Popular Music and Political Change in Post-Tuđman Croatia: ‘It's All the Same, Only He's Not Here’?

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to Dejan Jović and Christopher Lamont, the convenors of the workshop ‘Croatia: Dealing with Consequences of Conflicts and Authoritarianisms’ (Centre for European Neighbourhood Studies, University of Stirling, 27 February 2009), and to all the workshop participants for comments on an earlier version of this contribution.

Notes

¹The tamburica is a stringed folk instrument from Slavonia. As Zlatni dukati, Najbolji hrvatski tamburaši (translates to ‘The best Croatian tamburica-players’) had been at the forefront of its revival in popular music during the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s (Bonifačić1998).

²Indeed, it provided the Serbian composer–lyricist Dragan Brajović and the Skopje-born, Belgrade-based singer Tijana Todevska-Dapčević with the idea for a satirical pop single in 2005 which mocked the stereotypes and insecurities of each post-Yugoslav country. The song's Croatians were chiefly famous for marrying themselves off to Europe while listening to ‘narodnjaci’—pop-folk songs—‘as if we're Turks’, implying that Croatians were undermining their own myth of belonging to a European rather than an Ottoman cultural milieu (see Mikić2006).

³The Idol franchise started in the United Kingdom as a television show, Pop Idol, based on a music talent contest.

⁴The festivals, entertainment events which were hosted in touristically or politically significant towns, and which often ran for several evenings, were extremely characteristic of the 1990s pop industry. They had also been a Yugoslav practice and endured in the successor states, although after the break-up of Yugoslavia each new state's pop festivals showcased performers from that particular state. Some became more transnational after 2000, particularly the Montenegrin festivals in Budva and Herceg Novi.

⁵In later series, the programme's celebration of traditional culture's relevance in the contemporary world also included a display of folk costumes. Lijepom našom was not developed solely within the entertainment department but by one of its presenters, Branko Uvodić, and the political marketing expert and former fashion designer Rikard Gumzej, who was working as a special adviser to Ivica Mudrinić, the head of Hrvatska radio-televizija (HRT, Croatian Radio-Television, the parent organisation of HTV) (Cigoj 1997).

⁶ Strictly Come Dancing (Dancing with the Stars in the USA) is an entertainment format where celebrities are partnered with a professional dancer to compete in ballroom and Latin dancing. Just The Two of Us adapts the format to singing so that the competing pairs contain a non-singing celebrity and a professional pop singer.

⁷CMC, ‘O nama’, available at: http://www.cmc.com.hr/index.php?page=onama, accessed 3 June 2009.

⁸Adriatic Kabel subsequently amalgamated with its rival DCM to form B.net, Croatia's dominant cable operator at the time of writing. In June 2009, B.net's packages included channels from all the ex-Yugoslav states except Kosovo under the rubric of ‘regional channels’ (OBN and TV Pink BH from Bosnia & Herzegovina plus Slovenija 2 and Kanal A from Slovenia in the basic package of channels; TVCG from Montenegro and RTS from Serbia, as well as FTV from Bosnia, in the extended package). In Zagreb, its standard music channels were MTV Adria (the ex-Yugoslav MTV franchise), CMC, VH1 (a US pop channel), with an extra music package adding more MTV channels, Viva (German pop) and DM Sat. This last, B.net's own website stated, provided ‘a varied mix of musical genres with an emphasis on turbofolk and “zabavna”[pop] music’ (http://www.bnet.hr/cro/televizija/dm_sat). Subscribers to B.net's extended package also had access to Balkanika Music TV, which broadcast videos from all the ex-Yugoslav states (although had no separate entry for Kosovo), Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Turkey. B.net, ‘Ponuda programa’, available at: http://www.bnet.hr/cro/televizija/ponuda_programa/(region)/zg, accessed 3 June 2009.

⁹ Jutarnji list, 3 February 2006.

¹⁰Other national stations contained blocks of music programming; Zlatko Turkalj, an editor-presenter at Hrvatski radio (Croatian Radio), was particularly well known for his support of ‘domestic’ music. Hrvačić also owned another national station which played foreign (English-language) music, Otvoreni radio (Open Radio).

¹¹HRF had first been broadcast on a network of local channels and then moved to Nova TV, so did not depend on HTV.

¹²See http://www.yu4you.com/trazi.php?terms=City+records&lang=sr, accessed 3 June 2009.

¹³Ripping is a reference to the process of copying musical or video content from the internet without payment.

¹⁴Gotovina and Norac were Croatian generals who had both been indicted for war crimes and fled from justice. Gotovina was indicted in July 2001 for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war committed during Operation Oluja (Storm) in August 1995, the Croatian Army's final offensive against the Croatian Serbs. He remained at large until December 2005, when he was arrested in Tenerife. Mirko Norac spent 16 days on the run from a Croatian arrest warrant in February 2001 and was indicted the next month with four other men on charges of murder in the Gospić pocket in October 1991. Norac was convicted by a Croatian court in March 2003 and, in 2004, further indicted by the ICTY for crimes committed in the Medak pocket in 1993. The case was transferred to Croatian jurisdiction and he was convicted on this indictment in May 2008 for failing to stop his soldiers killing and torturing Serbs (see Pavkalović, this volume).

