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Abstract
As “music of commitment,” in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important purpose of providing a popular-cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of Yugoslav society. The three “music movements” that embodied the new rock’n’roll spirit – New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans – used rock music to critique the country's “new socialist culture,” with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This paper examines the New Partisans as the most radical expression of music of commitment through the works of its most important rock bands: Bijelo dugme, Plavi orkestar, and Merlin. The paper's argument is that the New Partisans' socio-cultural engagement, animated by advocacy of Yugoslavism, was a counter-logic to the nationalist dissolution of a distinctly Yugoslav fabric of a socialist community in crisis. Thus, the movement's revolutionary “spirit of reconstruction” permeating its “poetics of the patriotic” was a mechanism of socio-cultural resistance to political, cultural and moral-ethical de-Yugoslavization of Yugoslav society. Its ultimate objective was to make the case that the only way into the future – if there was to be any – rested on strategic reanimation of the Partisan revolutionary past as the only viable socio-cultural foundation of the Yugoslav socialist community.
Notes
The mid- to late 1970s was a time of popular-cultural revolution in Yugoslavia. Inspired largely by the British punk music revolution of the mid-1970s, its essence was the “substantive turn” of Yugoslav rock music – i.e. the radical transformation of rock’n’roll from a cultural form that understood its essence as a particular performative style to a cultural expression that was animated by a clearly defined normative substance. Before the substantive turn the cultural significance of rock music in Yugoslavia was assessed in terms of its ability to approximate, as faithfully as possible, the style and standards of Western rock’n’roll performance; after the substantive turn the cultural importance of Yugoslav rock music was assessed in terms of its ability to engage meaningfully with the realities of life in Yugoslav society and to communicate meaningfully to its audience. The end-effect of this revolutionization of rock music was its recasting as a form of socio-cultural praxis – that is, as a purposeful and meaningful artistic undertaking grounded in serious artistic dedication to society and responsibility to audiences.
For Sartre, foundational to “literature of commitment” (litérature engagée) is the notion of artistic engagement based on artists' serious responsibility to society. The literature of commitment is thus predicated on the artist adapting freely made choices to socially useful ends, and defining himself by consciously engaging in willed action. In this context, “engaged art” is a freely chosen artistic endeavor predicated on commitment to society and responsibility to audience. Its ultimate objective is social usefulness rather than artistic self-involvement. In Sartre's view, “art of commitment” is the polar opposite of bourgeois art for art's sake.
Broadly, the history of Yugoslav rock music can be divided into four phases: first from the mid-1950s to the mid- to late 1960s; second from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s; third from the early 1970s until 1977; and fourth from 1977 until the late 1980s. In the first phase, rock’n’roll in Yugoslavia is a relatively marginal phenomenon tied to a few larger urban settings with a non-existent rock’n’roll industry. Rock music's public visibility during this period is confined to weekend dance parties where the local acts use a primarily “reproductive approach” in an attempt to emulate as closely as possible the new rock’n’roll style and sound coming from the West (see Žikić; Vuletic 863–65). The second phase marks the beginning of Yugoslav rock’n’roll making first significant inroads towards full-fledged socio-cultural legitimation and institutionalization. The most significant developments of this phase are the rise of the first professional rock bands (such as Korni Grupa and Indexi) and an all-around technological, performative and stylistic professionalization of rock’n’roll – i.e. access to better instruments, a more serious approach to music, and better playing; a more defined sense of style and target audience; and gradual transformation of weekend dance parties into the first rock’n’roll concerts. These are coupled with two important infrastructural developments – the rising recording industry and increasingly rock-accepting (if not necessarily rock-friendly) media outlets – which secured the presence and visibility of rock music under Yugoslavia's socio-cultural sky. The third phase is hallmarked by the rise and establishment of Bijelo dugme, Yugoslavia's most important rock’n’roll band, and Buldožer, the country's most important alternative rock band. The significance of Bijelo dugme and its leader Goran Bregović lies in introducing the first viable form of fully professional and authentically domestic rock music within Yugoslavia's cultural landscape, and in transforming it from a marginal socio-cultural phenomenon to a central popular-cultural referent of Yugoslav youth culture (see Vukojević, “Dobrodošli u osamdesete”). The significance of Buldožer, on the other hand, rests in its being the very first Yugoslav incarnation of “rock’n’roll underground” and in introducing the new approach to music, performance and image previously unknown to (or not experienced by) the local rock’n’roll audience (see Glavan). Together, the two bands represent the most important foundations and precursors to the new rock sensibility inaugurated in the fourth phase. The beginning of the fourth phase is marked by the formation of the first punk scene in Slovenia in 1977, followed by the subsequent development throughout the 1980s of the three most important music movements: New Wave, New Primitives and New Partisans. Essential for this phase is the emergence of a new and distinct rock sensibility, coupled with a new type of poetics oriented towards communication that is meaningful, truthful, and oriented towards the real, the present, and the immediate. Effectively, the fourth phase is the period of revolutionary transformation of Yugoslav rock music and its substantive turn (for a cursory overview of the history of Yugoslav rock music, see Ramet, Balkan Babel 127–49; see also Ramet, Rocking the State 103–39).
