When alternative ends up as mainstream: Slovene popular music as cultural heritage

Abstract

One of the basic questions in cultural heritage studies is the relationship between accepted definitions of national cultural heritage and social power. In the case of Slovene popular music heritage, however, things are more complicated. Namely, the whole field is poorly organised, which means that the most influential work on Slovenian popular music heritage is not done by the institutions that are at least nominally in charge of this segment of the country’s cultural heritage, but by different popular music enthusiasts – i.e. the ones that are, for the most part, not related to established positions of power in society. Yet, this does not mean that the work of these enthusiasts is not important. After all, in the context of the lack of institutionalised contributions, it alone defines what Slovenian popular music heritage is. To determine what kind of picture of Slovenian popular music heritage this work portrays, its most important segments (all monographs, expert and scholarly articles, schoolbooks, and film and television documentaries that address aspects of Slovene popular music) are analysed. Results show that the publications cover mainly urban and alternative music genres. While this is interesting, there is at least one problematic side effect in this respect – namely that in this way, the music enjoyed by the majority of Slovenians is almost completely left out of the analytical focus. This means that not only is the picture of Slovenian popular music emerging from these accounts rather biased, but also that many problematic elements of this music are also left out of critical analysis.

Keywords:

• Slovene popular music
• music genres
• cultural heritage
• alternative music
• popular identities

Notes

This research has been supported as part of the Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (POPID) project by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007–2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.

1. As the latter greatly relies on the concept of authenticity, the viewpoint inevitably makes high and folk culture appear as the central focal points of the debate (see, e.g. Graham 2001, p. 63, Smith 2006, pp. 24–34).