Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the Poetics of Social Critique

Dalibor Mišina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409445654
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317056706
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From the late-1970s to the late-1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important social and political purpose of providing a popular cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of life in Yugoslav society. The three music movements that emerged in this period - New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans - employed the understanding of rock music as the 'music of commitment' (i.e. as socio-cultural praxis premised on committed social engagement) to articulate the critiques of 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 book offers an analysis of the three music movements and their particular brand of 'poetics of the present' in order to explore the movements' specific forms of socio-cultural engagement with Yugoslavia's 'new socialist culture' and demonstrate that their cultural praxis was oriented towards the goal of realizing the genuine Yugoslav socialist-humanist community 'in the true measure of man'. Thus, the book's principal argument is that the driving force behind the music of commitment was, although critical, a fundamentally constructive disposition towards the progressive ideal of socialist Yugoslavia.

1 SFR Yugoslavia: The Culture of Politics/The Politics of Culture

DOI: 10.4324/9781315608549-1

The country that concerns us here is known in the local historiographic idiom as the “second Yugoslavia,” or—as it eventually became named—the Socialist and Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (henceforth SFRY). The “first Yugoslavia,” the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Karaljevina SHS), was a fairly short-lived enterprise (1918–1941) that fell apart at the beginning of the Balkan extension of World War II in the spring of 1941, after its monarchical leadership capitulated to the German aggressor and fled abroad. Subsequently, the country was parceled out into several “pseudo-states” run by local quisling regimes under the protectorate of occupying Nazi/Fascist forces. Formed officially on November 29, 1943, the second Yugoslavia was an incarnation of the principles and idea(l)s of a local communist-led anti-Fascist struggle whose disposition was an antithesis to both the previous monarchical Yugoslavia and the local interim fascist–nationalist administrations. From its inception, the SFRY was promulgated as an egalitarian community of all South Slav nations and nationalities (naroda i narodnosti) based on the political dictum of what can be termed radical socialist democracy enshrined in the principle of “brotherhood and unity” (brastvo-jedinstvo) and its socio-cultural counterpart “freedom and equality” (sloboda i ravnopravnost). The new socialist Yugoslavia was modeled as a symbolic and practical dissociation from the authoritarian past of the first Yugoslavia and the virulent local nationalisms/fascisms of the 1941–1945 interval.

What I want to do in this opening chapter is to look at the main aspects of political/cultural dynamics of this second Yugoslavia and consider them in terms of their impact on shaping the country’s socio-cultural course since 1945. I want to do this by examining two separate, but highly interrelated, processes: (1) the culture of politics; and (2) the politics of culture. What I mean by the culture of politics is a dynamic of specific and changing modes of political governance (i.e. regime strategies), especially in terms of how they translated into particular modes of socio-cultural management. By the politics of culture I mean the specifics of Yugoslavia’s project of cultural defining, i.e. the particular way(s) of conjuring the country’s socialist–cultural praxis as immanently political and in service of the aforementioned socio-cultural management. Grasping these is a necessary prerequisite for proper understanding and treatment of the popular dimension of Yugoslavia’s cultural life and, more specifically, rock music as one of its incarnations—that is, for appreciating the developmental course, the place, and the role of popular culture and rock music within the overall cultural spectrum of the SFRY.

Having said this, I wish to stress that my intention here is not to engage in detailed historical treatment of the SFRY’s political and/or cultural history from 1943 to 1991, or to deal with the shifts and changes in the SFRY’s political/cultural policies in all their minute variations. Rather, my aim here is much more modest and limited in scope: to outline the SFRY’s regime strategies and its cultural praxis in a manner detailed enough to provide a political/cultural background sufficient for what is to be treated in the chapters to follow and general enough not to overpower with all the intricate specifics of the SFRY’s political and cultural realities, no matter how crucially important in the context of full-fledged historical treatment. Instead of being an end onto itself, then, what follows in this chapter is but a means to an end, i.e. the minimalist political/cultural contextualization framed as a jumping-off point for the exploration of the principal problematic of the book—Yugoslav rock music as a form of social critique.

