ROCK ‘N’ ROLL AND NATIONALISM:

A MULTINATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL AND NATIONALISM:
A MULTINATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Edited by

Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins

Cambridge Scholars Press

 Rock’n’Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective
Edited by Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins

This book first published 2005 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

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ISBN 1-904303-56-0
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Notes on Transliteration .........................................................................................vi
Foreword, Dave Laing...........................................................................................vii
Introduction, Mark Yoffe .......................................................................................xi

Chapter One. Some People in This Town Don’t Want to Die Like a Hero:
Multiculturalism and the Alternative Music Scene in Sarajevo.
1992-1996, Nikolai Jeffs ................................................................................... 1
Chapter Two. The Decline and Fall of Rock 'n’ Roll: Main Characteristics and
Trends of Croatian Popular Music in the Second Half
of the Nineteen-Nineties, Branko Kostelnik.................................................... 20
Chapter Three. English Folk-Rock—An Expression of Non-Belligerent
Nationalism, Kenneth Roseman ...................................................................... 33
Chapter Four. East of Rock: The Development of Finnish National Rock,
Tarja Rautiainen .............................................................................................. 40
Chapter Five. Retro-Nationalism? Rock Music in the Former German
Democratic Republic (GDR), Patricia Simpson.............................................. 54
Chapter Six. Hungary’s Cold War Rock ‘n’ Roll Spring: An Interview
with Andras Simonyi, Hungarian Ambassador to the U.S., Andrea Collins
and Mark Yoffe ............................................................................................... 82
Chapter Seven. Conceptual Carnival: National Elements in Russian
Nationalist Rock Music, Mark Yoffe .............................................................. 97
Chapter Eight. On the Relationship of Global and Local Music Production:
Mario Marzidovšek and His Independent Label
Marzidovshekminimalaboratorium, Rajko Mursic ....................................... 121
Chapter Nine. National Zapprobat: Reinterpreting Frank Zappa
Through a Patriotic Lens, Aaron Mulvany.................................................... 137

Index.................................................................................................................... 169
 NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Throughout the text we follow Library of Congress system of transliteration.

The only exceptions are some proper names that are internationally known in
different transliteration as it happens with Russian names ending in -ii, which are
rendered in footnotes and bibliographies as ending in -y, like in Dostoevsky, or
Troitsky, in accordance to a different standardized transliteration.

Also in the case of Mario Marzidovšek (in the essay by Rajko Muršič) the name of
his Independent Label Marzidovshekminimalaboratorium is spelled with -sh- as it
is known internationally.
 FOREWORD
Dave Laing, London

In what has been voted one of best songs of the rock era, John Lennon asked his
listeners to imagine that there were no countries and nothing to kill or die for.
Imagine is one of the most potent expressions of rock utopianism, in direct line
from The Beatles’ "All You Need Is Love" and leading, among other things, to
Live Aid, that practical expression of rock humanitarianism. Imagine is a plea to
transcend the barriers of the nation state in favour of a benign globalisation, and in
that sense, it is a pacifist equivalent to The Internationale.

Despite those examples and their respective traditions of internationalism, music

has more often been a vehicle for the expression of both national and nationalist
identities and emotions. Both subjects are explored in Rock ‘n’ Roll and
Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective. In the chapter on the complexities of the
“retro-nationalism” of certain bands exiled by the disappearance of the German
Democratic Republic, Patricia Simpson reminds us of an important distinction:
“Nationalism implies a conscious cognitive and emotional decision, and thus
exceeds the contingency of national identity.”

National identity as embodied in the flag and anthem of a nation state can be
construed as an accident of birth and not an ethnic inheritance; in contrast,
nationalism is an ideological identification that requires constant renewal, and is
often subject to contrasting visions. In the age of president George Bush’s one-
dimensional “war on terror,” it may be heartening for many non-Americans to read
Aaron Mulvaney’s claim that Frank Zappa’s carnivalesque oeuvre embodies an
alternative patriotism that is both dissident and fundamentalist (in the sense of
adhering to the ideals of the original Constitution of the United States).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, music was an important site of the
formation and renewal of nationalism. As the work of composers such as Dvorak
and Sibelius reminds us, such nationalism was often most fiercely expressed by
artists from nations that did not have their own secure states, but were subject to
rule or threat from others. In the work of these and other classical composers, the
national alibi came by way of the articulation of western classical forms with
elements and themes from folk music, dance, or legend.
 Rock’n’Roll and Nationalism ix

At this stage, the third great continent of music (the generally urban and
commercialised popular genres) was less commonly linked to nationalist feeling.
Instead, its connotations were those of a foreign or cosmopolitan modernism, and it
was often seen as a threat to the nationalist coalition of folk and classical styles.
Nevertheless, these imported popular musics—from tango and ragtime to rock ‘n’
roll and punk—took on national characteristics, as they were modified by
indigenous musicians, most obviously by the translation of lyrics into native
languages, or substitution of lyrics in those languages.

In some countries, notably some in the Soviet sphere of influence, rock groups
were tolerated only if the words were written and sung in the national language. At
other times in the Soviet era, as Andras Simonyi, the Hungarian ambassador to the
U.S., points out, censors approved songs sung in English, since none of them spoke
English and thus were unaware of the ideological content of the lyrics. Elsewhere,
as Tarja Rautiainen’s essay on Finland points out, such matters have been subject
to the play of market forces as well as generationally distinct perceptions of
national identity.

