Search

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo’sPlavi orkestar(The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band’s music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behindPlavi orkestar’s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and theNew Primitives“poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) theNew Partisans“poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans“hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect onPlavi orkestar’s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band’s continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is thatPlavi orkestar’s Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines current rock culture in the Balkans as a potential vehicle for rebuilding the broken sociocultural bonds between the different post-Yugoslav societies and for creating a constructive cultural space for articulating new forms of civic and post-nationalist identities. The argument offered is that, after the sociocultural exile during the war years, rock culture in the post-conflict Balkans has considerable potential to establish itself as a popular-cultural force of ‘utopian transcendence’ of the current ethno-nationalist sociopolitical moment, and as a catalyst of the new post-Yugoslav spirit of openness, tolerance and peaceful coexistence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper analyses Sarajevo's music movement of New Primitives and its 'poetics of the local' as a struggle against the cultural hypocrisy of Yugoslavia's 'new socialist culture' and its privileging of 'external-cosmopolitan' as apotheosis of cultured refinement and sophistication while denigrating 'local-parochial' as epitome of uncultured primitiveness. I argue that the movement's praxis is best understood as a call to reject externally-imposed frames of reference as the basis for self-understanding, and to embrace a socio-cultural awareness that the only way to be in the world is to be authentically 'primitive'- i.e. to exist as a distinct and autochthon socio-cultural self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]