified primarily through the pan-Slavic identity of its constituent republics  – a set-up in which Kosovo’s Albanians felt culturally and politically marginalized. On the other hand, due to Yugoslavia’s nonalignment and cultural openness, Kosovo’s Albanians were more exposed to Western cultural influences than the citizens of Albania, which was the most isolated communist state in Eastern Europe under the government of Enver Hoxha. As a result, popular music in the Albanian language was more progressive in Yugoslavia than in Hoxha’s Albania (Krasniqi 2011, 337). Yugoslavia’s Kosovar Albanians could also openly watch the ESC, whereas the consumption of Western European programs was sanctioned for the population of Albania. From 1973, Kosovo’s TV Priština submitted Albanian-language entries to the Yugoslav national selection for the ESC, which reflected the greater cultural and political rights that Albanians in Yugoslavia were given in the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially as Kosovo was granted autonomous status in 1974. However, no Albanian-language song ever represented Yugoslavia at the ESC, nor did a Macedonian one. The Yugoslav national selection, often dubbed Jugovizija (Yugovision), included entries from the respective Yugoslav republics and autonomous provinces as the structure of JRT reflected the Yugoslav federation itself. However, because of the economic and political dominance of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia, as well as the linguistic hegemony of Serbo-Croatian, not all of the republics and provinces were equally represented in the ESC. From the twenty-six Yugoslav entries in the ESC between 1961 and 1991, four Slovenian entries were the only other linguistic representation besides the songs in Serbo-Croatian. Moreover, the entries from TV Zagreb made up eleven of the other twenty-two entries (of which five were from Serbia, four from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and two from Montenegro), which reflected the fact that the Yugoslav popular music industry was centered in Croatia. Zagreb was the headquarters of the state’s leading record company, Jugoton, which also specialized in the production of the Europop that became synonymous with the ESC, especially after ABBA’s seminal victory in 1974. However, there is little evidence that the artists’ nationalities influenced JRT’s selection process: Yugoslavia’s delegations to the ESC were usually multinational groups of artists, composers, conductors, songwriters, and television officials, and the voting results themselves seemed to be based on professional interests rather than inter-republican politics (Andjelić 2015, 99–100). Still, in the early 1980s, tensions arose within the Yugoslav national selection over whether entries should have a folk-based national or international pop orientation, which foreshadowed some of the political problems that would contribute to the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation. In 1983, two entries, one by Lepa Brena, a singer of newly composed folk music (NCFM), and the other by the pop singer Daniel Popović, were regarded as the favorites to win the Yugoslav national selection. A debate ensued in the Yugoslav media as to whether Brena’s pop-folk sound (see Chapter 13) should represent Yugoslavia over Daniel’s international pop (Karan 2005, 38). Daniel won the national selection, representing Montenegro’s TV Titograd with the song “Džuli” (Julie). The song came fourth in the ESC, the highest place that a Yugoslav entry had achieved since 1962, and Daniel was compared in the international media to the UK’s best-selling 1980s singer Shakin’ Stevens (Suhadolnik 1983). “Džuli” epitomized the formula that would dominate Yugoslavia’s entries for the rest of the 1980s: Europop, peppered with foreign, usually English words (at a time when the contest’s rules stipulated that an entry had to be sung primarily in the official language of the state that it represented), and with innocuous and typically Europop themes about holidays and love. Both “Džuli” and the 1987 entry “Ja sam za ples” (I Wanna Dance) by Novi fosili, which also finished fourth, recounted a romance between a local and a foreign tourist against the background of Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast. In 1989, Yugoslavia

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finally  won  the ESC with Riva’s “Rock Me,” a Europop song in which the female singer summons her classical pianist beau to “rock” her world with something more lively and suitable for dancing. That song also promoted Yugoslavia’s Mediterranean identity, as its promotional video featured Riva’s coastal hometown of Zadar. Political tensions had increased in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, especially following the liberalizing cultural and political reforms introduced by the Slovenian government, and against the backdrop of rising Serbian nationalism and the coming to power of Serbia’s president Slobodan Milošević. These tensions were also played out in Yugoslavia’s participation in the ESC. In between the staging of the ESC in Lausanne in 1989 and in Zagreb in 1990, following the tradition of the previous year’s winner hosting the contest, communist-led governments collapsed across Eastern Europe. In April 1990, Slovenia held its first free multi-party elections since the period of communist rule, and Croatia was also in the midst of doing so when Zagreb staged the ESC on May 5. Indeed, the day after the ESC was held in the Croatian capital, a second round of elections resulted in the victory of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union, whose leader Franjo Tuđman became the president of Croatia, and which led Croatia to independence in 1991. The Zagreb edition of the ESC did not, however, hint at the political changes to come. Italy’s Toto Cutugno profited from the new, post–Cold War hopes for European integration with his winning song “Insieme: 1992” (Together: 1992), which thematized the European Single Market, while a tourism video called Yugoslav Changes was shown in the interval, after the performance of the entries and before the presentation of the voting results. Despite Tuđman’s calls for the 1990 ESC to showcase Croatia, the show still promoted Yugoslavia as a whole (Polimac 2016). In 1991, the political tensions between the Yugoslav republics were palpable at the national selection held in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian capital of Sarajevo on March 9 – the same day that Milošević quashed street protests in Belgrade against his government. The jury from TV Ljubljana presented its results in the Slovenian language, and the host Senad Hadžifejzović made sarcastic remarks that alluded to the Slovenian government’s vanguard efforts to dissociate from Yugoslavia. The jury that represented TV Priština was made up completely of Serbian members, reflecting the Serbian government’s encroachment on Kosovo and its Albanian population, in line with Belgrade’s efforts to reduce Kosovo’s autonomy since 1989. However, it was in the voting that the political tensions were most apparent. The juries from the republics and provinces whose governments supported Milošević – Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Vojvodina – backed the Serbian entry “Brazil,” performed by the alternative pop artist Bebi Dol. On the other hand, the juries from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia were the representatives of the Republics whose governments opposed Milošević’s policies, and they accordingly supported the entry from Croatia’s TV Zagreb, Daniel and his song “Ma daj, obuci levisice” (Come On, Put on Your Jeans). Bebi Dol ultimately won the national selection, which the Croatian press criticized as archetypal political manipulation by the Milošević government with its aspirations to dominate Yugoslavia (Vrdoljak 1991). In Serbia, though, the result was viewed as fair considering the fact that TV Zagreb had submitted all of Yugoslavia’s ESC entries since 1986. Ultimately, whereas TV Zagreb’s entries had been relatively successful, Baby Doll came last with a song about South America, which was clearly out of touch with the contemporary post–Cold War hope for European unity that Cutugno had articulated the year before. By the time that the 1992 ESC was held, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia had become independent states. The Yugoslav entry in that year was Ekstra Nena from Serbia with the folk-influenced song “Ljubim te pesmama” (I Love You with Songs), at a time when the NCFM genre was, alongside turbo-folk, commonly identified with Serbian nationalism.

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In 1993, a rump Yugoslavia comprising Montenegro and Serbia was expelled from the ESC because of UN sanctions imposed against it for its role in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia entered the ESC and used the contest to internationally promote their national independence and identities. In the cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, the themes of their entries in the 1993 ESC, “Sva bol svijeta” (All the Pain of the World) and “Don’t Ever Cry,” respectively, drew international attention to their war causes. For Serbia and Montenegro, their joint re-entry into the ESC in 2004, with the song “Lane moje” (My Dearest) by the singer Željko Joksimović, was a sign of their European re-integration after the years of sanctions and wars, including the more recent conflict in Kosovo in 1999. The end of the Serbian and Montenegrin union, though, was also played out through political voting in the national selection in 2006, the year in which the two states became independent. Montenegro and Serbia subsequently entered the ESC separately in 2007, when Serbia won the contest with Marija Šerifović’s song “Molitva” (Prayer). Since its declaration of independence in 2008, Kosovo has also sought to enter the ESC, but the EBU has not allowed this because Kosovo does not have full international recognition. Conclusion Yugoslavia’s geopolitical position in the Cold War period made it a unique participant in the ESC as the only communist, Eastern European, and predominantly Slavic state represented in the contest. As the ESC was an international contest, televised annually and followed by a huge audience in Yugoslavia and other European states, Yugoslavia’s experience was subject to much analysis among its citizens, often perceived in political terms. The ESC was used in Yugoslavia’s cultural diplomacy to promote the state as culturally liberal and open to Western Europe, including through the Yugoslav tourist industry. However, Yugoslavia’s exceptionalism in the ESC was also perceived to be problematic as the string of poor results in the 1960s and 1970s appeared to highlight the state’s cultural and economic peripherality in relation to Western Europe. In trying to explain Yugoslavia’s experience in the ESC, JRT officials and local journalists often misplaced and exaggerated their state’s exceptionalism, especially as there were other states on Western Europe’s cultural and political periphery whose entries in the ESC were also faring poorly. As Yugoslavia’s geopolitical identity as an East-West mediator became meaningless at the end of the Cold War, what really made the state exceptional in the ESC was the fact that its disintegration was played out so vividly on the ESC stage in the early 1990s, around the very time that its songs started to place well in the contest. Notes 1. This was the Croatian name for the JRT; there were slight variations to this name in the different official languages of Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian. 2. For a study of the wider political significance of the ESC in the history of postwar Europe, see Vuletic 2018. 3. OIRT was the abbreviation that was used internationally for the organization, based on its French name “L' Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision.” 4. Although the anticommunism of the Portuguese and Spanish governments meant that they did not have diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia until after the fall of their dictatorships in the mid-1970s, the juries that represented the three states still exchanged points in the ESC, and Yugoslavia did not boycott the contest when it was held in Madrid in 1969. 5. In Spain, for example, the original choice for its artist to sing in the 1968 ESC was Joan Manuel Serrat, but after he expressed his intention to sing in Catalan, which went against the policy of the Franco government that suppressed regional identities, he was replaced by Massiel (Gutiérrez Lozano 2012, 14–15). Under the military dictatorship in

Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest  •  173 Greece, leftist artists were also censored, and Marinella, the artist who represented Greece in the 1974 ESC, was accordingly not a public critic of the junta (Van Steen 2015, 167). 6. In the 1964 ESC an audience member held up a placard criticizing the Franco and Salazar governments; Austria similarly boycotted the 1969 ESC when it was held in Madrid. Greece and Turkey variously boycotted the contest in the late 1970s because of each other’s participation, especially in light of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. 7. Studies on voting patterns in the ESC in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrate the existence of voting blocs clustered in Western, Northern, and Mediterranean Europe. In these, Yugoslavia is categorized among the Mediterranean states, regarded as the weakest bloc with the lowest average number of points in the contest (Yair 1995, 153–60).

Bibliography Administrative Committee of the JRT. 1976. “Stenografske beleške sa 127. sednice Upravnog odbora Jugoslovenske radiotelevizije održane 30. IX i 1. X 1976. god. u Vrdniku.” Vrdnik, September 30–October 1. Archive of Yugoslavia, 646–48. Andjelić, Neven. 2015. “National Promotion and Eurovision: From Besieged Sarajevo to the Floodlights of Europe.” Contemporary Southeastern Europe 2 (1): 94–109. Buhin, Anita. 2015. “ ‘A Romantic, Southern Myth’: One Day by the Troubadours of Dubrovnik.” TheMA – Open Access Research Journal for Theatre, Music, Arts 4 (1–2): 1–19. Eugster, Ernest. 1983. Television Programming Across National Boundaries: The EBU and OIRT Experience. Dedham, MA: Artech House. “Foreign Language Broadcasts of Central and Eastern Europe.” 1950. European Broadcasting Union Documentation and Information Bulletin 1 (4): 317–23. Gutiérrez Lozano, Juan Francisco. 2012. “Spain Was Not Living a Celebration: TVE and the Eurovision Song Contest During the Years of Franco’s Dictatorship.” View 1 (2): 11–17. Karan, Momčilo. 2005. Pesma Evrovizije: Od Ljiljane Petrović do Željka Joksimovića. Belgrade: Svet knjige. Krasniqi, Gëzim. 2011. “Socialism, National Utopia, and Rock Music: Inside the Albanian Rock Scene of Yugoslavia, 1970–1989.” East Central Europe 38 (2–3): 336–54. Mihovilović, Maroje. 1976. “Jer što je nama Eurovizija?” Start, March 24. Pajala, Mari. 2007. “Finland, Zero Points: Nationality, Failure, and Shame in the Finnish Media.” In A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, edited by Ivan Raykoff and Robert Deam Tobin, 71–82. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Polimac, Nenad. 2016. “Od Grlića sam preuzeo film o Sanaderu.” Globus, August 21. Suhadolnik, Željko. 1983. “Nesretno izmakao (naj)bolji plasman.” Vikend, May 6. Van Steen, Gonda Hector Aline. 2015. Stage of Emergency: Theatre and Public Performance Under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967–1974. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. “Većina, ili 97, 53%, rekla je DA!” 1978. Studio, April 29. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 1991. “Yuga umire pjevajući.” Večernji list, March 12. Vukov, Vice. 2003. Tvoja zemlja: Sjećanja na 1971. Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice Hrvatske. Vuletic, Dean. 2008. “Generation Number One: Politics and Popular Music in Yugoslavia in the 1950s.” Nationalities Papers 36 (5): 861–79. Vuletic, Dean. 2012. “Sounds Like America: Yugoslavia’s Soft Power in Eastern Europe.” In Divided Dreamworlds, edited by Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal, 115–31. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vuletic, Dean. 2018. Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest. London: Bloomsbury. Yair, Gad. 1995. ‘Unite-Unite-Europe: The Political and Cultural Structures of Europe as Reflected in the Eurovision Song Contest.” Social Networks 17 (2): 147–61.

List of Songs ABBA. “Waterloo.” Eurovision Song Contest. April 6, 1974; Brighton: British Broadcasting Corporation. Ambasadori. “Ne mogu skriti svoju bol.” Eurovision Song Contest. April  3, 1976; The Hague, Nederlandse Omroep Stichting. Baby Doll. “Brazil.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 4, 1991; Rome, Radiotelevisione italiana. Boyer, Jacqueline. “Tom Pillibi.” Eurovision Song Contest. March 29, 1960; London, British Broadcasting Corporation. Brotherhood of Man. “Save Your Kisses for Me.” Eurovision Song Contest. April 3, 1976; The Hague, Nederlandse Omroep Stichting. Cutugno, Toto. “Insieme: 1992.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 5, 1990; Zagreb, Jugoslavenska radiotelevizija. Daniel. “Džuli.” Eurovision Song Contest. April 23, 1983; Munich, Bayerischer Rundfunk. Daniel. “Ma daj obuci levisice.” JRT izbor za pjesmu Evrovizije  – Sarajevo ’91. March  9, 1991; Sarajevo, Jugoslavenska radiotelevizija. Dubrovački trubaduri. “Jedan dan.” Eurovision Song Contest. April 6, 1968; London, British Broadcasting Corporation. Ekstra Nena. “Ljubim te pesmama.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 9, 1992; Malmö, Sveriges Television.

174  •  Dean Vuletic Fazla. “Sva bol svijeta.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 15, 1993; Millstreet, Raidió Teilifís Éireann. Joksimović, Željko, and Ad Hoc Orchestra. “Lane moje.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 15, 2004; Istanbul, Türkiye Radyo Televizyon Kurumu. Kesovija, Tereza. “Muzika i ti.” Eurovision Song Contest. March 25, 1972; Edinburgh, British Broadcasting Corporation. Korni grupa. “Moja generacija.” Eurovision Song Contest. April 6, 1974; Brighton: British Broadcasting Corporation. Kurt, Sabahudin. “Život je sklopio krug.” Eurovision Song Contest. March 21, 1964; Copenhagen, Danmarks Radio. Leskovar, Lado. “Vse rože sveta.” Eurovision Song Contest. April 8, 1967; Vienna, Österreichischer Rundfunk. Novaković, Lola. “Ne pali svetla u sumrak.” Eurovision Song Contest. March 18, 1962; Luxembourg, Compagnie luxembourgeoise de télédiffusion. Novi fosili. “Ja sam za ples.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 9, 1987; Brussels, Radio-télévision belge de la Communauté française. Put. “Don’t Ever Cry.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 15, 1993; Millstreet, Raidió Teilifís Éireann. Riva. “Rock Me.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 6, 1989; Lausanne, Société suisse de radiodiffusion et télévision. Šerifović, Marija. “Molitva.” Eurovision Song Contest. May 12, 2007; Helsinki, Yleisradio Oy. Vukov, Vice. “Brodovi.” Eurovision Song Contest. March 23, 1963; London, British Broadcasting Corporation. Vukov, Vice. “Čežnja.” Eurovision Song Contest. March 20, 1965; Naples, Radiotelevisione italiana.

15

“Rocking the Party Line”

The Yugoslav Festival of Patriotic and Revolutionary Song and the Polemics of “Soc-Pop” in the 1970s Danijela Š. Beard

For many, the Yugoslav seventies evoke the “socialist good life,” a decade of greater market economy, consumerism (Patterson 2011; Duda 2014), and a thriving popular music industry that was one of the most vivid expressions of that prosperity. In reality, the “good life” was plagued by mounting economic and sociopolitical crises (see Calic 2011) that started with student protests and the Croatian Spring (Maspok)1 at the close of the 1960s, and culminated with Tito’s death in 1980. In a nutshell, a liberal ascendancy in the 1960s threatened Yugoslav stability and led to a culling of liberals from all spheres of life (see Rusinow 1978, 229–307; Ponoš 2007; Klasić 2012), and largely as a consequence of 1968 and Maspok, the Party stimulated new cultural programs to discourage disengagement with socialism. Given that music had become a central aspect of youth consumption and leisure, marketing socialist popular music – songs created as entertainment but with clear political messages – became critical for the Party’s program. In this chapter  I  analyze how an interplay of ideological, economic, and aesthetic factors shaped popular music that endorsed socialist ideology – a phenomenon that I term “soc-pop.” I do not argue that soc-pop was a conscious grouping by the artists themselves or some organized institutionalized program by Party ideologues or the industry, although it did have strong institutional support. Rather, I identify the phenomenon broadly as patriotic values expressed through music in a variety of political, organizational, aesthetic, and economic projects, all underpinned by some kind of demonstrable engagement with Yugoslavism and socialism. In that sense, my study is part of a broader scholarly revision of state socialism, which goes beyond conformism and binary perspectives to interrogate the more complex modes of operation between individuals and the state (see Yurchak 2005). In particular, I  challenge blanket claims that Yugoslav soc-pop was merely political and economic opportunism, where “regime”  (režimski) artists peddled banal and artless political kitsch (Popović 1979; Žikić 1999). While the implicit schism between youth counterculture and the mechanisms of state socialism or patriotism suggests an irreconcilable opposition, in Yugoslavia the two were not only brought together for the mutual benefit of musicians and politicians but were central to the interplay of the symbolic politics of popular music, with its many contradictions and complexities. My premise is that engagement went beyond straightforward conformism to a spectrum of practices that elicited manifold, and at 175

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times contradictory investments in socialism, all of which were closely bound up with the thriving music industry, as well as a redefinition of socialist values in the 1970s. I ask whether soc-pop was more than a reaction against 1968 and Maspok, and why patriotism remained an important value for those associated with the popular music counterculture in a way that does not especially apply in the West. I also consider whether Partisan resistance represented more than conformism in popular culture, acting instead as a potentially unifying narrative against the ethnonationalism that plagued the Yugoslav national consciousness. From Partisan Mass Songs to “Socialist Pop” Soc-pop was essentially a popular-music update of Partisan (partizanske), revolutionary (revolucionarne) and patriotic (patriotske/domoljubne) mass songs that flourished during WWII. Created spontaneously as factual albeit embellished testimonies, these songs were canonized after 1945 within a larger revolutionary repertoire that glorified Partisan heroic narratives, celebrated Tito and the communist government, and fostered social cohesion through the programme of the “brotherhood and unity” of all Yugoslav peoples/ethnicities. Alongside the hugely popular genre of partizanski films (see Goulding 2002; Vasiljević 2016), Partisan songs were central to Yugoslavia’s post-war nation-building, saturating public and private spaces with a recognisable sonic thumbprint, from catchy mass songs to the monumentalized orchestral sounds of highly ritualized national celebrations (see Lukić Krstanović 2010). Alongside this revolutionary repertoire, the popular music industry steadily developed from the late 1950s, initially around the zabavna festivals of light music (see Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume). Following a series of debates in the 1950s, where Party representatives decided that popular music could be a powerful ideological tool if suitably adapted and “Yugoslavianized” (Vuletic 2012 and 2015),2 zabavna music was embraced as the model mainstream genre: it suited the idealized image of the socialist middle class promoted by the political and cultural establishment, and was correspondingly given strong support from national radio and television networks and record companies. Compared to jazz, rock, and neofolk (novokomponovana), zabavna singers attained the most favorable status in the media and were commonly enlisted to perform at state ceremonies and to represent Yugoslav culture abroad (Arnautović 2012, 103–212). In short, the rise of zabavna music and its profit-driven industry were facilitated by the political and economic changes since the 1950s: Yugoslavia developed a model of socialist self-­management (samoupravljanje) and market socialism (Lydall 1984), which enabled the growth of the entertainment industry and popular culture;3 correspondingly new domestic and foreign politics turned the popular music industry into a symbol of Yugoslav cultural openness, economic growth, and modernization (Vuletic 2008 and 2011). The leading songwriters and estrada (entertainment industry) managers were driven by the success of famous singers who could win festivals and sell tickets and albums – a commercial spirit best illustrated by the zabavna megastar Zdravko Čolić (discussed later on). But even though zabavna-pop became a commercial and profitable product within estrada, Party functionaries continued to support it. As late as 1978, in response to the Čolić phenomenon, the president of the Commission for Culture, Lev Kreft, declared that “The SSO [The Alliance of Socialist Youth] accepts mass culture and estrada completely,” arguing that this would not lead to banality, as was the case in the West, because in Yugoslavia both the public and the music stars had a “greater [degree of] social and cultural consciousness” (Kreft cited in Luković 1989, 272). Kreft’s remarks, and the Party’s attitudes in general, underline one of the many peculiarities of Yugoslav socialism,

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where entertainment forms seemingly at odds with state socialist culture were readily consolidated for political and economic benefit, for both the performers and the state.4 Equally peculiar, perhaps, is Kreft’s attempt to reconcile popular music and state socialism through recall to a more “developed” social and cultural consciousness in Yugoslavia – a discursive move that could be used to make almost anything acceptable. “Singing the Party Line”: Jugoslovenski Festival Revolucionarne i Rodoljubne Pjesme (1975–78) The Party’s investment in popular music was most clearly manifested in the Yugoslav Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Song (hereafter the Festival), co-organized in Zagreb in 1975 by two Party bodies – the Socialist Alliance of Croatian Youth (SSOH) and the alliance of Partisan veteran soldiers (SUBNOR).5 The Festival’s archival documentation reveals spirited debates between Party representatives and various music professionals in the 1970s, and offers rare evidence about the extent to which established musicians were involved in discussions about socialism, patriotism, and popular music. In the first working group meeting on June 3, 1975, the organizers outlined their twofold aim: to contemporize existing revolutionary and patriotic songs, and to create new ones that “motivate labour, zealousness and socialist conviction.”6 They agreed that popular music had the greatest “suggestive” power in forming the personality of a young person, as reiterated at their First Council Meeting held on April 20, 1976: Song, as an inseparable part of revolutionism and patriotism, and love towards homeland and revolution, are born together to ennoble and inspire a person towards superhuman efforts. [. . .] Our desire is to use varied musical expression [. . .] to develop love towards homeland and our socialist revolution. [. . .] Music should be in the function of building socialism with all its ethical and moral values. (Đelo Jusić, First Council Meeting, 13–14)7 The first Festival was held on November 23, 1975, commemorating thirty years since the liberation of Yugoslavia and the victory over fascism. It assembled an impressive coterie of largely Croatian zabavna-pop figures, including the brothers Ibrica and Đelo Jusić (the former a popular šansonjer, the latter the leader of the Dubrovački trubaduri ensemble), singers Dalibor Brun and Đani Maršan, traditional-folk ensemble Ladarice, the jazz singer Josipa Lisac, and leading composer-arrangers Darko Kraljić, Nikica Kalogjera, and Miljenko Prohaska. Performers were accompanied by the Revijski Orchestra of Radio-Television Zagreb, and the festival was organized in two parts: the first part comprised partizanske songs in contemporary arrangements commissioned from renowned composer-arrangers; the second showcased new songs obtained through a public contest, but arranged by professionals. During the break, established artists performed for free, including the singer-songwriter and šansonjer Arsen Dedić, rock musician Drago Mlinarec, and pop singer Neda Ukraden with the ensemble Kamen na kamen. The song “Dvanaesta je majka Slavonije” (The Twelfth [Brigade] is the Mother of Slavonia), which was based on a Partisan poem and composed by an amateur student, was performed as a duet by Lisac and Ladarice, and won the public vote with over four times more votes than anyone else. The festival had live coverage across the Yugoslav Radio Television (JRT) network, Jugoton released a compilation album with twelve selected songs, and the Alliance of Music Societies also published a songbook.

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The 53-page document from the First Council Meeting sheds important light on debates generated by the 1975 Festival, and its mixed reception. The organizers celebrated the positive response to the event and the project altogether (observed in the official press, and from the elated atmosphere in the auditorium), but they were equally eager to address criticism in the youth press about the Festival’s involvement with the commercial entertainment industry (discussed below). Reflecting on the Festival’s mixed reception, the Slovene jazz composer and Partisan veteran Bojan Adamič expressed anxiety about the reworking of venerated Partisan songs for such a high-profile official event. He felt that there was always a risk that contemporary arrangements would be labeled too conservative, too radical, or even offensive to various Partisan groups, which he noted had been the case with Lado Leskovar’s 1970 pop-hit “Hej brigade” (Hey Brigades) (Ibid., 8–9). Others shunned conformity in favor of critical engagement, especially the energetic 37-year-old Arsen Dedić: “This festival must not be a lecture but a place where ideas are generated. Surely it has succeeded by the very fact that it provoked interest and challenged younger [press] critics to be bold and say what they think” (Ibid., 9). Their exchange set the polemical tone within the Festival’s diverse group, which reflected the increasing climate of critical thinking in Yugoslavia, especially fostered since the early 1960s by the group of thinkers known as the Praxis philosophers (see Sher 1977). Discussion at the First Council Meeting focused on the perceived similarity of the Festival with other popular festivals of zabavna music, the negative influence of commercial pop music, and the role that professional musicians played in this. From the outset the organizers were keen to distinguish their Festival by emphasizing that theirs was a “sociopolitical manifestation [with] a different purpose and character” (Jusić in Ibid., 12–13, emphasis mine). In reality, however, it closely resembled other mainstream zabavna festivals: it was a competition (although not for a monetary prize); it used the same composers, arrangers, songwriters, and performers from the zabavna circuit, most of whom were paid; save for the subject matter, many songs reflected the zabavna light-entertainment styles, as in Đani Maršan’s “Ima jedna divna zemlja” (There Exists a Wonderful Land). In other words, even though the Festival’s message was clearly political, the means through which it was conveyed replicated the commercial styles and market-driven practices of the zabavna industry. Accordingly, Dedić noted that young people questioned the sincerity of the revolutionary ethos produced by zabavna sector professionals: perceived as an appendage to the Zagreb Festival of zabavna music, which happened the day before, Dedić remarked that “The same people [performers, songwriters, arrangers] show up the next day in revolutionary clothing, [and that] makes certain people suspicious” (Ibid., 33). In an attempt to downplay zabavna associations, the Council condemned the consumerist mentality that emerged in Yugoslavia through the zabavna scene, which it regarded as foreign to socialist ethics (Jusić in Ibid., 14). The most outspoken in this regard was the young rock journalist Darko Glavan, who attacked zabavna festivals for peddling the easy-listening genre šlageri (pl., hits) and an associated petit-bourgeois mentality that tailored to popular tastes (Ibid., 45). He condemned the professionals for “craftsmen posturing” at the first Festival, protesting how “a single honest stutter [by an amateur] is much more genuine, and closer to the [true] spirit of patriotism” (Ibid., 39). He stressed that the Festival had to change the very aesthetic nature of the event in order to have a different purpose and character. Notwithstanding Glavan’s objections, it seems remarkable from both Western and Yugoslav perspectives that a rock critic, who emerged through the cult music magazine Pop Express (1969–70; see Zubak 2012 and 2018, 214–22), was prepared to be involved in an official party project in the late 1970s, let alone enthusiastically promote ideas such as socialism and patriotism.8

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Glavan’s attack triggered retaliation from the many zabavna professionals at the meeting, who ultimately felt that nobody – be it amateur or professional – should be precluded from participating in the Festival conceived as a revolutionary activity (Dedić and Karakaš in Ibid., 40). They argued that the Festival’s openness had generated the varied participation in 1975, with songs by both professionals and amateurs, including the winning song composed by a student. Glavan’s attack on professionals was really an attack on the commercialization of the zabavna scene, and the ways in which the market-driven industry operated in the 1970s: if in the 1960s zabavna festivals were prestigious competitions that showcased the best singers and songwriters, in the 1970s they became a part of the lucrative estrada business, with teams of shrewd managers, pop stars, and leading composer-arrangers who dominated the market and reaped high profits (see Arnautović 2012, 123–39). Other Council members, however, seemed more concerned with how the Festival, and the Party, could find new ways to stimulate social engagement. This, Dedić argued, was more pressing than the Council’s futile pursuit of the “revolutionary hit,” which he argued professionals could write and produce (isproducirati) in hours. For Dedić, the purpose of the Festival was rather to awaken a specific kind of creativity among young people, engaging participants beyond a “safe middle-class routine. . . . Poetic and compositional freedom [would] encourage primarily youth, but also other artists, to have a dialogue with their surroundings” (Ibid., 33). Indeed, the opposition set up here recalls familiar debates between mass culture and authentically popular/ folk culture, the former identified with consumerism and passivity, the latter with democratic participation. Dedić renounced the Anglo-American pop models as having little relevance for Yugoslav youth or their reality, echoing the Festival’s criticism about the profusion of English-­ language songs on radio and TV. Dedić’s penchant for poetic aestheticism, and his views in general, resounded with the poet Zvonimir Golob, both central figures of the Zagreb Chanson School (see Chapter  4). Speaking at the Council, Golob argued that professional songwriters were “deceitful in writing a great amount of šlageri, surrendering to a vogue that was foreign to us” (Ibid.). With a somewhat different critique from that of Dedić, Golob juxtaposes music and poetry (as a practice that operates largely at a connotative level) with political discourse (as something that operates largely at a denotative level), warning against the “sloganish stylization” of the Festival that would deter potential writers and poets: Creative language is indirect, slogans are direct. If we want something lasting, then we have to avoid slogans. [To express] love and commitment to homeland, and happiness that you live in it, you [need to] allow the author of the text much freedom for him to speak as an individual. (Ibid., 26) In rejecting Anglo-American trends and domestic šlageri, Dedić and Golob advocated a chansonstyle aesthetic for their creative vision of patriotism, rendered in their song “Domovina” (1975), which was performed at the 1975 Festival, and subsequently released on the Festival’s 1976 album. The song was performed by Dedić and the acclaimed rock musician Drago Mlinarec (of Grupa 220), with the ensemble Spektar, to lyrics co-written by Golob and the Slovenian poet Janez Menart, and to music composed by Dedić. A  gentle, strophic ballad, the song was conceived as a nuanced expression of patriotism that unfolds through the poetic object of depression – a textbook example of nostalgia (Boym 2001). Set in Paris and narrated from the perspective of a protagonist who struggles with depression and homesickness, neither the shining Paris lights nor the soft moonlight can light up the darkness in his heart, an “illness” that he carries from

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home. A yearning for home is foregrounded in the last repeated verse, as he imagines traversing rivers, forests, and a mountain to reach the green island of his homeland, “to kneel there/ to shed tears there/ when it hurts wherever I am/ let it hurt at home.” The ballad reflects intimacy and the modest performance style of a left-bank Parisian chanson, with gentle vocals and a simple piano and guitar accompaniment, offset by harmonica. The cyclical two-verse strophic sections spin a simple harmonic progression in C major (I-IV-V7-I-III7-VI), offset by a catchy “tarara” sequence in D minor with suspended second. The climax of the song on “homeland,” in the relative minor, is thrown into relief with the words “hurt at home” on a cadential G7: while there is no cure for his pain, the harmonic resolution implies some comfort of experiencing that pain at home. Although the debates from the First Council Meeting inspired the Dedić-Golob “patriotic chanson,” the aesthetic discussion was curtailed by the veteran president of SUBNOR, Pero Car, who asserted that the primary purpose of the Festival was greater political penetration among the youth. “The essence of what we are doing here is political,” he asserted, “there cannot be an apolitical approach” (Ibid., 46). In line with this, the organizers set parameters that were more heavily weighted toward political-ideological concerns for 1976. They stressed the importance of utilizing mass songs focused on youth participation in the communist movement during the NOB, workers’ heroism, Youth Labour Actions (ORA), the development of Yugoslav self-­ managed socialism (samoupravljanje), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), national defense, social protection and love toward homeland.9 While SUBNOR’s intransigency reflected the Party’s concerns regarding youth alienation from the proclaimed goals of socialism in the late 1970s, it also explains the increasingly prescriptive nature of the Festival, and most likely why Dedić and Golob did not continue subsequent participation. The culmination of the Festival’s activities was in 1977 − the year of national celebrations marking the 40-year jubilee since Tito became leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party – even though they continued the Festival’s ambiguous relationship between socialist ideology and the burgeoning music industry. In line with their all-Yugoslav character, but also to diversify the zabavna profile, the Festival organizers assembled a more varied group of musicians from across Yugoslavia, including the zabavna heartthrob Zdravko Čolić, folk-pop singer Neda Ukraden, Adriatic singer-pianist Oliver Dragojević, pop-rock group Indexi, pop singer Sabri Fejzullahu, jazz-rock singer Zdenka Kovačiček, the guslar10 Rajko Tomović, Adriatic klapa (vocal ensemble) Maestral, and the classically trained baritone Georgi Božikov. These performers were also chosen for their capacity to represent other genres (folk, rock, jazz, classical), and accordingly the varied social groups that identified with those genres. The strategy demonstrates that genre was conceived in quasi-political terms as a form of representation: the variety of music associated with different youth communities, ethnic groups, and social positions were imaginatively linked in celebration of the ubiquitous Yugoslav symbols, Tito and the Party.11 Crucially, the 1977 Festival finally enlisted the “revolutionary hit” the Festival organizers hoped for, with Čolić’s song “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo” (Comrade Tito, We Pledge to You), a remake of the 1942 mass song “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo, da sa tvoga puta ne skrenemo” (Comrade Tito, We Pledge to You that We Will not Deviate from Your Path). The music was composed by the zabavna composer Đorđe Novković to lyrics by Mira Alečković. A paean to Tito and the Partisan resistance, the song is in three verses, each amplified by the rousing chorus “Comrade Tito, We Pledge to You.” The first verse recalls the struggle and sacrifices that the Partisan forefathers made for freedom, who died singing the oath; the second is a joyous celebration of freedom today, with a promise to honour Partisan sacrifices, and by implication their songs; the

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Figure 15.1  Record sleeve of the Yugoslav Festival of Patriotic and Revolutionary Song (1977), back cover

third is a reference to contemporary state celebrations, foiled in Cold War rhetoric, warning the enemies to fear the rousing power and bravery associated with those songs. Čolić’s appropriation of the slogan “Comrade Tito” symbolically fuses contemporary and Partisan pledges to Tito and signals a rejuvenation of the partizanska song genre – the Festival’s principal objective. The musical and rhetorical codes inscribe the conventions of the revolucionarni repertoire, especially with the military-style orchestrations of the socialist period associated with the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). The opening orchestral fanfare in B flat major sets up the marching rhythmic thrust that anchors the four repetitions of the chorus “Comrade Tito, We Pledge to You”; the melodic line occupies a narrow five-note ambitus (B flat-F, except for a single rise to G), accompanied by the predominantly syllabic text setting and a declamatory delivery, with verses that have a simple harmonic progression (I-V-IV) and strong cadential resolutions. Notwithstanding all the Festival’s rhetoric on socialist ethics, the song has many trappings of a soc-pop

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Figure 15.1  (Continued), front cover

šlager: the military brass-band associations of the opening fanfare and the chorus sections, stand in contrast to the soft rock/easy listening accompaniment in the verses, where the guitar and drums are more pronounced. Novković’s shrewd reworking of the partizanske genre hinged on the zabavna megastar Čolić, famed for his affective sincerity, to popularize slogans about the contemporary commitment to Tito; validation of the official revolutionary ideology thus relied heavily on the commercial culture industry, and specifically Čolić’s pop-culture appeal. The song certainly garnered significant ideological investments, becoming a popular hit into the 1980s. It was released as a single in 1980, reportedly selling over 300,000 copies, and was symbolically used for the last Day of Youth Celebration in 1987 (see Chapter 18). Behind the scenes the Festival commissioned a systematic study on popular music from four researchers, including the rock critic Glavan, who produced a thirty-four-page booklet titled Ideological Project: The Sociocultural Significance of Pop Music (1977). Despite Čolić’s winning

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combination of pop and politics, the four researchers continued to wage battles against the zabavna pop-culture industry and the growing estrada. Influenced by Adorno’s writings, they dismissed zabavna-pop as “music for listening without effort or depth,” with banal lyrics created primarily for fashion (Ibid., 13), and attacked the personnel within the institutional pop-music networks (primarily the record industry and concert offices), for behavior guided by commercial and financial rather than cultural, aesthetic, or ethical interests (Ibid., 12). In contrast, they argued, rock music questioned all zabavna norms, offering greater creativity, experimentalism, and an ability to express the spiritual state of youth more poignantly, which they identified with protest songs and the hippie movement. They asserted that the most important innovation in popular music came from subcultural spheres where amateurs and semi-professionals enjoyed greater experimental freedom and were not constrained by norms imposed by the institutional and professional industry sectors (22). In short, although proposed as an empirical and objective study, the booklet revealed a mixture of prejudice and elitism, and in particular Adorno’s critique of the culture industry that strongly influenced these four researchers, but also cultural commentators more broadly.12 Their critique of zabavna ultimately reflected Glavan’s personal devotion to rock subculture – the two scenes he regarded as fundamentally antithetical. Count on Us, Count With Us Somewhat ironically, the type of revolutionary rock song that both the Festival and Glavan advocated emerged through another festival, Omladina (Youth; founded in 1961), which became a rite of passage for emerging zabavna-pop and rock artists. Unlike other festivals, Omladina was embraced by “rokeri” (rock musicians, including new-wave and punk artists), especially from the late 1970s, due to maverick organizers who were in tune with contemporary youth and offered rokeri a creative forum with institutional support, who in turn partook in the “patriotic evening” that Omladina started in 1977. Unsurprisingly, Omladina’s legendary status had a pull that the Festival of Patriotic and Revolutionary Song could not rival, a fact that its organizers recognized as indicated in comments made during the Festival’s meetings. The song “Računajte na nas” (Count on Us) emerged through the 1978 Omladina Festival, written by Đorđe Balašević, who went on to became a leading singer-songwriter in the region. Performed by his vocal quartet Rani mraz,13 the song is a simple acoustic folk-like ballad that addresses contemporary concerns about youth and reinstates their commitment to Tito and the Partisan heritage. Accompanied with a plucked guitar, Balašević opens with a pensive “oath to Tito” in E minor, written on behalf of his post-1945 generation. The two female singers continue with an emotive warning an octave higher, about the many struggles that await them and “threaten like a deep torrent.” Their reminder that they have to keep the peace is offset by Balašević’s calmly resolute “Count on us.” The subsequent verses swap gender roles: the female singers delicately repeat Balašević’s opening verse, and Balašević and Bora Đorđević again address potential fears about the future, with another reassurance that “the Partisan blood flows/ through our veins/ and we know why we’re here/ Count on us.” An upbeat chorus in the relative G major then brings the quartet together to address concerns about the “wrong direction” associated with their rock lifestyle, with a reassurance that their generation is dependable. In terms of music, the song has limited rock signifiers, save for the electric guitar licks inserted in the chorus after the lines “we play rock [music].” Rather, the generational conciliation is implied at the symbolic level: the mixed quartet represents the masses, a united chorus of socialist youth who come together to reinstate their support for the revolutionary cause.