A further move in the evolution of nationalist popular music was the application of
the folk or traditional music alibi to the forms of rock itself in what was often
called folk-rock or electric-folk and is now frequently assimilated to the vexed and
contested category of “world music.” Kenneth Roseman’s affectionate essay deals
with an English attempt to create through folk-rock what the singer-songwriter
Billy Bragg calls (perhaps too optimistically) a “rational patriotism.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective is fundamentally a

series of individual essays or reports on the theme of rock music and nationalism.
In reporting on this theme, the essays also tell us much about the ways in which
national popular music is transformed into, or replaced by, nationalist popular
music.

The context for most of the chapters of this compilation is the collapse in the
nineteen-nineties of the two great federations of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
To the outsider, at least, these momentous events may seem straightforwardly to
have resulted in the creation or rehabilitation of many nation states, and the
resurgence of nationalisms previously repressed by the internationalist ideology of
the USSR as well as what Branko Kostelnik, in his chapter on Croatia, describes as
the liberal socialism of the Yugoslav federation.

These essays, however, have the salutary virtue of complicating such a view. The
chapters on the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence show how musicians have
x Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins

adjusted to Russia’s loss of its metonymic status as the hegemonic republic of the
USSR. One of them presents the response of popular musicians to the traumatic
fate of the German Democratic Republic, the only nation state to disappear in this
era of the proliferation of new states.

This proliferation has already had its (admittedly minor) effect on popular music
culture by forcing the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to reorganise the
Eurovision Song Contest. Because so many states wish to participate, the contest
now includes a preliminary competition, which results in the fact that no longer are
all member countries of the EBU entitled to have their ‘national’ songs performed
for the Contest’s hundreds of millions of television viewers.

The reports from Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are equally

fascinating in their accounts of the rendezvous of rock and nationalism. Newly
independent Croatia is shown to be a site of conflict between the westernising
culture of the political elite, and a more populist trend that has reimported the
music of the recent enemy (Serbia) under a new guise. In discussing music in
Sarajevo, Nikolai Jeffs make use of Timothy Taylor’s application of the concept of
‘strategic inauthenticity’ to describe music that embodies a “universal and
planetary code of rock culture” with distinct echoes of John Lennon’s utopianism.
In Slovenia, Rajko Mursic narrates the adventures of a music animateur who
sidestepped nationalism and the state to become a vector in a transnational network
of musical experimentation.

Above all, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective is a book
full of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” where the
authors’ insights into the detail and nuance of their topics will lead any attentive
reader to new understandings of what (perhaps sadly) will remain a major theme in
the study of popular culture for a long time to come.
 INTRODUCTION
Mark Yoffe

Rock ‘n’ Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective, which brings together
talents of a number of observers of popular music, came about as a result of my
years’ long fascination with the interplay between national and international
tendencies within the rock music idiom. It crystallized at the panels of two
extraordinary international conferences (Popular Music and National Culture,
Ljubljana, Slovenia, November 2000 and Crossroads in Cultural Studies,
Tampere, Finland, June-July 2002) at which I met most of the contributors to this
volume.

The notion of nationalism as it plays out in rock music first came to me in graduate
school (in the late eighties) when I was writing my dissertation on the Soviet rock
tradition. It continued to puzzle me through several fieldwork trips to Russia,
where I collected historical recordings of Soviet and Russian rock and interviewed
rock musicians and other members of rock counterculture.

What struck me as peculiar was the tendency, after the fall of the Soviet Union, for
some of the most illustrious members of former anti-Soviet rock resistance to
position themselves in opposition to the newly-established capitalist system. These
groups made a radical swing to the right into the ranks of ultra-nationalism.

From the moment in the late sixties when Soviet/Russian rockers began to sing in
Russian, this rock was trying to find its own true and special Russian identity.
After years of learning and self-discovery, by the mid-nineteen-eighties this
identity emerged as a clearly defined national tradition, with clearly noticeable
national characteristics. In the early nineteen-nineties this trend asserted its
specificity by developing a peculiarly Russian idiom.

What became apparent was that the clearly nationalist and in some instances ultra-
nationalist wing of the Russian rock community had adopted an international
American-British rock tradition as its own, but used it to further a nationalist and
often blatantly chauvinist and anti-western ideological agenda.

This seemed funny and almost absurd, and probably could be dismissed as some
sort of temporary trend or cultural aberration, if not for the inventiveness and force
of talent of some of these artists, as well as their significant influence upon fans
xii Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins

from different strata of society—not only disenfranchised youth from the

impoverished industrial overskirts of big cities, but often students, intelligentsia,
and bohemians.

From this observation of processes taking place within Russian rock milieu, I
became interested in looking at the mechanisms of the adaptation of the American-
British rock legacy within other national pop music traditions, and also the
question of weather or not similar ideological shifts were taking place within
musical outputs of other national countercultures.

The 2000 Popular Music and National Culture Conference in Ljubliana (four of its
participants, including myself, contributed papers here) deeply probed these issues,
with an emphasis on the rock experience in former Yugoslavia. Three papers from
that conference are included in Rock ‘n’ Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational
Perspective.