SFRY: Yugoslavia, the Second Time Around

As already noted, the local historiography of pre-1991 Yugoslav society is built around a narrative of two Yugoslavias: the first forged during and officially formalized towards the end of World War I (1917), and the second forged during and officially formalized towards the end of World War II (1943). The first incarnation was a compromise between two main and often opposing visions of the Yugoslav state and its framework: the unitarist–centralist, advocated by the Serbian government, and the anti-unitarist, or federalist, advocated by the Yugoslav Committee (Jugoslavenski odbor) representing Yugoslavs (primarily Croats) from Austro-Hungarian territories (see Harapin 1988c). Both visions represented the views and interests of the respective national bourgeoisie and reflected the “calculative merits” that can be drawn from such a union. In the end, the first Yugoslavia was officialized as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Kraljevina SHS), thus embodying the unitarist vision of Serbian political forces to the significant neglect of the Croatian political counter-vision. This arrangement was to be the main source of political tension for the entire period of the country’s existence.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes fell apart when its royal ruling elite fled the country for the safety and security of London exile at the outbreak of World War II in the Balkans. This left the country in a state of political chaos and opened up the space for various political forces that aimed to continue, reinvent, or simply abandon the initial national project. Overwhelmingly, the local struggle for the new political direction was militaristic rather than peaceful. Thus, the wartime of 1941–1945 was a time of dual confrontation: the internal conflict among the competing militarized political forces, and the fight against foreign occupier(s). In some cases, the former involved the politics of collaboration with the occupying forces.

The victorious political force, and therefore the force in a position to decide on the character and shape of the future Yugoslav society, was the communist Partisans lead by Josip Broz Tito. His vision of the new society was that of a country freed from foreign “imperialist forces and influences” and founded on the principles of socialist political governance and federalist political arrangement. This vision was officialized on November 29, 1943, at the second Congress of the Antifascist Committee of Yugoslavia’s Popular Liberation (Antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije, or AVNOJ). The Committee was the formal institutional embodiment of the communist–Partisan forces and their political platform. According to the proclamation titled “The Decision about the Founding of Yugoslavia on the Federative Principle” (“Odluka o izgradnji Jugoslavije na federativnom principu”), the foundations of the new society were to be the following (see Harapin 1988b: 27):

1. The Antifascist Committee of Yugoslavia’s Popular Liberation shall be the supreme legislative and executive body of Yugoslav peoples, and the supreme representative of the sovereignty of Yugoslav state and its peoples.
2. The founding principle of Yugoslav society shall be the right to self-determination (samoopredjeljenje), including the right to succession from or association with other nations.
3. Yugoslavia shall be a federalist society founded on the sovereignty of its peoples and the full equality of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins—that is, the peoples of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
4. The federalist principle of Yugoslav association shall be based on the most comprehensive democratic rights of all peoples of Yugoslavia, represented by the bodies of popular power (organi narodne vlasti) of each nation and nationality within the Yugoslav state.
5. Yugoslav national minorities shall be given full and all national rights.

The new community was to be built as a democratic federation of its constitutive nations and nationalities based on the principles of full national equality animated by the socialist political, economic, and cultural practice. ¹

¹ According to Milanović (1986: 10), Yugoslavia was a country with 15 officially registered nations where education took place in 12 different languages, and where there was no territory with 50,000 inhabitants without members from all nations being present.

The most delicate task in the political praxis of second Yugoslavia proved to be the realization of full national equality. It was recognized that national equality was dependent on the degree of economic development in the respective national federal units and thus could only be actualized if overall economic equality was achieved first. As Harapin (1988a: 45) puts it:

Constitutionally proclaimed national equality within a federation … does not mean its actual realization, because the factor deciding the nature of relations among the nations is and continues to be the degree of development of the respective national entities [entiteta]. Crucial for Yugoslavia as a multinational community is to make sure that contrary interests of the developed and undeveloped parts of the country do not beget the character of international conflicts and create relations of economic inequality. Every time this is forgotten, federalism and national and class questions will become contentious. This is so because, in the conditions of complex national structure, economic issues have a pronounced national–political aspect and weight. In other words, there cannot be true national equality without equal conditions for the economic development of each nation and nationality.

From this perspective, then, the entire political praxis of the Yugoslav state can be best understood as an effort to come up with the most effective form of political governance that would, by providing conditions for equal economic development of each nation and nationality, forge a mechanism for national equality of all peoples and, thus, for the full realization of federalist and socialist democracy. It can also be understood as an attempt to reconcile the (politicized) socio-cultural and economic demands of the new state and society.

Enter the regime strategies.

The Culture of Politics: Regime Strategies

Overall, successful reconciliation of socio-cultural and economic demands and the building of the new state and society meant reconstituting soci(et)al landscape along the lines of a particular brand of socialism, often identified as Titoism. In addition, it meant remodeling the hitherto-existing socio-cultural parameters and creating a new form of individual and collective self that would, imbued by the “new socialist spirit,” internalize the instituted social, political, and economic parameters. ² Thus the central socio-cultural preoccupation of post-World War II Yugoslavia was the construction of effective institutional mechanisms to carry on this project on a long-term basis. ³