I use “music movement” to denote several important aspects of Yugoslav rock music and its relationship to the Yugoslav socialist community: (1) the centrality of music as a cultural resource of socio-political empowerment; (2) the intentionality of using music to a strategic socio-political end; and (3) the fundamentally constructive relationship between Yugoslav “rock forces” and official society. Thus music movement is meant to encapsulate conceptually the strategic importance of rock music as an engaged popular-cultural force in the struggle for the affirmation and realization of (the ideal of) the Yugoslav socialist community. Moreover, it is meant to convey that the utopian imaginary which fueled the socio-cultural engagement through rock music had its source within Yugoslav society itself rather than in some form of imported, or external, socio-cultural transcendence of the existing.
Of the three music movements, New Partisans has the most problematic status in terms of ex-Yugoslav cultural memory. The invisibility of its mid- to late 1980s socio-cultural existence is overwhelmingly a consequence of an extensive cultural revisionism throughout the region in the 1990s, whose strategic objective was to reconstruct the cultural histories of emerging post-Yugoslav societies according to the demands of new post-socialist nationalist ideologies. Nevertheless, the traces of New Partisans' popular-cultural legacy can be found in the works of Slovenian rock band Zaklonišće prepeva and, in particular, their 1998 album Novo vreme – stare dileme (see Stankovič 107–09). More recently, in his review of the 2009 record Muzej revolucije by Sarajevo's Zabranjeno pušenje, Amir Misirlić observes that “this is a revolutionary album that speaks against the spirit of new times, and I would call it a some sort of ‘new partisanism’” (see “Amir Misirlić”).
New Wave's “poetics of the real” thus addressed the problem of youth's invisibility in Yugoslav society as a meaningful social agency in the context of the country's “new socialist culture,” while New Primitives' “poetics of the local” focused on the dominant culture's hypocrisy of privileging non-local cultural experiences as the national cultural foundation. Finally, New Partisans' “poetics of the patriotic” dealt with the dominant culture's nationalist turn and the dissipation of the foundational social and political values of the revolutionary past. The basis for all three variants of the “poetics of the present” was a radically new mode of expression whose central preoccupation was a direct and unmediated reflection on the here-and-now of one's social experience and one's existence in the world, and whose mode of expression was a language that was straightforward, honest and devoid of unnecessary stylistic and rhetorical adornments.