Rajko Mursic, a veteran scholar of Yugoslav rock music (and particularly of the
Slovenian experience), is an author of numerous monographs and articles on
developments in the Slovenian punk rock tradition. A former rock musician
himself, Mursic, Professor of Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology
of the University of Ljubljana, covers in his work the anthropological, economic,
ideological, social, and identity-building aspects of rock music’s influence on
Slovenian youth. His works deal with the nationalization of international rock
music idioms and with the nationalist notions underlying their development.

Mursic’s contribution in this volume presents and considers the system of

distribution of rock music production in Slovenia during the nineteen-nineties.
Initially, his essay may seem marginally related to the subject of nationalism. But it
is important to the understanding of the mechanisms behind nationalist rock music
development. In this context, production and distribution is an apparatus of
extreme importance, however often overlooked. It goes without saying that without
a system of production and distribution there cannot be a national pop music
tradition.

Nikolai Jeffs, a British trained scholar of Yugoslav counterculture, contributes here

a most fascinating article on the unexpected nationalist sensibilities within rock
milieu of besieged Sarajevo in mid-nineties. His finds and conclusions strike with
their freshness and an unanticipated twist of described ideological perceptions of
Sarajevo’s burgeoning-under-bullets rock milieu.
 Rock’n’Roll and Nationalism xiii

Croatian rock musician, art curator, and rock critic Branko Kostelnik contributes
an unusual insider’s perspective in his journalistic essay on ultra nationalism in
contemporary Croatian rock and pop.

Two other veterans of the Ljubljana conference, Aaron Mulvany and I, contribute
articles that were not presented at that conference, but were inspired by it.

Two years after the Ljubljana conference, at the Fourth International Crossroads
in Cultural Studies conference in Tampere, Finland, I organized a panel entirely
dedicated to the subject of rock music and nationalism, and the name of this panel
has become the title of this book.

Three of five papers read at that conference are present in Rock ‘n’ Roll and
Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective.

Ljubljana conference veteran and independent scholar of rock music (and multi
instrument musician in his own right), Philadelphian Aaron Mulvany delivered in
Tampere (and presents here) a thought provoking, if not provocative, paper in
which he interprets Frank Zappa’s musical ideology as an example of positive,
constructive nationalism, a nationalism that stems from patriot’s pain for his own
country.

Tarja Rautiainen, professor of Music Anthropology at the University of Tampere,

gives a most interesting account of the historical development of Finnish rock and
the mechanisms behind the “Finnishization” of the rock music of Finland.

Patricia Simpson, professor of German Language and Literature from the

University of Montana, contributes a profound study of retro-nationalist tendency
in the rock milieu of former East Germany. She not only gives a very informative
overview of East German rock history, but also shows how cultural and historical
nostalgia shapes ideologies behind pop music trends.

As a veteran of both conferences I choose to contribute an essay on the subject of

national carnivalesque tradition in Russian nationalist rock music, which I wrote
for this volume.

To present the issue of musical nationalism from the perspective of rock criticism I
invited Washington, D.C.-based veteran rock journalist Kenneth Roseman, who
has been writing about progressive English and American folk and roots music for
more than twenty-five years, to contribute an article on highly influential English
folk rock. This music has not until now been viewed from the point of view of
xiv Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins

nationalism. In an article that describes and contrasts the musical approaches taken
by Ashley Hutchings, Billy Bragg, and Jim Moray, he explores the relationship of
national musical traditions found in their songs to their personal national ideologies
and their ideas of “Englishness.”

An insider’s point of view on Hungarian rock comes from Hungarian Ambassador

to the United States Andras Simonyi, who twice sat down with co-editor Andrea
Collins and me to talk about the Hungarian rock tradition and his view of
nationalism in his country’s rock. Ambassador Simonyi (known in Washington as
the “rockin’ Ambassador”) is well qualified to speak on the subject. As a member
of Hungarian counterculture in the nineteen-sixties, he played guitar with his
country’s most celebrated rock band Locomotiv GT. Andras Simonyi presents his
profound “from the horses mouth” perspective of the Hungarian rock in an
opinioned and sometimes provocative manner.

As is apparent from the descriptions above, the contributors to Rock ‘n’ Roll and
Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective consider its subject from vastly differing
points of view, from rock music insider, to veteran rock music journalist, to
scholars trained in cultural analysis, anthropology, critical theory,
ethnomusicology, social studies and literary criticism. Not only do the book’s
contributors show different angles of academic and non-academic vision, but they
write from different perspectives: from national viewing his or her own culture to
savvy international observer.

The book’s polyphonic tapestry of ideas, observations, views, and voices on the
subject of rock music and nationalism represent a tremendously fruitful jumping
off point for thoughtful further research into the subject.

That’s why these articles, though exciting and informative by themselves, read best
in dialog with each other. Readers may disagree with some of the authors. Some of
the essays inevitably will evoke readers’ counter arguments. But that is the idea
behind Rock ‘n’ Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective: to provoke
further thinking and discussions of its exciting and little explored subject.

A few words regarding the geographical scope of the book (contributions cover
Finland, the United States, Bosnia, (East) Germany, Croatia, Russia, Slovenia and
England). We know full well that the list of countries where rock music and
nationalism find themselves intertwined spans the globe. By presenting a large
variety of culturally, historically, ethnically, and politically different national music
traditions, we want to underscore the universality of ideas and mechanisms of
 Rock’n’Roll and Nationalism xv

interaction, mutual dependence and influence that can develop between rock music
and nationalist sensibilities.