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This simple, understated song was immediately embraced as a generational hymn (“genera­ cijska himna”), most likely because it framed a generational conflict  – between the post-1945 generation of rokeri and the elders who doubt their revolutionary commitment – through a positive, pro-Yugoslav outlook. Balašević recalled how the song Had an extraordinary effect . . . because at that time we all loved that country. It wasn’t . . . a režimska communist song, [although] later it got distorted, it got some other markers, [and] I stopped performing it when I realized it was turned into a slogan. But at that time, while it functioned as patriotic . . . [bands like] Galija and Atomsko sklonište, who went on to achieve great success . . . were all backstage on the verge of tears. (Balašević)14 Behind a somewhat naïve patriotism, the more calculated ideological potential of “Računajte na nas” was seized upon immediately. According to Balašević, the song was enlisted for the LYC’s political rallies (Savković 1987), which he later cited as the reason why he stopped performing the song in 1983–84, when the federal interior minister Stane Dolanc requested it for a state celebration marking forty years of the State Security Service (Stanić 2002). Balašević explained: I clumsily spoiled the song because I  mentioned Tito.  .  .  . The song was powerful enough even without that. . . . But those were the times, when even I, a kid from the streets, who was never in those organizations with booklets, hammers, sickles, etc., I mentioned him, and who could’ve imagined that my songs would outlast Tito. (Balašević)15 From today’s perspective, “Računajte na nas” represents a poignant, even prophetic warning about the “deep nationalist torrent” that threatened peace in Yugoslavia, alluding to concerns about Yugoslavia’s future, especially with the ailing figurehead Tito, who died within two years. At the time, these foreboding references and the commitment to peace were skewed by Balašević’s purported servility to the regime, even though he tried to wrestle the song from co-option and sought to distinguish his personal patriotism from engaged political-ideological campaigning. In response to the song, the acclaimed rock critic Petar Popović criticized the unnecessary flagging of the nation by Balašević and other rock artists: I believe that this youth and all rokeri are essentially OK, and that such or similar outpourings of patriotism are gratuitous proof of Yugoslavism or patriotic consciousness. . . . A misuse of some grand thing often makes it lesser, in the same way that it diminishes some ideals, and makes certain concepts remarkably banal. Rokeri love this land and believe in its legacy, but they make fools out of themselves when they regard it their duty to express that at all costs. . . . Is it necessary? Is there so much doubt over musicians’ correctness? Their allegiance? (Popović 1979) To an extent Popović’s critique of banal patriotism foreshadowed Michael Billings’s seminal study Banal Nationalism (1995), which analyzes everyday representations of nationalism and argues that modern nationalism is not banal but dangerous. “Flagging the nation daily” through constant repetition of everyday national symbols (flags and various national designations) creates an effective, almost subliminal, sense of national togetherness. This “hidden” nature of modern nationalism remains largely unnoticed and unchallenged, which for Billings makes it a dangerous and powerful ideology.

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While Popović’s critique of widespread soc-pop in the late 1970s can be read as a symptom of Billings’s banal nationalism, the specific case of “Računajte na nas” was anything but, and this song, more than any other, was subject to intense critical scrutiny. The Slovenian punk band Pankrti directly condemned Balašević’s song with their response “Računite z nami” (Count With Us, 1980), which the songwriter Gregor Tomc explained in this way: What disgusted me the most, as a young man in the 1970s, was youth conformism. . . . When I first heard “Računajte na nas,” I was shocked. How could a young person write such verses! . . . It can’t get any worse than this, to mix rock music, which is supposed to be an expression of youth autonomy, with such ass-licking servility to the gerontocracy in power. . . . My song was a direct response [to this]. (Tomc, pers. comm., December 29, 2017). According to Tomc, their “Računite z nami” played on the double meaning of računite as both “count” and “rely,” implying that young people were just numbers to be counted, but also could be relied upon to comply, as reflected in the lyrics of their version: “We build roads/ we build tracks/ we go to meetings/ we don’t do drugs/ produce us/ shape us/ send us to the countryside/ but above all/ Count on us! /Count with us.” Tomc added: “Balašević was hard to ignore because mainstream media really gave him big exposure. For me, he epitomized the rotten core of Yu rock. My response was not so much a critique of the regime as a critique of young people who sold out” (Ibid.). Tomc’s response, however, was not a rejection of socialism tout court. Rather, as he clarified, it was motivated by his band’s belief in their own “right to a leftist position even though the authorities claimed that they had a monopoly on it. . . . We have our own vision of what it means to be a leftist and it has nothing to do with everybody who sold out” (Ibid.). With the changing political climate by the mid-1980s, and the seismic shift away from Yugoslavism, for many Yugoslav patriotism no longer symbolized conformism but a new resistance against ethnonationalism. In this atmosphere, many rock musicians openly lent their voices to the Yugoslav cause, in particular the Sarajevo-based bands who were gathered under the New Partisans label (see Mišina 2013, 191–223), and who now appropriated the Partisan legacy as an anti-nationalist stance in their 1986 albums: Bijelo dugme’s Pljuni i zapjevaj moja Jugoslavijo (Spit and Sing My Yugoslavia), Plavi orkestar’s Smrt fašizmu (Death to Fascism) and Merlin’s A još teže bez tebe (And Even Harder Without You). Similarly Balašević was arguably the bravest individual voice of anti-nationalist protest, when in 1992, as a Serbian musician, he openly attacked the Serbian-led Yugoslav National Army, who now waged wars against Croats and Bosnians, in his poem “Odjebi JNA” (Fuck off JNA): “Push some other Volunteer to the trenches of your incompetence. . . . There are no ‘Mine’ in this ‘War of Ours.’ . . . I’m too old to betray myself once more, so fuck off JNA.”16 Korni Grupa’s Poema 1941. and the Politics of Rock Perhaps more than any other genre, rock music in Yugoslavia elicited strong ideological investments and disinvestments. For the Festival, rock music was a vehicle to bridge the generational and ideological conflicts, and bring youth on board the socialist project. Their strategic use of rock music to promote socialist ideology and national cohesion also served to demobilize and discipline its subversive potential, reflecting wider recognition of the subcultural power of rock music. For Glavan, rock music was the ideal medium for engaging youth with socialism, primarily as a

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meaningful alternative to the commercial world of zabavna-pop. In contrast, for most rock journalists in Yugoslavia, rock was the subcultural voice that opposed rather than served the socialist program. But for all their die-hard defense of rock’s subcultural potential, these critics seemed prepared to overlook the patriotic exigencies of many rock artists, for instance Yu grupa, who named themselves after Yugoslavia and gave concerts on the Day of the Republic state holiday, or the keyboardist Tihomir Asanović Pop and rock singer Dado Topić, who wrote songs like “Zemljo majko” (Mother Land, 1974) and “Domovino” (Homeland, from Domovino moja album, 1979). Moreover, one of the outspoken critics of the regime, the rock journalist Aleksandar Žikić (1999, 129), hails Topić as the most important Yugoslav rock singer of the pre-punk era, even though Topić sang saccharine šlageri about Tito (in Pesme Titu [Songs about Tito], 1977) and made the promotional propaganda mini-album Vodilja (The Guiding Idea) for the 1983 Congress of the Communist Union of Yugoslavia (with Pepel in kri).17 Indeed much journalistic and academic writing on socialism and rock music (Žikić 1999; Tomc 2010) is predicated on binaries of repression and resistance, conformism and youth autonomy, official culture and counterculture, which misrepresents the multitude of coexisting perspectives shaped by “lived” socialism. As Alexei Yurchak (2005) has astutely argued in relation to Soviet late socialism, modes of operation between individuals and the state were more complex, and such binaries diminish the critical role of agency, as illustrated by my final case study Poema 1941. (Poem 1941; hereafter 1941). Following a commission from Radio-televizija Beograd (RTB) for Kornelije Kovač to compose songs based on the poetry of the celebrated Partisan poet Branko Ćopić, Kovač devised a concept album with seven or eight songs based on his choice of Ćopić poems (Kovač, pers. comm., May 3, 2014). Kovač, who trained as a classical pianist at the Sarajevo Music Academy in the late 1960s, emerged through Sarajevo’s rock scene with the band Indexi before embarking on a successful career with his own progressive-rock band Korni grupa in Belgrade (1968–74). His Korni band famously developed a dual approach that Žikić dubbed a “Trojan horse tactic” (1999, 119–36), with experimental progressive rock that was part of the local andergraund scene, and more commercial pop songs that tailored to the mainstream zabavna market. Yugoslav rock critics, however, accused Kovač of an “aesthetic selling out,” and even blamed him for the downfall of rock ‘n’ roll (Ibid., 126–27; Kovač in Arnautović 2012, 157). Yet the criticism of Korni’s zabavna-pop success not only disregards the important reasons for such decisions – from economic imperatives to a lack of audience for their highly experimental works – but also diminishes the canonic legacy of their highly developed and experimental rock forms, as in “Prvo svetlo u kući broj 4” (The First Light in the House No. 4, 1970), “Put za istok” (Road to the East, 1972) and 1941. Korni recorded and filmed 1941 at Radio Belgrade’s Studio 6 in March 1971, with their then lead singer Dado Topić, and guest vocalist Josipa Lisac. Commemorating thirty years of the socialist revolution, 1941 was broadcast on television on March 24, 1971, and this also became Korni’s first album, not released until 1979. Shot as a black-and-white video directed by the renowned director and rock champion Jovan Ristić, 1941 narrates a story of Partisan struggle, bravery, and sacrifice. In the cinematic opening, the camera zooms around barbed wire and machine-gun props to the sounds of grenade launchers and marching footsteps. The drums introduce a marching theme, which acts as a recurring leitmotif, and the music unfolds through a series of classical, jazz, funk, folk, and progressive rock passages that evoke early King Crimson and later Pink Floyd. The music and the narrative are integrated into a polished musico-dramatic text envisioned as a cantata, which aligns the work with the similar genre popularized in Soviet Russia.

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Figure 15.2  Screenshot from the TV broadcast of Korni grupa’s Poema 1941. (1971)

Topić’s dramatic delivery (via Ćopić’s text) highlights the coupling of “our [Partisan] Army” and the legacy of brave freedom fighters and uprisings waged on “this land,” corroborating Partisan bravery as historically inherent, linked to the folk (narod) who raised their weapons during the National Liberation Struggle (NOB) to proudly defeat the Germans. The subsequent soldiers’ battle is accompanied by a livelier funk-pop track, which shifts gears as the army withdraws at sunset: the music dies down to reflect the danger and the destruction, but soon crescendos through E minor, building tension for Topić’s line “one woman who fell there.” At this point, Lisac walks across the stage and picks up Topić’s final note E, and with aloof vulnerability, couples Topić’s “fallen woman” with her opening line: “I am singing about you Marija, girl warrior, who hid your plaits under the Titovka cap, and with your heart went against the concrete” (from Ćopić’s poem “Marija na Prkosima [Marija at Prkosi]). Following a free jazz interlude, Lisac escalates the musico-dramatic charge for Marija’s three attacks on the German bunkers: for the first, Marija’s destroyed village flashes in front of her; for the second, she sees rivers and towns under the spasm of machine gun fire; as she hits the third bunker “death pierced her . . . breaking the wings of this falcon-girl, as a falling star appeared over Kamenica.” In contrast to Lisac’s balmy jazz delivery, Topić raises the energy with the folk-inspired song “Oj Sokole” (Hey Falcon), before concluding with the sombre lament “Herojeva majka” (Hero’s Mother) – a mother’s emotional goodbye to her “fallen hero” son, Radovan. A free-jazz piano interlude transitions into a reprise with the opening drum leitmotif, symbolically fusing the two fallen Partisan heroes – Marija and Radovan – with the inherent bravery and sacrifices of their forefathers.

188  •  Danijela Š. Beard

Besides the accomplished musico-dramatic text, 1941 was symbolic because it aired at the height of Maspok in 1971. By 1971, Tito became seriously concerned that Yugoslavia was on the brink of a civil war, and symbolically alluded to the ethnonationalist horrors of WWII with a warning to the Croat Communist leaders: “Do you want 1941 all over again?” (Tito cited in Tanner 2001, 184). Thus 1941 was timely in many ways. Partisan resistance served as the greatest unifying narrative against the ethnonationalism that plagued national consciousness throughout Yugoslavia’s existence, and the sensitivity of Kovač’s text setting, and Topić’s and Lisac’s performances, suggest a genuine level of respect for the text, the poet, and presumably by association its message. Moreover, Korni grupa was hugely popular at the time, a mix of Serbian and Croatian musicians – a truly Yugoslav band (Žikić 1999, 128). By including Lisac, an iconic Croatian singer, Kovač gathered hip musicians who cemented a sense of common purpose: the fallen heroes Marija and Radovan, who died for the nation’s freedom, were now symbolically fused with the liberal ideals offered through progressive rock music and pan-Yugoslav collaboration. The Partisan struggle was a reminder of the shared sacrifices endured during the war, and by implication, the Croatian participation in that historical moment. Lisac’s symbolic performance furthermore highlights the important presence of the memory of women Partisans in Yugoslav public culture (Batinić 2015), which has received considerable scholarly attention recently (Dugandžić and Okić 2016).18 In the context of Maspok, Korni’s use of the Partisan legacy acts as an early prototype of the New Partisan trend that reinforced the revolutionary Partisan values of WWII as a way to combat ethnonationalist de-Yugoslavization in the 1980s. To date, however, the political implications of this seminal performance, and the work itself, have been overlooked by critics and scholars who generally associate New Partisanism with the mid-1980s Sarajevo rock scene (Mišina 2013, 191–223) or the short-lived project from 1972 known as “The Partisan shirt suits well” (“Lijepo stoji partizanska bluza”) (Luković 1989, 254–6). Along with 1941, Korni’s other more experimental TV performances, such as the televised “Put za istok” (see filmography), furthermore counter Glavan’s earlier assertion that creative freedoms were constrained by the music industry or that the most important innovations emerged in subcultural amateur circles. Kovač confirmed that he had complete creative freedom with this work (Kovač, e-mail message to author, May  3, 2014), and according to the cameraman who shot the video, Bratislav Grbić (see filmography), Belgrade National TV offered the technological means through which they could realize and stage their creative vision for 1941. Contrary to Glavan’s assertions, I would argue that the field of socialist politics in Yugoslavia offered more complex and mutually beneficial exchanges between artists and institutions. Certainly Kovač was astute to the market mechanisms, in adopting elements of commercial zabavna-pop, and political demands, by linking rock with symbols of socialist Yugoslavia as an inroad to gain significant media exposure in Belgrade in the 1960s and early 1970s (Arnautović 2012, 147–9). But even though Kovač denied that he got much support for his experimental music in this trade off (Kovač in Žikić 1999, 128; and in Luković 1989, 226), by any account, it was exceptional to have a progressive rock band in a post-1968 and Maspok climate that was popular on Belgrade Radio and TV, who released multiple singles and an album (1972), and had the first color TV video for the experimental “Put za istok,” at a time when the entire media network witnessed purges, and other socially engaged bands, like Atomsko sklonište, were taken off air (Arnautović 2012, 153). Additionally, just as rock music was used by the Party and state institutions to spread the socialist message, Korni used a socialist message to spread their progressive andergraund music, which made them important agents in the interplay of the symbolic politics of popular music. Moreover, most critics regard 1941 as the masterpiece of Yugoslav progressive rock, despite the

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“state rock” connotations. I argue, therefore, that the 1941 concept album demonstrates that it was possible to create experimental and progressive rock music that was also in the service of the state; that musicians were not necessarily coerced in the process, but demonstrated a vital creative agency; that it was possible to have a mutually beneficial relationship with the industry and state institutions; and that such works could still be respected by hard-line rock critics and audiences alike. Conclusion Despite soc-pop’s implicitly zabavna profile, in reality it was more complex than the reductive polarization it often provoked. For the Festival organizers, soc-pop was a vehicle to assuage disengagement with socialism, ranging from hardline veterans to the more flexible approaches of youth associations. For many artists and zabavna industry professionals, it served valuable economic and political gains but also affirmed personal and political values. For some it was a medium for new forms of social engagement and an aesthetic quest for domestic alternatives to both commercial popular music and agitprop sloganeering; for others it offered high-profile commissions that consolidated revolutionary thematicism with the experimental and hippie culture, which enabled media penetration or a personal expression of patriotism beyond co-option. For critics it ranged from banal patriotism or servility to the gerontocracy to a medium that could engage youth with socialism, primarily through rock music, and combat the profit-driven zabavna industry and estrada. As such, soc-pop eludes simple definition and is perhaps best understood as a “genre world” (Frith 1998) or “genre culture” (Negus 1999), constructed and articulated through a complex interplay of commercial organization structures, musicians, listeners, fans, and mediating ideologues. And for all the vehement rejection of soc-pop, many of these songs garnered huge popularity among the wider public, and still enjoy a considerable auditorium today.19 The central problem that blighted soc-pop, and the Festival in particular, was how to meaningfully revive Partisan songs and make them anything other than conformist. These songs began as genuine songs of resistance to foreign invasion during WWII, but ceased to function in that way when appropriated as the voice of the governing power. Protest songs, which are associated with movements for political and social change, 1960s beatnik figures and politically engaged 68ers, generally symbolized resistance against oppression and the dominant status quo (Kutschke and Norton 2013). Due to different circumstances in Yugoslavia, the Festival’s calls for engaged protest songs to affirm the status quo created a fundamental contradiction that undermined the primary function of these songs. That said, these songs could – and did – function as resistance against ethnonationalism, but because this topic was politically a Pandora’s box, public discussion was coded (as in the reference to a “deep torrent” in “Računajte na nas”). Whereas in France, a singer like Dominique Grange could openly promote “new popular resistance” against bourgeois oppression, for example in her 1970 single “Les Nouveaux Partisans” (Drott 2011, 75), in Yugoslavia Dedić, Čolić, Balašević, Topić, and Lisac could not sing directly about the growing threats of nationalist separatism like Maspok. In the context of a broader redefinition of socialist values in the 1970s, this was arguably a missed opportunity. For example, the 1941 broadcast was followed by a program on revolution with Korni, Lisac, and the poet Ćopić as guests, which focused on the legacy of 1941 rather than the new meanings that the work produced in 1971. This was symptomatic of how the regime engaged the Partisan past in general: the spaces for people to connect their present situation to what the Partisan legacy might have meant in the present was rarely encouraged by the Party, especially after 1971.20 This problem was also recognized by the

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Festival organizers in 1978, who noted that young people were not motivated enough to partake in the Festival anymore, and above all that there was little engagement with contemporary issues relevant to their lives. In their proposed plans for 1979, the organizers conceded to Dedić’s initial calls (albeit too late): Music should be an expression of the contemporary moment, which problematizes, and is in dialogue with its surroundings. . . . Today, the notion of revolution has to be understood more broadly . . . as an effort to fight for a more equal and democratic future, to fight against social evils. (7)21 The problem with reframing soc-pop as the voice of new Partisan resistance is that the specter of ethnonationalism for many young people was a phantom threat (recall Popović’s criticism of Balašević), and the Party was seen as passé, out of touch, and elitist by many. It was only when these threats proved to be real in the mid-1980s that musicians started reappropriating the Partisan legacy as an oppositional stance. But even then this was a slow process, and it was only with the onset of the Yugoslav wars in 1991 that rock musicians moved into political action (see the Introduction in this volume).22 Reflecting on soc-pop and the Yugoslav Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Song more broadly, it is not immediately clear why they never managed to engage artists like Goran Bregović or Kovač, who they invited to participate. Besides the fact that the Festival was a Party body without economic gain, it is also highly likely that the problem was their uniform conception of youth  – a homogenized group with shared taste, values, and beliefs. In contrast, what my examples and debates demonstrate is that Yugoslav youth groups, like any other, had varied and at times contradictory tastes and values, equally reflected in different visions of what constituted Yugoslav socialism and patriotism, the role that Tito and the Party played in this, as well as the sheer spectrum of pop and rock styles in the 1970s, both within the soc-pop genre world and Yugoslav diskografija more broadly. Yet for all their rejection of the “Party line,” most of these youth groups felt some pride in what Yugoslavia represented.23 Accordingly, Yugoslavia’s geopolitical positioning had a significant impact on youths’ self-identification and their sense of uniqueness and exceptionality, which called for a redefinition  – not a destruction  – of the Yugoslav project in the 1980s (Spasovska 2017). Decoupling Yugoslavism and dogmatic socialism reveals how soc-pop, as a form of symbolic politics, often chimed but never sang in unison with organized politics. Acknowledgment I would like to thank Robert Adlington, Catherine Baker, Eric Drott, and Charles Wilson for their insightful comments on this chapter, and Ana Boltužić, Naila Ceribašić, Jelka Vukobratović, Marina Filipović, and the staff at the Croatian State Archives for their help with obtaining archival materials. Notes 1. Defined as either the Croatian Spring by its advocates, or a separatist movement by it opponents, Maspok (lit. “mass movement”) called for greater Croatian autonomy. 2. The Yugoslav Communist Party was officially renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) in 1952. 3. Within market socialism, the markets guided domestic and international production exchange, while the socialist element comprised the “social ownership” and workers’ self-management (samoupravljanje) of enterprises. The

“Rocking the Party Line”  •  191 introduction of a market economy enabled the growth of the entertainment industry and development of popular culture in Yugoslavia (see Jelača, Kolanović, and Lugarić 2017). 4. A peculiar example of this was the “Kitsch Commission” (Komisija za šund) created in the 1970s. This comprised regional commissions with experts from literary criticism to ethnomusicology, as well as pop and jazz recording artists, who reviewed new recordings and made recommendations to producers on whether or not to release them. The companies would then issue the mandatory tax price—50% higher than the regular price—for the “questionable” recordings. Although in theory the Commission represented the single organised attempt to influence and control the production of popular music, in reality it functioned as a taxation body rather than a censorship filter, subject to arbitrary decisions exercised by few privileged individuals (Rasmussen 2002, 84). For more see Hofman 2013. 5. The Festival was conceived as part of the official political-ideological program of the Republican Conference, the highest political youth body since 1968. 6. First Meeting held on March 12, 1975. In “Rezime održanih sastanaka i radnih dogovora za organizaciju festivala revolucionarnih i patriotskih pjesama” (Resume of Meetings and Working Groups for the Organization of the Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Songs). HDA, 1231/KT—1. All subsequent Festival documents will refer to the same folder held at the Croatian State Archives (HDA). 7. “Scenografski zapisnik sa 1. sjednice Savjeta jugoslavenskog Festivala revolucionarne i patriotske pjesme” (Notes from the First Council Session of the Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Songs). April 20, 1976. 8. The following year Glavan was also joined on the Festival Committee by the foremost rock critic, Dražen Vrdoljak, although there is little evidence of Vrdoljak’s contribution to the meetings. 9. “Programska orjentacija Festivala revolucionarne i patriotske pjesme za 1976. god.” (Programmatic Orientation for the 1976 Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Songs). March 1976. 10. A guslar is a singer who performs lengthy narrative tales (epic poetry), while accompanying himself on a singlestringed instrument gusla. 11. For a related discussion on similar festivals and debates in France see Drott 2013. 12. The Festival also commissioned the first Yugoslav youth rock opera HO-RUK (Heave-Ho), co-written by two Festival composers, Đelo Jusić and Branko Karakaš, inspired by Youth Labour Actions as the central youth activity managed by the Socialist Alliance of Youth. 13. The group also included Bora Đorđević (later the frontman of the hard rock band Riblja čorba), and two female singers, Biljana Krstić and Verica Todorović. 14. Balašević, interview by Ivana Papes Bogosavljev, “Sećanje na festival Omladina” (Remembering the Omladina Festival), Sva ta muzika, July 27, 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKXYqXesEHs. Accessed December 12, 2017. 15. Ibid. 16. For an account on transnational relations after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, through the lenses of pop performers, including Balašević, see Baker 2006. 17. In the context of wider national celebrations that endorsed the cult of Tito in 1977, for Pesme Titu, Kovač assembled former Korni members, including their two iconic singers Topić and Zlatko Pejaković, alongside leading zabavna stars Oliver Dragojević, Neda Ukraden, Meri Cetinić, and Bisera Veletanlić, for a medley of catchy pop-rock šlageri about Tito. Other 1977 albums include Vojvodina peva pesme o Titu, Tito nam govori, Heroj Tito (by Boris Bizetić), Tito-Bilećanka, Titove reći, “Heroj Tito”/“Stazom Partizana” and Titovo ime k’o sloboda zrači. 18. For a list of recent publications see http://afzarhiv.org. 19. On YouTube, “Računajte na nas” ranges from 370,000 to over six million views (via “dkova640”), while “Druže Tito” ranges from 350,000 to over 1.745 million views (via “nervoznironioc”). 20. For a related discussion on the use of Partisan songs in Yugoslav Black Wave cinema, see Beard 2019. 21. Thesis for 1979 Programmatic Orientation, September 1978. 22. More recently, the singer Mile Kekin (of the rock band Hladno pivo), released the solo song “Ja nisam vaš” (I’m Not Yours, 2016) as a protest against rising neoliberalism and neo-fascism in Croatia, aligning himself instead with the Yugoslav Partisans. Throughout the region today, activist choirs revive Partisan songs, not as an ideological Yugo­ nostalgic stance but rather as a protest against neoliberalism, and for minority and workers’ rights (Hofman 2016). 23. For instance, in 1975 an NME reader from Zagreb rebuked the magazine for conflating Yugoslavia with the Communist bloc (J. Siftar, “Serbo-Croats Rule—ok?,” June 14, 1975, 42), and another Slovenian reader complained to Melody Maker in 1978 about their statement that Yugoslavia was “behind the iron curtain” (Tomaž Domicelj, “Raising the Curtain,” March 22, 1980, 14), which led the journalist Chris Bohn to write an article on the Yugoslav scene (“NonAligned Punk,” Melody Maker, March  22, 1980, 24−25). See Spasovska, Ljubica. 2017. “Non-Aligned Punk: The Last Yugoslav Generation.” Imperial and Global Forum Blog, May 30. https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2017/05/30/ non-aligned-punk-the-last-yugoslav-generation/.

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192  •  Danijela Š. Beard Batinić, Jelena. 2015. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beard, Š. Danijela. 2019. “Soft Socialism, Hard Realism: Partisan Song, Parody, and Intertextual Listening in Yugoslav Black Wave Film (1968–1972).” Special Issue “Music and Socialism,” edited by Danijela Š. Beard and Elaine Kelly. Twentieth-Century Music 16 (1): 95−121. Billing, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Calic, Marie-Janine. 2011. “The Beginning of the End – The 1970s as a Historical Turning Point in Yugoslavia.” In The Crisis of Socialist Modernity: The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s, edited by Calic, Neutatz and Obertreis, 65−86. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Calic, Marie-Janine, Dietmar Neutatz, and Julia Obertreis, eds. 2011. The Crisis of Socialist Modernity: The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Drott, Eric. 2011. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968−1981. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Drott, Eric. 2013. “Music, the Fête de l’Humanité, and Demographic Change in Post-War France.” In Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc, edited by Robert Adlington, 229−42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duda, Igor. 2014. Pronađeno blagostanje: Svakodnevni život i potrošačka kultura u Hrvatskoj 1970-tih i 1980-ih. Zagreb: Srednja Europa. Dugandžić, Andreja, and Tijana Okić, eds. 2016. Izgubljena revolucija: AFŽ između mita i zaborava. Sarajevo: Udruženje za kulturu i umjetnost and Crvena. Frith, Simon. 1998. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Goulding, Daniel J. 2002. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hofman, Ana. 2013. “Ko se boji šunda još? Muzička cenzura u Jugoslaviji.” In Socijalizam na klupi: Jugoslavensko društvo očima nove postjugoslavenske humanistike, edited by Lada Duraković and Andrea Matošević, 279−316. Pula and Zagreb: Srednja Europa, Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile and Sa(n)jam knjige u Istri. Hofman, Ana. 2016. Novi život partizanskih pesama. Belgrade: XX vek. Hofman, Ana, and Martin Pogačar. 2017. “Partisan Resistance Today? The Music of the National Liberation Struggle and Social Engagement.” In Sounds of Attraction: Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Popular Music, edited by Miha Kozorog and Rajko Muršić, 21−39. Ljubljana: Ljubljana University Press. Jakiša, Miranda, and Nikica Gilić, eds. 2015. Partisans in Yugoslavia: Literature, Film and Visual Culture. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Klasić, Hrvoje. 2012. Jugoslavija i svijet 1968. Zagreb: Naklada LJEVAK d.o.o. Kutschke, Beate, and Barley Norton, eds. 2013. Music and Protest in 1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukić Krstanović, Miroslava. 2010. Spektakli XX veka: Muzika i moć. Belgrade: Etnografski institut SANU. Luković, Petar. 1989. Bolja prošlost: Prizori iz muzičkog života Jugoslavije 1940−1989. Belgrade: Niro “Mladost.” Lydall, Harold. 1984. Yugoslav Socialism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. M.M. 1982. “Pesma za zakletvu.” Nada, July. Mišina, Dalibor. 2013. Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the Poetics of Social Critique. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London and New York: Routledge. Patterson, Patrick Hyder. 2011. Bought and Sold: Living & Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Petrović, Tanja. 2012. “Nostalgia for the JNA? Remembering the Army in the Former Yugoslavia.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 61–81. Oxford: Berghahn. Ponoš, Tihomir. 2007. Na rubu revolucije: Studenti ’71. Zagreb: Profil. Popović, Petar. 1979. “Ni crno, ni belo.” Zdravo 84, July 24. Ramet, Sabrina, ed. 1994. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 2002. Newly-Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. London and New York: Routledge. Risch, William J., ed. 2015. Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe. London: Lexington Books. Rusinow, Dennison. 1978. The Yugoslav Experiment 1948−1974. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Savković, Nada. 1987. “Đorđe Balašević, 10 godina na sceni: Zašto je bila nesrećna jedna, jadna i bedna – osamdeset sedma.” Intervju, n.d., December. Accessed November  2, 2016. www.yugopapir.com/2016/06/ore-balasevic-10godina-na-sceni-zasto.html Sher, Gerson S. 1977. Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Spasovska, Ljubica. 2017. The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stanić, Rade. 2002. “Balašević: Umalo da postanem muška Brena.” Blic News, November 20. Accessed June 20, 2017. www. oaza.rs/muzika/djole/tekstovi/intervjui/blicnews2.htm Tanner, Marcus. 2001. Croatia: A Nation Forged in War. New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene and Yale University Press.

“Rocking the Party Line”  •  193 Tomc, Gregor. 2010. “A Tale of Two Subcultures: A Comparative Analysis of Hippie and Punk Subcultures in Slovenia.” In Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, edited by Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. Vasiljević, Maja. 2016. Filmska muzika u SFRJ: Između politike i poetike. Belgrade: HERAedu. Vučetić, Radina. 2012. Koka-kola socijalizam. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Vuletic, Dean. 2008. “Generation Number One: Politics and Popular Music in Yugoslavia in the 1950s.” Nationalities Papers 36 (5): 861−79. Vuletic, Dean. 2011. “The Making of a Yugoslav Popular Music Industry.” Popular Music History 6 (3): 269−85. Vuletic, Dean. 2012. “Sounds Like America: Yugoslavia’s Soft Power in Eastern Europe.” In Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, edited by Peter Romijn, Giles Schott-Smith, and Joes Segal, 116−31. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vuletic, Dean. 2015. “Swinging Between East and West: Yugoslav Communism and the Dilemmas of Popular Music.” In Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc, edited by William Jay Risch, 25−41. Lanham: Lexington Books. Yurchak, Alexei. 2005. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Žikić, Aleksandar. 1999. Fatalni ringišpil: Hronika beogradskog rokenrola 1959−1979. Belgrade: Geopoetika. Zubak, Marko. 2012. “Pop-Express (1969.−1970): Rock-kultura u političkom omladinskom tisku.” Časopis za suvremenu povi­ jest 44 (1): 23−35. Zubak, Marko. 2018. The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968−1980): Student Movements, Youth Subcultures and Alternative Communist Media. Zagreb: Srednja Europa and Hrvatski institut za povijest.