The 1980s was a decade of gradual political, economic and cultural unraveling of the Yugoslav state, bolstered by increasingly complex ethnic tensions and conflicts. Of particular importance for contextualizing New Partisans' poetics of the patriotic are (1) the unrest in Kosovo which began in March 1981 and continued throughout the decade, intensifying in the second half of the 1980s; (2) the 1984 public debate about the status of the Yugoslav anthem, part of which was an open call for a new national song; (3) the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, released in September of 1986, that became a rallying point for Serb nationalists; (4) the rise to power of nationalist leaders Slobodan Milošević (in 1987 as the new leader of the Communist League of Serbia), Franjo Tuđman (in 1989 as the founder of the HDZ), and Alija Izetbegović (in Citation1990 as the founder of the SDA); and (5) the dissolution of the Communist League of Yugoslavia at its 14th Congress held in January Citation1990. There is a voluminous literature detailing and analyzing events leading to the break-up of Yugoslavia (see, for example, Crnobrnja). Bregović's song “Kosovska” from Bijelo dugme's 1983 record Uspavanka za Radmilu M. was a reaction to increasingly tense Serbo-Albanian relations in Kosovo, while the 1984 rendition of “Hey, Slavs” from the band's eponymous release was Bregović's reply to the public debate regarding the national anthem. In the same vein, the “Yugo-centric” orientation of Bijelo dugme's 1984 record and Plavi orkestar's 1985 release Soldatski bal were artistic antipodes to de-Yugoslavization of the country's political and socio-cultural fabric, while the 1986 records Pljuni i zapjevaj moja Jugoslavjio (by Bijelo dugme), Smrt Fašizmu! (by Plavi orkestar) and Teško meni sa tobom, a još teže bez tebe (by Merlin) all confronted the rising tide of ethno-nationalism of the pre- and post-Memorandum period. Finally, Bijelo dugme's Ćiribiribela, released in 1988, was a meditation on the “nationalist deluge” of the late 1980s, symbolically anticipating the drowning of the official political incarnation of the Yugoslav idea at the decade's close.
Until the early 1980s, the cultural milieu of Sarajevo was, for all practical purposes, the great unknown within the socio-cultural fabric of Yugoslav society. While Belgrade and Zagreb, as the two principal socio-cultural centers, had their cultural stamps firmly imprinted in just about any region of the country, Sarajevo's image was that of a “dark vilayet” (vilayet is an Arabic-derived word for one of the chief administrative divisions in Turkey that, in a Bosnian context, refers to an administrative province within the Ottoman Empire) – i.e. the place from which, with a few notable exceptions, nothing culturally significant ever comes. If Sarajevo was known to the outside world it was primarily through “the jokes about Mujo and Haso, the aroma of ćevapi, and the sound of Bijelo dugme” (see Todorović 26). At the root of the city's cultural invisibility was Sarajevo's core–periphery relationship with the country's principal cultural metropoles, the source of which was the cultural inferiority complex ingrained in the collective mind of the local official cultural authorities. Compared to the cultural output of Zagreb and Belgrade, Sarajevo's cultural offerings were perceived as not sophisticated enough and lacking the luster of “veritable culture.” In other words, they were seen as “primitive” and therefore as something that ought to be either hidden from Yugoslav cultural eyes or re-specified so as to conform to the officially accepted and recognized cultural mould. Not only were Sarajevo's cultural realities taken as the sources of uncomfortable cultural inferiority, but the language itself (i.e. the way Sarajevans communicated in their daily lives) was considered a cultural anomaly to be rectified through aggressive linguistic interventionism by the local cultural authorities (see Zildžo in Sarajevski New Primitivs 24). The consequence of the linguistic and, more broadly, cultural purges within the Sarajevo milieu was a cultural double life which relegated the authentic in the local socio-cultural universe to the sphere of dark peripherality while elevating the inauthentic(ally forced) to the status of the city's illuminating culturability. The ultimate message was that the way one is is not the way one ought to be, and that, in order to be, one needs to alter who (and where) one is. Hence the image of Sarajevo as the dark vilayet. Not only was this the image through which the country – if it was noticing it at all – framed its regard for Sarajevo's socio-cultural milieu, but also the prism that filtered the latter's regard of itself. It was only with Emir Kusturica's unabashed embrace of Sarajevo's “cultural peculiarity” as the source of artistic inspiration and expression for his internationally acclaimed 1981 directorial debut Sjećaš li se, Dolly Bell that the city's linguistic, cultural, and sociographic distinctiveness was transformed from a source of discomfort and shame into a source of pride and affirmation of local individual and collective identities (on Kusturica's “artistic localism” see Aleksić). Kusturica's film and the subsequent cultural affirmation of the New Primitives' poetics of the local mark the awakening of Sarajevo's new socio-cultural conscience and the forging of the city's new socio-cultural relationship to the rest of the country.