Hopefully in future publications we will be able to see how these tendencies work
or don’t work within the cultures of other nations.
 CHAPTER ONE
SOME PEOPLE IN THIS TOWN DON’T WANT TO
DIE LIKE A HERO:
MULTICULTURALISM AND THE ALTERNATIVE
MUSIC SCENE IN SARAJEVO, 1992 - 1996
NIKOLAI JEFFS

I.
The outbreak of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 marked the more or
less complete demise of the music scene in Sarajevo, as a number of individuals
and bands characteristic of the pre-war scene split up and/or left the city. Goran
Bregović thus produced music from exile; Zabranjeno Pušenje fell apart only to
rise to prominence again as two different bands, albeit sharing the same name,
(Led by the band’s lyricist Nele Karaljić, the eastern wing based itself in Serbia,
while its western counterpart, coalescing around the guitarist Sejo Sexon, covered
Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia.); the members of Plavi Orkestar decided not only on
exile but on putting their careers on temporary hold.
Only few bands survived the transition to war intact—Lezi Majmune, Protest,
Sikter, and SCH. The latter proved to be a bridge, as well as pivot, between the
pre-war scene and the scene that existed in Sarajevo while it was under siege.
Hence, SCH’s tenth anniversary concert in Sarajevo on May 4, 1993, not only re-
established the concert scene in the city, but also represented “the first large
gathering of people who had stayed behind.”1
Importantly, SCH’s sound and style as heard on their CD The Gentle Art of
Firing (1995), which brings together songs mostly written before the outbreak of
the war, can also be seen as forming an important context for the scene’s later
production. Namely, SCH played industrial post-punk combined with foreign
language lyrics often cast in expressionist modes. These charted the fragmentation
of the society as well as the self, the rejection of a false unity and full realization,
either on the level of the subject (the band’s name is an abbreviation for
schizophrenia), or in terms of its extension into collectivities of ethnicity and
nation.
2 Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)

In the eighties SCH was relatively marginal in a city where the most successful
bands tended to perform—albeit in different ways—Bosnianize rock music. This,
in part at least, was the case with the first Yugoslav rock supergroup Bijelo
Dugme, led by Goran Bregović. It was also the case with exponents of the New
Primitivism movement such as Zabranjeno Pušenje and Elvis J. Kurtović. But, in
the context of the war, the delocalisation of music, as well as the awareness that a
Bosnian identity could no longer be unproblematically projected through music,
can be seen as a strategy which also casts SCH’s earlier attempts of same into a
different, more influential light.
The conditions of life for those who remained in the city after the outbreak of
the war were unprecedented, but they did not dispense with the creative urge

It was necessary to find some kind of means to survive: how to find food, how to
move around the city. Only when this had been achieved could you see how much
free time you had, and if you had any at all . . . A large number of groups started
playing, groups on the edge between life and death. You could die any moment.
Everything was dangerous. It was dangerous to go and get bread, it was dangerous
to go and visit your neighbour living across the road . . . People started gathering in
the streets, in cellars, anywhere they could play. In the beginning, they were usually
out of tune and out of practice, trying to make electronic music without electricity.2

Thus, a new Sarajevo scene emerged from the ruins surrounding it.
The concern of this essay will be to outline not only the scene’s brief history
and socio-political context, concentrating on an analysis of the compilations Rock
Under The Siege (1995) and Rock Under Siege B (1996), but also its philosophy of
multiculturalism, as one of the most important issues relating to the cultural forms
arising out of the war, and their ability to confront the tasks war necessitates.
First though, it is important to note that the discourses and practices of
multiculturalism identified as emancipatory have usually postulated the need for
the full recognition of cultural difference based primarily on ethnic collectivities as
the enabler of a more equitable, tolerant, social, and historical dynamic.
Such is also the dominant discourse of multiculturalism in the specific context
of Bosnia, where the recognition of cultural difference postulates social space as
the sum rather than the transcendence of cultural differences comprising it.
Therefore, and to give a practical example, it sees social space as ideally
ecumenical rather than secular.
Of course, in conditions of war, the recognition of cultural difference and the
practices of tolerance arising from it seem a necessary and obvious task. However,
the hypothesis put forward here is that the philosophy of multiculturalism as
discernable on the Sarajevo scene is “difference blind.”
In order to understand multiculturalism as discernable on the Sarajevo scene’s
appeal, it should be remembered that in a war underwritten by violent nationalisms,
where cultural difference literally becomes a matter of life and death, the resolution
 ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 3

of the oppositions generated by conflict can be false if the principle element that
organizes social life—between destruction and ethnic cleansing on the one hand
and peace and parity on the other—remains intact.
At the same time, the postulation of the recognition of collectivities of cultural
difference as offering full realization to the individual can lead to a condition, not
only of an a priori, but also singular, extension of individual identity into the public
sphere and hence the postulation of—from the part of the collectivity—“life-
scripts” that have certain “expectations” and “demands” with regards to the proper
manner in which individuals should act, for instance, as “patriotic” and therefore
also as “heroic” Serbs, Muslims, and Croats . . .
This can affect relations between the collectivities themselves, and recognition
of their difference can lead to a possible situation of “neo-racism,” which upholds
the separation of these collectivities, precisely in the name of the retention of the
ideal of cultural difference. Also, the final horizon of the cultural difference, its
“end of history,” is bounded and contained by its realization in state recognition
and/or state formation, rather than in the postulation of a possible society and
history beyond the state itself, including the socio-economic forms of life it
upholds and those classes, internally as well as globally, in whose interest it is that
this state of affairs obtain.