Discography Asanović, Tihomir Pop. Majko zemljo. Jugoton LSY 63003, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Čolić, Zdravko. “Druže Tito mi ti se kunemo”/ “Titovim putem.” Jugoton SY 29164, 1980, 45rpm. Džez orkestar RTB/ Revijski orkestar RTB. Po šumama i gorama. PGP RTB 2120224, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Korni Grupa. “Ivo Lola”/ “Znam za kime zvono zvoni.” PGP RTB SF 52547, 1973, 45rpm. Korni Grupa with Josipa Lisac. 1941. PGP RTB 5374, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Originally recorded in 1971. Rani Mraz. “Računajte na nas”/ “Strašan žulj.” PGP RTB, S 51820, 1978, 45rpm. September. Domovina moja. RTV Ljubljana LD 0465, 1979, 33⅓ rpm. Umetnički ansambl JNA. Rodoljubive i revolucionarne pesme naroda Jugoslavije. Diskos LDP 951, 1973, 33⅓ rpm. 8xLP compilation. Various, with Studijski ansambl Kornelija Kovača. Pesme Titu. PGP RTB 5315, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Various. 26. Festival Zagreb, Večer revolucionarne i rodoljubne glazbe. Jugoton LSY 61545, 1980, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Hej, haj brigade. Jugoton LSY 63007, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Jugoslavenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme. Jugoton LSY 61238, 1975, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Jugoslavenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme. Jugoton LSY 61316, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Jugoslavenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme. Jugoton LSY 61360, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Jugoslavenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme. Jugoton LSY 61419, 1978, 33⅓ rpm.

Filmography Korni Grupa. 1972. Recording of the TV broadcast of “Put za istok.” Accessed August  12, 2017. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mBkBXc2hWg0&list=RDmBkBXc2hWg0&t=1 Korni Grupa and Josipa Lisac. 1971. Recording of the TV Broadcast of Poema 1941, with commentary by Bratislav Grbić. Accessed August 12, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=75HkX_33L7U

16

“Comrades, We Don’t Believe You!” Or, Do We Just Want to Dance With You? The Slovenian Punk Subculture in Socialist Yugoslavia Gregor Tomc

The late 1970s and early 1980s was a time of profound changes in socialist Yugoslavia. The economic crisis and a large foreign debt made economic reform imperative, but after the death of the charismatic leader Tito in 1980, a paralysis of the formal political system made reform unlikely if not impossible. Slowly but inevitably, the country was disintegrating. An ideal breeding ground for youth discontent, the acute crisis inspired a creative boom, galvanized by American and British punk bands of the mid-1970s (namely the Ramones and the Sex Pistols) and subsequent new wave developments in the 1980s. The result was a peak of Yugoslav popular music, with one of the more interesting musical scenes in 1980s Europe. Since Yugoslavia was an aggregate of national cultures, specific local alternative rock scenes emerged, notably in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo, generating unique forms of resistance through rituals of corresponding youth subcultures: punks, new wavers, Belgrade alternatives, and New Primitives. In Slovenia, a distinctive punk subculture emerged in the late 1970s, with bands such as Pan­ krti, Lublanski psi, and Kuzle, and alongside it, a smaller scene in neighboring Croatian Istria, which included bands Paraf, Termiti, and Problemi. These first-generation punk bands sought to capture the rebellious social spirit of the Sex Pistols, often translated in the Yugoslav context into a direct attack on the ruling communist regime. This is exemplified by one of Pankrti’s earliest songs “Tovar’ši, jest vam ne verjamem” (Comrades, I Don’t Believe You, 1981), whose message was: “Gentlemen Comrades I don’t believe you/ I don’t believe the state that delivered you” (Tovariši gospodje jest vam ne verjamem/ ne verjamem državi, ki vas je rodila). By contrast, punk and new wave were combined within the three major musical scenes that developed in the capitals of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1980s: novi val or novi talas (new wave) in Zagreb, with bands such as Prljavo kazalište, Film, and Haustor; the so-called Belgrade Alternative Scene (BAS), with bands like Šarlo akrobata, Idoli, and Električni orgazam; and Novi primitivci (the New Primitives) in Sarajevo, with bands such as Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors, Zabranjeno pušenje, and Plavi orkestar (see Chapters 3, 5, 6 and 8). According to Serbian rock critic and writer, David Albahari, the 1981 song “Zamisli” (Imagine), 194

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by the band Film, became an anthem for Yugoslavia’s new wave followers (cited in Brlek 2015, 271). Its escapism, however, was more in tune with Duran Duran than the Sex Pistols: “Imagine a life in the rhythm of dance music/ imagine a life different from this one/ and dance, dance, dance” (Zamisli život u ritmu muzike za ples/ zamisli život drugačiji od ovog/ i igraj, igraj, igraj). But as I argue in my analysis and recollections of the times, this song was not an anthem for Slovenian punks. The song’s author and singer Jura Stublić apparently did not mind the “comrades” as long as they danced with him, or he was perhaps content with the new wave prospect of light rebellion, and the implication of potential change one could imagine. But what caused such a difference between the attitudes of the original punk subculture and those of the new wave responses in the rest of Yugoslavia? To answer this question, I will first consider three factors that shaped the nature of those developments: the size of the linguistic communities, the setup of the media and music industry, and the style of political rule in Yugoslavia. Size Matters As with other multinational states, Yugoslavia comprised different cultural and linguistic communities. Not unlike other European nations, nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism led Serbian and Croatian intellectuals to forge a pan-Yugoslav ideology based on a shared linguistic and cultural heritage. These early attempts at synthesizing Serbian and Croatian provided the foundations for the Serbo-Croatian language that was later standardized as the official language of Yugoslavia. In 1981, the start of the decade that interests us, Yugoslavia had approximately 22.4 million inhabitants, the majority of whom spoke Serbo-Croatian (Feldbauer 1988, 124). Four national categories (Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Herzegovinians, and Montenegrins) belonged to the SerboCroatian linguistic community, making up over 15 million inhabitants, or approximately 68% of the country’s entire population. The statistical category of citizens who declared themselves as “Yugoslavs” comprised mostly Serbo-Croatian speakers. Roughly one-third of the populations of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina identified as Yugoslav, whereas in the other republics, where different languages were spoken, the figures were considerably lower (Isailović 2011).1 In short, despite their religious and cultural differences, citizens in SerboCroatian speaking republics still shared a greater cultural affinity than did other nationalities whose first language was not Serbo-Croatian (the majority of Slovenians, Macedonians, and Albanians). Even though Serbo-Croatian was compulsory in the public school system, in terms of culture, it was articulated, in Gramscian terms, as a consensual rather than coercive hegemony (During 1994, 5). Because the Serbo-Croatian media were integrated within the Yugoslav Radio and Television network (JRT), all Yugoslav citizens were familiar with its popular culture, mediated through television, movies, and music. Very few non-Slovenians, however, knew the Slovenian language or were familiar with its popular culture. This sentiment was illustrated by Serbian rock critic Momčilo Rajin, in his review of Pankrti’s debut album Dolgcajt (Boredom 1980). Along with the editorial staff of Džuboks, Rajin admitted that he did not know Slovenian well enough to understand Pankrti’s lyrics, noting that “We [Serbo-Croatian speaking Yugoslavs] are in a bit of a paradoxical situation – often we understand Anglo-American bands better than our own” (in Mišina 2013, 109). The Yugoslav Communist party advocated patriotism based on a shared cultural identity, founded on the principle of “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo) of all Yugoslav peoples and nationalities. While most Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians took this ideology for granted, its appeal among citizens of other nationalities was probably limited. Due to the syncretic nature of

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pan-Yugoslav identity, along with the fact that Serbia and Croatia carried more political weight than all other republics combined, there existed a common perception that Yugoslavism was, essentially, a façade for greater Serbianism and Croatianism. The workings of cultural hegemony pursued through language is markedly illustrated by the remark made by Nele Karajlić (the frontman of the band Zabranjeno pušenje) that “there is no one among us who does not consider Krleža and Andrić his writers” (cited in Mišina 2013, 188). Krleža was a Croat and Andrić a Bosnian Serb, and Karajlić had cited these two prominent literary figures as equally “his” writers, in order to demonstrate his pro-Yugoslav and anti-nationalist position. But like most commentators, Karajlić was less likely to refer to an Albanian, Slovenian, or ethnic Hungarian writer in order to prove his Yugoslavism. Another example is the leader of the most popular Yugoslav band Bijelo dugme, Goran Bregović, who since the mid-1970s has fused hard rock with elements of regional folk traditions to create a rock form appealing to urban and rural youths alike. Bregović was convinced that there was a real Yugoslav character to his music (Ramet 1994, 133). The success of Bijelo dugme, sometimes compared to the Beatles, transformed popular music in the Serbo-Croatian cultural space: after Bijelo dugme, rock could be played either as a local interpretation of a global form, or as a domestic variant – “shepherd rock” (pastirski rock). Yet for Slovenian rockers, who were at best suspect of folk-rock fusions, Bijelo dugme sounded very different from anything associated with rock music. Boris Bele, the guitarist from the progressive rock band Buldožer, questioned Bregović’s self-flattering claim about the Yugoslav character of Bijelo dugme's music. “I  was constantly repelled by their ‘shepherd rock.’ . . . For me personally, they played the music that could be called rock only conditionally” (cited in Tomc 2003, 453–54). Such opinions did not sway the overall popularity of Bijelo dugme, and by contrast, Slovenian punks who stuck to “their linguistic tradition” were perceived as “esoteric” (Mišina 2013, 108–09). In other words, the linguistic and market barriers, combined with the progressive orientation of Slovenian bands, shaped a perception of Slovenian popular culture as the “other” within. Music Media Throughout the 1980s, Yugoslavia had a mixed economy, combining elements of state planning (socialism) with a market economy (capitalism). All music media institutions were “social ­property” − a code word for Party-controlled state ownership. There were no commercial recording studios where one could simply walk into a studio and pay for a recording. Instead, artists had to sign contracts with a studio that was either owned by a state-owned record label (e.g., Jugoton), or a national radio and television station (e.g.,  PGP RTB). At that time, according to Sabrina Ramet, there were twelve record and cassette labels in Yugoslavia that marketed around a hundred rock artists per year, and all except one released at least some rock acts (Ramet 1994, 24). Jugoton in Zagreb was the largest label, which accounted for about 30% of all rock artists in the late 1980s, and 70%–80% of the total production of rock records. According to Siniša Škarica, the program director of Jugoton, in 1986 rock accounted for about a fifth of popular music production, approximately 1 to 1.5 million records and cassettes (cited in Ibid.). PGP RTB, based in Belgrade, was the second-largest record company in the country. Alongside these two major labels, there were also smaller labels: Suzy in Zagreb, Jugodisk in Belgrade, and Diskoton in Sarajevo. Slovenia had two record labels: ZKP RTV in Ljubljana and Helidon in Maribor. Rock music was popular across the urban centers of the country. A survey conducted in 1985– 86 by Zagreb’s Institute for Social Research (cited in Ramet 1994, 109) found that about half of

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Yugoslavia’s young people reported a high interest in rock music. Interest was highest in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia (68%) and lowest in Serbia’s province of Kosovo (28%). According to an estimate by Petar Popović, the international label manager for PGP RTB, in 1987 there were approximately forty professional rock bands in Yugoslavia, and some five thousand amateur groups, with around two hundred amateur rock bands in Belgrade alone (in Ramet 1994, 109). The biggest Serbo-Croatian rock bands, for example Riblja čorba (Belgrade) and Bijelo dugme (Sarajevo), would sell between 200,000 and 500,000 copies per album (Ibid., 124). For rock bands that did not rely on Serbo-Croatian audiences, such figures were unimaginable, and as a result, it was harder for them to perform on a professional basis. While Serbo-Croatian labels reached the country-wide rock audiences, Slovenian labels were largely limited to the smaller Slovenian market, whose position within the music-market economy remained subsidiary. The growing commercial appeal of rock music is illustrated by the earlier mentioned Croatian band Film. The band recorded its debut album Novo! Još jučer samo na filmu a sada i u vašoj glavi (New! Until Yesterday Only in a Movie, and Now Also in Your Head, 1981) with the smaller Slovenian label Helidon. The album was produced by Buldožer’s Boris Bele, featuring music influenced by the ska revival of bands like Madness. All this reinforced Film’s alternative new wave commitment as they entered the Yugoslav music scene. As Bele recalls, the group signed for Helidon because at the time they were still relatively unknown and no other label had shown any interest in them. But after the success of the first album, it was only natural for them to sign with a bigger, more prestigious label, Jugoton, for their second album Zona sumraka (The Twilight Zone, 1982). This system, however, did not function both ways, where a Slovenian band could easily sign with a Serbo-Croatian label, even if they chose to write songs in Serbo-Croatian rather than in Slovenian. For example, Buldožer sought to reach a wider audience by signing a record deal with PGP RTB and writing songs in Serbo-Croatian. But their music turned out to be too provocative for the mainstream Belgrade label, and even after their first record sold 13,000 in a single month, PGP RTB refused to reprint it. It is hard to say whether this was due to outside political pressure, or the label was engaging in some kind of preemptive self-censorship, but either way, PGP RTB refused to release their second album. As Bele recalls, lyrics were the main problem. According to the executives at PGP RTB, some texts supposedly alluded to drugs, for example, in the song “Ne brini mama” (Don’t Worry Mother): “Don’t worry mother/ everything is going according to plan/ In a day or two/ I’m off to nirvana” (Ne brini mama/ sve je po planu/ za dan ili dva/ odoh ja u nirvanu); others were supposedly pornographic, for example “Jeste li vidjeli djevojčice” (Did You See the Girls): “Did you see the girls?/ They licked ice cream/ and chewed gum” (Jeste li vidjeli djevojčice?/ Lizale su sladoled/ i žvakale gumu) (Tomc 2003, 451). From then on, Buldožer issued all their albums with the Slovenian label Helidon. The Style of Political Rule Given the persistent struggle between Serbs and Croats for dominance in the Yugoslav Federation, there was an ongoing danger of nationalist conflict erupting. Official communist ideology maintained that class solidarity would eventually prevail over selfish nationalist interests, but pro-Yugoslav ideologues underestimated the significance of separate national identities. As a result, keeping the lid on tensions was a permanent concern of Croatian and Serbian politicians. For this reason, a more authoritarian form of political rule characterized Serbia, Croatia, and especially the multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina. In popular music, such politics were reflected

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through a mutual fascination between Serbs and Croats – a love-hate relationship that swayed, depending on the given moment, between cultural closeness and political rivalry. Since Slovenians did not compete as vigorously with Serbs and Croats for domination in the Federation, Slovenian nationalism took less hostile forms. Also, given that Slovenia was ethnically the most homogenous republic, with no significant minorities, it did not face the challenges of multiethnic republics and could enjoy a more liberal style of political rule. In the late 1960s, under the Slovenian branch of the Communist Party led by Stane Kavčič, two independent institutions were founded which provided significant support for alternative rock scenes. Radio Študent (Radio Student) and Študentski kulturni center or ŠKUC (The Student Cultural Center), which offered recording and publishing opportunities, and broadcasts well beyond the Ljubljana district. This is especially important, because at the time, the rest of the country experienced a return to authoritarian governance, brought about by the crackdown on the Croatian nationalist movement, Maspok (the Croatian Spring). Kavčič became a collateral victim of Maspok in the early 1970s (compare Chapter 15) and was replaced by the hardliner France Popit, but even under Popit’s leadership, the alternative rock scene did not lose its independent institutions in Slovenia. Similarly, the replacement of the autonomous student movement of the late 1960s reached its peak with the occupation of the Faculty of Philosophy in 1971 by the Communist Party-controlled Zveza socialistične mladine Slovenije (ZSMS, the Alliance of the Socialist Youth of Slovenia) (Baškovič 1982, 152). This was a major setback for student political activism, but not for youth subcultures. The local Party elite no longer perceived the official youth organization as crucial for recruiting the future Party cadre. Formally, the organization would remain a part of the political structure until the fall of the communist regime, but in reality it was steadily losing political weight. From 1983 onwards the organization gradually drifted away from Party control and tried to politically reinvent itself by addressing real youth problems, and not only those that kept with the official Party line, as will be shown later (Tomc 2010, 191–92). Punk Under the Slovenians: Personal Recollections The late 1970s and early 1980s were a very creative period for music in Slovenia. It all started with Pankrti and punk bands inspired by them (Lublanski psi, Kuzle, Otroci socializma, and Niet were the most notable). By today’s standards, they were hard rock bands with a critical attitude, playing short, loud, and energetic songs. In the early 1980s, two new musical trends emerged: hard core and electronic music. The hard core scene was active in Ljubljana from 1983 to 1986 and included UBR, Stres DA, and Tožibabe. After a period of angry songs with catchy tunes that became hits on the radio, bands countered commercialism with even faster, louder and simpler songs. Meanwhile, an electronic music scene developed with bands, widely popular in Yugoslavia: electropop Videosex, alternative electronic Borghesia (also known in Western Europe), and Laibach (which started as an industrial band but gradually moved into more experimental electronic music). In 1977 Peter Lovšin and I were students at the Faculty of Sociology, Political Science and Journalism in Ljubljana, and decided to challenge both the “still life” under socialism and mainstream rock from the capitalist West. Inspired by a disparaging article on punk music in a major US magazine (either Time or Newsweek), which branded punk as primitive, aggressive, loud, and provocative, we recognized that this was our kind of music. During our summer vacations, one of us went to London to hear what punk really sounded like and gathered a group of musicians back home. By the autumn we formed the band Pankrti (Bastards), with a repertoire including

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songs by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, and the Dead Boys, as well as our own songs. In 1977 we organized our first concert in a local high school gym, approved by a friendly ZSMS official. We made our own posters, with the announcement: “The first punk concert behind the Iron Curtain.” To our surprise, some three hundred people showed up, and the gig was favorably reviewed by the local press. The day after the concert, Radio Študent organized an open air concert for Pankrti on the grounds of the student dormitories of Ljubljana University. Soon after, ŠKUC issued our single “Lepi in prazni”/ “Lublana je bulana” (Pretty and Vacant/ Ljubljana is Sick), which we recorded in Italy in 1978 (to record in a Yugoslav studio it was necessary to have a contract with a label or media production house, which we did not have at the time). ŠKUC also mediated a recording deal between us and Ljubljana’s ZKP label for our first album, resulting in a successful partnership and the recording of six albums between 1980 and 1987 (Tomc 2010, 24). It was after the encounter with Pankrti that Radio Študent began to promote punk more openly (Bašin 2006, 19), recording numerous punk bands in its studio and co-organizing the Novi rock music festival with Radio Ljubljana in 1981 (Ibid., 20, 27, 31). Most of the significant punk bands at the time had their recordings released by either ŠKUC or on ZKP compilations (Ibid., 32). The music journalist and producer Igor Vidmar was a key figure in promoting the punk scene. Like most people who worked on Radio Študent, he favored improvisational jazz of the likes of Keith Jarrett, but after an encounter with Pankrti his taste changed. Over the years, he essentially transformed Radio Študent into a fortress of punk orthodoxy by recording, promoting and institutionalizing punk. Well-versed in Marxist ideology (he was a member of the Communist Party for a period of time), he was also instrumental in changing the ZSMS attitudes toward punk, especially after the so-called Nazi Punk Affair (discussed below). Before 1981, the Slovenian Communist Party expressed no official position on punk. On the whole, punk grew more or less undisturbed in Slovenia. The situation abruptly changed when the Slovenian Communist Party chief France Popit, otherwise a fan of traditional Slovenian folk music, translated his personal dislike of punk into a public policy. The Slovenian Conference of Municipal Party Functionaries met every four years to devise programs for ideological-political action, and at the 1981 meeting, Popit made the case that punks take drugs, publicly “throw up,” and generally behave in a “tasteless” manner: “What kind of protest is this? It has become the domain of all those who are lazy – not only in physical but also in mental work. If someone does not feel like studying or working, he can at once transform himself into a supporter of a freedom fighter and join a punk band” (Žerdin 2002, 33). Franc Šali, in charge of the Party’s cultural affairs, retorted that this was not the Party’s official position, and Popit eventually conceded that he had only expressed his personal view. But as the local functionaries returned to their districts and learned what punk was all about, the repression against punks began (Tomc 1994, 120). There were raids on punks’ meeting places, and pubs and musical venues were closed down. Youths were interrogated by the police, taken in from school classes and sometimes jailed overnight. Graffiti artists were persecuted, especially for spraying swastikas on residential houses. Punks appropriated the swastika as a symbol for Party repression, but for the majority of citizens it was an offensive reminder of the Nazi atrocities of WWII. Tensions culminated with the infamous Nazi Punk Affair in 1981, when police arrested three punks on fabricated charges that they had organized a national socialist party of Slovenia. The incident generated moral panic, with journalists from all over Yugoslavia reporting on the hidden threat of Nazi punks in Slovenia (see Malečkar and Mastnak 1985, 222–349). About two months after the detention of three alleged Nazi punks, an article titled “Who draws swastikas?”

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(Kdo riše kljukaste križe?) appeared in the popular weekly newspaper Nedeljski dnevnik. For the journalist, Zlatko Šetinc, the question whether punks corrupted Slovenian youths was only rhetorical. Who corrupted the boys and girls who have lived among us for fifteen, sixteen, eighteen years, to whom we have given everything they need (and more) and who got education in our schools? In a homeland in which, as schoolchildren sing, it is good to be young. (Žerdin 2002, 39) The judge eventually dropped all the charges in the case, and in the public debate that ensued, punks and critical intellectuals shifted the focus, arguing that the authorities were the real culprit: it was not punks who were Nazis but politicians who were authoritarian. This was also a turning point for the ZSMS. In the aftermath of the affair, president Darja Colarič stated that the organization rebuffed any confrontation with the thousands of young people who identified with punk, concluding that the affair questioned the legitimacy and the legality of the authorities (Tomc 1994, 125–26). After the ZSMS was criticized by punks and intellectuals for not having done enough to prevent police repression, its officials tried to compensate, subsidizing concerts and punk events like the Novi rock festival (Ibid., 38). Punks were therefore instrumental, albeit unintentionally, in the ZSMS’s siding with the citizens rather than the Party, despite being an official subsidiary political organization. Prominent Slovenian dissident Tine Hribar later asserted that Pankrti and the counterculture they generated – the teenage punk bands, the punk music venues and pubs, the images, fashion and fanzines – played a critical role in subsequent political movements against Communist Party rule (Hribar 2002, 5–7). Slovenes were more fortunate than other citizens in the Federation. They had the support of the alternative institutions, and the relative cultural autonomy enabled them to express artistic visions outside the political, cultural, economic, and commercial mainstreams. Of course, the alternative institutions were never completely free of conformist influences. Pankrti’s commercial success had put them in the rare position of controlling their own creative decisions, yet Panktri too experienced a fall from grace with the music establishment of Radio Študent around their second album, Državni ljubimci (State Lovers 1982), as they were no longer in line with “the original punk orthodoxy.” On the other hand, for the hard core collective, Panktri were too soft and melodic; about as relevant for the 1980s as the Beatles. Pankrti found themselves between Scylla (the New Left orthodoxy of Radio Student journalists) and Charybdis (grassroots hard core fans). But by that time, they were a commercially viable band and had transcended the local scene which they helped to create. Other punk bands who wanted to perform at Novi rock, record at Radio Študent or release their music at ŠKUC were completely dependent on alternative institutions and many of them had to conform to the creative politics of those institutions. An endorsement from Radio Študent music critics was essential for any new punk band (Tomc 2010, 192). But in the absence of a functioning musical market, representatives of alternative institutions became elitist, snobbish, self-sufficient, and complacent. Their position on music combined Adorno’s contempt for popular music with the elitism of the 1970s jazz fans and NME and Melody Maker rock journalism. One could argue that they ignored anything that did not accord with current Radio Študent taste; for the most part, the bands that did not fit their standard simply remained anonymous (Bašin 2006, 34, 56). Slovenian punk bands, with the exception of Pankrti, were overlooked by the Serbo-

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Croatian rock music critics for two reasons. Critics did not understand the logic of a small and underdeveloped market, where even good bands are easily overlooked. (In the mid-1980s, Niet played melodic punk with commercial potential, but were unnoticed by producers, and only after independence did they become popular in Slovenia.) And Slovenian punk bands were more provocative than their new wave, art rock and New Primitives counterparts, and as such, were unacceptable for labels outside Slovenia. On the whole, the Slovene alternative institutions created a counterculture market and an industry run by students of new left persuasions who had no interest in joining the commercially successful music business. They perceived the growth of a punk subculture in Slovenia as a potential catalyst for radical political change, even though they never precisely specified the nature of that change. They were gatekeepers who ensured that Slovenian punk would not stray into the more acceptable new wave music. And while it is true that punks played a significant role in the process of democratization, it is also true that there would be no punk without the three alternative institutions that gave the movement its platform in Slovenia, and more broadly in Yugoslavia. The Alternative to the Mainstream In her Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, Sarah Thornton argues that the relationship between mainstream culture and alternative youth movements is not one of exclusion but interdependence (Thornton 1996, 117). But is this true for Yugoslavia? And if so, what was the nature of interdependence between hegemonic Serbo-Croatian rock and the alternative punk scene in Slovenia? While developments of comparable punk subcultures were suppressed within Serbo-Croatian cultural spaces, the import of Slovenian punk to those regions was allowed. This is best illustrated by the infamous Slovenian post-punk band Laibach. Following his 1983 interview on Slovenian national television with band members, journalist Jure Pengov claimed that Laibach promoted pro-Nazi ideas. Soon after that event, their concert in Zagreb was stopped by the police, and the authorities in Slovenia followed suit by banning the band from performing in Ljubljana (Bašin 2006, 40). The authorities were especially sensitive to the band’s name Laibach – the German name for Ljubljana used by the Nazi occupying forces during WWII. Despite the ban, Laibach was still able to tour in the rest of the country, and it remains widely recognized as the most iconoclastic Yugoslav band. To paraphrase an old saying: no band achieves stardom in its own land. In a somewhat similar fashion, in 1979 Pankrti were nominated for the Zlata ptica (Golden Bird), the ZSMS award for artistic achievement, but the proposal was denied by that organization’s leadership (Tomc 1989, 189). A year later, they received a similar award from the Croatian youth organization, Sedam sekretara SKOJ-a (Seven Secretaries of SKOJ). I would argue that the Slovenian bands Buldožer, Pankrti, and Laibach functioned as models for Yugoslav alternative rock musicians, especially for local new wave acts of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The response in Croatia and Serbia to English and Slovenian punk was not wholesale import but to create new, local reinterpretations. In Zagreb, Film combined a guitar-heavy mainstream rock with a new wave sound of bands like Joy Division; Prljavo kazalište emulated the 2-Tone Ska revival of bands such as the Specials and Madness (although their 2-Tone aesthetic gained a specific political dimension in the 1980s); Haustor broadened the existing mainstream rock and new wave by incorporating elements of reggae and funk. In contrast, the Belgrade Alternative Scene explored art rock with bands such as Šarlo akrobata, Električni orgazam, and Idoli. Rock critic Zoran Jakšić compared the Belgrade

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Figure 16.1  Record sleeve of Pankrti’s Državni ljubimci (1982)

new wave to “a big tree whose roots are somewhere in punk, with each of its branches figuring out a unique way of understanding new wave” (Ibid., 139). New wave in Sarajevo was interpreted as a dual parody of Bosnian traditionalism and new wave modernism, generating the distinctly urban Sarajevo-centric aesthetics of the New Primitives. Elvis J. Kurtović, for example, drew on an eclectic pop-rock vocabulary for local consumption, while Zabranjeno pušenje garnered national recognition for their plain rock sound and penchant for satire and provocation. To use Jakšić’s metaphor, the three Serbo-Croatian rock scenes had one thing in common: they were branches with roots that grew in an imaginary punk humus (Ibid.). As we have seen, Yugoslavia had a respectable market for rock music, and this market drive was a constant temptation for commercialization. In the 1980s, however, commercialization was criticized by cultural commentators and authorities as voracious show business (estrada) that debased normative (read socialist and artistic) cultural values. The same discourse

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sometimes developed around rock music as well. Dragan Kremer, a prominent rock critic of the time, described estrada as catering to mass audiences and media by simultaneously polishing the form and emptying the content (Ibid., 65). Regardless of how one interprets the phenomenon, a prospective market of sixteen million people drove many rock musicians to the mainstream, notably, the Croatian band Azra, one of the most critically acclaimed and popular rock bands in Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s. Azra’s frontman Branimir Štulić Johnny initially played in bands that fused sevdalinka (the Ottoman-derived urban folk song), with the Beatles and his own songs. With the emergence of punk, however, Štulić formed Azra and became not only an “urban messiah” for many of his fans but also a very rich man. As Goran Bregović of Bijelo dugme put it (Ibid., 197), “Rock ‘n’ roll is a medium that won freedom within the media system because it brings in a lot of money. . . . that is no small thing.” Conclusion Serbo-Croatian rock bands experienced two kinds of pressure that shaped their music and career choices: political and commercial. By contrast, the temptation of showbiz (estrada) commercialism had little relevance in Slovenia, where even in the case of commercially successful Pankrti, band members did not make a living exclusively from music. Yugoslavia was a multinational state in which Serbs and Croats held the monopoly. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the competition for political dominance was to a large extent subdued, which spurred a period of increased interaction between the pop and rock scenes (the Paket aranžman project is a good example; see Chapters  5 and 6). The communication between Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo rock musicians was also open to exchanges, and even when hostilities broke out in the early 1990s and public interaction was no longer desirable or possible, the shared cultural affinities remained. This is drastically exemplified by the rise of so-called turbo-folk (Darko Hudelist cited in Kostelnik 2003, 32), whereby rock scenes in other republics within the Federation remained comparatively marginal. As I have argued, the interaction between Slovenian punk and Yugoslav new wave was not a mutual exchange. Was Slovenian punk counterhegemonic? Did it question the Serbo-Croatian cultural hegemony? Not really. All Yugoslav rockers relied on one of the few things that still functioned at the national level – its shared culture industry. In Ljubljana, young people were familiar with the same movies, football teams, and television shows as their counterparts in Zagreb, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Sarajevo, Skopje, Priština, or Titograd. They enjoyed the same rock bands and concerts. For the most part, Slovenes seemed oblivious to the asymmetrical design of Slovenian and SerboCroatian production and consumption of culture. Most Slovenian musicians felt comradeship with their new wave counterparts elsewhere in the country, and despite their political activism at the local level, no Slovenian punk band ever addressed the question of cultural hegemony. When the Slovenian dissident magazine Nova revija dedicated its fifty-seventh issue to the Slovenian national question in 1987, I was invited to write a contribution. I expressed the opinion I felt was prevalent among the Slovenian subcultural youth, one which annoyed the dissident elitists (1986, 144): “I think that my fate, the fate of the people I know, and the biggest problems we face are not determined above all by the fact that we are Slovenians, but by the fact that we live under [state] socialism.” For us, the problem of socialist Yugoslavia was not that it was a multinational state, but that it was not democratic. In Slovenia, the question of Serbo-Croatian hegemony was first raised by the cultural elites (artists, humanist intellectuals, and social scientists) who had vested interests in maintaining a

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particular nationalist agenda. Their work was subsidized by the government, securing their privileged intelligentsia status. The same was true of cultural elites in all other republics. It is thus not surprising that separatist aspirations were first articulated by these elites. All others who despised “highbrow” art, who would not be caught dead in a theater, a gallery, a symphony hall, or an opera house, lived by and large in a parallel cultural world, constructed by the mass media: young people were in a similar position to the Croatian soldiers in the last Balkan war (1990s) who fought Serbs yet enjoyed listening to their turbo-folk songs (Hudelist cited in Kostelnik 2003, 32); a youth from Ljubljana would similarly listen to Serbian Partibrejkers despite the fact that the Serbian army was waging a war against them. The soldiers, like the youth, were Yugoslavs, united by the common thread of diverse culture, which, even though it was not always close, was somehow “ours.” The Balkan scene in Slovenia from 1990 to the mid-1990s illustrates this attitude. A group of alternative rockers, mostly punks and hard core fans, decided to organize the “Balkan žur” (“Balkan” is synonymous with Yugoslavia in Slovene everyday parlance, and žur is Serbo-Croatian for party). They called themselves VIZUME VSEM (Visas to all), referring to the difficulties people from other republics faced while trying to enter Slovenia in the 1990s. They organized their first Balkan žur in the disco-club Bunker in Ljubljana on November 29 1990, coinciding with Yugoslavia’s state holiday, the Day of the Republic. With an entrance ticket, one would also get a glass of šljivovica brandy and salty cream cheese (kajmak), both associated with traditional Yugoslav cuisine. The most infamous Balkan žur was organized on June 25 in 1991, a day before Slovenia’s declaration of independence and two days before the start of the Ten Day War for independence against the Serbian-led Yugoslav army. Eventually, Balkan žurs spread to other towns throughout Slovenia. The music played by DJs was very diverse, including not only Yugoslav alternative rock (Azra, Idoli, Partibrejkers), but also mainstream rock (Bijelo dugme, Parni valjak, Riblja čorba), pop (Zdravko Čolić, Denis & Denis, Xenia), as well as ethno-music (Ferus Mustafov, Fejat Sejdić, Šaban Šaulić) (Ceglar 1999, 75–78). This Balkan scene must undoubtedly be understood as a provocation of both parent subculture and dominant culture, which were at the time both promoting a Central European identity for Slovenia and ignoring its “Balkan” past. But I believe that there was much more to it than a mere provocation. It was also an admission of a spiritual home by the last generation of young people who were still brought up in Yugoslavia. And home is where the heart is, even when parents get divorced. Note 1. Serbia had 35.4% self-declared Yugoslavs, followed by Croatia with 31.4%, and Bosnia and Herzegovina with 26.9%. The share of Yugoslavs in non-Serbo-Croatian regions was smaller. In Slovenia there were 2.6% of all Yugoslavs, in Macedonia 1.2%, and in Kosovo 0.2%.

Bibliography Bašin, Igor. 2006. Novi rock: Rockovski festival v Križankah 1981–2000. Maribor: Subkulturni azil. Baškovič, Ciril et al. 1982. Študentsko gibanje 1968−’72. Ljubljana: KRT. Brlek, Tomislav. 2015. “Sječanje na budučnost (197?−19841–99?).” In Osamdesete! Slatka dekadencija postmoderne, edited by Branko Kostelnik and Feđa Vukić, 257–89. Zagreb: DIPK and HDLU. Ceglar, Miha. 1999. “Balkanska scena.” In Urbana plemena: Subkulture v Sloveniji v devetdesetih, edited by Peter Stankovič, Gregor Tomc, and Mitja Velikonja, 75–82. Ljubljana: ŠOU – Študentska založba. During, Simon, ed. 1994. The Cultural Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Feldbauer, Božidar, ed. 1988. Atlas svijeta. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža. Hribar, Tine. 2002. “Pankrti, tovariši in drugi.” In Punk je bil prej, edited by Peter Lovšin, Peter Mlakar, and Igor Vidmar, 5–7. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba and ROPOT.

“Comrades, We Don’t Believe You!”  •  205 Isailović, Neven. 2011. “Ko su (bili) Jugosloveni?” Accessed September  29, 2016. http://pescanik.net/2011/09/ko-subili-jugosloveni Kostelnik, Branko. 2003. “Androcentrizem Hrvaške pop rock scene v devetdesetih na primeru art rock skupine Roderic Novy.” MA diss., University of Ljubljana. Malečkar, Nela, and Tomaž Mastnak, ed. 1985. Punk pod Slovenci. Ljubljana: KRT. Mišina, Dalibor. 2013. Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the Poetics of Social Critique. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Ramet, Sabrina Petra. 1994. “Shake, Rattle, and Self-Management: Making the Scene in Yugoslavia.” In Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Sabrina Ramet, 103–39. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England and Wesleyan University Press. Tomc, Gregor. 1986. “Civilna družba pod slovenskim socializmom.” Nova revija 57: 144–49. Tomc, Gregor. 1989. “Zgodba, ki je ni.” In Kompendij za bivše in bodoče politike, edited by Bojana Leskovar, 177–96. Ljubljana: ZSMS. Tomc, Gregor. 1994. “The Politics of Punk.” In Independent Slovenia: Origins, Movements, Prospects, edited by Jill Benderly and Evan Kraft, 113–34. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Tomc, Gregor. 2003. “We Will Rock YU: Popular Music in the Second Yugoslavia.” In Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant- gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, edited by Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, 442–65. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Tomc, Gregor. 2010. “A Tale of Two Subcultures: A Comparative Analysis of Hippie and Punk Subcultures in Slovenia.” In Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, edited by Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik, 165–98. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. Žerdin, Ali H. 2002. “Kratki kurz zgodovine panka.” In Punk je bil prej, edited by Peter Lovšin, Peter Mlakar, and Igor Vidmar, 8–53. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba in ROPOT.