¹⁵The standard translation of ‘bojna’ is ‘battalion’. However, the Čavoglave unit, consisting of local men who had taken up arms to defend the area after the regular Croatian forces, was self-evidently not of battalion size. Calling it a bojna may have helped present an image of a larger force to the enemy and/or reflected the fluidity of Croatian military organisation and vocabulary in autumn 1991. Thanks are due to Dejan Jović and Louise Askew for their advice on this translation.

¹⁶The argument in defence of the slogan claims that the Ustaše were not the first to use the slogan because it combines war cries used by two historical Croatian heroes: Nikola Šubić Zrinski (who held off Suleiman the Magnificent's Ottoman forces at the siege of Sziget) used ‘za dom’, while King Petar Krešimir IV (1059–1074) used ‘spremni’ in defiance of Venice. See, for example, Goran Rohaček (vice-president of Hrvatska čista stranka prava: Croatian Pure Party of Right), ‘Neznanje je majka svih zala’, Hrvatska čista stranka prava, available at: http://www.hcsp.hr/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1216038493&archive=&start_from=&ucat=3, accessed 3 June 2009.

¹⁷From 2007, his concerts opened instead with the first song on his 2006 album, which called on contemporary society to turn away from sin.

¹⁸One sequence in the song's video showed him in jail while a man in a white shirt with an EU armband was evaluating him on a clipboard as a ‘primate’; later on, he punched through an EU emblem on the screen.

¹⁹‘Stranka Jedino Hrvatska najavila izlazak na izbore’, 15 September 2007, available at: http://www.javno.com/hr/hrvatska/clanak.php?id=81036, accessed 3 June 2009.

²⁰T. Kocijančić, ‘Umag nije Bandićev Zagreb’, available at: http://www.sdp-umag.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=530, accessed 3 June 2009. Sinj is the birthplace of Mirko Norac and the location of the Alka, the annual jousting festival which became a key site of resistance to Račan and Mesić during the early 2000s protests (see Schäuble 2009).

²¹See Banjeglav (2008). Kajin was responding to accusations that it was hypocritical to obstruct Thompson while Serbian pop-folk singers were able to perform at nightclubs in Istria.

²²A ‘klapa’ is a Dalmatian close harmony group.

²³Čolić was from Sarajevo but had lived in Belgrade since the outbreak of war in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH).

²⁴The word ‘turbofolk’ was originally made up, with satirical intent, by the rock musician Rambo Amadeus and later became a term for mid-1990s Serbian pop-folk production; in Croatia its meaning was more general and included pop-folk of all origins up to the present day, with a commonsensical allusion to Serbia.

²⁵Standard Croatian used a language variant known as ijekavica and standard Serbian used ekavica (ijekavica used the vowel ‘ije’ in many words where ekavica would use a long ‘e’ instead); ijekavica was also the basis of Montenegrin, and was spoken in much of BiH, although the Serbianisation policies of the 1990s extended the use of ekavica in Serb areas.

²⁶Sučić and his band had been a core member of the Sarajevo ‘new primitives’ movement in the 1980s and continued its practices of mocking inequality and hypocrisy into the new political circumstances of post-Yugoslavia; Edo Maajka had been too young to belong to the movement but his use of humour and Bosnian slang had much in common with the creative work of the ‘new primitives’ (although the same could not be said for his lyrics' anger or bad language). Ana Dević, personal communication, 27 February 2009.

²⁷Proeski had entered the Croatian market by singing duets with Croatian performers (as several Bosnian pop singers had also done before him); one of his duet partners, Antonija Šola, who had written several of his Croatian songs, subsequently began recording in Macedonian.

²⁸Where a word differed between ‘ijekavica’ and ‘ekavica’ (i.e. it used the vowel ‘ije’ in one variant and ‘e’ in another), it would be transposed into the ijekavica word.

²⁹However, they reversed the gender of the lyrics so that the female narrator was being rescued from ‘strašni haremski čuvari’ (‘terrible harem guards’) rather than carrying out the rescue.

³⁰He was only able to use the city stadium instead when Anto Đapić ceased to be mayor of Osijek. Borbaš went on to launch Folk magazine and act as the Croatian representative for Balkanika television.

³¹At the time of writing, the party's main site no longer attributed the anthem to any musician; two regional branch websites in Osijek–Baranja county and Slavonski Brod still attributed it to Thompson.

³²See Pavlaković, this volume.

³³Including Thompson's annual celebration of the end of the Homeland War (and Operation Oluja) in Čavoglave and both his controversial concerts on Trg bana Jelačića (in 2003 and 2008).