II.
It’s significant here to note that one significant background to the
multiculturalism of the scene is contained in the multicultural make-up of Sarajevo.
Bands that emerged from the siege included Muslims, Croats, Serbs, others as well
as individuals of mixed parentage. Similarly, their audiences were not ethnically
cleansed either.
In terms of age structure, at one point the scene was more or less dominated by
fifteen or sixteen year olds. This is partly a reflection of the degree to which bands
that had younger members had a greater chance of continuing playing together, as
they were subject neither to mobilization,3 or compulsory labor. Hence, younger
band members could spend more time making music.
Nevertheless, if the war opened up possibilities for a new generation, it did not
open up possibilities with regard to gender. This is surprising because war—on the
most immediate level, through the mobilization of men to the front—usually opens
up the somewhat emptied public sphere for women, who fill it up and are
empowered by taking up roles previously monopolized by men. Despite this
tendency, the Sarajevo scene was, and today still is, a predominantly male scene
(in terms of band members), with women emerging only in secondary roles as
radio editors, concert organizers, and music journalists, etc.
4 Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)

During the war, culture was an integral part of the struggle, and music was no
exception in this. While Sarajevo would be shelled to the tunes of traditional
Serbian folk music and kolo dancing around the heavy artillery pieces, syncretic
musical forms such as newly composed folk music, known locally as novo
komponovana narodna muzika, and/or straight rock and pop, would also contribute
to the drawing of real (in terms of definite topographies, locations), as well as
symbolic, boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.
In these forms, the denunciation of one group and the upholding of another (for
instance, honourable Serbs, as opposed to cowardly Muslims and Croats) was often
achieved through recourse to past historical performances. In this way, culturally
determined songs not only pre-empted the identities of their audiences,
determining certain courses of social action, but also tied them in with specific
political structures, and elites and their ideologies. This would be done through the
specific deployment of the names of historical, political leaders, or the
foregrounding of various classes and formations (soldiers, military units) not only
as representatives, but also as representative of the ethnic groups in question.
The musical delineation of the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion was not
only confined to extreme Serbian nationalists. Indeed, the official and government
controlled media of Bosnia-Herzegovina would also favor songs expressive of
definite ethnic collective identities. A telling example of this is the manner in
which, in late 1993, government controlled TV and Radio Bosnia-Herzegovina
would start and finish their news bulletins with a song performed by the choir from
the Gazi Huzrevbeg Mosque.
This song was associated with the Muslim nationalist party SDA and “was
understood by staff and audience alike as further signal of Muslim political
predominance, or even of Islamization.”4 On the other hand and in the same year,
the privately owned Radio M, broadcasting from within Sarajevo, was attacked by
members of the Bosnian Army, in part for playing Serbian songs.5
This was when the city was, as is the case today, officially multicultural. The
scene itself did not abstain from the cultural, nor the actual, battles being waged at
the time

During the war, a genuine “underground” has been operating in Sarajevo—in its
most literal meaning of cellars, garages and different improvised shelters, in time of
a total struggle for survival. For those young people this was the crucial moment of
the struggle. For many of them, a guitar in a hand had the same weight as the gun
that awaited them in the trenches after rehearsal.

The cruciality of the moment of struggle is reflected not only in the spectacular
growth of the scene—the thirty new bands to emerge from the siege—but also of
its immense popularity. For instance, segments of the radio program “No Sleep till
. . ,” that aired demo tapes of the Sarajevo scene and were broadcast on Radio Zid,
 ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 5

the city’s most popular FM radio station, commanded large audiences, up to 2,000
callers per night when the telephone lines where open.
In addition, the whole scene came to represent the cultural identity of the city to
the outside world. Hence, the July 28, 1994, concert by SCH, Lezi Majmune,
Sikter, and the Moron Brothers was broadcast by MTV. Soon after, the Rock
Under The Siege concert, organized by Radio Zid, powered by generators and held
during a short lull in the conflict on January 14, 1995, was described in the words
of one its organizers as “ . . . the best concert in Sarajevo ever. I cannot remember
better one because simply there was not any . . . ” Another most poignant testament
to the cruciality of this moment can be discerned from the CD compilation Rock
Under the Siege (1995), which was recorded live at the afore mentioned concert.
In Rock Under the Siege, the techno funk track “Rock Under Siege,” by
Ornamenti, uses a mixture of Bosnian and English to outline the dire conditions of
life in the city, while at the same time calling for its liberation. The song offers
proof of the ability and resolve to carry out this dual task by self-referentially
drawing attention to its heavy bass line, a triumph over the conditions in a city
without electricity.
Such a doubling of the tasks of actual and cultural liberation and the previously
quoted equation of the guitar and the gun, however, should not lead us to conclude
that there was, with regards to the alternative music scene, a coextensiveness which
recalls similar conceptions postulated in the course of various colonial, liberation,
and revolutionary movements.
One way to show the problematic relationship between the political-military
and the cultural spheres is to show the context for the relationship between the two,
with a particular emphasis on how Radio Zid, being the patron of the alternative
music scene, entered this relationship.
Thus, Radio Zid, while undoubtedly contributing to the defense of the city and
its externalisation, can be seen as forging, on the terrain of culture, a discourse and
practice opposed to those shelling Sarajevo, and (in contrast to the political and
military command structures within the city itself) the cultural forms as well as the
nationalist ideologies underwriting them.
Needless to say, such resistance brought on problems. While the initial Rock
Under Siege CD (masterminded by Radio Zid) received international coverage and
reviews in The New York Times, Billboard, and Time Magazine, making Radio Zid
a veritable cultural institution, reactions from the Bosnian government were hardly
accommodating. Thus, in January 1995, the Bosnian government attempted to
mobilize Radio Zid’s staff, a move that can be interpreted as an attempt to disperse
the “enemy within.”
One can easily understand why Radio Zid could be seen as a threat to the
government. Its mission was simple—to overcome all the walls that divide people
(the translation of zid is wall). One of Zid’s methods for overcoming these walls
was to forge a multiculturalism that rejected dominant forms of nationalism,
6 Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)