Discography Buldožer. Pljuni istini u oči. PGP RTB ATLP 109, 1975, 33⅓. Buldožer. Zabranjeno plakatirati. Helidon FLP 05013, 1977, 33⅓. Film. Novo! Još jučer samo na filmu a sada i u vašoj glavi. Helidon K 9605025, 1981, compact cassette. Film. Zona sumraka. Jugoton LSY 10012, 1982, 33⅓. Pankrti. Lepi in prazni. ŠKUC ŠZ GP2 (P), 1978, 45 rpm. Pankrti. Dolgcajt. ŠKUC ŠZ GP/4 LD 0581, 1980, 33⅓. Pankrti. Novi punk val. ZKP RTVL KD 0658, 1981, compact cassette. Pankrti. Državni ljubimci. ZKP RTVL LD 0748, 1982, 33⅓. Pankrti. Svoboda ’82. Helidon, FLP 05041, 1983, 33⅓. Pankrti. Rdeči album. ZKP RTVL LD 0934, 1984, 33⅓. Pankrti. Pesmi sprave. ZKP RTVL LD 1304, 1985, 33⅓. Pankrti. Sexpok. ZKP RTVL LD 1481, 1987, 33⅓.

17

Music Labor, Class, and Socialist Entrepreneurship

Yugoslav Self-Management Revisited Ana Hofman

Recent accounts of Yugoslav socialist self-management (samoupravljanje) engage predominantly with factory workers, largely overlooking marginalized groups of workers whose labor activities fall within legally undefined, precarious and even oppressive conditions of the so-called gray economy.1 One such group of samoupravljači (self-managed workers) are popular music professional musicians who fought for their legal and social labor rights through forms of (self-)organization and unionization. Since the mid-1960s, professional musicians’ associations sought to legally define the music profession and to establish social protection on a par with workers in other professions.2 These attempts affected the ways in which professional musicians in zabavna (light-­entertainment pop) and novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music, NCFM)3 negotiated their positions in relation to other social groups. Musicians struggled to achieve the status of regular employees which would guarantee them access to contracts, health services, social insurance, and pensions (see Hofman 2015). However, certain groups of musicians, particularly those active within the hospitality and entertainment sectors of the service industry (hotels, restaurants, and pubs/ taverns (kafanas))4 operated largely under unregulated labor conditions. While this enabled them to act as individual entrepreneurs (poduzetnici), their socioeconomic position was characterized by precariousness, vulnerability, and often exploitation. In fact, they were regarded among “the most sensitive segment[s] of the working class” (Petrović and Hofman 2017, 64), never fully integrated into the socialist social system. In this chapter, I take more nuanced perspectives on class relations, entrepreneurship, and socialist-capitalist linkages to demonstrate how the legally undefined status of musicians contributes to a rethinking of the dominant accounts of Yugoslav self-management.5

Popular Music as Service Industry Yugoslav socialism was intended as a system that emancipated workers as political subjects, and after the interwar capitalist economic exploitation, the post-1945 period brought sustained improvement in the working and living conditions of most people. Since the early 1950s onwards, a central goal of the Yugoslav Communist Party (the League of Yugoslav Communists, LYC from 1952) was not merely the abolition of private property, but the redefinition of state ownership through the introduction of the “social ownership” (društveno vlastništvo) policy. A  formal 206

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constitutional act to that effect was passed in 1953 (Ustavni zakon o osnovama društvenog i političkog uređenja FNRJ). For the leading ideologues of workers’ self-management (see Kardelj 1977; Šuvar 1980; Horvat 1983), it was meant to economically liberalize the socialist market and diminish the political monopoly and power of the state, and its bureaucracy (see Kirn 2014). The 1963 market reforms a decade later transformed Yugoslav economic politics through an interaction with world markets by “giving companies the freedom to enter independently into contract with each other and their foreign partners” (Musić 2011, 182). The Yugoslav state also significantly increased financial support to private owners (Hanson in Dimitrijević 2016, 32). Market reforms, however, underscored the contradictory mechanisms of social and independent capital in Yugoslavia, described by some analysts as the proto-capitalist tendency of Yugoslav socialism (see Kirn 2014). This created a peculiar, much discussed version of consumer socialism (Doder 1978, 131), or Yugoslav market socialism (see Unkovski-Korica 2015; Dimitrijević 2016). Particularly in the areas of record production and dissemination, the Yugoslav music industry was the earliest example of market socialism. The division of music markets along regional, linguistic, and cultural lines precluded a single system of distribution and advertising (Rasmussen 2002, 179), but all record production houses were completely dependent on the profit they generated (Janjetović 2011).6 The entertainment industry divergence from other industrial sectors resulted in a discrepancy between the explosive rise of entertainment production and Yugoslavia’s slow-­ growing economy (Čvoro 2014, 34–35). Zdravko Čolić, one of the best-known Yugoslav pop singers, identified the specific position of the entertainment industry in the 1980s when he remarked: Investments are a necessary part of show business, because it’s all linked to managers or enterprises that take care of the singers and bands . . . yet nobody wants to take any risk – they just look to gain profit as much as possible. And this is not a real show business. . . . there are various self-management agreements that prevent managers from investing more than is allowed by this or that Law Article. . . . but such agreements mustn’t be a part of this business: if more money is expected [to be generated], as is the case with my album where revenue is measured in the billions [of dinars], then there must be more investment. (Cited in Luković 1981) As Čolić suggested, self-management in reality was a system full of contradictions.7 These contradictions were particularly evident in the unregulated economic fields such as professional music-making. Because of the intangible nature of their product and the commercial underpinnings of their labor, popular musicians’ work was considered neither art nor proper work (Hofman 2015, 31). The undefined status of musicians as workers was reflected in the terms “music artists” and “music workers,” often used interchangeably when defining professional musicianship (also by the musicians’ professional association, see below). Musical work was a part of “unproductive labor” (Ibid.), in line with the dominant concept of self-managed culture (samoupravna kultura), itself founded on principles of non-commercial socialist culture. Yet musicians who performed the less-valued popular music genres of zabavna and NCFM (novokomponovana) were not recognized as “real” artists because their labor was seen as trade rather than aesthetic practice. Their work ranged from the hospitality/entertainment industry to communal celebrations such as village fairs (vašari), dance gatherings (sabori), and family celebrations (weddings, engagements, baptisms, and send-offs of young men undertaking military service). Thus despite the increased presence of popular musicians in media and public life, they remained in a legal limbo, with no defined formal status within the Yugoslav economy.

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Struggling for Workers’ Rights The aforementioned undefined status of professional music-making and the growth of the entertainment industry necessitated a formal organization of musicians into professional associations intended to represent their interests and improve their wages and working conditions. These associations included musicians regardless of their status as amateur or professional; many had other “regular jobs” and performed mainly in their leisure time, as was the case with my interlocutors, the popular folk singing duo Braća Bajić (The Bajić Brothers; Andrija Bajić, pers. comm., April 21, 2016). The first organization of this kind, the Association of Estrada Workers (Udruženje radnika estradne umetnosti, AEW hereafter), founded in 1962 in Belgrade.8 The intention of the AEW9 was to professionalize and institutionalize labor activities previously unrecognized by the official cultural policy. The Federation of Estrada Artists of Yugoslavia (Savez estradnih umetnika Jugoslavije) was established six years later in Dubrovnik, with the purpose to connect the existing musicians’ and entertainers’ associations throughout Yugoslavia. The AEW played an important role in the general recognition of the profession by regulating two specific areas: 1. The Establishment of Preliminary/Foundational Standards as a Means to Define the Profession. Associations introduced a licensing system that included auditions for particular genres and instruments (see figure 17.1). The associations and their members also acquired formal recognition by the Ministry of Culture. The AEW formed committees that nominated members for status within one of three ranks: the “artist” (umetnik), “independent artist” (samostalni umetnik) or “prominent artist” (istaknuti umetnik). The main criteria for the highest rank were not just record sales or high income, but also public persona, length of service, artistic level and overall contribution to the profession (Majkić 1966, 5). 2. Securing the Rights of Professional Musicians by Securing their Wages and Improving Labor Conditions. The AEW provided access to major services, such as social security and health care, to address the main problems of musicians’ livelihoods. Membership in the Association also ­enabled musicians to amass the length of service necessary for a pension. In addition, members were provided assistance in finding jobs, with the AEW undertaking direct negotiation with the employers, predominantly restaurant and hotel managers. Managers of ugostiteljski objekti (a collective term for restaurants, hotels and bars) contacted the AEW, who made contracts with the musicians (Dragan Nikolić-Nune, pers. comm., January  28, 2017) and defined all the working obligations and rights of both musicians and employers (see Figure 17.2). The AEW also negotiated with concert organizers at home and abroad, helping musicians to obtain the required working visas. For instance, hotel musicians were usually expected to work between the hours of 7 p.m. and 1 a.m., six days a week, with exceptions for New Year celebrations and national holidays. Employers were obliged to cover musicians’ travel expenses, daily allowances, and free accommodation for the duration of the engagement. Overtime work on holidays was not guaranteed, as Nikolić-Nune recalls. The AEW officials claimed that their main task was to secure musicians’ rights and to protect them from “greedy” employers, exploitation, and unreported illegal employment. This was particularly important for kafana musicians10 and those who worked mainly in informal and private settings. The AEW membership guaranteed they would be hired legally, with a regular wage and social and health insurance: “The association had to pay taxes to the state on all

Figure 17.1  Membership card with license for a guitar player issued by the Association of Jazz and Pop Musicians of the Socialist Republic of Serbia

Figure 17.2  A sample contract between artists represented by the Association of Estrada Workers and Performers and the employer (hotel manager).11

Figure 17.2  (Continued)

212  •  Ana Hofman

contracts – between 70% and 90% for taxes and social care (porezi i doprinosi)” (Dragan Nikolić-­ Nune, pers. comm., January 28, 2017). Also, many session musicians who obtained their own recording or touring contracts arranged their taxes and social rights through the AEW. In this sense, the AEW played an important role in improving labor conditions, particularly for the marginalized musicians who worked in the service industry. In practice, however, the formalization of music labor was a difficult task, with regulation often poorly formulated and open to interpretation. Because of constant fluctuation, irregular payment of membership dues (Đorđević 1966, 7), and opaque accounting and financial leadership, it was difficult to track the exact number of AEW members. My interlocutors also reported frequent irregularities and nepotism in obtaining the formal status of a “prominent artist.” Many musicians never joined the AEW, although they were prominent professionals. Despite the contractual rights and obligations, many often reported violations of contracts and workers’ rights, particularly by managers of hotels and restaurants. Musicians themselves also disobeyed the rules. AEW officials in particular complained that working hours were often violated; for instance, the typical six-hour nightly shift was often extended to eight (Milić 1966, 8). Managers and staff were also accused of interfering in the structure of the program, demanding changes in the repertoire or in the makeup of the ensemble (Dragan Nikolić-Nune, pers. comm., January 28, 2017). The AEW often reported that, in some cases, musicians were fired because they refused to change the program setup or otherwise disagreed with the management or the owners. In general, the employment patterns of musicians were precarious: tenure contracts were extremely rare, and short-term contracts for work in hotels and restaurants were usually for one month, on a renewable basis. Most professional musicians in the service industry lowered fees to compete in the market, thus performances at private events, and privately owned kafanas in particular, hindered professional associations’ efforts to organize these activities legally.12 Kafana Musicians: Self-Managers or Private Entrepreneurs? For musicians, workers’ (self-)organization in socialist Yugoslavia was contingent on economic and sociocultural differentiations based on music genres, gender, ethnicity (particularly minority Roma), regional and generational markers, and types of work. Musicians themselves valued labor regimes that regulated everyday working practices, such as stable workplace and methods of payment. The term muzikanti, often used for musicians active in the service field, explicitly defined their “low-class” status against the established concert performers and stars who had recording careers. These muzikanti worked usually in kafanas, predominantly illegally without a contract, cash-in-hand, and often for tips only (Hofman 2015, 19).13 This treatment matched kafana entertainers’ status at the bottom of the professional musicianship scale. “In kafanas, they get the list of songs to play from number 1 to 250, where each song costs 250 dinars: these musicians are merchants in the open market (pijačari)” (Dragan Nikolić-Nune, pers. comm., January 28, 2017). Private kafana owners were often criticized for violating musicians’ rights, mistreating them and sometimes even leaving them without payment: I came to one privatnik [private kafana owner]. [. . .] He employed me. He saw I was young and beautiful. I  started working for a salary of one hundred dinars [plus] accommodation and food. But this place did not look like a place to live in. It was more of a closet. [. . .] Then another privatnik came and I went to another kafana. I worked there for fifteen days. He told me that I did not suit [them] and that I can leave. When I asked about my payment, he said:

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“You ate your salary.” I picked up my belongings and left. I asked myself how [would I] feed my child now, when I don’t have a single cent? (unnamed female kafana singer in Rabrenović, n.d.) Yet despite the stigma associated with performing in kafanas, even more established musicians continued work at such venues, off the books, which offered possibilities for informal and less traceable cash transactions and tax evasion. Inconsistent government regulations in this field created legal loopholes conducive to musicians’ lucrative enterprises (MacMillen 2011, 97). These musicians reaped high profits by “cheating the system,” earning more for a gig (tezgarenje) paid cash-in-hand than for playing a regular gig under contract. My interlocutors acknowledge that they often took advantage of both legal and illegal means to reduce the sums they reported and avoid taxes: “It was both cash-in-hand and via personal bank accounts, but much of the labor was done in the ‘gray zone’ ” (Dragoslav Mihajlović Kanarinac, pers. comm., January 27, 2017). This system was bolstered by the state’s flexible policy toward private managers, who became important actors in the industry from the mid-1960s onwards. The Federation of Estrada Artists of Yugoslavia often reported damage done by private managers who earned enormous amounts of money from tax evasion, facilitated by lax state regulation and monitoring (S.C. 1966, 4). Professional musicians epitomized the contradictions of market socialism, where, against the broader efforts to legalize labor in the service industry, a parallel entertainment labor economy (particularly in kafanas) remained effectively untouched. This marked the dominance of private rather than public or social interests, and also introduced a new class dynamic: discursively presented as workers, these professional musicians acted as self-employed entrepreneurs – privatnici (private business people), who operated under the conditions of capitalist economic competition. As the folk music singer Dragoslav Mihajlović Kanarinac (2015, 43) recalled: We, folk music performers (narodnjaci), take big risks, unlike the stars of zabavna music [who] do not want to even hear about performing if someone does not ensure them good money. We, on the other hand, make a deal with the organizers to work for a percentage, of course, according to our market value. That means that folk musicians were more susceptible than those in other genres to market pressures, although as entrepreneurs, they were also flexible in responding quickly to market changes and flows. Consequently, a complex and fractious relationship between the state and musicians in the entertainment industry was played out, underscored by pronounced social anxieties. Public judgment about popular stars often defaulted to criticism of high wages and lifestyles out of reach for most Yugoslav workers, while the public images of a new class of privatnik was shaped by the perception of “earning by cheating the system,” bending the rules and finding legal loopholes (Perišić 2014). Yet social security and retirement benefits remained out of reach for most professional musicians, particularly the “lower” class of kafana musicians. Overshadowed by the celebrity images of folk singers of the late 1970s and 1980s,14 these muzikanti have remained socially and economically marginalized to this day. Conclusion In 2012, the Serbian Association for Service Industry Employers (Unija poslodavaca Srbije) made a special collective agreement with the Association of Estrada Artists and Performers (AEW’s

214  •  Ana Hofman

successor),15 to define the labor rights and obligations of workers in the entertainment sector. The agreement addressed musicians – performers of folk, zabavna, jazz, pop, and rock music, as well as other estrada music activities. It defined the obligations of restaurants, kafanas, and club owners to sign contracts intended to legalize all entertainment activities, and to guarantee a minimum wage of 115 dinars per hour (c. 90 euro cents). On this occasion, the president of the Free Union of Estrada Artists and Performers (Slobodni sindikat estradnih umetnika i izvođača) stated: With the exception of the famous stars, most [gigging] musicians in Serbia live on the verge of poverty. Many work only for tips, which means that the minimum wage, although quite modest, can be seen as a [positive] change. Moreover, when estrada artists want to retire at the end of their careers, it turns out that they do not have an adequate length of active service, so they have to purchase the difference at their own expense. Thanks to this collective agreement they will now have at least some kind of protection. (Golubović 2012) A year later, in her text “The Working Rights of Musicians in Serbia” (2013), rock singer Milena Branković complained that the music industry in Serbia still operates through the gray economy. She asserted that despite the state’s seeming regulation of the field of entertainment, the system is set up in such a way that legal work is practically impossible, and that the entire field of music production, performance, and consumption is forced to operate outside the law. Although officials from the Ministry of Culture and Information declared their dedication to improving labor conditions in the entertainment business by signing the aforementioned agreement, musicians objected to the lack of a mechanism for its implementation. In other words, despite the presumed systemic change from state socialism to capitalism, the position of the majority of professional musicians did not significantly change. Today in Serbia, several small associations are fighting to retain their membership and new professional associations are formed annually. This fragmentation testifies to the further dissolution of the organizational structure and an absence of systematic care for this sector. Although market competition had been at the core of music labor during socialism, the lack of structural (self-)organization and support has left a vacuum in which many battle for mere survival in the post-socialist markets. Under these conditions, only the most famous stars and established bands can survive; for many professional musicians it means a deprivation of labor conditions and life on the edge of poverty. This has engendered further social stratifications of musicians beyond the socialist division into “artists” and “workers.” Especially within the marginalized labor environment of kafana, musicians are suffering from the lack of any structural mechanisms of social protection. Nevertheless, unlike other socialist workers who lost not only their jobs but also social recognition and dignity after the breakup of Yugoslavia, professional musicians within the unregulated sector were able to accommodate the social transformations more easily. Since the majority of music workers were active in a legally unregulated field, their status and labor patterns did not radically change. According to its representatives, even the Association of Estrada Artists and Performers still functions more or less as it did during socialism. The main changes after the breakup of Yugoslavia are visible primarily in the ruination of the organizational infrastructure, in a lessened sense of the importance of self-organization and unionization, and in a general lack of solidarity among musicians. This case does not point only to the hybrid nature of Yugoslav market socialism. It reminds us that while Yugoslavia was a land of “capitalism without

Music Labor, Class, and Entrepreneurship  •  215

capitalists,” as Darko Suvin (2015) remarked, for certain social groups it was a socialist country with grassroots capitalists. Acknowledgment I would like to thank all my interlocutors who helped me to understand the struggles that professional musicians in socialist Yugoslavia faced. They include my family and particularly my mother Svetlana, who provided contracts and legal material, and my dear colleagues and friends Jovana Lukić, Sanja Petrović Todosijević, Tanja Petrović, and Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc for directing my attention to additional material and helping me access it. I particularly thank the editors of the book, Ljerka V. Rasmussen and Danijela Š. Beard, for their insightful comments, collaborative approach, and patience in their editorial work. This article is dedicated to all professional musicians and to the memory of my father Rusomir Hofman, who was a professional musician-guitar player in several rock, pop, and kafana ensembles during the 1970s. Notes 1. For new works on Yugoslav self-management see Musić 2011; Unkovski-Korica 2015, 2016; Kirn 2014; Stanić 2014; Suvin 2014; Koroman 2016. 2. Importantly, the first popular musicians’ association was founded in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1928 in Belgrade under the name “The Union of Musicians, Tambura Players, Accordionists, Players, Male and Female Singers in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia” (Udruženje muzikanata, tamburaša, harmonikaša, svirača, pevača i pevačiča u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji) (Dumnić 2013, 83–84). 3. For more about this genre see Rasmussen 2002. 4. Within the service industry, kafana (a space for drinking, eating, listening to music and socializing) was a ubiquitous environment for professional music-making, and a key institution for shaping the profile of professional musicians in the Balkans, as well as the principal venue where labor inequalities were played out. 5. I align myself with several authors who claim that the class dynamics in socialist Yugoslavia were not that different from capitalist societies in the second half of the twentieth century, and call for a rethinking of the essentialized vision of socialist Yugoslavia as a classless society (see Archer, Duda and Stubbs 2016; Jelača, Kolanović and Lugarić 2017). 6. Annual record sales of 22 million, even during the 1980s recession, amounted to half of the total sales in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania combined (Rasmussen 2002, 178). 7. Although self-management theoretically called for the inclusion of workers in a company’s decision-making processes, market reforms gradually shifted the power from workers to the managerial class (Kirn 2014, 245; Suvin 2014, 260–66). 8. Estrada is a term used in many socialist countries in Eastern Europe, but its meaning varies. In socialist Yugoslavia it referred to a variety of entertainment and performing arts activities, including popular music, acting, modern dance, and circus arts (Milovac 1966, 24). Since the late 1960s it was used mainly in relation to two musical ­genres – pop music and predominantly NCFM – supported by a strong publishing and broadcast media infrastructure. Nowadays, estrada denotes again the diverse aspects of the entertainment business, although the focus remains on pop-folk music. 9. My analysis is based on data from Belgrade’s Association of Workers of Estrada Art (Udruženje radnika estradne umetnosti). After the dissolution of Yugoslavia it was renamed the Association of Estrada Artists and Performers. 10. On the specific public figure and status of kafana musicians, see Hofman 2010, 2015. 11. A contract between the Association of Estrada Artists and Performers and the director of the Hotel “Mineral” from Kosovska Kamenica regarding the engagement of the music ensemble “Kragulji II” for the month of November, 1975. The contract defined obligations and rights on both sides, granting an honorarium of 10,875 dinars, free accommodation, food vouchers for up to 1,000 dinars, and travel expenses. 12. The economic cooperation agreement with West Germany, signed in 1956, created new possibilities for Yugoslav musicians and entertainment guest workers (gastarbajteri, pl.) to work in Western Europe (especially in Germany, Austria and Switzerland). This important aspect of temporary work divided Yugoslavia’s musicians into those who enjoyed the privileges abroad or those who endured an ambiguous status at home. John Williamson (2014, 11) makes similar observations in the UK regarding the organization of professional musicians in the Musicians’ Union,

216  •  Ana Hofman citing a distinction between “gentlemen” (the London-centered elite of orchestral musicians) and “players” (musicians working in the music halls and theaters, often in the provinces). 13. Receiving tips for a “requested song” was considered shameful for the more prominent performers and bands, particularly the ones performing pop music. For more about the practice of tipping and requesting songs see Marković 2013; Hofman 2015, 9−10. 1 4. For more about socialist celebrities in Yugoslavia in the 1980s, see Hofman and Sitar 2016. 15. Poseban kolektivni ugovor za radno angažovanje estradno-muzičkih umetnika i izvođača u ugostiteljstvu (A Special Collective Agreement for the Engagement of Popular Music Artists and Performers in the Service Industry), published in Službeni glasnik 66, 2012.

Bibliography Archer, Rory, Igor Duda, and Paul Stubbs. 2016. “Bringing Class Back in: An Introduction.” In Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Rory Archer, Igor Duda, and Paul Stubbs, 1–20. London and New York: Routledge. Branković, Milena. 2013. “Radna prava muzičara.” Crno na belo, February 8. Accessed March 14, 2015. www.crnonabelo. com/vesti/4756-radna- prava-muzicara Čvoro, Uroš. 2014. Turbo-Folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia. London and New York: Routledge. Dimitrijević, Branislav. 2016. Potrošeni socijalizam: Kultura, konzumerizam i društvena imaginacija u Jugoslaviji (1950– 1974). Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga. Doder, Duško. 1978. The Yugoslavs. London: George Allen & Unwin. Đorđević, Peđa. 1966. “Tezgarenje – uzrok neangažovanosti.” Estrada 2 (11–12): 7. Dumnić, Marija. 2013. “Muziciranje i muzičari u Beogradu od početka emitovanja programa Radio Beograda do drugog svetskog rata.” Matica srpska Journal of Stage Art and Music 49: 77–90. Golubović, Dragiša. 2012. “Oko 20.000 muzičara mora da legalizuje posao.” Savez samostalnih sindikata Srbije, May 8. Accessed January 27, 2017. www.sindikat.rs/aktuelno.html Hofman, Ana. 2010. “Kafana Singers: Popular Music, Gender and Subjectivity in the Cultural Space of Socialist Yugoslavia.” Narodna umjetnost 47 (1): 141–61. Hofman, Ana. 2015. “Music (as) Labour: Affective Labour, Professional Musicianship and Gender in Socialist Yugoslavia.” Ethnomusicology Forum 24 (1): 28–50. Hofman, Ana, and Polona Sitar. 2016. “Buy Me a Silk Skirt, Mile!” Celebrity Culture, Gender and Social Positioning in Socialist Yugoslavia.” In Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Rory Archer, Igor Duda, and Paul Stubbs, 155–72. London and New York: Routledge. Horvat, Branko. 1983. Politička ekonomija socijalizma. Zagreb: Globus. Janjetović, Zoran. 2011. Od Internacionale do komercijale: Popularna kultura u Jugoslaviji 1945–1991. Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije. Jelača, Dijana, Maša Kolanović, and Danijela Lugarić, eds. 2017. The Cultural Life of Capitalism: Yugoslavia’s (Post)Socialism and Its Other. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kardelj, Edvard. 1977. Samoupravljanje u Jugoslaviji 1950–1976. Belgrade: Privredni pregled. Kirn, Gal. 2014. Partizanski prelomi in protislovja tržnega socializma v Jugoslaviji. Ljubljana: Založba Sophia. Koroman, Boris. 2016. “Radnički tisak i problemi koncepta samoupravljanja u kulturi u Hrvatskoj 70-ih i 80-ih godina 20. st.” Acta Histriae 24 (3): 615–42. Luković, Petar. 1981. “Zdravko Čolić  – intervju za magazin Intervju: ‘Žene su moja najvažnija publika’.” Yugopapir. Accessed January 4, 2017. www.yugopapir.com/2012/11/pop-ikona-zdravko-colic-intervju-1981.html MacMillen, Ian. 2011. “From the Center in the Middle: Working Tambura Bands and the Construction of the In Between in Croatia and Its Intimates.” Current Musicology 91: 87–122. Majkić, Dragomir. 1966. “Predstoji: Kategorizacija estradnih umetnika.” Estrada 2 (4): 5–6. Marković, Alex. 2013. “Exploring the Politics of Performance Among Roma Brass Musicians in Vranje, Serbia.” Forum folkloristika 2. Accessed November 14, 2014. https://eefc.org/post-folklorista/beat-that-drum/ Mihajlović, Dragoslav Kanarinac. 2015. Bele note. Izvorište, Svrljig: Centar za turizam, kulturu i sport. Milić, Ljubomir. 1966. “Ugostitelji ‘kreatori’ kafanske muzike.” Estrada 2 (11–12): 8. Milovac, Boris. 1966. “Estrada i društvo.” Estrada 2 (7): 24. Musić, Goran. 2011. “Yugoslavia: Workers’ Self-Management as State Paradigm.” In Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzelini, 173–90. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Perišić, Vuk. 2014. “Kakve poduzetnike Hrvatska uopće ima?” Tportal.hr. Accessed February 2, 2017 https://www.tportal. hr/vijesti/clanak/kakve-poduzetnike-hrvatska-uopce-ima-20140113 Petrović, Tanja, and Ana Hofman. 2017. “Rethinking Class in Socialist Yugoslavia: Labor, Body, and Moral Economy.” In The Cultural Life of Capitalism: Yugoslavia’s (Post)Socialism and Its Other, edited by Dijana Jelača, Maša Kolanović, and Danijela Lugarić, 61–80. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Music Labor, Class, and Entrepreneurship  •  217 Rabrenović, Radivoje. n.d. “Emisija o kafanskim pevačicama.” TV Titograd, RTCG, TV arhiv. Accessed December  3, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbyNgku9oN8&t=186s Rasmussen, Ljerka Vidić. 2002. Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. New York and London: Routledge. S.C. 1966. “Štete od privatnih menadžera.” Estrada 2 (10): 4. Stanić, Igor. 2015. “Što pokazuje praksa? Primjer funkcioniranja samoupravljanja u brodogradilištu Uljanik 1961–1968. godine.” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 46 (3): 453–74. Šuvar, Stipe. 1980. Politika i kultura. Zagreb: Globus. Suvin, Darko. 2014. Samo jednom se ljubi. Radiografija SFR Jugoslavije 1945. – 72., uz hipoteze o početku, kraju i suštini. Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Suvin, Darko. “Tko se ne bori zajedno, izgubi pojedinačno (I/II).” Interview by Saša Hrnjez. Accessed December 2, 2017. https://www.portalnovosti.com/darko-suvin-tko-se-ne-bori-zajedno-izgubi-pojedinacno-i-ii Williamson, John. 2014. “Cooperation and Conflict: The British Musicians’ Union, Musical Labour and Copyright in the UK.” MUSICultures 41 (1): 73–92. Unkovski-Korica, Vladimir. 2015. “Self-Management, Development and Debt: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Yugoslav Experiment’.” In Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics After Yugoslavia, edited by Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks, 21–44. London: Verso. Unkovski-Korica, Vladimir. 2016. The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment. London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

18

Music for the “Youth Day Central Ceremony” After Tito De-ritualization and Other Indices of Yugoslav Decline Naila Ceribašić and Jelka Vukobratović

Across former Yugoslavia, springtime was marked by a nationwide event, the Youth Relay (Štafeta mladosti), arguably the most important state celebration in socialist Yugoslavia. A baton (štafeta), containing birthday pledges for the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, was carried by hundreds of thousands of runners throughout Yugoslavia, and accompanied by a multitude of cultural programs and social activities. The ritual peak was the concluding Youth Day Central Ceremony (hereafter the Ceremony), held each year on Tito’s birthday (May 25) at the Stadium of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army in the capital Belgrade, where the baton was handed over to Tito.1 These ceremonies reinforced the key principles of the socialist Yugoslavia that remained unchanged during the history of the relays (1945–87): to glorify Tito, the Partisan movement during WWII, the ideology of “brotherhood and unity” among all Yugoslav peoples, and the youth (omladina) as the guarantor of continued socialist progress. The setup of the Ceremony was significantly remodeled twice. In 1957, the initial “Tito’s Relay” was renamed “Youth Relay,” and the 25th of May became known as the Youth Day (Dan mladosti), following Tito’s wish to downplay his role and transform the events into a “review of manifold youth activities” (Stefanović et  al. 1989, 64). The second remodeling happened after Tito’s death in 1980, against increasing political, economic, and social tensions, which is the focus of our chapter, and in particular how the Ceremony and its music foreshadowed Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Moreover, we argue that the process of decline was enacted by the Ceremony itself, manifest in a shift from ritual to entertainment that reflected the disarray of indexical connections between the sign (the Ceremony) and its object (Yugoslavia). The Ceremony as a Ritual The program of the Ceremony comprised a series of connected scenes or blocks, often called exercises, such as large-scale synchronized gymnastics and dances choreographed as “collectivist and egalitarian performance” (Vujanović 2013, 22). They involved thousands of participants dressed in different colors, “drawing” with their bodies and movements an assortment of forms, images and messages, similar to state celebrations in communist countries and the 218

Music for the “Youth Day Central Ceremony”  •  219

Olympic Games ceremonies. There were three main groups of performers: high school students (pl. omladinci), children (pl. pioniri) and Army cadets.2 The children were represented as playful and carefree, accompanied usually by children’s choirs; the youth groups were central in “body drawing” and dancing which represented certain universal themes (such as spring), and in Tito’s own words from 1958, “new, progressive and better aspirations of our peoples” (Tito cited in Stefanović et al. 1989, 66); the cadets dominated sections that dealt with WWII and its legacy, often through dramatic enactment, musically enhanced by a medley of anthemic pieces in orchestral rendition. The baton handover was the central rite that established a “physical mutual bond” between the citizens and Tito (Čolović 2005, 141). The final baton carrier was always an exemplary omladinac or pionir, selected through equal rotation between six republics and two provinces. They would emerge from the mass of other performers, and start running across the stadium toward the central suite at the top of a tiered structure. Approaching Tito, the carrier would express greetings and a pledge of allegiance in the name of Yugoslav youth, while Tito would deliver a short speech, addressing virtues of socialist Yugoslavia and its youth. From 1957 to 1965 this part came at the beginning of the ceremony, in 1966 in the middle, and from 1969 toward its end, followed by a fireworks finale. After Tito’s death the baton recipient was the president of the Alliance of Yugoslav Socialist Youth (SSOJ). The youths were the most sizeable group, forming usually two-thirds of the performers.3 Although financially challenging, it was crucial to bring youth from all the republics and provinces, testifying to Yugoslav unity and equality. The ceremony was also a significant media event. Each year 50,000 spectators attended in person, while millions watched the live TV broadcast, lasting an hour. In the 1980s, technological innovations also enhanced performances, including music videos for TV spectators, slogans on the stadium screen, and the use of laser beams and neon graffiti. The Ceremony was produced by a professional team. Renowned composers, lyricists and arrangers prepared the music, while the music performers were likewise mainly professionals. Stanko Terzić (1980), Bashkim Shehu (1984–86) and Kornelije Kovač (1987) were some of the prominent music editors for the Ceremony in the 1980s. As a rule, music was pre-recorded with no live performances,4 with the exception of when an anthemic song resounded across the stadium. Until the 1980s, music and musicians remained outside the Ceremony’s “realist circle” (Vujanović 2013, 21) of actual youth participants, cadets, children, baton carriers, distinguished guests, and the live audience. For instance, at Tito’s last Ceremony in 1979, the only visible musicians in the broadcast were three military trumpeters who played a fanfare over a pre-recorded soundtrack, and the children’s choir Kolibri, who greeted Tito on his entrance to the stadium with the song “Pionirska zakletva” (Pioneers’ Oath).5 This changed in the 1980s, when it became conceptually important to feature pop and rock musicians in person, although their performances were generally dubbed. The Ceremony After Tito In the weeks following Tito’s death on May 4, 1980, May was transformed from the “month of youth” into the month of mourning, but the messages of sorrow were soon replaced by a determination to “continue on Tito’s path” (Popović 1980, 3). In the following years, critics, however, challenged the Ceremony for becoming a preservationist holiday (R.D. 1983b, 16) and participants as “objects . . . in someone’s ‘authorized’ interpretation” (Litvan 1983, 5). Clearly, the

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Ceremony faced a crisis: if the Youth Day was to continue after Tito and become a real celebration of youth, the organization and the wider society had to rethink the contemporary identifications of Yugoslav youth. The media regularly discussed the problem of defining youth as a social group, especially around the Youth Day, and often criticized young people for their disinterest in politics, and their preoccupation with popular music.6 Criticism went both ways, and youth representatives were equally dissatisfied with the fact that the youth was treated as an abstract social category rather than an active social agency (Mišina 2013, 39). Prompted by the negative reception of a giant floating statue of Tito at the 1983 Ceremony, which invoked comparison with the totalitarian socialist countries (R.D. 1983a, 16), the SSOJ and its organ responsible for the Ceremony, the Federal Committee for the Celebration of Youth Day (SOPDM), decided to introduce conceptual changes. According to Goran Radman, the president of the SSOJ in 1984, their goal was to “move away from strict politics and ideology, toward the affirmation of youth creativity and productivity” (pers. comm., September 2016). Regardless of the Ceremony’s relatively successful “re-invention” (Ibid.) and emancipation from svečarenje (Stefanović et al. 1989, 189) – a negative term for the Ceremony’s official and celebratory modus operandi – criticism continued. A public debate regarding the inappropriate and mocking aphorisms at the 1986 Ceremony ensued, only to be eclipsed by greater scandal regarding the initially approved poster for the 1987 relay, which was based on a Nazi painting and suggested a link between Yugoslav and Nazi cultural concepts and tastes (see Vurnik 2009). Whether due to conceptual disputes after Tito’s death, a growing disconnect with the youth, or increasing sociopolitical tensions, the last Ceremony proper was in 1987.7 On the whole, the Ceremony was not radically transformed during the 1980s, and the main changes included the framing of the event and the use of music. In terms of framing, the ceremonies’ titles are illustrative: the first phase was characterized by allegiance to Tito’s legacy (“Comrade Tito, We Swear to You” in 1980, “Tito Even After Tito” in 1981, “With Tito Within Us” in 1982, and “Tito’s Time” in 1983), followed by neutral themes (“Spring and Rejuvenation” in 1984 and “A  Hope for a Brighter World” in 1985), while the titles of the two last ceremonies were ambiguous, perceived as either engaged pleas or mockery and provocation (“Wake Up, Something is Happening, Your Fate is Also Being Decided” in 1986 and “Turn On the Lights” in 1987). Also, the introduction of the “Event Within the Event” and “Youth Informally” for the 1984 Ceremony was indicative of new framing, which accommodated an increasing emphasis on popular music, and rock music in particular. Consequently an all-night rock concert was introduced in 1984 after the Ceremony, at the Marx and Engels Square in Belgrade, and these concerts continued in subsequent years as Maj rok (May Rock). Rock as a New Sign of the Youth The Ceremony’s emphasis on rock music in 1984 brought more than simply a new genre to the soundtrack of the Ceremony: popular rock bands Film, Laboratorija zvuka, Divlje jagode, and Željko Bebek (a former singer of Bijelo dugme), located on a separate stage, captured the attention of the TV crew as much as the mass performances choreographed to their music. The emerging rock artists and bands at the ceremonies between 1985 and 1987 included Momčilo Bajagić Bajaga and his band Instruktori, Džakarta, Kerber, and Vatrene kočije, along with the somewhat older Laboratorija zvuka, and the most popular Yugoslav rock band, Bijelo dugme. This signaled the acknowledgment of rock music’s appeal among the youth, and the Ceremony’s heavy investment in rock as its new marker. As the journalist Vladko Fras noted (1985, 64), if the Ceremony

Figure 18.1  Scenes from the 1980 Youth Day Central Ceremony. Photograph published in Borba newspaper on May 25, 1980, author unknown.