² Although the Yugoslav state, or the ideological–political apparatus of the country, was the principal coordinator and executor of this undertaking, its success depended on strategic alliances with various non-political forces in society. Of these, the cultural/intellectual establishment was deemed paramount because of the belief that the long-term resocialization of the Yugoslav citizen could succeed only insofar as the new socialist norms became legitimate aspects of the country’s cultural/intellectual framework and thus, in due time, were assented to by the population at large. This resulted in an arrangement between the state and the socio-cultural institutions where various cultural expressions were officialized as the principal carriers of the “new socialist spirit” and thereby decreed as central to the general life of society. Culture, in turn, came to be posited as a proactive artistic and intellectual force, and its contributions, because of their strategic importance, were celebrated as vitally important for the country’s overall wellbeing. Far from being part of an economically attuned cultural–industrial complex, thus, culture in post-World War II Yugoslavia was the foundational aspects of political–ideological undertaking, bolstering the dominant political–ideological, rather than economic, exigencies. It is important to note that the Yugoslav brand of socialism was much more lax than that of any other East European country, and cultural endeavors and expressions enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy. Consequently, the principal regulatory mechanisms that informed cultural boundaries of the possible were self-administered by various cultural agents through internalized limits of the expressible rather than by officially sanctioned and enforced guidelines (as was the case in the USSR, for example). Absence of an omnipresent state-sanctioned committee for cultural correctness provided greater possibility for going beyond, even if obliquely, the boundaries of the possible and for using culture as a critical reflection on the social, political, and economic realities of Yugoslav life. The long-term impact of the interplay of these elements was the establishment of culture as an ideological–political signifier both in terms of official political demands and, more importantly, in terms of unofficial critical pronouncements. Overall, cultural expression in the socialist Yugoslavia figured as the vital socio-political resource for both the political state and the general public. ³ The inter-relationship between the conceptualization and the development of cultural and political dynamics of the day is evident in the following observation by Matvejević:

After the war we have passed through several … interconnections between culture and politics. There is, in this respect, a certain parallelism between politics and culture. In times when—because of heavy international dissociations and conflicts—a certain form of centralism happened to be partly a necessity and partly a duty to follow the Soviet model, the convergence of cultural factors was strongly emphasized. Not for a moment was the right of each nation to have its national culture brought into question, but there was a stronger emphasis placed on all Yugoslav cultural orientation. (Matvejević 1977: 8)

The new mode of political governance that was put to practice developed as an attempt to reconcile the two polarities of the new Yugoslav society: the political desire for a socialist order where the party would have the final say on what goes on in the society, and the recognition of the multinational (or, in current terminology, multicultural) foundations of that society. Thus the politics of the Yugoslav state revolved around specific strategies used to affirm and, ideally, reconcile society’s mono-partyism and multinationalism. Their principal logic rested on the belief that the political success of a socialist form of governance depended on the existence of a socio-cultural milieu within which the cultural needs of all Yugoslav nations would be equally affirmed and given full expression. This translated into a cultural policy far removed from any attempt to suppress national specificities within the society and to replace them with an umbrella framework of Yugoslavism. The foundations of the cultural policy were, rather, grounded in the expectation that Yugoslavism, as a form of supranational and civic identity, would be embraced as an affirmation of the de facto existing cultural–national equalities, realized within the newly created socio-political—and equally important, economic ⁴ —space of socialist Yugoslavia. Thus the cultural priority of Yugoslav political praxis was centered on the different modes of managing and negotiating the complex web of cultural–national relations, informed by a desire for the full equality of cultural expressions and—through this—for the affirmation of the established political norms and, ultimately, the country’s political regime.

⁴ As already noted, it was recognized that cultural equality rests on the equality of economic development within the country and, in particular, on the need for the economically disadvantaged parts (such as Macedonia and Kosovo) to be brought up to the levels of economic development characteristic of the “Western” republics (i.e. Slovenia and Croatia). As Harapin writes, “there is no true national equality without the equal conditions for economic development of all [Yugoslav] nations and nationalities” (Harapin 1988a: 45).

In concrete terms, then, the history of the post-World War II Yugoslav political praxis can be best framed as a succession of regime strategies (i.e. modes of political management and negotiation of cultural/national diversity): revolutionary fusion (1945–1950), evolutionary merger (1951–1962), pluralist socialism (1963–1972), and pragmatic consolidation (1973–1991). ⁵ The first two regime strategies are specific variants of the general management strategy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 SFR Yugoslavia: The Culture of Politics/The Politics of Culture
• 2 Yugoslavia, Culture, and Popular Culture: The Discoveries of Youth and Rock‘n’roll
• 3 The Substantive Turn: A History, Philosophy and Praxis of Yugoslav Rock‘n’roll
• 4 New Wave: “In the Rhythm of the Compressor”
• 5 New Primitives: “Anarchy All Over Baščaršija”
• 6 New Partisans: “Spit and Sing, My Yugoslavia”
• Epilogue
• Works Cited
• Index