regardless of their particular ethnic affiliations, and combine this multiculturalism

with the articulation of a civil society independent of party political interests.
Thus the alternative music scene (then its own specific multiculturalism) can be
analysed on a number of different levels. As pertains to the question of genre
choice, the scene adopted and advocated what it saw as the “universal and
planetary code of rock culture.” Of course, there were also a few techno bands on
the Sarajevo alternative music scene. Their emergence is quite striking, because if
it is relatively easy to play proto rock on an acoustic guitar, while banging out
rhythms on pots and pans in periods when the city was without electricity, then
there are no acoustic samplers to offer the same for techno!
The specific form of rock during the siege was marked by a sharp break with
the hegemonic tradition of popular music, in rock as well as novo komponovana
narodna muzika, as it existed in the city before the war. Syncretic and hybrid, such
music scored some important domestic and international success (for instance, by
Kalesijski Zvuki or, more importantly, by Goran Bregović in his Time of the
Gypsies soundtrack from the late eighties, or those produced in exile for the films
Arizona Dreaming and Underground.). In contrast, and for the new bands
emerging out of the siege, there was “No more Balkan inspiration, folk motifs, or
traditional sounds mixed with modern trends.”
The importance of this refusal can be better appreciated in the context of the
war and the earlier mentioned specific manner in which the scene entered the
cultural struggle. Forms deemed “local” and “traditional” can be considered
ethnically determinate, and as such have the possibility to play into the hands of
one or another nationalism.
Diachronically, the adoption of syncretism can signify delving precisely into
the tradition that the nationalist elites were also busy unearthing. Synchronically, it
can reach beyond urban areas (as the epitome of modernity) into the village (the
location of tradition), and reinforce what many saw as the real cause of the war: the
“primitivization” and “ruralization” of Bosnian social life, its domination by “small
town” philosophy. The latter is expressed succinctly below

The spirit of the small town is between the tribe and the world; it is not an urban
spirit but one opposed to the city and civilization, close, finished, petrified spirit of
the tribe, finished in the time which is gone and unrepeatable, the spirit from the 14th
century, living like a ghost in the consciousness and soul of certain classes of the
people. It tends to revive in its unchanged form and content. The fact that its
realization is impossible leads towards a monstrous behavior towards oneself and
the world in the form of aggression, destruction and self-destruction.6

Of course, oppositions of the traditional and the modern, the local and the
global, or their tie-in with definite topographies, such as the village and the city,
are not without problems. The division between rural (traditional, monocultural,
intolerant, local, closed), and urban (modern, multicultural, tolerant, global, open),
 ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 7

can be seen as metaphysical and ideological in the sense that the divisions are
somewhat predicated on topographical and temporal sectioning off, as well as
hierarchization in relation to subjects, forms, practices, and ideologies that have a
simultaneous existence in the city and the countryside. Precisely because of this
simultaneity, they also refuse historicizing.
However, the false opposition of the country and the city is not necessarily
resolved through its seeming transcendence as witnessed in some strategies of
syncretism and hybridity, which combine, for instance, urban rock with rural folk.
The reasons for this are similar to the reasons why such strategies do not
necessarily resolve the problem of ethnic and nationalist determination. Namely,
the composite elements in a given hybrid form can still be seen as retaining their
original auras, these being coupled, not deconstructed, by hyphenation. Even if
these forms are not specific in their ethno-nationalist designation, they can still be
perceived as postulating the necessity for a continued divide between the city and
the country, or a generalized ethnicity, as a necessary determinant of cultural
expression and of political life.
In this context, the only example of hybridity on the Rock Under The Siege
compilation can be thought of as undoing the relativizing claims of hybridity itself.
Thus “Vera’” by Bedbug, is announced as a folk song. It then leads on from a
Balkan unaccompanied vocal in Bosnian to a syncretisized Balkanic bridge with
guitar riffs reminiscent of the eighties hit Suada by Plavi Orkestar. The main part
of the song dispenses with its Balkanic elements and turns to hardcore. Sung in
English, this “original” seems to return its opening to its proper status, rendering its
folk elements as sentimental and kitschy, the object of parody rather than serious
attention, superseded by a form that seems to express more relevance. It is
modernizing and universalising in relation to its predecessor.
The hardcore of “Vera” on Rock Under The Siege is not the exception, but the
rule. Hardcore as well as other subcultural musical forms were dominant on the
Sarajevo scene. Of course, subcultural forms were present in the city before the
war, but with its outbreak, their popularity was somewhat radicalised. The reasons
for this can be considered in psychological, economic, and political terms. Thus,
when Primož Oberžan travelled from Slovenia to Sarajevo, he was surprised by the
popularity of raw guitar music outside main trends. Oberžan first understood this
popularity in terms of a lack of a fresh flow of musical information predicated on
the conditions of the siege, but only later came to realize it as the integer of a more
emotional context of cultural reception. Marinela Domančić and Amir Hodžić
explained to him that