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was to have “a minimum credibility for the young people, the inclusion of rock was necessary.” The integration of rock was a relatively successful strategic move, because it was less problematic than folk music, more fun than classical music, and it could become an effective tool in reconnecting the youth with the Ceremony’s messages. However, not everyone saw this as positive. For instance, the editors of SSOJ’s weekly Mladost accused the SOPDM of “adulation towards youth” (Jović 1984, 9). Fras (1987, 77) argued that rock had lost all of its credibility in its “fight for stadium positions,” while for the rock journalist Petar Janjatović (1985, 18), audiences’ negative reactions to certain bands were “a sign of the new way of thinking amongst youth who . . . won’t keep quiet and put up with something they don’t agree with.” These attitudes reflected a general perception of rock’s rebellious stance toward the establishment. Moreover, musicians had to balance their own views with the ideological requirements of the Ceremony, especially evident with the 1987 song “Jugosloveni” (Yugoslavs) by the eponymous rock band. The song was initially included in the Ceremony, and then rejected as “a typical example of p ­ olitical-ideological vulgarization” and an “inadequate text” with negative stereotypes of Yugoslavs who cannot live without sex, alcohol and meat (Babić 1987, 19). In contrast to rock, the top-selling genre of newly composed folk music (NCFM) was excluded from the Ceremony, regarded as lowbrow by the Yugoslav cultural authorities, as made evident by the comments of the SOPDM regarding the celebration of Youth Day in the Yugoslav diaspora: In the spirit of nostalgia for the sound (melos) of our nations and nationalities, and cultural and revolutionary traditions of [our] homeland, we have often achieved the opposite effect to what we intended: it increasingly happens that the trash (šund) and kitsch of Yugoslav “newly composed” art sells well for a lot of money, and various managers run wild in the interest of good profit, often deceiving and robbing our citizens who . . . themselves finance these kinds of events.8 The exception was the ultimate folk star Lepa Brena, who sang the lead vocal in the 1986 song “Vreme je naše” (It’s Our Time; music by Bashkim Shehu, lyrics by Iskra Tanodi, arrangement by Zlatko Tanodi), most likely because the song was musically and thematically on the margin of the NCFM, bolstered by Brena’s self-proclaimed Yugoslavism and her enormous popularity (see Chapter 13). Although “rock and youth” was hailed as the winning combination for the Ceremony, pop artists were also well represented. They included the singer-songwriter Đorđe Balašević9 and zabavna-pop singers Doris Dragović and Krunoslav Kićo Slabinac, as well as the pop-rock bands active since the 1960s and 1970s, such as Indexi, Drugi način, Ambasadori, and the rock singer Dado Topić. The pop-rock sound of the Ceremony was ultimately an amalgam of popular music repertoire written and performed by established artists who appealed to a mass audience. Rock musicians, who were at times critical of the establishment and whose music was usually “harder” in sound, never took part in the Ceremony. Their absence underscored the palpable division into different music scenes and respective subcultures in the 1980s, which the journalist Sanja Muza­ ferija deliberately emphasized in the weekly Danas by juxtaposing interviews with the socially engaged roker Branimir Štulić and a representative of “sweetened bourgeois” rock Vlado Kalember (Muzaferija 1982, 68), to underline their, and wider, artistic and political differences. Aside from Štulić’s band Azra, she also singled out some other socially critical bands such as Pankrti, Buldožer, and Riblja čorba, who never participated at the Ceremony.

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Joking With Folkloric Fusion In socialist Yugoslavia, one of the major models for public folklore was the artistic reworking of traditional folk music and dances, where performances of repertoires from various parts of Yugoslavia dominated over single ethno-regional repertoires. The Ceremony adapted this model into a form of “folklore fusion” within a single piece, best illustrated through dancers dressed in picturesque folk costumes of various Yugoslav peoples performing kolo  – a generic round dance widespread across Yugoslavia, except for Slovenia. Besides a few songs from the region of Tito’s birthplace (Zagorje), the Ceremony in the 1980s had no identifiable local or regional material, barely acknowledging the multicultural and multiethnic composition of the Yugoslav society.10 Despite this downplaying of folklore’s diversity, most likely because of its recognized ethnonational appeal, the framing segment of the 1987 Ceremony was still folkloric, because of the inclusion of the famous “Brankovo kolo” (Branko’s Circle Dance). “Brankovo kolo” was based on Branko Radičević’s poem “Đački rastanak” (The Parting of School Friends, 1844), who used the metaphor of kolo to call “brothers” from various South-Slavic regions to dance together. The poem was set to music by Jovan Paču in 1883, and soon became popular as the paramount artistic expression of South-Slavic (Yugoslav) aspirations toward union. The dance choreography was added only in the 1960s, readily accepted by folklore ensembles, especially those from Serbia proper and Vojvodina (Sremac 2002, 156). In the 1987 Ceremony, “Brankovo kolo” was performed twice, at the beginning and just before the baton handover, in the finale, in which folkloric ensembles, dressed in distinct national costumes, performed a medley of regionally or locally recognizable dances, including all verses of the poem accompanied by a classical orchestra. As the performance unfolded across the stadium, the TV commentators highlighted the “political message” for the viewers, warning that while “anyone can dance their own kolo, we [Yugoslavs] should not leave the kolo that unites us,” which is “our” kolo. They highlighted the message on the scoreboard: “We Don’t Want What Is Not Ours; What Is Ours, We Must” (Tuđe nećemo, svoje moramo in the original), an ambiguous pun on a popular slogan (Tuđe nećemo, svoje ne damo [We Don’t Want What Is Not Ours; We Won’t Give up What is Ours]) coined during the territorial litigation between Yugoslavia and Italy after WWII, but here left open to interpretation. The spectators might have found the slogan playful, even inappropriately mocking the legacy of Tito’s nation-state building. In any case, the implication was that there was something oddly light-hearted, perhaps absurd, around the “Brankovo kolo.” Humorous undertones were particularly evident in the first performance at the beginning of the Ceremony, titled “Kakvo kolo naokolo” (What Walkabout Kolo). Youth groups, dressed in variously colored suits, danced a kolo loosely resembling the “Brankovo kolo,” at first forming one single wide circle, which then divides into semicircular and straight shapes. The music was clearly based on Paču’s 1883 score, but the arrangement merged orchestral and rock sound (electric guitar riffs, melody in the synthesizer, and most prominently, electric drums). The chosen verses describe the qualities of the kolo, while those addressing “brothers” were omitted. The TV commentators’ conversational yet apparently scripted explanations over the visuals offered a telling narrative in itself: Female presenter (FP): “As you can see, the kolo starts unified. But something is happening.” Male presenter (MP): “Where is that united kolo from the beginning? Why [are there] different kolo dances that slowly separate, one after another?”

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FP: “Look, Serbia has separated, then Croatia, [then] Bosnia and Herzegovina. One after another, the republics and provinces are separating.” MP: “Why are we dancing eight different kolo dances? Why are they dancing kolo dances to their nationally recognizable melodies, instead of dancing together?” FP: “It seems that we are not as united as we should be.” MP: “We understand this as a warning, even if brimming with dancing and singing; [even] if it is polished from outside, from the inside we struggle. . . .” FP: This kolo is a warning about the current situation.” When the kolo finally unites again, the TV commentators explain: FP: “Young people . . . believe in a better tomorrow, the kind of tomorrow they would control themselves. In the center of the pitch we see republics and provinces united again.” MP: “After a dispersed kolo, all of us Yugoslavs are here together again. This should be celebrated. Rock [music] is a significant thread that unites us, that unites youth: rock on stage, rock in disco clubs, rock on the pitch of the Youth Stadium, the stadium of the Yugoslav People’s Army in Belgrade. The rockers’ kolo.” The implication was that the opening rock kolo fell apart, while the finale classical kolo sustained Yugoslav unity – be it real or alleged – by respecting the “unity in diversity” motto. The spectators must have been confused. Were these two performances intended as a parody, or were they to be taken seriously? Who was directing the show and who was in charge of such a display? Was this a sign of democratization or disarray? Either way, the event highlighted the deteriorating social agreement through which a symbol properly functions as a symbol (Turino 2014, 197). Downgrading of Anthemic Pieces The classical repertoire for the Ceremony was based on songs from the Partisan WWII movement and the early socialist period, which were characterized in the literature as mass, revolutionary, combat, resistance, workers, and/or patriotic songs. From the perspective of the Ceremony, we argue that the term “anthemic” is more appropriate, because this repertoire was rousing, dignified, and easy to learn, and suitable for various occasions including official celebrations such as the Ceremony. Musically, it consisted of hymns, marches, folk anthems, and fanfares, which generally define national anthems (Boyd 2001, 655).11 Anthemic pieces were both performed separately or integrated (fully or partially) into a medley of new compositions created for specific scenes/blocks of the Ceremony, performed by choirs and/or orchestras, which highlighted their anthemic character. They were also the main point of reference for new “revolutionary and patriotic songs” in various pop style arrangements, which were continuously promoted, especially by the Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Song, established in 1975 in Zagreb (see Chapter 15). Although anthemic pieces slowly decreased, making way for pop-rock music in the 1980s, their performers were occasionally featured during the live broadcasts, as in the case of the poprock musicians. For instance, the large “Yugoslav choir,” consisting of twelve choirs and vocal ensembles from Belgrade, Mostar, Priština, Zagreb and Zrenjanin (cf. Ninković-Džafo, Popović and Klisinski 1984, 8) was physically present at the 1984 Ceremony, and spotlighted during the performances of two anthemic pieces – “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo” (Comrade Tito We Pledge

Figure 18.2  Scenography and performers at the 1987 Youth Day Central Ceremony. Photography published in Danas weekly on June 2, 1987. Photographer Milisav Vesović, reproduced with permission. 

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to You) and “Svečana pesma” (Ceremonial Song). They sang over the pre-recorded soundtrack accompanied by a symphonic orchestra, not physically present at the stadium. While they may have sung to their own pre-recorded “Druže Tito,” for “Svečana pesma” they sang along to a pre-1980 recording of the Choir and Symphony Orchestra of the Art Ensemble of the Yugoslav People’s Army. Thus the large “Yugoslav choir” functioned only as a visual. Another novelty in the 1980s was that new anthemic compositions were frequently rendered by light, pop, jazz and big band orchestras, at times supplemented with rock/electric instruments, in contrast to the brass band and symphonic arrangements that had dominated previously. The most important change concerning this repertoire, however, was its gradual downgrading, especially noticeable with a group of canonic pieces performed at the Ceremonies: “Kozaračko kolo” (Kozara Mountain Circle Dance), the Partisan song “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo,” and the compositions “Svečana pesma” (also known as “Jugoslavijo,” written by Mira Alečković and composed by Nikola Hercigonja) and “Uz maršala Tita” (With Marshal Tito, written by Vladi­ mir Nazor and composed by Oskar Danon). With its spirited evocation of the revolutionary resistance movement, “Kozaračko kolo” became the staple of Partisan repertoire, and was widely promoted as the embodiment of the common Yugoslav heritage (Ivančan 1960). Its standardized version (see Dimitrijević 1958, 15) was regularly performed at the Ceremonies (either within various blocks or as the final piece in the program), but in the 1980s it was removed from the official program and instead used as a sort of “fade out encore” that coincided with the closing credits. As an anticipated aspect of the ritual participatory character of the ceremony, it was now hardly heard or made visible in the TV broadcast. “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo,” often labeled a “testament song” in the 1980s, had a similar fate. Like “Kozaračko kolo,” it originated during the Partisan movement. Oskar Danon, who was a vice commander of the Partisan forces on Romanija mountain and a renowned composer, added the melody to an existing verse “Ide Tito preko Romanije” (Tito Traverses the Romanija Mountain) in 1941, with a view to “making the melody familiar [to the people] in the region, and with lyrics that everyone knows” (Hercigonja and Karaklajić 1962, xi). While Danon’s “Druže Tito” was regularly performed at the Ceremony, usually after or immediately before the baton handover to Tito (mainly as a soundtrack, recorded by the Choir of Radio-Television Belgrade), another song with the same central verse appeared in the late 1970s and vied for official attention. Written for the Yugoslav pop star Zdravko Čolić, the 1977 “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo” (lyrics by Mira Alečković, composed by Đorđe Novković, arranged by Rajmond Ruić), had verses in the style of domestic zabavna-pop, a chorus that echoed the folksy Partisan tunes, and accompaniment by the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra. The song was premiered at the Yugoslav Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Song and was released on the Festival’s official album compilation in 1977 (see Chapter 15). The song garnered huge popularity, especially after Tito’s death, when it was re-released as a single in 1980 and appeared on a number of compilations in the 1980s. During the 1980s, it also became a standard piece at the Ceremonies, gradually replacing Danon’s classic. In 1984 both compositions were treated as equal, Čolić’s blending into Danon’s during the final baton run toward the central suite; in 1987, however, Čolić’s version accompanied the finale – the end of the speech by the youth president, the closing words of TV commentators, and the beginning of the fireworks – while Danon’s version came in at the very end of the TV broadcast, performed spontaneously by both participants and the audience during the fireworks and closing credits. The canonic pieces that were once the poetic epitome of Yugoslavia were now marginalized in the official program; as with “Brankovo kolo,” this was another surprising transformation of the Ceremony during the 1980s.

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De-ritualization and the Disarray of Signs Following Richard Schechner’s theory of ritual and theatre (Schechner 1974, 2013), we argue that beneath the veneer of the modernization after Tito’s death, the Ceremony’s increasing focus on entertainment endangered its ritual efficacy. The Ceremony started to address the current sociopolitical situation – the “here and now” in Schechner’s terms – evident in its new interpretation of canonic repertoire (from anthemic songs to “Brankovo kolo”), but also its greater investment in rock, and more contemporary themes in song lyrics. Choice topics between 1985 and 1987 highlight the agency and responsibility of the youth in many songs, including “Omladinska pesma” (Youth Song) and “Ne treba niko da radi umesto mene” (Nobody Needs to Work Instead of Me) performed by Bajaga and Instruktori; unemployment and the questionable social engagement of the youth in “Udarna” (Shock-Labour Song) by Mladen Vojčić Tifa and the band Vatrene kočije; the workers’ gloomy quotidian existence in Đorđe Balašević’s “Za treću smenu” (For a Third Shift); the danger of nuclear power plants in “Vreme je naše” (It’s Our Time) by Lepa Brena, Nenad Radulović and the children’s choir Kolibri; state-sponsored vacation in “Radnička odmara se klasa” (The Working Class Is on a Vacation) by the band Prava kotka; allusions to Yugoslavia’s uneasy cooperation with the International Monetary Fund and/or the conflict between the working class and bureaucracy, for example in a scene called “Vuk i crvenkapica” (The Wolf and Little Red Ridinghood, music by Zlatko Tanodi); and political and ethnic tension in Kosovo in a scene accompanied by the song “Seobe” (Migrations) by the band Kerber. Overall, the effort to relieve the Ceremony from the svečarenje testified to the “here and now” impulse of the organizers. Schechner’s distinction between a performer in trance (in ritual) and the self-aware performer who is in control (in theater) also applies to the Ceremonies in the 1980s: masses of performers at the stadium were distinguished from rock and pop musicians as individuals who encroached on the scene and captured attention. Even though they did not literally control their performance (which was staged, planned and pre-recorded), they nonetheless had a degree of control in terms of presenting their own music created independently from the ceremony. According to Schechner, through such engagement “new scripts and behaviors” can slip into the event, namely the script of individualism opposed to collectivism. At the Ceremony, rock and pop musicians spearheaded individualism: placed on a separate stage, the Ceremony was merely an additional, albeit important, stage for presenting their music. This underlined the theatrical character of the ceremony, a shift from enacting toward performance, from realism toward a play. But it was humor and jokes, however, which had the key role in transforming ritual into a theatre – “for fun” in Schechner’s model – as in the case of “Brankovo kolo.” Likewise, the multiple participation of the band Laboratorija zvuka (1984–86), famed for their wit, “colourful performances, genre variety,” and “sexual associations” in lyrics (Janjatović 2007, 124),  also suggests that the use of humor was intentional.12 In music itself, the humorous mode was a sort of postmodern linkage of disparate clichés and exaggerated sound mixes, evocative of music humor more generally (Guillebaud and Stoichiţă 2013). Considering all these aspects – the Schechnerian here-and-now, individualism, presentation and humor – the ritual was in decline. In addition, our study on 1980s transformations in the Ceremonies, and regarding anthemic pieces in particular, highlights the concept of repetition and invariance. After all, ritual is characterized by invariance and the notion of the sacred derived from it, stereotypical displays, and the social contract embodied in the ritual (Rappaport 1992, 249–57). But why is invariance important beyond the question of either preservation or destruction of the ritual? Thomas Turino’s application of Peirceian semiotics to music (1999, 2014)

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suggests that the key is in the indexical connection based on co-occurrence between a sign and its object, in contrast to an iconic connection based on resemblance, and a symbolic connection based on a social agreement confirmed linguistically. In the 1980s, the symbolic connection between the Ceremony and Yugoslavia was, no doubt, decaying: there was no more a general, linguistically confirmed social agreement about basic Yugoslav values, even though the performers at the stadium pitch and their (en)acting still functioned as iconic and indexical signs of Yugoslavia, or more precisely, of an imagined and officially sanctioned community from Tito’s time. A greater rock presence and the repositioning of anthemic pieces created disarray within the system of signs. The introduction of primarily musical play with indices was especially important, precisely because it was “sneaked from within,” impacting the experiential sense of reality, and creating “particularly direct . . . un-reflected upon, effects at a variety of levels of focal awareness” (Turino 2014, 196). A disarray of familiar indices was concomitant with the emergence of new connections, mainly the base indication of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Notes 1. The Ceremony was called centralna priredba or završna priredba (central or closing ceremony/show), or centralna/završna proslava (concluding celebration), as well as slet (relay). 2. In primary school, children aged seven would become pioniri (members of the Pioneer Organization) through a ritual organized through schools. In the seventh grade of primary school (equivalent to secondary school, aged fourteen), all young people would become omladinci (members of the Youth Organization). All men aged between eighteen and twenty-seven had obligatory army service, although participants at the Ceremony were more often cadets from the Military High Schools/Academy. 3. For example, in 1980 the numbers were: youth 9,600, cadets 2,350, and children 800. 4. From 1982 to 1986, the two largest state labels Jugoton and PGP RTB released albums with selected tracks from the ceremonies (see Discography). 5. It was also known as “Pionirska zakletva Titu” (Pioneers’ Oath to Tito), “Rođendanska pesma” (Birthday Song) and “Svaka naša petica” (All of Our Highest Grades); lyrics by Božidar Timotijević, composed by Aleksandar Korać. 6. The preliminary results of significant sociological research into the tendencies of Yugoslav youth were published in 1983, in the weekly Danas. They showed a lack of interest in politics and self-governing socialism, as opposed to an interest in “easy-listening” music (R.D. 1983b, 16). Another text in Danas also argued that Yugoslav society was faced with “a generation whose most representative part is precisely a young ‘rocker’” (Fras 1985, 62). 7. It is debatable whether the event held at the stadium in Belgrade under the umbrella of the Youth Day in 1988 was still a distant relative of the Ceremony, or rather a “stadium-sized choreo-drama” that took its place (see Vujanović 2013, 26–27). 8. The tenth meeting of the SOPDM, December 10, 1986, deposited in the funds of SSOH’s Committee for Celebrations and Manifestations, Croatian State Archives, sign. HDA 1231 − 5.3.13, box 569. 9. Although Balašević was one of the regime’s favorite pop musicians, primarily because of his song “Računajte na nas” (Count on Us, 1978), the performance of his song “Orkestar stari” (An Old Orchestra) at the 1987 Ceremony caused controversy because it was seen as a critique of the Yugoslav Communist Party and its anachronistic and misleading policies. 10. Its “diversity” was manifest only in the use of various Yugoslav languages in the addresses delivered by the final carriers of the baton, and in rare cases in the use of multilingual songs, such as “Pionirska zakletva” (Pioneers’ Oath, 1979) and “Omladinska pesma” (Youth Song, 1986) performed by the singer Davorin Popović of the famed rock band Indexi and Iliriana Riza of the vocal ensemble Mostarske kiše, respectively. 11. The fifth general subcategory of operatic anthems, discussed by Boyd, did not exist at the Ceremony. 12. Despite an incident in 1982, when they were charged with “insult[ing] socialist morals and hurt[ing] patriotic feelings,” namely the image of Tito, the charge was later dropped, and clearly did not preclude their participation at the Ceremony.

Bibliography Babić, Jasna. 1987. “Vivaldi u odbor: Putovanje Štafete mladosti od lakopotrošne robe do političkog kiča.” Danas, May 26: 18–19. Boyd, Malcolm. 2001. “National Anthems.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, 654–87. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Čolović, Ivan. 2005. “O maketama i štafetama.” In VlasTito iskustvo, edited by Radonja Leposavić, 137–48. Belgrade: Samizdat B92.

Music for the “Youth Day Central Ceremony”  •  229 Dimitrijević, Vladislav, ed. 1958. Zbirka borbenih i masovnih pesama. Belgrade: Partizan. Fras, Vladko. 1985. “Rokersko posvećenje mladosti.” Danas, June 4: 62–64. Fras, Vladko. 1987. “Dukati za oprost grijeha.” Danas, June 2: 76–77. Guillebaud, Christine, and Victor A. Stoichiţă. 2013. “Introduction: Constructions sociales de l’humour sonore.” Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie 26: 11–17. Hercigonja, Nikola, and Đorđe Karaklajić, eds. 1962. Zbornik partizanskih narodnih napeva. Belgrade: Nolit. Ivančan, Ivan. 1960. “Partizanski ples u Hrvatskoj.” In Zbornik radova SAN, LXVIII, Etnografski institut 3, edited by Dušan Nedeljković, 281–86. Belgrade: Naučno delo. Janjatović, Petar. 1985. “Njihova noć.” Nin, June 2: 16–18. Janjatović, Petar. 2007. Ex Yu Rock enciklopedija: 1960–2006. Belgrade: Čigoja štampa. Jović, Dejan. 1984. “Ulagivanje omladini, veli.” Polet, June 1: 9. Litvan, Goran. 1983. “Dani mladosti.” Polet, December 29: 5. Mišina, Dalibor. 2013. Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the Poetics of Social Critique. Aldershot: Ashgate. Muzaferija, Sanja. 1982. “Čemu politizacija rocka?” Danas, May 11: 67–69. Nedeljković, Vladimir. 2010. Devojčice i dečaci s Dunava: Prilog istoriji urbane kulture grada Novog Sada 1962-1980. Novi Sad: Zavod za kulturu Vojvodine. Ninković-Džafo, V[esna], S[avo] Popović and S. Klisinski. 1984. “Hoćemo teret na svoja leđa.” Borba, May  26–27: 8. [Ninković written down as Vinković]. Popović, S[avo]. 1980. “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo.” Borba, May 26: 3. Rappaport, Roy A. 1992. “Ritual.” In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communicationscentered Handbook, edited by Richard Bauman, 249–60. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. R. D. 1983a. “Dostojanstvo se ne gradi pretjerivanjem.” Danas, June 14: 14–16. R. D. 1983b. “Gdje je prostor za htijenja?” Danas, May 24: 16–17. Schechner, Richard. 1974. “From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad.” Educational Theatre Journal 26 (4): 455–71. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Sremac, Stjepan. 2002. “Pleszopiszen Maksimilijana Vrhovca ili kako je kolo postalo simbolom zajedništva.” Narodna umjetnost 39 (2): 141–58. Stefanović, Momčilo, Momčilo Baljak, Dušan Petrović, Zoran Sekulić, and Borislav Vasić. 1989. Titova štafeta mladosti. 2nd ed. Belgrade: NIRO Mladost. Turino, Thomas. 1999. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology 43 (2): 221–55. Turino, Thomas. 2014. “Peircean Thought as Core Theory for a Phenomenological Ethnomusicology.” Ethnomusicology 58 (2): 185–221. Vujanović, Ana. 2013. “The ‘Black Wave’ in the Yugoslav Slet: The 1987 and 1988 Day of Youth.” Social Choreography: TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory 21: 21–28. Vurnik, Blaž. 2009. “Plakatna afera.” In Plakatna afera 1987, edited by Blaž Vurnik et al., 7–20. Ljubljana: Muzej novešje zgodovine Slovenije.

Discography Various. S’ Titom do slobode, s’ Titom u slobodi: Jugoslavenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme. Jugoton LSY 61360, 1977, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Sa Titom u nama: Pesme sa završne svečanosti Dana mladosti. Jugoton LSY 61706, 1982, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Titovo doba: Dan mladosti 83. Jugoton ULP 1253, 1983, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Pramaletje što si mi zelene: Dan mladosti 1984. PGP RTB 2121727, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Da svet svetliji bude: Dan mladosti ’85. PGP RTB 2121980, 1985, 33⅓ rpm. Various. Probudi se, nešto se dešava, i tvoja se sudbina rešava. PGP RTB 2122376, 1986, 33⅓ rpm.

 

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Yugoslav Popular Music and Global Histories of the Cold War Catherine Baker

Popular music from the Yugoslav region – a sphere of cultural activity that has both predated and outlasted the existence of Yugoslav states – is, as this volume demonstrates, the product of a set of historical contingencies which have made the notion of a “Yugoslav region” meaningful, created ingredients for the symbolic boundaries that are continually constructed and contested around the idea of the Yugoslav region as a cultural space, and made it possible for the concept to endure after the destruction of Yugoslavia as a political entity. It is simultaneously the outcome of the region’s global entanglements – some of which are well-established points of reference in post-Yugoslav popular music studies, while others have been able to emerge as Yugoslavia’s transnational connections beyond as well as with Europe and North America have become increasingly important to the study of socialist and Yugoslav internationalisms. This literature itself, drawing on new approaches to the culture, ideology and geopolitics of the so-called global Cold War (Westad 2006), has the potential to build the kinds of “connected histories” for which Gurminder Bhambra, Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery have all called in order to view what are often thought of as separate postsocialist and postcolonial worlds as part of the same global space (Chari and Verdery 2009; Bhambra 2014). Few, nevertheless, might have expected the transregional connectivities of 1960s Yugoslav zabavna (light-entertainment) music to become a footnote in the Croatian presidential election of 2014–15 – far less when it resulted in victory for a Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) candidate, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, whose public persona was consistent with HDZ’s ideology of rejecting the legacies of Yugoslav communism and Yugoslavia as a state.1 Her unusual first name, however, testified to a complex global history of migration, translation, and adaptation that lay behind the Croatian zabavna singer Zdenka Vučković’s recording of “Colinda” in 1967, after which Grabar-Kitarović’s parents had named their daughter when she was born in Rijeka in 1968. In Grabar-Kitarović’s own narrative about her name, according to a biography published on the presidential website in February  2015: “Dad wanted a son and therefore didn’t have a female name ready. Mum, out of spite (iz inata), named me Kolinda, after the song he was singing as he drove her to the hospital” (Predsjednik.hr 2015).2 The Croatian singer and model Nives Celzijus even released her own cover version of “Kolinda” a month after Grabar-Kitarović’s election, poking fun at the president on video by dressing in her characteristic power suits and waving in front of Croatian and European Union flags.

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Nine years before recording “Colinda,” Vučković had won the Opatija Festival of zabavna music as a sixteen-year-old with the famous hit “Mala djevojčica (Tata, kupi mi auto)” (Little Girl [Daddy, Buy Me a Car]).3 Performed as a duet with Ivo Robić (himself about to become a European schlager celebrity with the German-language song “Morgen”), the song depicted a young girl in the city showing her father the toys and everyday luxuries she hoped that he would buy. Her comically excessive list of desires nevertheless suggested ordinary Yugoslavs could aspire to obtain these goods more easily than their counterparts to the East. For this song to have won the Opatija Festival, writes the social and cultural historian Igor Duda (2016, 174; see also Patterson 2012), “marked society’s willingness for a consumer revolution but indirectly also signalled the political elite’s readiness to help in fulfilling these wishes.” “Colinda” represented another dimension of Yugoslav socialist modernity as mediated through popular song: its incorporation of fashionable exoticisms current in light-entertainment music at the time, which might not have been immediately audible in its schlager sound but lay in its Cajun background, as relayed via French-speaking Canada.4 Vučković’s recording of “Colinda” was a Serbo-Croatian translation of “Colinda” by the French-Canadian country singer Lucille Starr, who set its bayou romance as the B-side to her 1964 recording of “The French Song.” Vučković had heard the English-language song at a concert of Starr’s she visited during a tour of Canada with another Croatian/Yugoslav zabavna music personality, Ivica Šerfezi (Šimundić-Bendić 2015). She added it to her repertoire with a localizing move that removed the bayou from the first line of its setting but retained the conflict between the beautiful Colinda, her protective mother and the young men singing to Colinda to come out and dance (a scenario that many teenage girls in Yugoslavia could have imagined).5 Starr had herself adapted “Colinda” from the Louisiana “swamp pop” singer Rod Bernard, who recorded a French-English version (with extra lyrics about the mother’s opposition to “Cajun boys”) in 1962; Bernard himself acknowledged having heard English and French versions (“Allons danser, Colinda”) of what he thought of as an old Cajun folk standard on Louisiana broadcast talk shows in the late 1940s. “Colinda,” however, appears to have a longer and more global history. The folklorists Shane Bernard and Julia Girouard suggest that the song not only dated back to the beginning of the twentieth century in oral tradition but had originally referred to a black Creole dance – with the referent of “allons danser” shifting from the dance itself, Calinda (as it was then spelled), to an imaginary girl’s name, by the time it was first recorded in 1946 (Bernard and Girouard 1992, 38). The dance itself, with versions known in Louisiana, Trinidad, and Haiti, originated in Guinea and, as Bernard and Girouard (1982, 48) note, “travelled to the New World on slave ships.” Vučković’s song would have remained one among many curiosities of 1960s zabavna music if Grabar-Kitarović had not entered public life in post-Yugoslav Croatia. Employing a process of so-called circuit listening (Jones 2016, 73) and considering the routes, networks, and histories necessary for a song to come about, however, reveals “Colinda” as the outcome of circuits of music, migration, and colonialism, owing its existence to aspects of global history to which Yugoslav popular music cultures are still rarely connected. Not every piece of popular music names its origins as precisely as “Colinda,” but all are the products of connected musical histories of some kind – even those which address a demonstratively mononational and monoethnic audience, like the Croatian patriotic songs chanted by Grabar-Kitarović’s campaign staff during her presidential victory speech, or the songs by a controversial nationalist musician Marko Perković “Thompson” that Grabar-Kitarović has said her daughter likes to play in the car (Baker 2015a; Dnevno 2016).

