War Memory and Musical Tradition: Commemorating Croatia's Homeland War through Popular Music and Rap in Eastern Slavonia

Abstract

From the outbreak of the Homeland War (1991–1995) in Croatia to the present day popular music has been used as a means to commemorate the upheaval and sacrifice of Croatia's war against the Yugoslav National Army and the Serb militia. This paper focuses on the musical commemoration of a particular region, Eastern Slavonia, which was not fully integrated into the Croatian state until three years after the official end of the war. The narrative, vocabulary and symbols established during the immediate wartime phase have persisted into the present day when war memory has become inflected by post-war developments, such as the indictment of Croatian Army officers for war crimes.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I would like to thank Wendy Bracewell, Eric Gordy, Jelena Obradović and Téa Sindbaek for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

¹ All translations are the author's own.

² During the campaign Croatia Records released a compilation of patriotic songs with the same title, suggesting that the firm (at least under its then management) participated in the ostensibly apolitical political project.

³ It has since been covered by the Montenegrin singer Bojan Bajramović and the late Macedonian singer Toše Proeski (who had a posthumous hit with it in Croatia). Both removed the tamburica.

⁴ North-eastern Slavonia.

⁵ The paradigm also included a third, ‘Dinaric’ area, the highlands of the Dalmatian hinterland and Herzegovina. This cultural area tended to be pejoratively associated with ‘the Balkans’ and was systematically marginalised during the 1990s (Pettan, 1996). One of the many interlocking reasons Croatians might express dislike of Marko Perković Thompson, a well-known patriotic singer, was that his music incorporated Dinaric vocal/musical practices.

⁶ This itself is different from socialist Yugoslavia, where the cult of industry ensured the large body of pro-regime pop songs included some about construction and renovation.

⁷ The only national station with an entirely Croatian playlist. It regularly plays ‘hometown’/patriotic songs and rarely plays hip-hop.

⁸ Significant, too, that they were ‘sons’: the song's gender portrayals were consistent with the wartime and pre-war imagery of male friends or soldiers as the sons of a maternal landscape which can reappear as a fairy (the ‘Slavonian fairy’ was mentioned at one point) and of male comradeship (cemented by drinking and righteous combat) being more important than female company. The song's only non-mythical woman was the narrator's mother, praised for raising him as a good Slavonian male.

⁹ Likewise, a 2007 song (Nije na prodaju, Not for Sale) by the tamburica ensemble Mladi šest, attacking the selling-off of islands and waterways by politicians who used to be atheist Communists, alluded to Ravnica and wartime sacrifice while warning them to leave the plains alone because people had died for them.

¹⁰ Dejan Jović (2006, p. 90) argued that ‘Europe’ replaced Yugoslavia as a fundamental other in Croatia during late Tuđmanism when the EU began to demand cooperation with The Hague. Thereafter the EU delayed Croatia's accession talks at the request of the British and Dutch because of the Croatian government's alleged failure to share intelligence on Gotovina's whereabouts. Euroscepticism and support for Gotovina were often mutually reinforcing, as when Zadar teenagers burned an EU flag after Gotovina's arrest (Vučetić, 2005).

¹¹ The original 1980s ‘new wave’ denoted an explosion of creativity among Croatian and other Yugoslav rock bands.

¹² HIP (Hrvatski Identitet i Prosperitet, Croatian Identity and Prosperity) is a fringe right-wing party led by Tuđman's son Miroslav.

¹³ Glavašević was twice commemorated at Brodfest: once in a 1993 song where Šima Jovanovac (the festival director) promised him a familiar male friendship experience (sitting down with ‘us’ while tamburica music soothed his pain) if he returned and again in 1999 by Viktorija Kulišić-Đenka after he was confirmed dead.

¹⁴ Thanks to Eric Gordy for this point.