Rage Against the Machine and Clawfinger are bands, which were more popular
in Sarajevo during the war than anywhere else in the world. Both have the kind of
energy and rebelliousness that is very familiar to an isolated group of people.
Listening to this kind of music was one of the few opportunities to go wild and
forget. If, that is, you had somewhere to listen to it.7
8 Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)

Important though these moments of imaginary flight were in terms of offering

temporary emotional relief from the constant pressures of war, in the context of
Sarajevo under the siege going “wild” while listening to Rage Against the Machine
and Clawfinger, the desire to forget the realities of Sarajevo should not be seen so
much in terms of a manifestation of escapism (as a form of final disengagement
with social reality), as it should be seen as an abstention from the tasks of its
ultimate transformation,
Subcultural forms are by definition those arising out of economic, political, and
aesthetic marginality; they are particular forms of empowerment in conditions of
general disempowerment, alienation, and dispossession. They refuse the
reproduction of these conditions by remaining outside the dominant modes of
social life. Indeed, desiring “energy” and “rebelliousness” can be read as desiring
subjectification, self-expression, and self-realization in a context in which these are
generally absent. This is an understandable emotion given the conditions of siege
and the experiences of objectification arising out of being the daily target of
bombing and sniper fire.
The affinity felt with subcultural aesthetic forms not predicated on the
experience of actual and immediate warfare in its classical sense also signals just
how much feelings of frustration can traverse zones of war and those of peace.
That these feelings can engender sentiments that can be recognized by those living
in the conditions of extremity reveals the conditions of a perceived normality as
somewhat false.
Apart from this, affinity with global subculture reveals how expressions and
projections of the transcendence of existing social conditions, laid down by the
political and cultural elites internal to Sarajevo, fail to arouse the same conviction.
This sense of disengagement with the narratives of these elites, narratives they
expected the minnows to sacrificially realize, is aptly caught in Karim Zaimović’s
characterization of the impetus behind the Sarajevo scene: “There are some people
in this town whose main goal is not to die like a hero.”
Questions of language choice as well as questions of genre have an important
place on the Sarajevo scene. Here and certainly, the use of English became more
widespread than before the war. Its deployment can be seen as a way to externalize
the conditions within the city and Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole. Such
externalization could mobilize opinion abroad and hence bring about more decisive
outside interventions to end the war. Thus Meldin Hota, of D. Throne, once
substantiated his band’s use of English by noting that since everybody in the city
knows about the war, the task is to communicate this experience to the outside
world.
The necessities guiding such externalization (and this argument also pertains to
the problematics of genre choice) are one reason why we cannot dismiss the
cultural forms discussed here as mere manifestations of “cultural imperialism.”
These strategies also avoid the reproduction, and challenge the monopoly, of
the imperialist culture seemingly being internalized by the periphery. Foreign
 ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 9

language use can be seen as wresting the imperial linguistic standard from the
metropolis itself. The English lyrics of the scene under siege are often marked by
individual mannerisms that evade the standard and engender a plurality within the
English itself. At the same time, such communication to the metropolis undermines
its image of the other. What is absent in this communication is the reproduction of
ethno-nationalist ideology as expected of the Balkan subject. Moreover, the lyrics
on the scene are marked by a critical stance towards the socio-economic order that
the metropolis epitomizes.

Foreign language use can also internally subvert the dominant ideological and
political structure’s own postulations of cultural determination and necessity and the
final limits of creative freedom within these. Embarking on singing in English or
German during the days of socialist Yugoslavia could prompt an almost Pavlovian
denunciation by the authorities of these examples of western decadence or Nazi
sympathies. In the context of emergent nationalism in ex-Yugoslavia, the
denunciation of foreign language lyrics in popular music would be based on a
romantic nationalist view of language as the highest expression of a people’s culture
inherently springing from their land. Thus, as one authority critic explained: “Some
of them write in English as if they were ashamed of their mother tongue. I doubt that
these people would be willing to protect our country if it were necessary, since they
seem to surrender to foreign influences so easily.”