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The question of where and how “empire” is audible in music (Radano and Olaniyan 2016, 17) has its resonances in the Yugoslav region, pointing to another, still emergent but illuminating way in which practices and traditions of music illustrate dynamics of (post-)Yugoslav histories on a wider scale. Throughout my own writing and teaching about the Yugoslav wars in general for UK-based and English-language audiences, I have argued that popular music and its connected domains of culture and language are not just sources that reflect the course of political, military, and social history, even though they have much to reveal about them. They are also among the domains through which the very processes of ideological fragmentation, forcible separation and ethnonational homogenization that broke up Yugoslavia operated in the first place. The angry mockery of ethnicized political clientelism in post-war Bosnian hip-hop, resonating with the themes of anti-nationalist civic activism (see Arsenijević 2014), represent for Jasmin Mujanović (2017) a more effective form of social and political critique than any program on offer in mainstream Bosnian politics. For Tea Hadžiristić (2015), meanwhile, it is precisely through operating through the spaces of tradition inscribed in sevdah aesthetic and sevdalinka song that the Bosnian musician Božo Vrećo has been able to articulate a fluidity of gender and sexuality that does not depend on Western norms of performing sexual difference and gender non-conformity, refuting the notion widespread in contemporary nationalist formations of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia that queerness is an import from the West. Gender, indeed, has long been and remains a key theme of post/Yugoslav popular music studies (e.g., Ceribašić 2000; Dimitrijević 2009; Grujić 2009; Delić in this volume). Contrasting approaches to the gender politics of pop-folk and “turbo-folk” music exemplify ongoing debates about sexuality, the body, capitalism, and desire within feminist theory itself: criticism of turbofolk’s objectification of women, strongly grounded in structural critiques of patriarchy and pornography, linking turbo-folk’s representation of women to the criminality of 1990s ethnonationalisms (Kronja 2001, 2004); the potentially yet never automatically “reparative” capacity for transgressing social hierarchies that Dijana Jelača (2015, 36), drawing on Donna Haraway, perceives in the aesthetics of pop-folk as it had developed by the mid-2010s; the queer readings of its ambivalent or even homoerotic depictions of comradeship that Milorad Kapetanović (2014) finds post-Yugoslav gay, lesbian, and queer internet users able to make; the incipient delinking of masculinity and ethnonational identity that Marko Dumančić and Krešimir Krolo (2017) argue might occur within current “Balkan-” rather than nation-oriented pop-folk. These are inflections of transnational feminist conversations, but grounded in knowledge of what privatization, corruption, war and organized crime have wrought in this specific region and the cultural spaces that radiate out from them around the globe. The study of popular music under state socialism is likewise inseparable from wider themes in researching socialist Yugoslavia (Spaskovska 2011), including the revival of interest in social inequalities and in how alternatives to ethnonationalism were undermined during late state socialism. These themes went against the grain of the ethnopolitics-centered Western academic mainstream during the 1990s (e.g., Dević 1997), but offers important possibilities for contextualizing the social activism and socioeconomic crises of the present (e.g., Horvat and Štiks 2015; Archer, Duda, and Stubbs 2016). Popular music, as this volume shows, was at the same time a retrospective source of evidence about the desires, fantasies, and realities of everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia (Dragičević-Šešić 1994; Hofman and Sitar 2016; chapters by Delić, Hofman, Medić, Nenić, and Paulus in this volume); a site of ideological struggle where Party officials, musicians, journalists, and the public contested the balance between capitalist consumerism

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and state socialist principle (Beard and Tomc in this volume), plus the equally difficult balance between collective pan-Yugoslav identity, ethno-national forms of belonging, regional ties, and the lived experiences of belonging to city, village, and zavičaj (birthplace; see Baker 2015b; Serafimovska in this volume); a resource for creating the emotional atmospheres of identification with Yugoslav identity and state socialism that Titoist public spectacle needed to produce (Ceribašić and Vukobratović in this volume); and a domain of social and economic activity where the Yugoslav system’s capacity to fulfil its promises about standard of living was being tested by those who participated in it, even as they took up the role of depicting it to their audiences (Kostelnik and Žikić in this volume). Social and cultural history, including historical ethnomusicology, makes Yugoslav society and its prospects for reform, persistence, or collapse perceptible through the lenses of the period rather than those crafted with hindsight from its remains. It is little wonder that the position of Yugoslav popular music and its stars in post-Yugoslav memory practices, whether or not those who engage in them consider themselves to be expressing “nostalgia,” has remained another major theme of post-Yugoslav popular music studies (e.g., Volčič 2007; Velikonja 2014; Pogačar 2015; Petrov in this volume).6 The multisensory, affective appeal of music (Hofman 2015a) and its capacity to stir remembering into action in resonance with sonic memories of sounds heard before, along with the technologies that since the turn of the millennium have made clips of individual songs increasingly indexable, searchable, curatable and reproducible online, make popular music a powerful ingredient in the projects of personal and public “micro-archiving” (Pogačar 2016, 8), through which memories and meanings of Yugoslavia have been remediated. Yet the same media and platforms nevertheless also facilitate forms of national and diasporic micro-ethno-archiving – recovering patriotic audio and video recordings of new and revived songs that might otherwise have gone half-forgotten on the cassettes and video tapes that were circulating between homelands and diasporas in the wartime 1990s (see Kolar-Panov 1997).7 Popular music studies and ethnomusicology simultaneously document the re-production of “Yugoslavia” as a virtual cultural space and post-Yugoslav processes of identification and homogenization along politicized ethnonational lines. Locating Yugoslav Popular Music Studies Recent studies of popular music in the post-Yugoslav region and the rest of south-east Europe have helped to reframe the geopolitical categories with which scholars approach the Yugoslav region. The “Ottoman ecumene,” Donna Buchanan’s term denoting the similarities that postsocialist popular and folk musics (and the identity discourses constructed around them) from Slovenia to Greece and Turkey were displaying in the 1990s and 2000s (and still are), is a space constituted by “intentional sharing, interchange, collaboration or dialogue” across boundaries of national and religious identification, within longue-durée legacies of Ottoman rule and a more recent context of the collapse of state socialism in Europe (Buchanan 2007, xviii–xix; see also Archer 2012).8 Even though Buchanan’s volume goes no further east than Turkey, it nevertheless suggests how the present-day Yugoslav region can be positioned within a post-Ottoman space just as it can be positioned within “postsocialist” or “eastern” Europe. Indeed, popular music even demonstrates the reach of a wider post-Ottoman space – extending into Transcaucasia and the Middle East as much as the Balkans – which historians and sociologists in other fields are beginning to reconnect (see Hajdarpašić 2008). The circuits of remix, collaboration, translation, and sometimes appropriation in pop-folk music which make the Ottoman ecumene sonically and audiovisually identifiable run not only between Greece/Turkey and

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the post-socialist nation-states of southeast Europe but also connect the Yugoslav region directly with Transcaucasia, along routes that might sometimes have been facilitated by the mid-2000s expansion of the Eurovision Song Contest but depend on longer-standing post-Ottoman affinities.9 The Serbian singer and producer Željko Joksimović, no stranger to the cultural translations of the Ottoman ecumene or the incentives to self-exoticism created by the Eurovision gaze,10 for instance, was able to rearrange Azerbaijan’s 2010 Eurovision entry, “Drip drop” by Safura, into an alternate “Balkan version” employing similar instrumentation to his own “etno” styled pop. Both the Caucasus and the Yugoslav region have been the site of post-socialist ethnopolitical conflict that has shaped local historiographies around “a perceived need to define and defend exclusive national histories, identities and traditions,” raising similar questions of how far nationalism should or needs to be the dominant explanatory lens for understanding each region’s present (Laycock and Johnson 2017, 65; see also Bracewell 1999; Baker 2015c) – suggesting there is scope to seek connection as well as just parallel in relating these regions to each other. Yugoslav–Middle Eastern connections, implicit in the adaptations of Israeli, Lebanese, and Iranian hits alongside Greek and Turkish ones in Serbian pop-folk, represent a further aspect of the wider post-Ottoman space.11 Darryl Li and Dušan Bjelić, tracing the histories of Herzegovinan Muslims’ and Bulgarian Zionists’ migrations to Palestine/Israel in the 1870s and 1945–48, respectively, both argue for a geopolitical lens in which southeast Europe and the Middle East can be seen not only as parallel cases but part of the same milieu of colonialism and displacement during and after the rule of the Ottoman Empire (Li 2015; Bjelić 2017; see also Seferović 2015). Thousands of Slovenian women, known as “aleksandrinke” (after their port of arrival, Alexandria), migrated to Egypt as domestic workers, nannies, and wet nurses between the mid-­ nineteenth century and 1954, but were rarely acknowledged in public until writers and museum curators began reconstructing their histories in the 2000s (Milharčič Hladnik 2015). Under Tito, Yugoslav engineers and construction workers traveled to build factories and infrastructure in Yugoslavia’s non-aligned allies, while exchange students from the Middle East and Africa studied in Yugoslav universities to become part of their home countries’ professional elites (though hundreds would settle in Yugoslavia instead). Lepa Brena’s orientalized fantasy of a marriage proposal from a rich Kuwaiti sheikh (in “Šeik,” 1984), which her character turned down, as a female embodiment of Yugoslavia’s geopolitical balancing act (see Hofman 2012, 23), entered Yugoslav record stores and television at a time when Middle Eastern capital was part of the lifeworld of the sections of the Yugoslav public that her songs addressed. There are many connections like these between Yugoslavia and the Middle East which were everyday in their own time but have now been largely forgotten except by the individuals who lived them. While only scratching the surface of Yugoslav–Middle Eastern history, the background to “Šeik” shows what kind of surface there might be to scratch. Yugoslav Popular Music and Global Histories of the Cold War Beyond the wider post-Ottoman space, meanwhile, studies of Yugoslav popular music, ideology and state socialism also exemplify cultural politics that can now be viewed through the frame of the “global Cold War” (Westad 2005). Historians of eastern European states as well as the USSR have begun to study “encounters across the borders of nation and bloc” (Slobodian 2015, 1), between areas of the globe more often seen as shaped by different yet chronologically simultaneous ideologies: the once state socialist space of eastern Europe and the (eventually former) USSR, and the postcolonial space of the “Third World” and decolonization. Sharad Chari and Katherine

Yugoslav Popular Music and Global Histories  •  237

Verdery’s call for scholarship that could think “between the posts” after the Cold War to theorize the impact of the collapse of European state socialism and the end of US-Soviet rivalry across the globe, and equally the impact of colonialism and empire on the most obviously “postsocialist” areas, is a call for “connected global histories of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism” (Chari and Verdery 2009, 22; see also Bhambra 2014) with clear implications for the study of events before as well as after 1989–91. One consequence of this global lens for the historiography of Yugoslavia – a country where, after the Tito-Stalin split, the drive to stand for an alternative “between east and west” was perceptible throughout ideological struggles over cultural and musical production (Rasmussen 2002; Vuletic 2007; Patterson 2012; Vuletic in this volume) – has been a fresh attention to the significance of the Non-Aligned Movement as an arena for Yugoslav geopolitical self-­ fashioning ­(Jakovina 2011; Mišković, Fischer-Tiné and Boskovska 2014; Rajak 2014). Another has been the emergence of Yugoslavia’s Cold War transnational entanglements as a subject of study. This agenda asks similar questions to studies of the USSR, East Germany, and other east European states – about humanitarian internationalism, cross-border mobilities, cultural diplomacy and exchange, the political economy and infrastructure that made these possible, and the discourses of modernity, development, and solidarity with which they were pursued – but from the point of view of a regime which saw itself as part of an alternative pole in global geopolitics and indeed as the representative of an alternative, more accomplished model of state socialism. Moreover, it traces routes not just across the North Atlantic but also along axes between East and South, or in the Yugoslav case (according to some inflections of 1950s–1960s Yugoslav geopolitical identity) even South-to-South  – between state socialist Europe and Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Recent studies have, for instance, explored public expressions of anti-imperialist solidarities with the people of North Vietnam in Yugoslavia as well as Hungary and Poland (Mark et  al. 2015); the remaking of Belgrade into a symbolic and material hub between East and West  – and, Phil Tiemeyer adds, South – through innovative architectural projects and the formation of Yugoslav Airways (JAT) as a global airline whose routes connected Yugoslavia’s Non-Aligned allies and both Cold War blocs (Kulić 2013; Tiemeyer 2017; Subotić 2018); Tito’s diplomatic visits to Africa (Hozić 2016); and the design and construction projects with which Yugoslav engineers, architects, and manual workers helped to visualize and realize imaginaries of development and progress in the Middle East, West Africa, and Asia (Kulić 2014). Dean Vuletic (2012) has already demonstrated the role of Yugoslav popular music as an instrument of “soft power” in Yugoslav diplomacy. Recognizing popular music as embodied and affective labour (Hofman 2015b, this volume), and acknowledging the importance of public and private diaspora performances for many Yugoslav musicians’ earnings, makes popular music also visible as part of this wider political economy of hospitality and tourism, and Yugoslav musicians as particular kinds of peripatetic migrant workers (and sometimes exiles)12 within these old, well-established transnational circuits. The multilateral entanglements brought to light by studies of the Cold War suggest routes of “circuit listening” that Yugoslav popular music studies could pursue even further: just as transnational histories of the Eastern Adriatic have put a spotlight on to the politics of Italo-Yugoslav musical exchange (Rolandi 2015; Buhin 2016a), for instance, popular music studies would be well served by more studies of Yugoslav exchanges with Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. At the same time, thinking about circuits of transnational solidarities, migration, and Cold War politics in connection with popular music draws attention to an even broader

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theme where Yugoslav popular music studies (and Yugoslav studies in general) may have distinctive contributions to make: Yugoslavia’s position within the global history of “race.”13 Racial Imaginations and Yugoslav Popular Music If 1945 represents, as Howard Winant writes, the beginning of the “postwar racial break” (Winant 2001, 133) composed by anti-colonial and civil rights movements around the world, decolonization struggles in Africa and Asia, and Global South political challenges to the North, the Cold War politics of performative anti-imperialist solidarity meant that state socialist societies in Europe were also part of these developments despite not having had overseas colonies of their own. Historians of the US-Soviet relationship have shown how racial injustice and white supremacy in the United States permitted the USSR and other state socialist regimes to cast themselves as morally superior geopolitical spaces untainted by racism and colonialism (Borstelmann 2001). Within this ideological competition, which extended into popular and consumer culture (Baldwin 2016), the politics of popular music in the Cold War were integral to post-1945 contestations of race and formations of anti-imperialist/anti-racist solidarity. The global histories of popular music and race in the twentieth century (and before) are, indeed, inseparable. For scholars of black thought and struggle, the networks of popular musics originating in the worldwide black diaspora represent a significant assemblage of communication, memory-work, history-making, and political critique, taking the sonic and embodied forms they have because of the movements of people, capital, technologies, and sounds that resulted from European colonialism, the enslavement of Africans and the legacies of this violence (Gilroy 1993; Perry 2004; Weheliye 2005). The transnational cultural space of struggle and exchange that Paul Gilroy has called the “Black Atlantic” is constituted by soul, reggae, Afrobeat, and hip-hop musicians as well as the poets, novelists, and scholars who have expressed black thought in written form (Gilroy 1993, 72–110). Simultaneously, however, African American contributions to the musical Black Atlantic were part of the US consumer culture that circulated around the globe and that the United States even deployed as cultural diplomacy in its rivalry with the USSR (von Eschen 2006). Sounds, songs, stars, and genres that were deeply embedded in US racial politics – from jazz to Motown to Michael Jackson – were also cultural artifacts that entered Yugoslavia as symbols of Americanness, coolness, and hipness, feeding into how vocalists, musicians, and producers conceived of their sonic and embodied practices (Vučetić 2012). What it meant to be a diva, a term of distinction and appreciation in Yugoslav critical discourse, was inflected as much by the personas and critical reception of American jazz, soul, and disco stars as by the star personas of Italian light entertainment. At the same time, black diasporic musics from Jamaica and Nigeria, from Britain and France and Germany, were also part of Yugoslav popular music cultures: how far did Yugoslavia depend on western European entrepôts to become part of these networks, and how far did its non-aligned links create multilateral routes of musical circulation that bypassed these? Yugoslavia, like any other country where the popular culture of the Black Atlantic formed part of the domestic cultural landscape, was therefore one of many sites around the world where notions of race were being renegotiated in interaction with other forms of collective identity and hierarchy such as ethnicity, religion, and place (see Stokes 1994). While literature on global racial formations or “race in translation” typically concentrates on the relationship between large settler colonial and postcolonial societies on either side of the Atlantic (the United States, Britain, France, and Brazil) (Goldberg 2009; Stam and Shohat 2012), their questions can and should be extended to former state socialist societies, including Yugoslavia. “Translating” race in Yugoslavia

Yugoslav Popular Music and Global Histories  •  239

involved the interpretation of ideas and representations of race and blackness from elsewhere through lenses of racialization that already existed in Yugoslav (and pre-Yugoslav society), including the construction of Roma as racially different from South Slavs (rather than just ethnically different, as South Slavs were from each other within the framework of Titoist “brotherhood and unity”), but also constructions of blackness and Africanity attached to projects of Europeanness and modernity at the fin-de-siècle. In this respect, popular music and its star systems take on particular importance as one of the major sites where the Yugoslav public would have obtained everyday knowledge about race and blackness in the United States. The new sociabilities created around disco music by Romani clubgoers in Yugoslavia (see Chapter 7) might stand as another such translation at a grassroots level. The importance of US popular culture as a source of knowledge that informed everyday understandings of race during and after state socialism has already been recognized by Miglena Todorova, a scholar of racial formations in twentieth-century Bulgaria. Todorova shows that audiences in 1970s and 1980s Bulgaria encountered US racialized hierarchies of beauty, power, morality, and rationality through the videos of US feature films they could obtain on the informal economy and the US music videos, awards ceremonies, and basketball matches that started being permitted on Bulgarian television in the wake of perestroika. Bulgarian viewers, she argues, “decoded African-Americans’ filmic depictions in terms of the Bulgarian Gypsy minority,” intensifying the racialization of Bulgarian Roma (Todorova 2006, 292). In Ukraine, meanwhile, translated perceptions of US racial politics derived from US popular culture as well as the USSR’s own representations of the United States led to “Africans [being] transformed into African Americans in Ukrainian imaginations,” such that African musicians now living in Ukraine have their “skin color and English language skills” indexed as signs of “African American” identity (Helbig 2014, 96). Yugoslavia, however, witnessed much more official openness toward US popular culture much earlier (Vuletic 2012), and also occupied a different geopolitical position to the USSR and its satellite states: Yugoslavia did not just position itself between East and West within Europe, a dynamic that popular music studies and ethnomusicology have consistently illustrated well, but also performed affinity with the Global South rather than the rest of Europe in moves such as Tito’s prominence within the Non-Aligned Movement and Yugoslavia’s advocating to join the African and Asian group within the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) rather than aligning with any of UNCTAD’s other three groups (eastern Europe, the developed market economies, or Latin America and the Caribbean) (Alden, Morphet, and Vieira 2010, 53–54). Yugoslavia’s place in global racialized geopolitics was not the same as Bulgaria’s or Ukraine’s. Contextualizing the transnational entanglements of Yugoslav popular music during the Cold War, therefore, needs to account for the production of racial imaginaries around and within Yugoslavia in order to position it within the dynamics of the global Cold War  – especially in order to write the “connected global histories” for which Charad and Verdery, echoing Bhambra, have already urged scholars of state socialism and postsocialism to strive. The politics of racialized difference in socialist Yugoslavia, as in socialist Bulgaria, were commonly seen as a problem supposedly peculiar to the USA, that is, a legacy of American worldwide capitalist exploitation. However, European consumer culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and transnational discourses of scientific racism running up to the Second World War, had already created a “cultural archive” (Wekker 2016, 2) of visual and textual evidence that race, blackness, and whiteness were already present in national identity narratives in the early twentieth century, even in states without a large demographic presence of people of color. Traces, at least, of such

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a cultural archive can also be found in the fin-de-siècle cultural history of at least some of the territory that would become Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s post-1948 geopolitical alignments nevertheless suggest an even more complex set of “translations” in play than in Bulgaria, where Todorova has already distinguished US, European and Soviet racial formations as frames of reference for how Bulgarians constructed nationhood, whiteness, and race. In varying times and contexts, Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs have identified themselves both with Europeanness/modernity – that is, from the perspective of critical race theory (Mills 1997), with whiteness and the position of the colonizer – and with the experience of having been colonized, the subject position on which Yugoslav participation in the Non-Aligned Movement relied (Petrović 2013; Subotić and Vučetić 2019), although these identifications have been cross-cut by narratives of ethnic identity and “nesting orientalisms” (BakićHayden 1995; Longinović 2011). The field of post-Yugoslav popular music cultures encompasses both the visual and linguistic caricatures of blackness with which musicians have occasionally impersonated “African” characters in songs and videos,14 and the horizontal solidarities with Jamaicans and West Africans expressed by supporters of a monument to Bob Marley unveiled in Banatski Sokolac, Vojvodina, in 2007 (Šteflja 2015, 1312–14). To the builders of the monument, commemorating a figure like Marley in statue form was a political statement, choosing to commemorate a global hero of anti-colonial resistance rather than accepting the premises of ethno-nationalist commemorative culture. At its most intense, these late Yugoslav and postYugoslav ethno-nationalisms had identified their most threatening Others in racialized terms, playing on ideas of “race” that must have already been embedded in national identities in order to mobilize such hatred and fear. Writing a decade after the end of the Cold War, Paul Gilroy (2000, 272) looked to the “intricate circulatory network” of black diasporic popular music around the globe as a collection of “oppositional imaginings” that “could usefully complicate our historical sense of Cold War capitalism, its cultural industries, and the dissidence they unwittingly formed and disseminated”  – even though by the time of his present moment he considered that a “rampant . . . culture of simulation and iconization” (Gilroy 2000, 273) had stripped it of its radical significance as the expression of a transnational black mobilization. Integrating the ever-expanding history of Cold War music with the reach of global Cold War history makes it possible to begin asking how such dynamics might have played out even in societies like Yugoslavia that did not have their own domestic political struggles over the postwar racial break. Conclusion It is surprising that, with such a vibrant popular music scene within Yugoslavia, Yugoslav music did not have more reception abroad until after Yugoslavia had broken apart, when international reception of music from the Yugoslav successor states was largely channeled through the frame of “world music.” This is in contrast to the reception of cinema from the region, which was also subjected to self-exoticizing pressures during the 1990s, but which in the state socialist period had enjoyed much more international dissemination and prestige. Although the history of “Colinda” exemplified the flow of international popular music into Yugoslavia, musical exchanges between the rest of the world and Yugoslavia were not solely one-way. Some singers of zabavna music did become stars abroad, like Ivo Robić singing in German or Tereza Kesovija singing in French, and novokomponovana (“newly composed”) folk music was already starting to influence the emergence of Bulgarian pop-folk in the 1980s (Rice 2002, 29). The Yugoslav music that won most

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acclaim abroad was probably that of the late Yugoslav rock scene (Žikić in this volume), which identified itself with a “transnational subcultural movement” bridging Yugoslavia, the eastern bloc, and the West (Jovanović 2016, 42). Even then, Western reviewers were liable to approach the geopolitical idea of Yugoslavia with preconceptions that did not match how Yugoslavs saw themselves: it took the shine off UK rock magazines’ coverage of Yugoslav rock somewhat when Yugoslav readers still had to write in to complain that Yugoslavia was not, as their reviewers tended to describe it, “behind the Iron Curtain” (Spaskovska 2017, 128). After the collapse of Yugoslavia, however, international and especially Western reception of (post-)Yugoslav music was driven by what the Western music market’s gaze expected of the Yugoslav region at that time: the authenticity of folk repackaged as “world music,” given extra charge by the unfolding Yugoslav wars. The 1990s world music market, which “thrives on heightened ethnic and racial difference” and on the exoticization of supposedly peripheral regions such as the Balkans, took up Romani musicians and Goran Bregović’s appropriations of their sound as it did the polyphonic singing of Bulgarian choirs (Silverman 2012, 244). Serbian wartime “turbofolk” captured foreign journalists’ sensationalized attention. In the 2000s, the Exit Festival in Novi Sad grew out of youth resistance to the regime of Slobodan Milošević to develop into one of Europe’s major summer festivals, partially helping to rebrand Serbia as a destination for cosmopolitan youth musical tourism. In Serbian media discourses of sociocultural identity during the 2000s and 2010s, the cosmopolitanism of Exit was often juxtaposed against the opposite pole of the Guča Brass Band Festival, with its connotations of folk tradition (Gligorijević 2014). By the end of the 2010s, musicians such as the sevdah performer Damir Imamović had been able to use the international market to connect foreign audiences with their research into and reinterpretation of early urban folk musical traditions (Nenić 2015, 265–70). Where millions of international viewers most commonly, if briefly, experienced post-Yugoslav music was through the Eurovision Song Contest, where performers were again caught between gazes which incentivized repackaging traditional music into pop and others which rewarded embodying international, cosmopolitan styles (Baker 2008). The asymmetries of the transnational popular music industry did not produce a Yugoslav equivalent of flamenco or canzone with worldwide recognition, reception and reworking – yet the distinctive geopolitical position of the Yugoslav region and its music still reveals much about the contexts for global popular music during and after the Cold War. Notes 1. In March 2015, for instance, Grabar-Kitarović removed a bust of Tito from the presidential palace, thus going even further in erasing the memory of communism from the public culture of the Croatian presidency than Franjo Tuđman had done as the first president of post-Yugoslav Croatia and founder of the anti-communist HDZ (Jutarnji list 2015). 2. Her presidential biography as of July 2018, however, contains no intimate or personal narratives beyond the information that she is married with two children, and otherwise is entirely dedicated to her educational, diplomatic, and political achievements (Predsjednica.hr 2018). 3. On the role of Opatija and other festivals in the zabavna scene, see Rasmussen 2002; Buhin 2016b; Arnautović in this volume. 4. On exoticism in German schlager, see Simon 2000. 5. On how Yugoslav media aimed at teens handled intergenerational conflict and the values of a socialist community, see Senjković 2008, 120–21. 6. On starogradske pesme (old urban songs) and an earlier wave of musical nostalgia (for monarchist Yugoslavia), see Chapter 10. 7. Importantly, these micro-archiving practices predate the emergence of online video-sharing: in the early 2000s, before the creation of YouTube in 2006, the concurrent development of free blogging platforms and free audio download services already permitted curators of mono-ethnic and far-right as well as neo-Yugoslav music to make

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

hundreds of recordings available in collections that epitomized their preferred cultural imaginary (Senjković and Dukić 2005). I frame this shorter-term context differently from Buchanan’s own “impact of recent political transition away from Soviet-style state socialism” (Buchanan 2007, xix)—partly because Yugoslavia’s system had not been Soviet-style since the early 1950s, partly to emphasize that a transnational or global history of postsocialism (Chari and Verdery 2009) should also encompass the impact of the end of the Cold War on countries where state socialist regimes were not in power (including Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey, which all fall within the southeast European part of the post-Ottoman musical ecumene). On translations and cover versions around the Ottoman ecumene, see Buchanan 2007; Susam-Saraeva 2015. “Sedam godina” (Seven Years), the first song on Joksimović’s debut album in 1999, was a cover version of a song by the Turkish-German group Sürpriz, “Reise nach Jerusalem” (On the Way to Jerusalem), which had represented Germany at the Eurovision Song Contest in Jerusalem earlier that year. “Reise nach Jerusalem” had actually been composed by a white German pop composer and serial Eurovision entrepreneur, Ralph Siegel, but contained enough sonic authenticity for Joksimović to adapt it on the same terms. It was then (and is) quite common practice for singers in Serbia and elsewhere in southeast Europe to record albums with a few arrangements of popular songs from elsewhere in the Ottoman ecumene alongside original compositions (Susam-Saraeva 2018): the Serbian pop-folk singer Jelena Karleuša, her lyricist Marina Tucaković, and her producer Dejan Abadić, for instance, translated two Turkish hits by Tarkan onto her 1998 album Zovem se Jelena (My Name is Jelena), so that Tarkan’s “Şımarık” (Spoilt) became Karleuša’s “Žene vole dijamante” (Women Love Diamonds) (Susam-Saraeva 2018, 18) and his “Şikidim” (Shake) became her “Jelena.” On the separation between “Balkan” and “Middle Eastern” studies in the United States, see Hajdarpašić 2009. A comparable separation results in UK language–based area studies from the division of the post-Ottoman space between the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the School of Oriental and African Studies. “Division”—when talking about academic institutions founded in an imperial metropole in 1915–16 a few years before the Paris Peace Conference (that confirmed the boundaries of nation-states in eastern Europe and created imperial protectorates in the Middle East)—is not an innocent word. For musicians who fell afoul of the Yugoslav authorities, notably Vice Vukov who was prevented from working as a musician after Tito’s repression of the Croatian Spring in 1971, working abroad was the only means of continuing in music: Vukov had in fact been in Australia when notified of some other participants’ arrest, and worked in exile for five years in Paris before returning to Croatia to work as an editor until the reformed Party allowed him to start performing again in 1989 (Vuletic 2011, 13). Tomislav Longinović (2000) has discussed music and race in Yugoslavia during the break-ups of 1941 and 1991, concentrating on racialized thinking as a form of ethnonationalism in drawing violent symbolic boundaries between South Slav ethnic groups. See further Baker 2018, 31–56. Such as the Serbian hip-hop group Tap 011’s blackface impersonation of African bakers in the video for their 1995 song “Pekara” (Bakery)—a cover version of Ini Kamoze’s 1994 hit “Here Comes the Hotstepper,” which shows the band handing out abundant loaves of bread to queueing citizens in a fantasized Belgrade which in reality was experiencing the economic effects of international sanctions against the Milošević regime; and, more recently, the institutionalization of blackface as a costuming technique on the Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian franchises of the celebrity talent show Tvoje lice zvuči poznato (Your Face Sounds Familiar, 2013—) when contestants draw a black musician to impersonate.

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Hofman, Ana, and Polona Sitar. 2016. “ ‘Buy Me a Silk Skirt Mile!’: Celebrity Culture, Gender and Social Positioning in Socialist Yugoslavia.” In Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Rory Archer, Igor Duda and Paul Stubbs, 155–72. London and New York: Routledge. Horvat, Srećko, and Igor Štiks, ed. 2015. Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia. London: Verso. Hozić, Aida. 2016. “Tito’s Journey(s) Through Africa: Race and Nation in International Politics.” Paper presented at 2016 Millennium Conference: Racialized Realities in World Politics, London School of Economics, October 22–23. Dnevno. 2016. “Kolinda pjavala ‘Srce Vatreno’ i otkrila da s djecom sluša Thompsona.” Dnevno, June  10. Accessed December  27, 2018.  https://www.dnevno.hr/sport/nogomet/kolinda-pjevala-srce-vatreno-i-otkrila-da-s-djecomslusa-thompsona-video-929464/ Jakovina, Tvrtko. 2011. Treća strana Hladnog rata. Zagreb: Fraktura.

244  •  Catherine Baker Jelača, Dijana. 2015. “Feminine Libidinal Entrepreneurship: Towards a Reparative Reading of the sponzoruša in Turbo Folk.” Feminist Media Studies 15 (1): 36–52. Jones, Andrew F. 2016. “Circuit Listening: Grace Chang and the Dawn of the Chinese 1960s.” In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, 66–92. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jovanović, Zlatko. 2016. “ ‘My Life Is New Wave’: Poland, Yugoslav New Wave and the Transnational Sense of Connectedness in the Early 1980s.” Popular Music History 11 (1): 28–46. Jutarnji list. 2015. “Foto: Tito više nije na Pantovčaku: Uklonjena bista Josipa Broza, predana Muzejima Hrvatskog zagorja.” Jutarnji list, March 18. Accessed December 20, 2018. www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/foto-tito-vise-nijena-pantovcaku-uklonjena-bista-josipa-broza-predana-muzejima-hrvatskog-zagorja/487738/ Kapetanović, Milorad. 2014. “ ‘A što ćemo ljubav kriti?’: Jugoslovensko muzičko naslijeđe i postjugoslovenski kvir.” In Među nama: Neispričane priče gej i lezbejskih života, edited by Jelisaveta Blagojević and Olga Dimitrijević, 238–50. Belgrade: Hartefakt. Kolar-Panov, Dona. 1997. Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination. London and New York: Routledge. Kronja, Ivana. 2001. Smrtonosni sjaj: Masovna psihologija i estetiketa turbo-folka. Belgrade: Tehnokratia. Kronja, Ivana. 2004. “Turbo Folk and Dance Music in 1990s Serbia: Media, Ideology and the Production of Spectacle.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 22 (1): 103–14. Kulić, Vladimir. 2013. “National, Supranational, International: New Belgrade and the Symbolic Construction of a Socialist Capital.” Nationalities Papers 41 (1): 35–63. 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Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nenić, Iva. 2015. “World Music in the Balkans and the Politics of (Un)Belonging.” In Beyond the East – West Divide: Balkan Music and its Poles of Attraction, edited by Ivana Medić and Katarina Tomašević, 259–72. Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA. Patterson, Patrick Hyder. 2012. Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Perry, Imani. 2004. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Petrović, Tanja. 2013. “Europe’s New Colonialisms.” Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications 4: 109–25. Accessed December  20, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20160508163546/www.fmk.singidunum.ac.rs/content/journal/ Tanja%20Petrovic.pdf Pogačar, Martin. 2015. “Music and Memory: Yugoslav Rock in Social Media.” Southeastern Europe 39: 215–36. Pogačar, Martin. 2016. Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-Presencing the Past. 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Yugoslav Popular Music and Global Histories  •  245 Seferović, Nina. 2015. “The Herzegovinan Muslim Colony in Caesarea, Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 45 (1): 76–83. Senjković, Reana. 2008. Izgubljeno u prijenosu: Pop iskustvo soc culture. Zagreb: IEF. Senjković, Reana, and Davor Dukić. 2005. “Virtual Homeland? Reading the Music on Offer on a Particular Web Page.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (1): 44–62. Silverman, Carol. 2012. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simon, Sunka. 2000. “Der vord’re Orient: Colonialist Imagery in Popular Postwar German Schlager.” Journal of Popular Culture 34 (3): 87–108. Šimundić-Bendić, Tanja. 2015. “Predsjednica je ime dobila zbog ovih stihova: Daj, daj, daj, Colinda, izađi sad Colinda, zapjevaj malo s nama.” Slobodna Dalmacija, January 13. Accessed December 20, 2018. https://slobodnadalmacija. hr/scena/mozaik/clanak/id/259840/predsjednica-je-ime-dobila-zbog-ovih-stihova-daj-daj-daj-colinda-izai-sadcolinda-zapjevaj-malo-s-nama Slobodian, Quinn. 2015. “Introduction.” In Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, edited by Quinn Slobodian, 1–19. Oxford: Berghahn. Spaskovska, Ljubica. 2011. “Stairway to Hell: The Yugoslav Rock Scene and Youth During the Crisis Decade of 1981– 1991.” East Central Europe 38 (2): 355–72. Spaskovska, Ljubica. 2017. The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat. 2012. Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic. New York: New York University Press. Stokes, Martin. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg. Subotić, Jelena. 2018. “JAT – More Than Flying: Constructing Yugoslav Identity in the Air.” East European Politics and Societies 32 (4): 671–92. Subotić, Jelena, and Srđan Vučetić. 2019. “Performing Solidarity: Whiteness and Status-seeking in the Non-Aligned World.” Journal of International Relations and Development 22 (3): 722–743. Susam-Saraeva, Sebnem. 2015. Translation and Popular Music: Transcultural Intimacy in Greek – Turkish Relations. Bern: Peter Lang. Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem. 2019. “Interlingual Cover Versions: How Popular Songs Travel Round the World.” The Translator 25 (1): 42–59. Šteflja, Izabel. 2015. “To History or to Hollywood? Monuments to Foreign Celebrities in Twenty-First Century Balkans.” Europe – Asia Studies 67 (8): 1302–27. Tiemeyer, Phil. 2017. “Launching a Nonaligned Airline: JAT Yugoslav Airways Between East, West and South, 1947– 1962.” Diplomatic History 41 (1): 78–103. Todorova, Miglena S. 2006. “Race Travels: Whiteness and Modernity Across National Borders.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota. Velikonja, Mitja. 2014. “New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Popular Music in Slovenia.” In Post-Yugoslavia: New Cultural and Political Perspectives, edited by Dino Abazović and Mitja Velikonja, 57–95. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Volčič, Zala. 2007. “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24 (1): 21–38. Von Eschen, Penny M. 2006. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vučetić, Radina. 2012. Koka-kola socijalizam: Amerikanizacija jugoslovenske popularne kulture šezdesetih godina XX veka. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Vuletic, Dean. 2007. “The Socialist Star: Yugoslavia, Cold War Politics and the Eurovision Song Contest.” In A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, edited by Ivan Raykoff and Robert Deam Tobin, 83–97. Aldershot: Ashgate. Vuletic, Dean. 2011. “The Silent Republic: Popular Music and Nationalism in Socialist Croatia.” EUI Working Paper MWP 2011/20. San Domenico di Fiesole: European University Institute. Accessed December  20, 2018. http:// cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/18635/MWP_Vuletic_2011_20.pdf Vuletic, Dean. 2012. “Sounds Like America: Yugoslavia’s Soft Power in Eastern Europe.” In Divided Dreamworlds: The Cultural Cold War in East and West, edited by Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith, and Joes Segal, 115–32. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2005. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Westad, Odd Arne. 2005. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winant, Howard. 2001. The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II. New York: Basic Books.

Discography Lepa Brena and Slatki greh. “Šeik” from Pile moje. PGP RTB 2113473, 1984, 33⅓ rpm. Safura featuring Željko Joksimović. “Drip Drop (Balkan Version)” from Drip Drop. Zaphire Group AB, 2010, DVD. Vučković, Zdenka. Colinda. Jugoton EPY 3925, 1967, 45 rpm. Vučković, Zdenka, and Ivo Robić. “Mala djevojčica (Tata, kupi mi auto)”/ “Kućica u cveću.” Jugoton SY 1038, 1958, 45 rpm.

 

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Afterword

20

“What Would You Give to Be in My Place?”

A Conversation with Goran Bregović

Vesna Andree Zaimović, Ljerka V. Rasmussen, and Danijela Š. Beard1

Goran Bregović is the most internationally renowned musician and composer from the former Yugoslavia. Born in Sarajevo, he came to fame as the founder, producer, and guitarist of the rock band Bijelo dugme – the most popular rock group in socialist Yugoslavia. When Bijelo dugme disbanded in late 1980s, Bregović embarked on a solo career as a film composer and performer of Balkan music. His  soundtrack for Emir Kusturica’s film  Time of the Gypsies  (1988), which won the best director award at Cannes Film Festival (1989) and was also nominated for a Palme d’Or, was seminal in the creation of a Balkan niche within the realm of World Music. In his subsequent collaborations in a series of projects with Polish singer Kaya, Israeli Ofra Haza, Greek George Dalaras and Iggy Pop, he explored and redefined traditional conceptions of Balkan music and expanded its appeal to global audiences. His international visibility, unprecedented among Yugoslav artists, is propelled by ongoing concert appearances throughout the world, with his Orchestra for Weddings and Funerals, which brings together Roma and folk musicians from across the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Vesna A. Zaimović (VAZ): First question – “shepherd rock” (pastirski rock). What were your thoughts when the journalist Dražen Vrdoljak coined the term to describe the sound of your band, Bijelo dugme? How did you understand the term at the time [1974] and did the label adequately describe your aesthetics and your musical aspirations? Goran Bregović (GB): I never had a particularly reflective attitude towards what I’m doing. Others did that. I’m a composer and it’s not my job to analyze what we are doing, so the term escaped me as if it wasn’t about me. At that time [the mid-1970s] it was probably blasphemous to stick rock ‘n’ roll over folk because prior to Bijelo dugme, homegrown bands mostly made rock ‘n’ roll copies and copies of foreign folk music. Of course rock ‘n’ roll comes out of folklore, but not ours [Yugoslav]. So probably something so blasphemous suddenly became successful, and these two [rock journalists, Vrdoljak and Darko Glavan] were brighter than everybody else, coining a label for it. I think they respected our music and had no intention of saying something bad with this.