For Abdulah Sidran this is “trans-historical Sarajevo” as a “metaphysical congregation of the local Balkan collective destinies, traditions, cultures, emotions and mentalities” (in Joković 38).
The first organized attempt to reintroduce “partisanism” occurred in the fall of 1972 under the slogan of “nicely fitting Partisan jacket” (lijepo stoji partizanska bluza). The overall intent of the action was to resist the destructive influence of “imperialism” (i.e. cultural Westernization of Yugoslav society) and an appeal for a return to the true moral values of Yugoslav society. The operation had two fronts of action – music and fashion – and was, as one of the high officials of the Yugoslav Peoples' Army put it, a “happy marriage of Partisan spirit and attire.” The musical front had the task of invoking the spirit of true moral values by offering songs that celebrated the heroic Partisan legacy and values of the World War II Partisan liberation struggle, while the fashion front had the function of recreating the Partisan revolutionary spirit by (re)introducing revolutionary “designer clothes.” Thus, the overall aim was to arm Yugoslav youth with an appropriate spirit and appropriate style and, in doing so, invoke a sense of proper and authentic moral/ideological disposition. Despite these best intentions, however, the “nicely fitting Partisan jacket” action was a short-lived, one season, effort: “buttressed with pomp and revolutionary slogans, the action failed at the most important level – that of the market. The clothes were piling up in the warehouses of Kluz [one of Yugoslavia's biggest clothing manufacturers and retailers], while the unscrupulous youth kept on wearing the menacing jeans with ‘Made in USA’ tags” (see Luković, “Boris Bizetić” 255). The crucial difference between the “nicely fit Partisan jacket” action and the praxis of New Partisans was that the former was animated “from above” while the latter welled up “from below.”
For a detailed account of the history of Sarajevo and a discussion of the city's complex multinational fabric, see Donia.
Also important is the fact that Bijelo dugme, Plavi orkestar, and Merlin were the first bands to openly advocate Yugoslavism through their music and that the outpouring of Yugo-sentimentality by a number of artists and bands in the late 1980s gained prominence only after New Partisans' poetics of the patriotic met with commercial success.
All English translations are by the author.
The term “New Partisans” is Bregović's coinage first mentioned in an interview with Dušan Vesić (see Vesić).
Reflecting on the importance of Bregović's engagement, Krstić (15) writes:
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If one were to put it bombastically, one could say that with “Kosovska” the Yugoslav rock’n’roll revolution penetrates all regions of Yugoslavia and that ought to generate – even if Bregović is unaware of what he is working on – significant consequences. On the plane of daily politics, he has done more against the counter-revolution in Kosovo with this song than all other political forums with their sloganly conclusions. Not to mention that Bregović made a million people for the first time ever sing in a language of one of our peoples and of the nationality they effectively do not understand. One now only needs to wait for some sort of rock’n’roll scene to emerge in Albania itself, which is something that today appears inevitable.
To that end, Muharem states (in Bašić and Maleš 23) that “we insist on using unpopular forms, and a form of revolutionary music is completely thrown into obscurity.”
As Lošić puts it: “I simply cannot stand primitive forms any more. It is not an escape from rock or folk-rock, but to me rock somehow appears to be an untouching music – sterile so even homemakers listen to it. However, some sort of folk has remained as some kind of an inheritance, some sort of a spirit […]” (see Miletić, “Povratak u izloge”).
A reference to Yugoslavia's pre-World War II monarch who, at the first sign of Hitler's attack on the county, fled abroad.
The same method is used by, say, US army recruits.
The characters of a highly popular Partisan comic strip.