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VAZ: Besides Indexi, Bijelo dugme are considered pioneers of the Sarajevo Pop-Rock School. Your early albums are imbued with pastoral images of Ottoman Bosnia, for instance with references to galloping horses, calls to “nana” [grandmother], or when you do things “iz inata” [out of spite] and “za ćejf ” [for pure pleasure]. Do you think that these early songs adequately paint the picture of Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina? GB: I don’t think so. If you look at Bijelo dugme . . . it’s difficult to locate all of the things that influenced me only between the Ilidža and Pale districts of Sarajevo, it doesn’t work like that. For instance, Bijelo dugme’s early single “Da sam pekar” (If I Were a Baker), is essentially a drmeš [round dance from Croatia’s Slavonija plains], which is arranged as a riff for an electric guitar; this is actually a single-chord Slavonian drmeš. . . . I listened to sevdalinka2 when I was young, I had a period when I listened to it for a month or two almost every day because Behka [a singer] and Igbal Ljuca [a saz3 player] played above an aščinica [traditional Bosnian food restaurant] at Sarajevo’s Baščaršija4 every night. Then it had some simple beauty, where only the melody is sung accompanied by a melody on saz. I’ve listened to this a lot in Istanbul’s coffee shops, where sevdalinka comes from [and] it’s always just melodies; if a percussion instrument is added then it only adds a rhythm, never a harmony. At one moment, I don’t know precisely when, this became caricatured, which I personally think has taken a wrong direction. . . . When you add harmony, I think it banalizes all that beauty that sevdalinka otherwise has. VAZ: In the context of the Yugoslav pop-rock scene, what was it from Sarajevo that had an influence on the rest of Yugoslavia? Can you trace that? GB: I  think it’s more than that. Why did things actually start in Sarajevo? In all other radio stations that had small recording studios, they allowed domestic covers (prepjevi) of foreignlanguage songs. When you look at that period of the 1970s, you will find covers of old songs by Belgrade or Zagreb groups. Take the editorial staff at Radio Sarajevo (I presume Esad Arnautalić was the editor-in-chief at that time); you could not record in the Radio Sarajevo studio if you did not write an original song. The whole secret lies in this. And then, at the same time, suddenly people in Sarajevo started to pay attention to poetry. You had this whole generation of poets, from Duško Trifunović to Rajko [Petrov Nogo] to [Abdulah] Sidran. People came to listen to them in equal numbers as to rock ‘n’ roll. It somehow raised literacy . . . because Duško was the editor of the Entertainment Program at Sarajevo Television, so he did not mind writing texts even for us, giving us his songs to be put to music. Hence everything that is Sarajevo came out of this atmosphere, out of that compulsion. We could not do things like the bands in Belgrade, where Siluete show up and record god knows whose song in the studio; we had to write our own song if we wanted to get into the studio. This is the reason why suddenly authentic music came from Sarajevo. But it’s hard to find some common denominator there. I do not believe that you’ll find anything of Indexi in my work. In terms of music, nobody had any touchpoints with anyone else. VAZ: Can we then talk about the Sarajevo Pop-Rock School, or was it just a scene? GB: I do not see that there was anything that connected things musically. I don’t see some cohesive musical element. Do you see something between Indexi and Bijelo dugme? VAZ: Well, not specifically between Bijelo dugme and Indexi, but the transferal of musical ideas has had an influence, maybe somehow subconsciously. GB: My ideas were directly opposed to everybody over there because I  was interested in the periphery. I was not interested in the city center because I was not from the center of town.

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I was part of the middle class: my father was a military figure and my mum a bookkeeper, and I bear the taste of this class. I didn’t make it up, it didn’t just occur to me one morning to start using folklore. Rather, this was natural. VAZ: I wanted to ask you who was your model for folk motives? In any case someone had to open the door for you . . . GB: I played in a pub (kafana) when I was fifteen years old. VAZ: And you knew about the drmeš and the bećarac [humorous folk song]? GB: When you go through Konjic, at the bus station there is a kafana. I played there when I was fifteen. I played narodnjaci [neofolk music]. VAZ: Regarding your concert at Hajdučka česma in 1977. This concert remains a remarkable event in the history of Yugoslav rock music and, of course, in the career of Bijelo dugme; it is often referred to as the Yugoslav Woodstock. What are your memories of this event in terms of audience, atmosphere, publicity, organization and especially in the context of the growing rock scene in Yugoslavia at that time? GB: From today’s perspective, when I put it in the context of the time in which it happened . . . you know, I still think that rock ‘n’ roll was much more important in the communist world than in the West. Perhaps not as much as a form of music, but as a social phenomenon, it was much more important than rock ‘n’ roll in the West, where you could choose from thousands of possibilities to express yourself. By some miracle, in Yugoslavia, they allowed rock ‘n’ roll, as much as possible. But when you put Hajdučka česma in that context . . . there were so many people there, and I remember afterwards I had some interview at [Belgrade] Studio B, when Marko Janković said to me: “I think now is the moment for us to set off for the Parliament.” That was the time of high [political] temperature. Never after that would rock ‘n’ roll have the same importance. Because even though I wrote better music afterwards compared to the first period (objectively, I  composed much better later on), the social relevance was lesser. Because Bijelo dugme had some kind of social importance, perhaps even greater than the musical one. Therefore, something in that brings an alternative system of values in relation to the official one. I think that was more precious than the music itself, so Hajdučka česma was primarily a manifestation of that need for counterculture at that time. And perhaps the best thing about Bijelo dugme is that it grew out of that counterculture, the subculture of Yugoslav communism. VAZ: Did your singing in the Serbo-Croatian language limit your potential for popularity west of Yugoslavia? Would it have been any different had you sung in English? GB: I was never under the illusion that [Yugoslav music] was something that could be exported. As a young man, for example, I wanted to translate Bob Dylan. But I already knew that poetry was untranslatable – you don’t have world poets, you only have world writers. But poets, who work with a condensed language, in terms of cultural codes – these are untranslatable things. When you translate our best poets, it loses its meaning. When I translated Dylan, it wasn’t that great, because when you omit the cultural code in which a specific language of poetry operates, it doesn’t have the same meaning for me as it does to English speakers, because I don’t have that cultural code. So I was never under the illusion that it was something translatable. As you can see today, the Anglo-Saxon world operates in its milieu. We do not have access to that because these are untranslatable things. My greatest wish was to go to Russia; it was somewhat certain, [that I would go], but there was some damn cultural attaché at the Russian Embassy [in Belgrade], who always gave a negative opinion of us and we never went.

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VAZ: Then I have incorrect information that you went to the Soviet Union, and that you played there . . . GB: Well, I did go once for a concert that was actually cancelled. It was some youth festival, Bajaga played before me, and already after Bajaga they stopped the concert because riots started. VAZ: What were the concerts in the Soviet Union like? GB: Well, like that. VAZ: Riots, ok.  .  .  . Let’s talk about your 1986 album Pljuni i zapjevaj moja Jugoslavijo (Spit and Sing My Yugoslavia), about the political turn with that album, about the fact that you then turned to some prominent figures for artistic and music collaboration, for instance Vice Vukov [Croatian singer] and Mića Popović [Serbian dissident painter and film maker], but also how you learned at this time what censorship meant. What was your initial message with that album in its entirety, and especially with the title song “Pljuni i zapjevaj moja Jugoslavijo?” Do you think that this album is misunderstood today? GB: Well, that was not the first time. . . . Of course, I always knew that I shouldn’t cross that line when real problems start, because it was not worth it for a man to go to jail for that. But, for instance, we initially had a cover for the Bitanga i princeza album (Brute and the Princess, 1979), with a girl who kicks a man in his balls and that cover was never released. The song on the album, “Sve će to mila moja pokriti snijegovi, ruzmarin i šaš” (Snow, Rosemary and Reed Will Cover Everything, My Darling) had the verse “Christ was a bastard and a wretch.” The word “Christ” was simply cut with the scissors [and replaced with “He”]. I never went too far, to go to jail. Tifa, during his early concerts with us, performed in a white marshal’s uniform, and in the second part of the concert he was dressed as a kapo [prisoner functionary] from a Nazi concentration camp. So we always had these little signs. In the song “Pljuni i zapjevaj moja Jugoslavijo,” because war was in the air, somehow I felt a need to step on it perhaps more intensely, so I put those two nationalistic songs together.5 Later I had a Greek version of the song [and] it always sounds natural, that transition from the minor to the major, a chorus in the major into the minor. I like the allegory, when I put these things together and let them fly in the air. “Ružica si bila” (You Were a Rose)] was written for Vice Vukov, who was a banned singer and declared Croatian nationalist. I had a meeting with him when he said: “No one will release this.” I then went to meet the Serbian academic Mića Popović because I wanted to have an album cover by him – I do not know if you know his famous paintings, a series of paintings where there’s a guy laying in the park covered with the official newspaper Politika. He then told me: “Sonny, don’t make any unnecessary problems for yourself, no one will ever print that cover.” So, out of all the things I wanted was a concept for my cover art, to have both the nationalists and the partisans together on one album creating something called music, which, again is a metaphor for man before he learned to speak and started making problems with speech, before he had politics and religion. From all of this, I only managed to persuade a prominent communist Svetozar Vukmanović Tempo to sing the partisan song “Padaj silo i nepravdo” (Fall Down Yee Force and Injustice), accompanied by a children’s choir from the Ljubica Ivezić orphanage in Sarajevo. I liked that I had some small metaphors that flew behind Bijelo dugme, because I thought this was important at the time. That is why I’m talking about rock ‘n’ roll, which, as a social phenomenon, is much more important than the music it produces. VAZ: You say that you felt the war in the air. How did you feel that with the audience? For decades you’ve been playing across Yugoslavia, but I presume that the audience expectations had changed.

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BG: We stopped our last tour. I remember the first two concerts – one was in Sremska Mitrovica [in the Vojvodina province of Serbia], and the next day in Osijek [Croatia]. Bijelo dugme was coming onto the stage in darkness, and we just heard chanting “Serbia, Serbia,” while the next day we only heard the chants “Croatia.” That never existed in concerts before. This tour was tortuous, and I think after ten-to-fifteen concerts it was discontinued. VAZ: Which is your favorite Bijelo dugme album, a favorite song or what stands out as the most special moment in your career? GB: I don’t know, to be quite honest. . . . I’m playing concerts with Bijelo dugme again and every time I wonder: what state was I in when I wrote that? VAZ: Good or bad? GB: Well, I think there are some solid songs, but I can’t at all recall the state I was in when I wrote them, because today I’m in an entirely different mindset. I would never ever be able to write something like that again. It’s from another time that was interrupted by the war, so that my life literally split in two in every respect – before and after the war. But as a composer I no longer have that mechanism that I had before the war. I have such a curiosity towards these songs, like somebody who didn’t write them. I don’t have a relationship with them as something that I wrote. VAZ: Success. You and Bijelo dugme are considered the most successful Yugoslav rock phenomenon, and you were arguably the first ones, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to combine your art with commercial success. Before you, the business of music was not in the foreground, even considering Indexi who did not play for money but when they had [free] time. If you agree with the claim that you were the most successful commercial act, what was it like to reach that stage? GB: Everybody had that intention. You know how it went: you played, and then if nothing came of it, you finished university and got a job. Because most of them actually ended up like that. We were the first ones who could make a living out of it. Not because we were smarter, but it simply worked out like that. We sold more records than everybody else combined. But from this perspective, I think it was logical: the music that I created was governed by my tastes, which were the same tastes of the people who were listening to us. As something completely non-exclusive, aimed as if from a shotgun, a gamble on who it would reach, and it seemed that it reached many. We had huge sales. VAZ: Have you ever made any compromise in order to increase sales? GB: Well, I never had to. I was in my final year of university when I made the first Bijelo dugme record. From then on I never had the need to think about money. I’ve always had the luxury to do things and get paid for them, which I would otherwise do for free, so I never had the need to think about money. But when artists start to think about money, that’s not good, I think. I mean, whether you think about it or not, it makes little difference. Money will either come or not. VAZ: Ranko Rihtman said something similar to me in an interview: “Is there anything nicer, you do a job that you would otherwise do for free, but you get paid for it?” Speaking of Rihtman, the next question relates to film music. I’d say that your breakthrough moment in writing film music was Ranko’s arrangement of your song “Sve će to mila moja pokriti snijegovi, ruzmarin i šaš” (Snow, Rosemary and Reed Will Cover Everything, My Darling), and your subsequent role as a composer for Kusturica’s film Dom za vešanje (Time of the Gypsies). The question is, who or what motivated you to go into the movies and become equally successful in that area?

“What Would You Give to Be in my Place?”  •  253

GB: I was a big star when I made the first movie. Big stars do not do music for movies. There is not enough money, nor enough glory in that. You can only do that for great friendship. I did the Time of the Gypsies out of friendship. For zero money, I think I even paid a lot for studios because there was no budget. That’s how I went into the movies. Later, with my second movie, that already became serious, we signed contracts and made money. Unfortunately, I worked very little with Ranko, he has only done two arrangements for my records. I’d love it if it was more, but it happened that way. My film music has nothing to do with Ranko. VAZ: But he did a good job with the songs he did for you? GB: Of course. Whatever you want to know [regarding composition and arrangement], Ranko already knows an answer. VAZ: To what extent did the openness of Western pop music to the trend of World Music influence you and your career after Bijelo dugme? When did you discover World Music and in what way? GB: Very little was heard in Yugoslavia prior to my record Time of the Gypsies, which was a gold record in ten countries. Prior to that, it was only the album Mysteries of Bulgarian Voices (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares) that had some listeners in exclusive circles. But Balkan music first emerged with Time of the Gypsies. Before that, I know only about the Mysteries of Bulgarian Voices that showed a glimpse of the Balkans, but there was never a curiosity towards the Balkans. I think it was only with Kusturica that a small curiosity about the general Balkan culture emerged (and before that with the writer Ivo Andrić), but we were not attractive for anybody. VAZ: And then you boosted it all, with Iggy Pop, with the Polish singer Kayah, with Sezen Aksu, and through Greeks like George Dalaras. GB: Well, it all had its course, you know what it’s like when things get going . . . VAZ: It spread with all those voices in different countries, and your Balkan music spread in this way. Do you consider yourself responsible for that? BG: I don’t, but that’s how it happened. It’s possible that if it wasn’t me it would’ve been somebody else. I mean, to this day I do not see anybody else from the Balkans who has come up with something special. VAZ: When you listen to foreigners talk about Balkan music, do you think that there is a Balkan stereotyping going on, with odd rhythms, particular harmonies. . . . do you sense that? GB: I would be glad to see that curiosity reach a phase of stereotyping, but I’m afraid we’re far from it. I do not know that there is someone else, except me, who is on that path, with a certain audience all over the world. I do not see anyone else doing it; it would be good if they were, but unfortunately they aren’t. VAZ: And when it comes to Roma “Gypsy” music? BG: I’ve always meddled. My father used to say, you’re not going to be involved in “gypsy business?!” (When you’re involved with music, you are in the gypsy business). I’ve always been surrounded by Gypsies. Bijelo dugme had a custom before our big concerts to have a brass orchestra in the dressing room before we went out on stage. VAZ: Really?! And that raises your adrenaline? GB: Exactly. VAZ: Well, that’s a great idea, I did not know about that. GB: When you look at our last three records, which are the most successful Bijelo dugme records, the song “Lipe cvatu” (Linden Trees Blossoming) – Bijelo dugme doesn’t play that at all but The Orchestra of National Instruments from Skopje; the next one is “Hajdemo u planine” (Let’s Go to the Mountains), only a synthesizer plays with a singer – there is not a single note

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of Bijelo dugme at all; after that “Đurđevdan,” with the Bakija Bakić Orchestra and nobody from Bijelo dugme. So Bijelo dugme was going in that direction already. Over time, it somehow felt that some of my songs were more comfortable in a different ambience, with not just electric guitars. So today, when I play Bijelo dugme with my brass players, for me it’s much more natural than before. VAZ: In your case, I’m interested in how much of a limiting factor that is? Namely, your Orchestra for Weddings and Funerals? GB: Actually, it’s a very diverse Orchestra. For example, my saxophonist is a professor at a music academy, the second trumpet is the first Gypsy to undertake postgraduate studies in trumpet, and the first trumpet is barely literate. Then, my first trombonist has finished studies in trombone and piano, and the other one is almost illiterate. Female singers are from Bulgaria and from across various territories, some from southern Serbia, some from the borderland with Romania. It’s a very colorful world. There is some joy in my Orchestra, there is a joy of playing because of this diversity, because they are all very different musicians. VAZ: The last question is about life. What else is left for Goran Bregović to research, to say, to prove. GB: In terms of success, nothing. This, what is happening to me, it’s a total miracle. Really, it would be arrogant to ask for something else, but . . . I’m writing well right now, I think better than ever. Probably because I worked very little during the communist times, when taxes were c. 90%, I did very little. The entire Bijelo dugme opus has, I think, some 100 songs. Professional composers write that in a year. Because taxes were enormous, I couldn’t be bothered to work. So I only practically started working like all normal people after the war. Translated by Danijela Š. Beard Notes 1. The conversation was conducted on November 29, 2017, by Vesna Andre Zaimović, and is based on questions by the volume editors and the interviewer. 2. A lyrical love song, from Turkish sevda, meaning love. Sevdalinka originated within the urban culture of Bosnian Muslims, and was modernized and widely disseminated by the mass media during the socialist period. 3. A long-necked fretted lute introduced to Bosnia by the Ottoman Turks. 4. Sarajevo’s “old town,” founded in the fifteenth century under the Ottoman rule. 5. This is a reference to two traditional songs, “Lijepa naša domovino” (Our Beautiful Homeland), which Croatia adopted as the national anthem after its independence in the 1990s, and “Tamo daleko” (Over There, Far Away), a well-known WWI song recalling the struggle of Serbian soldiers during the retreat across Albania.

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Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Tomc, Gregor. 2010. “A Tale of Two Subcultures: A Comparative Analysis of Hippie and Punk Subcultures in Slovenia.” In Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, edited by Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. Tvrtković, Ognjen. 1974. “Predstavljamo vam pop grupu ‘Bijelo dugme’.” Džuboks 1: 29. Vasiljević, Maja. 2016. Filmska muzika u SFRJ: Između politike i poetike. Belgrade: HERAedu. Velikonja, Mitja. 2008. Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz. Ljubljana: Mirovni inštitut. Velikonja, Mitja. 2014. “New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Popular Music in Slovenia.” In Post-Yugoslavia: New Cultural and Political Perspectives, edited by Dino Abazović and Mitja Velikonja, 57–95. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vesić, Dušan. 2014. Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu – Bijelo dugme. Belgrade: Laguna. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 1991. “Yuga umire pjevajući.” Večernji list, March 12. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 2008. Moje brazde: Bilješke o hrvatskoj zabavnoj, pop i jazz glazbi. Zagreb: V. B. Z. Vučetić, Radina. 2012a. Koka-kola socijalizam. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Vučetić, Radina. 2012b. “Trubom kroz gvozdenu zavesu – Prodor džeza u socijalističku Jugoslaviju.” Muzikologija 13: 53–77. Vukojević, Branko. 2005. Kako je bio rokenrol (izabrani tekstovi 1975–1991). Edited by Goran Tarlać. Belgrade: Društvo ljubitelja popularne kulture. Vuletic, Dean. 2008. “Generation Number One: Politics and Popular Music in Yugoslavia in the 1950s.” Nationalities Papers 36 (5): 861–79. Vuletic, Dean. 2011. “The Making of a Yugoslav Popular Music Industry.” Popular Music History 6 (3): 269–85.

258  •  Bibliography Vuletic, Dean. 2012. “Sounds Like America: Yugoslavia’s Soft Power in Eastern Europe.” In Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, edited by Peter Romijn, Giles Schott-Smith, and Joes Segal, 116–31. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Žikić, Aleksandar. 1999. Fatalni ringišpil: Hronika beogradskog rokenrola 1959–1979. Belgrade: Geopoetika. Zubak, Marko. 2012. “Pop-Express (1969.−1970): Rock-kultura u političkom omladinskom tisku.” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 44 (1): 23–35. Zubak, Marko. 2018. The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968–1980): Student Movements, Youth Subcultures and Alternative Communist Media. Zagreb: Srednja Europa and Hrvatski institut za povijest.

Filmography Bukovčan, Miljenko, dir. Takvim sjajem može sjati. 2013. Zagreb: HRT1. Television documentary series in seven episodes. Kupres, Radovan, dir. Sav taj folk. 2004. Belgrade: B92. Television documentary in eight parts. Mirković, Igor, dir. Sretno dijete. 2003. Gerilla DV Film and Vizije SFT. Vesić, Dušan, dir. Co-written with Sandra Rančić. Rockovnik. 2011. Belgrade: Radio Television Serbia. Television documentary, forty episodes.

Notes on Contributors

Vesna Andree Zaimović is a Sarajevo-based publicist and radio producer who holds an M.A. in Musicology from the Music Academy of Sarajevo University. In 2000, she took part in the founding of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian national public radio (BH Radio 1), the first broadcasting service for the entire country since the 1992–95 war. As head of BH Radio 1’s Music Program, she led the Bosnian and Herzegovinian team’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest (Istanbul 2004; Kiev 2005). Since 2008, she has been co-editor and project manager of Radiosarajevo.ba, one of the country’s most visited news portals. She has presented at international musicology conferences, and has published a dozen of academic papers, including the entries “BosniaHerzegovina” and “Sarajevo” in  the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Volume 7, 2013). Jelena Arnautović received her Ph.D. in musicology from the Faculty of Musical Arts, University of Belgrade, and is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts in Kosovska Mitrovica, University of Priština. Her research interests center on popular music of the Western Balkans and former Yugoslavia, and in particular on issues of music and identity, intercultural dialogues, and human rights. She has published two monographs: Between Politics and Markets: Popular Music at Radio Belgrade in SFRJ (2012), and Intercultural Dialogues at Music Festivals in Serbia (2017). She has participated in international conferences, including a special project on women in music within Fondazione Adkins Chiti: Donne in Musica, in Fiuggi, Italy (2012). Catherine Baker is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Hull. Her research interests include the cultural politics of nationalism, music, media, and war, especially in the post-Yugoslav region. Her books include Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991 (2010), The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (2015), and Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (2018). She has published research on post-Yugoslav popular music in Nationalities Papers, Popular Communication, Narodna umjetnost, Southeastern Europe and elsewhere. Danijela Š. Beard is a musicologist who works on music and politics in the former Yugoslavia, with an interest in popular and film music, early modernism, and opera. She has published chapters and articles on Josip Slavenski, Yugoslav popular music, and film music, and recently co-edited a special issue on Music and Socialism for the journal Twentieth-Century Music (2019, Cambridge University Press). She is the international reviews editor for the Slovenian journal Muzikološki Zbornik/Musicological Annual, and a convenor of the Study Group for Russian and East European 259

260  •  Notes on Contributors

Music within the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES REEM). Between 2013 and 2015 she was a lecturer in music at Nottingham University, and in 2016–17 an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Musical Research (Royal Holloway, University of London). She is currently an associate lecturer in music at Cardiff University (DCPE). Anita Buhin received her Ph.D. from the History and Civilization Department at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2019), with a dissertation titled “Yugoslav Socialism ‘Flavored with Sea, Flavored with Salt’: The Mediterranneanization of Yugoslav Popular Culture in the 1950s and 1960s under Italian Influence.” She is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, working on popular culture and Yugoslav socialism. Naila Ceribašić is a scholarly advisor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research and Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Zagreb. Her research and publications cover traditional music in Croatia and Southeast Europe, the history and ethnography of public practice of traditional music, festivalization and heritage production, cultural politics, war and post-war social developments, gender aspects of music-making, musical expressions of minority communities, and theories and methods of applied ethnomusicology. Zlatan Delić is a Research Curator at the Museum of Literature and Performing Arts in Sarajevo and a Ph.D. student at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where he is undertaking a dissertation on interwar female writers in Bosnia. He earned his B.A. in Literature and BCS Languages at Tuzla University, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and his M.A. in Gender Studies at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies at the University of Sarajevo. His research interests are literary history, feminist theory, gender and cultural studies, museology, and Bosnian female writers. He has published a monograph titled Turbo-Folk Star: The Construction of Female Subjectivity in the Lyrics/Texts of Lepa Brena, Svetlana Ceca Ražnatović, Severina Vučković and Jelena Karleuša (2013). He is on the editorial board of Patchwork, a magazine for feminist and gender theories, and of Heritage, the Yearbook of the Museum of Literature and Performing Arts. Marija Dumnić Vilotijević is a research associate at the Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2014–15 she was a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Music of the University of Arts, Belgrade, where she received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. Her research interests include music in the Balkans, methodologies in ethnomusicology and popular music studies, applied ethnomusicology, sound archiving, and urban soundscapes. She has published articles in national and international peer-reviewed journals and proceedings. Ana Hofman is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts in Ljubljana. Her research centers on the intersection between memory and music, with particular interest in activism and the social meaning of resistance under socialism, and the current formulations of neoliberalism and postsocialism in the former Yugoslavia. Her publications include two monographs: Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (2011), and Music, Politics, Affect: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (2015). Hofman has been a visiting researcher at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle; the Centre for Southeastern European Studies,

Notes on Contributors  •  261

University of Graz, Austria; and the School of Music, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. During the spring of 2018, she was a post-doctoral Fulbright Fellow at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Branko Kostelnik is a publicist, producer, and multimedia professional. He earned his M.A. in sociology at Ljubljana University and he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at Zagreb University. A  curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Kostelnik has published widely since late 1970s on topics in popular culture and contemporary art. His work includes monographs on rock music, Moj život je novi val (2004), Popkalčr (2011), and Eros, laži i pop-rock pjesme (2011), the rock drama Osječki long, long play (2018), and the coauthored volume, Antologija rock poezije (forthcoming in 2020). He created and organized the multi-media exhibitions Sound & Vision (2006), Rock Photography (2009), and Osamdesete (The Eighties, 2015). He has authored several multimedia publications, and created and appeared in numerous performance art productions, notably with European art guru Ivan Kožarić. He is a founding member of the art rock band Roderick (1983, later Roderick Novy) and the multimedia art project Gorgona Nova (2012). He is the president of the Croatian Society for Research in Popular Music. Ivana Medić is a senior research associate at the Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, where she serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Musicology. She has completed two international projects at the Institute: City Sonic Ecology (2014–17) and Quantum Music (2015–18), and is currently head of the project Identities of Serbian Music within Local and Global Contexts: Traditions, Changes, Challenges. Since 2011, Medić has been a convenor of the REEM Study Group for Russian and Eastern European Music with BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her areas of expertise are post-WWII Soviet/Russian, Balkan and Serbian music, and her publications on these topics include three monographs, four edited books, and numerous articles. Medić holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Manchester and serves as vice president of the Serbian Musicological Society. Iva Nenić is an ethnomusicologist and cultural theorist. She earned her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Belgrade’s University of Arts and is currently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Musical Arts in Belgrade. Her research interests include music and gender, traditional and popular culture, and ideology and identification. She has published widely on these topics, and she regularly collaborates with educational and research institutions at home and abroad. Irena Paulus is a film music scholar who received her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb (2010), with additional coursework in film music at the European Film College, Ebeltoft, Denmark. She has published four books: Music for the Screen: Croatian Film Music from 1942 to 1990 (2002), Brainstorming: Writings on Film Music (2003), Kubrick’s Musical Odyssey (2011), and Theory of Film Music through Theory of Film Sound (2012). A permanent associate of the Croatian National Radio, in 2007 she co-produced the documentary film Conversations on Film and Music for Croatian National TV. Paulus is a tenured teacher at the Franjo Lučić Art School in Velika Gorica, Croatia, and teaches film music at the Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Zagreb). She also lectures at the School of Media Culture (Zagreb).

262  •  Notes on Contributors

Ana Petrov is a sociologist and musicologist who works on the intersection of sociologies of culture and music, and cultural and memory studies, with an emphasis on the politics of memory and nostalgia in the post-Yugoslav context. She is the author of several books, including Yugoslav Music without Yugoslavia: Concerts as Memory Sites (2016), which deals with the reception of Yugoslav popular music after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. She is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Ljerka V. Rasmussen is an ethnomusicologist whose publications include entries on Yugoslavia’s folk-pop music genres in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Volume 11, 2017), the monograph Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia (2002), and essays in the edited volumes Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image and Regional Political Discourse (2007) and Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe (1996). An occasional freelance music writer in the 1980s and 1990s, she contributed a series on American contemporary music and interviews with Louie Bellson (Radio Sarajevo, 1989; 1997), Guy Clark (Radio Slovenia, 1995), and La Monte Young (Zvuk, 1986). Rasmussen is on the Advisory Board of the Nashville-based Music City Review. She holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, Connecticut, and is on the faculty of Tennessee State University, Nashville, Tennessee. Velika Stojkova Serafimovska is associate professor at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University and a researcher at the Institute for Folklore “Marko Cepenkov” in Skopje, Macedonia. She received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University. Her research interests and publications focus on examining transitional processes in Macedonian traditional music and dance from sociological and anthropological perspectives. She has published in regional and international journals, including Bulgarian Musicology (3/2016) and Yearbook of Traditional music (48/2016), and is a facilitator within UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage network. Gregor Tomc is a specialist in social neuroscience. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Faculty of Social Sciences, the University of Ljubljana, where he is an associate professor of the sociology of music, teaching cognitive theories of creativity, religion, and popular music. His work has been published in numerous academic journals and multi-authored volumes, including his 2011 monograph Geni, nevroni & jeziki (Genes, Neurons & Languages). He has been involved in several national research projects since 2000, including leadership roles in The Cultural Industry (2000) and The Competitiveness of Slovenia (2004 and 2006). Tomc was also a founding member of the Slovenian punk group Pankrti (Bastards), with whom he collaborated on five albums between 1977 and 1987 as lyricist and manager. Jelka Vukobratović is a teaching assistant at the Music Academy in Zagreb and a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria. Her research interests include the relationships between music and ethnic identities and the role of professional musicians in local social life. In 2013 she participated in the research project East Central European Communities and Cultures in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, led by Marcia Ostashewski at the University of Cape Breton, Canada. Dean Vuletic is a historian of contemporary Europe at the University of Vienna’s Department of East European History. A Lise Meitner Fellow, he leads the research project “Intervision: Popular Music and Politics in Eastern Europe,” focusing on the Intervision Song Contest. He is the author

Notes on Contributors  •  263

of the first scholarly monograph on the history of Eurovision, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest (Bloomsbury, 2018), produced under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship. Vuletic received his doctoral degree in history from Columbia University with the dissertation Yugoslav Communism and the Power of Popular Music. He regularly comments on the Eurovision Song Contest in the international media, and more information about his work can be found on his website www.deanvuletic.com. Marko Zubak holds a Ph.D. in history from the Central European University in Budapest and is a research associate at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb, where he focuses on popular, alternative, and youth cultures and media under socialism. He has curated several exhibitions and published extensively on these topics, including the recent monograph The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968–1980): Student Movements, Youth Subcultures and Alternative Communist Media (2018). Most recently, he co-edited (with Flora Pitrolo) Disco Heterotopias: Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan). Aleksandar Žikić has been a professional journalist, a music writer, and a practicing musician since 1981. He has written for major newspapers and magazines in the former Yugoslavia (Džuboks, Start, Intervju, Politika, Rock, Studio, Blic, Reporter, and others), radio (Beograd 1, Beograd 202, Radio Politika, City Radio) and television (RTS, TV Politika), and has acted as an editor of leading popular-culture and music magazines, including Džuboks, NON, Ukus nestašnih and Pop Rock. He has written various books, including several monographs on rock music and musicians: The First Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll at Vračar: The Secret of Vračar Triangle (2016), Red Hot Chili Peppers (2007), A Place in the Storm: The Milan Mladenović Story (1999; 2014), Fatal Merry-Go-Round: The Belgrade Rock ‘n’ Roll Chronicles 1959–1979 (1999), and Electrodeo: The Almanac of New American Music (1986). Albums of his two bands, S.T.R.A.H. and the LVC’z were released in 2019/2020. Žikić holds a Master of Divinity degree in Theology (Swedenborgian) at the Academy of the New Church in Bryn Athyn, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Index

1968 (year; impact on popular culture) 175, 176, 188, 189

Balkan(s), the xii, 1, 3, 7, 13, 15, 25, 49, 158, 235, 241; in Macedonia 143 – 144, 148 – 150; music 44, 46, 52, 81 – 82, 99, 106, 108, 123, 133, 135, 138 – 140, 152, 156, 158 – 159, 234, 236, 248, 253; in Slovenia 204 beat (bit) music 62, 67 Bebek, Željko 43 – 44, 115, 220; see also Bijelo dugme Bebi Dol (Dragana Šarić) 21, 101, 171 Bele, Boris 196, 197; see also Buldožer Belgrade rock 59, 61 – 73, 77 – 79, 82 – 86, 103 – 105; see also rock Belgrade Wave, the/ the Belgrade Alternative Scene (BAS) 69 – 72, 77, 194, 201 Beogradski sabor festival 136 Beogradsko proleće festival 16, 17, 125 Bešlić, Halid 138 Bijelo dugme 2, 6 – 7, 36, 39, 42 – 47, 70, 76, 78, 101, 111 – 118, 118n3, 146, 196 – 197, 203 – 204, 220, 248 – 254; Kad bi’ bio bijelo dugme (1974) 76, 78, 112, 116, 118n1; “pastirski rock” (shepherd rock) 43, 111 – 112, 113, 118n1, 196, 246; Pljuni i zapjevaj, moja Jugoslavijo (1986) 114, 185, 251; post-Yugoslav revival and reunion concerts 47, 115 – 118; see also Hajdučka česma concert, the Bitka na Neretvi (The Battle of Neretva) 52, 56n6 Bogdan, Zvonko 124 – 125; see also starogradska muzika Bohn, Chris 72, 77, 191n23 BOOM rock festival 112 Borghesia 198 Borota, Nikola Radovan 39, 42, 112 Brecelj, Marko 81; see also Buldožer

Adamič, Bojan 16, 178 Adorno’s culture industry critique 7, 83, 200 Adriatic, the: coastal culture and zabavna music 13, 25 – 33, 167, 180; Radio brod 9n12; see also Dalmatian pop; Melodije Jadrana Aerodrom 78 Albahari, David 194 Alliance of Yugoslav Socialist Youth, the (SSOJ) 77, 177 – 183, 198, 201, 217, 218; see also Communist Party, the (LCY) Altarac, Želimir Čičak 39 Ambasadori 41, 42, 101, 169, 222 Anastasija 147 Antonijević, Nebojša Anton 72, 83 Arhangel 147 Armenulić, Silvana 137 – 138 Arnautalić, Esad 38, 39, 41, 249 Arnautalić, Ismet 37, 38, 39, 42 Asanović, Tihomir Pop 40, 186 Association of Estrada Workers, the (Udruženje radnika estradnih umetnosti) 128, 135, 208 – 210, 213, 214n9, 214n11 Atomsko sklonište 184, 188 Azra 2, 69, 78, 81 – 82, 113, 118, 203, 204, 222; Sunčana strana ulice (1981) 81 Bachrach-Krištofić, Sanja and Mario Krištofić 78; Istočno od raja project (Jugoton) 86 Bajaga, Momčilo Bajagić 9n9, 118, 220, 227, 251 Bajramović, Šaban 138 Balašević, Đorđe 56, 118, 183 – 185, 189 – 190, 222, 227, 228n9; “Računajte na nas” (1978) 183 – 185, 189, 191n19

264

Index  •  265 Bregović, Goran 1, 9n9, 21, 39, 42 – 43, 47, 190, 196, 203, 248 – 254; Balkan/world music 248, 253 – 254; in Bijelo dugme 42 – 44, 47, 112 – 117, 196, 246 – 252; film music 248, 252 – 253; Orchestra for Weddings and Funerals 115, 248, 254; Roma collaboration 115, 241, 253 – 254; see also Bijelo dugme broadcasting, radio-television 2 – 4, 8n7, 9n12, 15, 17 – 18, 22n3, 4, 5, 6, 27, 32, 37 – 39, 41, 44, 45 – 46, 59, 65, 67, 76, 91, 94, 99 – 104, 108 – 109, 109n6, 121, 125, 126, 133 – 140, 140n3, 144, 146 – 148, 165 – 172, 176 – 177, 186, 188, 198 – 200, 219; humoristic-entertainment programs 17; see also JRT “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo) 17, 26, 112, 152, 158, 176, 195, 218, 239 Brunclik, Zorica 138 Buldožer 70, 78, 81, 196 – 197, 201, 222 canzone (Italian) 13, 15, 26, 29, 51, 241 Carevac, Vlastimir Pavlović 126, 134, 135 Ceca, Svetlana Ražnatović 115 censorship 163, 168, 191n4, 197; in Bijelo dugme 112, 251; self-censorship 80, 197; of turbofolk 148; see also šund Cetinić, Meri 76, 191n17 chanson see šansona Clan 91 class 3, 13,  64, 80, 85, 95, 108, 130, 136, 163, 176, 179, 206 – 215, 227, 250; class mobility in novokomponovana narodna muzika 136, 139, 152, 156; middle-class starogradska associations 121, 123, 127, 130; musicians’ class hierarchy 2 – 3, 130, 133, 209 – 213; working-class kafana associations 133, 135, 212 – 213 Cold War, the 1, 165 – 166, 172, 232 – 242; cultural 32, 59, 97, 163; in the Eurovision Song Contest 165 – 168; global connections in popular music 232 – 242; rhetoric in popular music 163, 181 commercialism: in disco 90 – 91; in zabavna music 13, 15, 19 – 21, 76, 148 – 149, 176 – 183, 186, 188; in new wave 77, 78 – 79, 85 – 86; in neofolk and pop-folk 73, 106, 121, 123, 125 – 127, 130, 133 – 134, 136 – 137, 152; in rock/punk 69, 70, 112, 197, 198, 200 – 203; in revolutionary repertoire 176 – 183, 189

Communist Party, the (LCY): censorship 80, 127, 163, 168, 112, 191n4, 197, 251; critique 6, 107, 108, 114, 194, 228n9; hegemony 1, 16, 166, 168, 175 – 190, 180, 189, 197, 195, 198, 199; on popular culture 16, 163, 166 – 167; repression of punk 199 – 200; on rock/new wave/punk 62 – 63, 77 – 78, 80, 104, 163, 194, 197 – 200, 250; see also Alliance of Yugoslav Socialist Youth, the Crnobrnja, Stanko 94, 103, 109n6 Croatian Spring see Maspok Croatia Records 6, 75, 77, 115, 149; see also Jugoton Crvena jabuka 9n9, 36, 44, 46, 77, 118 cultural capital 5, 6, 41 cultural diplomacy 165, 167, 169, 172, 237, 238 culture industry, pan-Yugoslav 182, 183, 203 ča-val (Istrian pop-rock idiom) 33 Čolić, Zdravko 2, 13, 19 – 22, 36, 41 – 42, 55 – 56, 76, 92, 94, 101, 176, 204, 207, 226; “Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo” (1977) 180 – 183, 191n19, 224 – 226; in Jugoslovenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme 180 – 183, 189; post-Yugoslav career 22, 36, 47, 118 Čolović, Ivan 7, 122 Čutura, Branislav Marušić 62 Dalmatian pop/song 30, 33; dialect 29, 33n8; see also Mediterranean (Adriatic) Dan Mladosti see Youth Day Central Ceremony, the Dedić, Arsen 14, 19, 21, 30, 49 – 56, 177 – 178, 189; social/political critique 49, 53, 55; chanson 49, 51 – 55; film music 49 – 55, 56n2, 56n5 “Devojko mala” (Hey, Little Girl, 1958) 16, 19, 100; Idoli cover 72 diaspora 3, 22, 137, 139, 149, 222, 235, 237, 238 Disciplina kičme 71, 73, 77, 81, 85; Sviđa mi se da ti ne bude prijatno (1983) 81 disco/disko: discotheques and dance competitions 94 – 95; and socialism 90, 95, 97; stylistic variety 21, 91 – 92, 93 – 94; “Yu-disco” 60, 89 – 97, 239; see also class diskografija (recording industry) 2, 59, 75, 76, 82, 190; in Croatia 7, 8n2; rock and new wave 70, 75 – 87; zabavna music 21, 26 Diskos (record label) 136

266  •  Index Diskoton (record label) 41, 78, 136 Divljan, Vladimir Vlada 72, 77 Divlje jagode 92, 220 Dragićević-Šešić Milena 136, 153, 154, 157 Dragojević, Oliver 19, 31, 33, 115, 149, 180, 191n17 Dragović, Doris 76, 115, 222 Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ 7, 70, 71 (Figure 5.4) Dubioza kolektiv 6, 47 Dubrovački trubaduri 32, 167 – 168, 177 Dubrovnik 28 – 30, 32, 208 Dujmić, Rajko 77 Ðakonovski, Dragan Špato 147 – 148 Đogani, Hamit 95 Đorđević, Bora (alias Bora Čorba) 55, 56, 69, 108, 183; see also Riblja čorba Džuboks 7, 65 – 67, 70, 92, 195; critics’ poll 71, 85 economy: free markets 137, 175 – 179, 190 – 191n3, 196 – 197, 207, 212 – 215; gray 19, 95, 206, 207, 213, 214; market reforms 90, 206 – 207, 215n7; see also music labor; music markets Električni orgazam 4, 9n12, 69, 70, 72, 77, 78, 82, 194, 201; Električni orgazam (1981) 72, 77, 81 Elipse 63, 65, 69 Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors 44 – 45, 194, 202 EKV, Ekatarina Velika 4, 9n9, 9n12, 60, 71, 73, 82, 85, 99, 103 – 105, 108; “Par godina za nas” (A Few Years for Us, 1989) 104 – 105 entertainment music see zabavna music ethnonationalism see nationalism ethno-pop 149, 236 estrada (music entertainment industry) 2, 15 – 16, 19, 21, 33, 42, 76, 90, 92 – 94, 97, 121, 128, 133, 135 – 136, 138 – 139, 145, 176, 179, 183, 189, 202 – 203, 208, 210, 213 – 214, 215n8; managers 19, 176; see also Association of Estrada Workers, the Euridika club 65, 68 Eurodance 140, 152 European Broadcasting Union, the (EBU) 165, 166, 167, 172 Europop 153, 170, 171 Eurovision Song Contest, the (ESC) 17, 18, 20, 21, 31 – 32, 39, 41, 42, 77, 92, 146, 163, 165 – 172, 236; cultural diplomacy 165, 169, 172; Intervision Song Contest (ISC) 32, 165,

169; Jugovizija 100, 170 – 171; see also EBU; JRT Exit festival 241 Fejzullahu, Sabri 180 Film 69, 78, 82, 194 – 195, 201, 220; Novo! Novo! Novo! Još samo večeras na filmu a sutra i u vašoj glavi (1981) 81, 197; “Zamisli” (1981) 194 – 195 film, arthouse/black wave: Kad budem mrtav i beo (1967) 100; Ponedjeljak ili utorak (1966) 49, 52 – 53, 55; Nacionalna klasa (1979) 92; Živa istina (1972) 53 – 55 film music 49 – 56, 56n11, 63, 252 folk music 2, 15 – 16, 28, 42 – 43, 75, 102 – 103, 112, 115, 121 – 122, 125 – 126, 135, 180, 199; at the Eurovision Song Contest 168, 170 – 171; fusions with zabavna-pop/disco/ rock 28, 60, 69, 91, 94, 99, 107, 127, 111 – 113, 115, 147 – 149, 152 – 153, 180, 196, 203; izvorna (from the “source”) 3, 133 – 134; modernized /commercialized 2, 52, 69, 93, 99, 106 – 107, 126, 128 – 130, 133 – 139, 163; traditional 121, 123, 138, 143 – 146, 177; at the Youth Day Ceremony 222 – 233; see also novokomponovana narodna muzika folk-pop/pop-folk 3, 41 – 42, 56, 60, 72, 85 – 86, 92, 106, 145, 152 – 153, 156, 160, 170, 179 – 180, 234 – 236, 240 – 241 Furlan, Slavko 78 gender and sexuality 30, 91, 94, 97, 122, 139, 152 – 153, 156 – 159, 183, 212, 234 Gitarijada 37, 64 Glavan, Darko 7, 112, 178 – 179, 182 – 183, 185 – 186, 248 global history in popular music 230, 232 – 233 Gojković, Predrag Cune 139 Gojković, Srđan Gile 72, 81 Golob, Zvonimir 51, 179 – 180; see also Zagreb Chanson School Grand produkcija 160 Grupa 220 70, 76, 179 Hadžimanov, Zafir 18, 146 Hajdučka česma concert, the (1977) 43, 46, 112, 250; see also Bijelo dugme Hari Mata Hari 9n9, 21, 76, 118 Haustor 77 – 78, 82, 194, 201

Index  •  267 Hegedušić, Hrvoje 39, 51; see also Zagreb Chanson School Helidon (record label) 77, 78, 81, 82, 196, 197 Hudelist, Darko 2, 8n5, 203, 204 Huljić, Tonči 77 Idoli 69, 70, 71 (Fig. 5.4), 72, 77, 78, 82, 85, 194, 201, 204; Odbrana i poslednji dani (1982) 72, 85 igranke (dance-entertainment events) 16, 36, 37 Ilić, Mirko 78, 79 – 80 Ilić, Miroslav 2, 138, 158 Ilidža festival 125, 136 Indexi 9n9, 36 – 41, 47, 69, 180, 186, 222, 228n10, 249, 252; experimental song forms 39 – 40; Modra rijeka (1978) concept album 40 International Organization for Radio and Television (OIRT) 166, 167, 172n3 internet and post-Yugoslav online music sharing 6, 96, 116, 117, 234, 241 – 242n7 Iskre 63, 73 Islamović, Alen 44, 114, 115, 116, 158; see also Bijelo dugme Jakšić, Dušan 18, 76 Janković, Kruna 137 Janković, Nenad Nele (alias Nele Karajlić) 9n9, 45 – 46, 85, 196; see also Zabranjeno pušenje; Top lista nadrealista jazz 2, 8n3, 13, 15, 16, 18, 22n3, 22n6, 52, 59, 61, 62, 91, 102, 103, 126, 176, 177, 180, 191n4, 199, 200, 212, 235; and disco 91 – 92; the Jazz Hour radio show (the Voice of America) 147; Macedonian 145, 146 – 148; progressive rockjazz idiom 146 – 147, 186 – 187 Jevremović, Miki 16, 18 Joksimović, Željko 172, 236, 242n10 JRT see Yugoslav Radio Television Jugodisk (record label) 136, 196 Jugoslovenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme (the Yugoslav Festival of Revolutionary and Patriotic Song 177 – 183, 190, 226 Jugoton (record label) 6, 17, 26, 41, 60, 68, 70, 72, 81, 86 – 87, 128, 145, 146, 170, 177; infrastructure and growth 75 – 76; licencing agreements 75, 76; censorship 112 – 113; market competition 127 – 129; new wave 77 – 87, 197; see also diskografija; rock music; zabavna music

Jurin, Nenad 40 Jusić, Đelo 19, 177 – 178 Jusić, Ibrica 56n4, 177 Južni vetar 108, 138, 139 kafana (tavern/pub/drinking joint) venues 121, 134, 153, 208, 212 – 213, 215n4; as cultural institution/ musicians’ training ground 126, 134 – 135, 137 – 138; musicians 107, 126, 133, 134 – 135, 137 – 138, 209, 248; violating musicians’ rights 206, 208, 209 – 213 Kalember, Vlado 158, 222 Kalogjera, Nikica 31, 177 Kamen na kamen 42, 177 kancona (canzona) 15 Karajlić, Nele see Janković, Nenad Nele Karaklajić, Đorđe 127, 134, 135, 226 Karaklajić, Nikola 65, 66, 67, 68 – 69, 99 – 100 Karleuša, Jelena 242n10 Kerber 220, 227 Kerliu, Adrian 91 Katarina II 71, 81 – 82; see also EKV Kekin, Mile 191n22 Kesovija, Tereza 18, 19, 21, 28, 33, 92, 115, 118, 149, 168, 240 KIM band 92 kitsch see šund klapa, vocal singing groups of the Adriatic 13, 33, 33n9, 180 Koja, Dušan Kojić 71, 81, 84 – 85 Koncert za ludi mladi svet 67, 100 – 101 Kontić, Boro 44 – 45 Koraljka Kos 136 Korni grupa 19 – 20, 42, 69, 168, 185 – 188; Poema 1941. (1971) concept album 186 – 189; “Put za istok” (1972) 186, 188 Kosovo/ Kosova xii, 1, 8n1, 28, 169 – 170, 171, 172, 197; 1981 protests 114, 118n4, 169, 226; Albanian language 28, 114, 170; Albanian music 144, 148, 170; “Kosovska” (Kosovo Song, 1984) 114; “Kosovski božuri” (1972) 112; Zdravko Čolić concerts 118 Kostić, Zoran Cane 72, 83 Kovač, Kornelije 19 – 21, 38, 40, 69, 157, 186, 188, 190, 219; see also Korni grupa Kovač, Mišo 19, 31, 33, 76 Kovačević, Slobodan Bodo 37, 38 (Fig. 3.1), 39, 40

268  •  Index Krajač, Ivica 51, 102; see also Zagreb Chanson School Kraljić, Darko 16, 72, 100, 177 Krasavac, Nenad 71, 81 Kremer, Dragan 86, 203 Kršić, Dejan 9n14, 78, 86 KUD (cultural-artistic society) 143 Kusturica, Emir 1, 37, 85, 149, 248, 252; Dom za vešanje (1988) 252; Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell (1981) 37 Laboratorija zvuka 78, 220, 227 Lačni Franz 82 Ladarice 177 Laibach 77, 82, 83 (Fig. 6.2), 106 – 107, 198, 201 League of Yugoslav Communists (LCY) see the Communist Party Leb i sol 146 – 147, 149 Lepa Brena 2, 93 – 94, 101, 121, 138 – 139, 152 – 160, 170, 222, 227, 236; Čačak, Čačak (1982) 153; “Jugoslovenka” (1989) 158 – 159; Mile voli disko (1982) 138, 153, 154; post-war activity 159 – 160; “Sanjam” (1987) 138 – 139, 157; turbo-folk 152, 156, 159 Leskovar, Lado 168, 178 Lisac, Josipa 19, 22, 60, 76, 99, 101 – 103, 108, 118, 149, 177, 186 – 189; Dnevnik jedne ljubavi (1973) 76, 102 Lokice 42, 94 Lojpur, Mile 63 Lošić, Saša Loša 46 Lovšin, Peter 198 Lukić, Lepa 101, 136 – 137; “Od izvora dva putića” (1964) 136 – 137 Luković, Petar 7, 18, 112 Ljubav i moda (1960) 16, 100 Macedonian music 121, 143 – 150; rock/ jazz 146 – 148; folk music revival/ ethnonationalism 148 – 149; “Makedonija” (1973) 146; “Makedonsko devojče” (1964) 145, 150; Yugoslavism 149 – 150 Magazin 21, 33, 76 Majka, Edo 6, 47 Maksimetar 101 Mandić, Oliver 21, 78, 94 Marjanović, Đorđe 13, 16, 18, 21, 61 – 62, 100; fans “djokisti” 18

market socialism 1, 90, 96, 137, 176, 179, 190 – 191n3, 207, 212; and NCFM 121, 135; see also economy Martin, Leo 18 Maspok (Croatian Spring, 1971), 54, 168, 175 – 176, 188 – 189, 190n1, 242n12; effect on Slovenia 198 Mediterranean (Adriatic) 25 – 26, 28 – 33; Dalmatian pop 29; in the Eurovision Song Contest 165, 167, 170 – 171; idiom in zabavna music 26 – 33, 167 – 168; at Melodije Jadrana 29 – 31 Medunjanin, Amira 149 Melodije Jadrana (the Adriatic Melodies) festival 16, 26, 29, 51 Merlin, Dino 9n9, 36, 46, 47, 115, 118, 185 Metikoš, Karlo 101, 102, 103 Mijalkovski, Dragan 146 Milošević, Aleksandra Slađana 92, 93, 94, 101 Milošević, Slobodan 3, 4, 6, 160, 140, 159, 171, 241 Mimica, Vatroslav 49, 52, 53 Mirković, Dragana 138 Miščević, Zoran 63 Mirzino Jato 92, 93 (Figure 7.1) Mitrev, Kire 91 Mitrović, Borislav Buca 65 – 66 Mizar 86, 147 Mladenović, Milan 71, 81 – 82, 84 – 85, 103, see also EKV Mlinarec, Drago 42, 76, 177, 179 – 180; see also Grupa 220 Monteno, Kemal 21, 36, 41 – 42, 46, 101 music journalism 7, 8n5, 65 – 67, 70, 76, 92, 115, 136 music labor 163, 206 – 215; entrepreneurship/privatnici 163, 206, 212 – 213; musicians as workers 206 – 214; see also class; economy; samoupravljanje music market (s) 2, 8n2, 19, 115, 127, 133–136, 138, 140n3, 145, 149, 178, 179, 186, 196 – 197, 200 – 203, 207; illegal distribution in the 1990s 115 music video see television narodna (folk) music 2 – 3, 13, 15, 21, 41, 101, 121 – 123, 133 – 134, 136, 138, 153; (dance) ensembles 143 – 144; narodna-zabavna duality 21, 41, 127; see also folk music

Index  •  269 nationalism/ethnonationalism xii, 1, 3, 158, 171, 176, 188, 190, 195, 197 – 198, 236, 240; anti-nationalist protests/activism 3 – 6, 185, 234; and music 2, 3, 5, 9n11, 47, 69, 72, 85, 107, 108, 114, 117, 127, 139, 140, 143, 147 – 8, 153, 159, 163, 184 – 185, 189, 233, 234, 251; see also race; turbo-folk NCMF see novokomponovana narodna muzika neofolk 2 – 3, 7 – 8, 13, 21, 85, 108, 121 – 122, 133, 136 – 138, 143, 158, 163, 176, 250; hiperprodukcija (neofolk market surplus) 2; see also novokomponovana narodna muzika newly composed folk music (NCFM) see novokomponovana narodna muzika New Partisans 46, 114, 185 New Primitives see Novi primitivci new wave (novi val/novi talas) 4, 5, 7, 44, 59 – 60, 67, 69 – 70, 72, 75 – 87, 113; album cover design 78 – 79; commercial success 78 – 79, 85; critique 194 – 195; and disco 89, 95 – 96; as youth subculture 99, 103, 183, 194, 197, 201; see also rock Nikolić, Sofka 126, 135, 140n1 Non-Aligned movement/non-aligned politics/ nonalignment 1, 32, 61, 165, 166, 167, 169, 180; Middle Eastern connections 236 – 240 No Smoking Orchestra, the see Zabranjeno pušenje nostalgia 6, 87, 116, 123, 139, 179 – 180, 235; and starogradska song 121, 123, 125,128 – 130; see also Yugonostalgia Novak, Gabi 18, 30, 76 Novaković Lola 18, 76, 168 Novković, Đorđe 19, 40, 42, 180, 226 Novi fosili 2, 19, 21, 76, 170 Novi primitivci (New Primitives) 44 – 45, 85, 194, 201, 202 novi val/novi talas see new wave novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music; NCFM) 2, 3, 13, 17, 21, 86, 101, 121 – 123, 128 – 130, 133 – 141, 152 – 153, 156, 158, 170 – 171, 206 – 207, 222, 240; commercial 133 – 134, 136; as counterculture 136; kafana associations 133, 134 – 135, 136, 137, 138; narodna update 133 – 134; nationalism 139; on radio 121, 133 – 135, 136; zabavna-pop fusion 137, 138; see also estrada; pop-folk; turbo-folk Novosel, Marko 30

NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) collective 82, 106 OIRT see International Organization for Radio and Television Omladina festival 19, 183 Opatija Festival, the (1958) 16 – 18, 20, 26 – 29, 33n5, 76, 94, 125, 145, 147, 233 Ottoman legacy 25, 36, 121, 123, 125, 127, 139, 144, 145, 203, 235 – 236, 249, 242n8–10; Middle Eastern connections in popular music 235 – 236; orientalism/exoticism 134, 139, 234, 242n10; see also pop-folk; Turkish influence Paket aranžman 70, 72, 78, 82, 84 (Figure 6.3); Serbo-Croatian cooperation 203 Paldum, Hanka 101 Pankrti 69, 70, 77, 185, 194, 198 – 201, 203, 220; Dolgcajt (1980) 80, 82 – 83, 195; Državni ljubimci (1982) 80, 202 (Fig. 16.1) Paraf 69, 194 Parni valjak 204 Partibrejkers 4, 9n12, 72, 77, 82, 83, 204; Partibrejkers (1985) 83 Partisan: as anti-nationalist stance 114, 188 – 190, 191n22; films 52, 55, 85, 176; legacy in popular music 20, 46, 54, 63, 108, 114, 168, 175 – 190, 180 – 189, 216, 218, 224 – 226, 251; post-Yugoslav revival 191n22; songs 163, 176 – 178, 224, 226, 251; the Youth Day Central Ceremony 216, 222 – 225; see also New Partisans; patriotic songs; revolutionary repertoire Party see the Communist Party “pastirski rock”see Bijelo dugme patriotic songs/music 9n9, 36, 41, 124, 127, 139, 146, 158 – 159, 168, 175 – 190, 224, 233; “patriotic chanson” 179 – 180; postYugoslav recovery 235; see also Jugoslovenski festival revolucionarne i rodoljubne pjesme; revolutionary repertoire; Tito Pečar, Bojan 103 Pejaković, Zlatko 20, 191n17 Pekinška patka 69, 78 Pepel in kri 92, 186 Percl, Ivica 42 Petrović, Boban 91, 97 Petrović, Žarko 16, 126 – 127

270  •  Index PGP RTB (record label) 4, 17, 18, 37, 41, 78, 92, 127, 136, 145, 146, 147, 196, 197, 228n4; censorship 22n6, 197; market competition 127 Pink TV 159 – 160 Plavi orkestar 9n9, 36, 46, 77, 194 Polet magazine 76, 95 politics see popular music and politics Pop Express magazine 76, 178 pop-folk fusion 3, 41, 42, 72, 86, 133, 138 – 140, 160, 170, 234, 235, 236, 240, 242 n10 Pop mašina 69, 70, 73 Popović, Daniel 77, 158, 170 Popović, Davorin 37, 38, 40, 228n10 Popović, Milutin Zahar 146, 153 Popović, Petar 4, 5, 40 – 41, 67, 184 – 185, 197; Džuboks 67 popular music and politics 163, 165 – 172, 175 – 190, 194 – 204, 206 – 215, 218 – 228, 232 – 241 post-Yugoslav: cross-border concerts 118; music scenes 47, 21 – 22, 117, 149 – 150, 204 reconciliation 6, 115 – 118 Pravdić, Vlado 40, 43, 116 Praxis group/philosophers 178 Predin, Zoran 55, 56, 82 prepevi/prepjevi (cover versions) 16, 38, 249 Prljavo kazalište 9n11, 69, 70, 77, 79, 80, 82 – 84, 113, 194, 201; Prljavo kazalište (1979) 83 – 84 Pro Arte 19, 41 Prohaska, Miljenko 52, 103, 177 Proeski, Toše 149 – 150 punk 2, 5, 7, 44, 47, 59, 60, 67, 69 – 70, 72, 75, 79 – 87, 163, 183, 185; alternative institutions 198 – 201; Jugoton 76 – 78; repression/ “Nazi Punk Affair” 199 – 200; in Slovenia 194 – 204; see also rock race: Cold War anti-imperial solidarity 238; ethno-nationalist racialized othering 238 – 239, 242n13; popular music of the “Black Atlantic” in Yugoslavia 238 – 239; see also Cold War, the; Non-Aligned Movement, the Radio Beograd/Belgrade 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22n5–6, 65, 67, 99 – 100, 126, 127, 128, 134, 137, 139, 186; Radio B92 4 Radio Luxembourg 37, 51, 62, 65 Radio Sarajevo 37, 38, 41, 44 – 45, 102, 249 Radio Študent 198, 199 – 200 Radio Television Skopje 144 radne akcije (Voluntary Labor Actions) 63 Rahimovski, Aki 149

Rajin, Momčilo 70, 78, 195 Rambo Amadeus 9n10, 60, 73, 99, 106 – 108 Rani mraz 183 recording industry see diskografija recording labels/studios 196 – 197; see also Diskos; Diskoton; Helidon; Jugodisk; Jugoton; PGP RTB; Suzy; ZKP RTV Ljubljana Redžepova, Esma 145 – 146, 150 Redžić, Fadil 37, 38, 40 Redžić, Zoran 43, 115 revolutionary repertoire 16, 75, 175 – 190, 224 – 226 Riblja čorba 2, 69, 108, 197, 204, 222 Rihtman, Ranko 40, 252 Rimele, Oto 82 Rimtutituki 4, 5 (Fig. 0.1) Ristić, Jovan 67, 99 – 100, 186 Riva 171 Robić, Ivo 18, 28, 30, 56n11, 76, 233, 240 rock music/ rock ‘n’ roll 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 19, 21, 36 – 43, 47, 59 – 73, 90, 96, 99 – 109, 111 – 118, 163, 183, 184; the Belgrade Wave 61 – 73; and communism 59, 61, 62, 69, 77 – 78, 183 – 189; conformity critique 185, 222; counterculture 62, 63, 72, 86, 163, 248; in Macedonia 146 – 147; on radio/programming 22n6, 99; Sarajevo pop-rock 36 – 48; on TV 67, 99 – 109; Zagreb (and regional) new wave 77 – 86; progressive rock-jazz idiom 186 – 187; rock and punk in Slovenia 194 – 203; see also Belgrade Wave, the/ the Belgrade Alternative Scene (BAS); new wave; punk Roma musicians 91, 95, 97, 107, 115, 126, 128, 135, 139, 145 – 146, 148, 150, 209, 212, 239, 241, 248, 253 – 254 romansa song 13, 15, 123, 124, 127 Rundek, Darko 9n12, 77, 82 Runjić, Zdenko 19 Sabor magazine 136 Sacher, Srđan 77 – 78, 82 samoupravljanje (self-managed socialism) 1, 2, 52, 59, 90, 163, 176, 180, 206 – 215; democratic reform socialism 163, 185; late socialism and disco 97; market competition 76, 127; see also class; economy; music labor Sanremo Italian Song Festival 17, 26, 61, 166, 167 Sarajevo pop-rock scene 14, 36 – 48, 249; see also rock Savić, Massimo 56, 118 self-managed socialism see samoupravljanje

Index  •  271 Sepe, Majda 18 Serbo-Croatian language 5, 7, 8n7, 13, 16, 38, 49, 114, 196, 202, 204, 233, 250; hegemony 147, 170, 195, 197, 201, 203 – 204; popular culture 5, 16, 195, 202, 231 sevdalinka song 102 – 103, 123, 124, 126, 203, 234, 249 seven/eight (7/8) meter 69, 124, 139, 144, 146; the Tavitjan Brothers 148 – 149 Severina, Kojić 33 SFRJ (Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia) see Yugoslavia Shehu, Bashkim 219, 222 “shepherd rock” see “pastirski rock” Siluete 63, 66 (Fig. 5. 2), 73, 249 Simjanović, Zoran 63, 92 Skadarlija see starogradska muzika SKC (Student Cultural Center, Belgrade) 70 Slabinac, Krunoslav “Kićo” 18, 76, 222 Sloga (club) 37, 45 socialism see samoupravljanje “socialist pop”/soc-pop (socialist popular music) 168, 175 – 177, 181, 185, 189, 190 SOKOJ (The Union of Composers’ Associations of Yugoslavia) 8n5 Soviet Union 1, 61, 90; cultural exchange/ touring 18, 21, 250 – 251 Spirova, Nina 145 Split Festival, the see Melodije Jadrana starogradska muzika (old urban music) 13, 121, 123 – 130, 130n1–2, 145; marketing 123, 126 – 128; nostalgia 123, 128 – 130; at Skadarlija 123, 126, 128 – 130 state rock see soc-pop Stefanović, Dragan S. 40, 78 Stefanović, Margita 81 – 82, 103, 104, 105 Stefanovski, Vlatko 147, 149 Stojaković, Jadranka 36, 42, 101 Stublić, Jura 81, 195 subculture 7, 86, 89, 183, 194 – 195, 198, 201, 204 Sučić, Davor Sula 45, 46; see also Top lista nadrealista; Zabranjeno pušenje Suljaković, Šemsa 108, 138 – 139 Suzy (record label) 77, 78, 83 – 84, 196 S vremena na vreme 69 šansona (domestic chanson) 15, 19, 49, 51 – 55, 179 – 180; see also Dedić, Arsen; Zagreb Chanson School šansonjer (chanson singer-songwriter) 19, 49, 51, 55, 56n4, 177 Šaper, Srđan 72, 77

Šarlo akrobata 69, 70, 71, 73, 77, 78, 82, 103, 194, 201; Bistriji ili tuplji čovek biva kad . . . (1981) 70 – 71, 84 – 85 Šerfezi, Ivica 18, 76, 233 Šerifović, Marija 172 šlager (pop hit) 15, 21, 37, 39, 41, 51, 55, 61, 71; critique 51, 178–179; disco šlager 92; in films 56n11; folk-šlager 138; on Radio Sarajevo 44; revolutionary šlager 180 – 182; about Tito 186, 191n17 Špišić, Zvonimir 51, 56n3; see also Zagreb Chanson School Študentski kulturni centar/ ŠKUC (The Student Cultural Center) 198 – 200 Štulić, Branimir 81, 203, 222 šund (kitsch) 13, 21, 136, 140n4, 222; Komisija za šund (“The Šund Committee”) 191n4 tamburitza see starogradska muzika Tanodi, Zlatko 222, 227 Tavitjan Brothers 148 – 149 television 17, 27, 45, 50, 76, 99 – 100, 109n2, 160, 165 – 173; music video 99 –109, 186 – 189; shows 44, 59, 92, 93, 94 Termiti 69, 194 Teška industrija 101 Thompson, Marko Perković 3, 233 Time 69, 76, 146; see also Dado Topić Tito, Josip Broz 1, 6, 126, 146, 166, 188, 190, 236, 237, 239; critique/mockery 61, 72, 107, 108, 218, 221, 227n12; cult of personality 69, 100, 107, 158, 168, 169, 176, 180 – 184, 186 – 188, 190, 191n17, 194, 218 – 228; death and aftermath (crisis) in popular music 69, 77, 80, 113, 152, 158, 163, 169 – 170, 175, 184, 190, 191n17, 194, 218 – 228; on folk music 143; see also “brotherhood and unity”; Youth Day Central Ceremony, the Tito-Stalin split (1948), effect on popular culture 1, 61, 90, 165, 166, 237 Tomc, Gregor 80, 185; see also Pankrti Topić, Dado 20, 92, 146, 220; in Korni grupa 69, 186 – 189, 191n17 Top lista nadrealista (The Top List of Surrealists) 44, 45 (Fig. 3.2) tourism: the Eurovision Song Contest 165, 167, 170 – 171; Exit festival 241; Lepa Brena’s videos 156; and Melodije Jadrana 29, 31; migrant workers-musicians 214n12, 237; and starogradska muzika 130 Tucaković, Marina 21, 42, 92, 242n10

272  •  Index Tuđman, Franjo 6, 171; and Croatian separatism at the Eurovision Song Contest 171 turbo-folk 3, 72, 106, 108, 121, 133, 139 – 140, 148 – 149, 152, 156, 159, 163, 171, 203 – 204, 234, 241 Turkish influence in Macedonian folk music 124, 144, 145, 148, 236, 254n2; see also Ottoman legacy Tutić, Zrinko 77 Udruženje radnika estradnih umetnosti see Association of Estrada Workers, the Ukraden, Neda 41, 42, 76, 92, 101, 112, 177, 180, 191n17 Vaš šlager sezone (Your Schlager of the Season, 1967) festival 16, 20, 41 – 42 Vatreni poljubac 40 Vdović, Ivan 71, 84, 105 Veletanlić, Bisera 191n17 Vesić, Dušan 42, 113, 115 Videosex 198 Vidmar, Igor 199 VIS (vokalno-instrumentalni sastavi) vocalinstrumental ensembles 37 Vojčić, Mladen Tifa 44, 46, 115, 117, 227, 251; see also Bijelo dugme Vrdoljak, Dražen 7, 26, 111, 112, 118n1, 191n8, 248 Vučković, Zdenka 30, 232 – 233; “Mala djevojčica (Tata, kupi mi auto)” 233 Vukov, Vice 18, 76, 167, 168, 242n12, 251 wars of secession 1, 3, 8n1, 36, 46, 234; in the Eurovision Song Contest 171 – 172; and popular musicians 108, 114 – 115, 159, 163, 185, 190, 241; post-conflict resolution 118, 172; and turbo-folk 3, 152, 159, 163 world music 145, 148 – 149, 240 – 241, 248, 253 X Factor Adria 7, 149 youth: and the Communist Party 175, 176 – 183, 185 – 186, 189 – 190, 194 – 204, 218 – 227; generational conflict 183 – 184, 190; see also Alliance of Yugoslav Socialist Youth, the Yugonostalgia 6, 22, 33, 116 – 118, 191n22, 235

Yugoslavia: disintegration 8n1, 36, 114, 166, 170 – 172, 216, 221 – 227; East-West mediator see Cold War, the; see also socialism Yugoslavism 4 – 6, 114, 175, 184; networking through folk music 143 – 144, 158 – 160; New Partisan values 46, 114, 185 Yugoslav Radio Television (JRT) 3, 8n7, 17, 22n4, 27 – 28, 33n2, 33n5, 45 – 46, 67, 99, 109n2, 140n3, 177, 195; in the Eurovision Song Contest 165 – 172, 172n1 Youth Day Central Ceremony, the (Dan mladosti/Štafeta mladosti) 100, 182, 218 – 228; popular music debates 220 – 222 Yu Grupa 62, 63, 69, 112, 186 Yutel TV station 3; “Yutel za mir” (Yutel for Peace) concert 3, 4 zabavna music festivals 15 – 21, 25 – 33, 39, 41, 76, 100, 102, 178; infrastructure for popular music market 166 – 167, 176; see also Melodije Jadrana; Opatija Festival, the; Zagreb Festival, the zabavna muzika/glazba 2, 3, 7, 8, 8n3, 9n11, 13 – 42, 49 – 56, 121, 146; institutional infrastructure 15, 26, 41, 90; stylistic variety and genre fusion 15, 21, 70, 92, 100, 127, 147 – 149, 176 – 183; monopoly 19, 21, 76, 176; diskografija 21; post-Yugoslav revival 21 – 22, 33; idiom (zabavna-pop) 30 – 31, 38, 39, 42, 51; estrada 178 – 179, 183; “circuit listening” and global history 233 zabavna-pop see zabavna muzika/glazba Zabranjeno pušenje 36, 44 – 45, 194, 202; Das ist Walter (1984) 44, 85; war-time division 46, 85 Zagreb Chanson School 19, 49, 51, 56n4, 179 Zagreb Festival, the (Zagrebački festival ) 16, 26, 51, 167, 178 Zagreb Music Biennale, the 52, 76, 87 Zana, Nimani 21, 78, 101 Zdravković, Toma 128 ZKP RTV Ljubljana (record label) 80, 91, 196 Zlatni dečaci 65, 67 – 68 Zmijanac, Vesna 138 Zubović, Anica 18, 76 Zvezde Granda 7, 149, 160