With the break up of Yugoslavia, such conceptions of language not only pitted
the pure mother tongue against that of the seedy foreigner, but also gave rise to the
linguistic wars paralleling the actual ones raging at the time. In this context, usages
of Serb, Croat, and Bosnian were being redefined in strict ethno-nationalist terms
in order to bring them more in line with the desired and proper ethnic identity of
their speakers. The consequences of this were the ethnic cleansing of languages—
for instance of Turkish elements in Serb—and the rise of war newspeak, in which
the adjectification of ethnic identity was idiomized to serve functions of the
glorification of the Self and the denigration of Other.
Archaisms and neologisms were also used in this process, an example of which
would be “Jugo-unitaristic srbochetnik bandit groups,” as well the substitution of
previously common place names with other ones in order to reflect the proper
ethnic identity of their constituencies.8
In contrast, the adoption of English can be used to avoid the reproduction of
such war newspeak, and hence address an audience without necessarily
interpellating it into a given ethnic and national identity. The same refusal can be
discerned in connection with the actual contents of the lyrics. These, regardless of
whether they are in English or Bosnian, are marked by a complete absence, in
contrast to propaganda songs, of positing the subject in terms of definite and
determining ethnic identities; there is no ethnic “naming” of the friend nor the foe,
no presence of Muslims, Croats, and Serbs in the songs, nor any postulations of
10 Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)

“our” culture and practice against “theirs:” nothing which could be traced back to
singular ethnic origins.
This strategy of non-naming the aggressor through ethnic designation, adopted
at the beginning of the war and then dropped by the non-nationalistic media, and
criticized by some as the expression of a false transnationalism,9 does have the
advantage of avoiding the reproduction of the ideologies of ethnic causality that led
to the outbreak of the war. In this strategy, ethnic particularization not only
engenders the process of homogenization desired by their elites, but also obscures
multiculturalism, the degree to which those defending were made up of all of
ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina (and similarly the territories they inhabited).
Thus, the strategy of avoiding strict ethno-national designation has the advantage
of pursuing precisely the point on which it has been criticized as it attempts to
“erase the element of nation from social organization,”10 and tries to avoid
reproducing the very terms under which the siege of Sarajevo was being
conducted.
The absence of ethnic designation (and the causality as well as homogenization
stemming from it) runs across the whole of Rock Under the Siege. “Story from
Sarajevo,” by D. Throne, laments a former friend who crossed over to the other
side of the frontline and was killed in action.
The song offers an explanation of the wedge between them—religious
difference—in a manner that signals a lack of belief in its absolute determination.
And, where the lyrics directly address the friend on the other side and ask if he
thinks about the friendship when he turns his guns towards the enemy, his friend,
the lyrics imply a refusal to completely disown the former friendship and its
intimate community, while still gesturing towards the possibility of dialogue
carried out by means other than weapons.
Such reconciliation is further underlined by the refrain “It does not matter, life
goes on.” Of course, this can be seen the ironic deployment of a popular saying
that enables the management of the harsh life under siege, but it can also be
understood as an optimistic postulation of a future beyond specific national and
religious ideologies and the divisions they engender.
In “Story from Sarajevo,” if the crossing over of the friend is posited in terms
of a particularized act rather then being the a priori fate and realization of every
Serb (thereby avoiding constructing an essential and necessary link between ethnic
and religious identity), then “A lot of Idiots per Day,” by Grafit, again not only
avoids positing a determinate collective identity that always fully signifies the fate
of the individual, but also points to alternative “life-scripts” for those on both sides
of the frontline.
Thus, in English, the song sings of a women who left the city of “bad rules,”
where “she’s not been well been killing by her own.” A refugee, she still remains
unhappy, for she is separated from her loved one who has remained in the city and
who, however, also realizes that “My life, here is wrong, a lot of idiots per day.”
 ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 11

[original English preserved] These idiots, the song seems to imply, are not only
those attacking the city, but also those within it.
Another strategy that can be seen as subverting war newspeak, is the use of
irony and cynicism, both figures identified as one of the hallmarks of the Sarajevo
scene. The Bosnian lyrics of “Sarajevo feeling,” by the punk band Protest,
celebrate conditions of life in the city under siege: one can cry with joy when there
is electricity, everybody is so happy, they just stay at home, nobody drinks water
but dew, there is no need to bathe or wash one’s hair.
The song directly addresses those who have left Sarajevo either to seek peace
and plenitude elsewhere or to participate in its shelling: “Our dear friends, come
back here so that you will see how we much fun we are having here.”
Such ironic celebration is not only a device for emotionally managing the
realities of life and death in Sarajevo, but also one that in this context dampens the
resentment felt towards refugees, as well the charges of betrayal they had to face.
Even for individuals who were most vocal in their critiques of those who had left
the city, irony, in the long term, is a safer bet than open hostility. More
importantly, irony is also a means to challenge censorship and the stakes of
transgression against dominant social mores and political structures. These stakes
and the responses to them were already high under socialism: in war they are even
higher. However precisely because of its celebrative nature, “Sarajevo Feeling”
cannot be understood as demoralizing in terms of the conditions in the city, nor in
terms of encouraging refugees to leave, a practice not only resented by those who
stayed behind, but also by the Bosnian government.
The context of the violent extension of individual identity into publicly opposed
ethnic collectivities, the demands made by the “representatives” of the ethnic
collectivity in question or the state on individuals regarding their proper realization
(for instance as “heroes”), and the determinations and dangers of public space that
give rise to the objectification and reification of those signified by nationalist
discourse and living under shelling and sniper fire, can herald a retreat from public
space altogether. “Rijeći,” (Words) by Pessimistic Lines, describes a happiness
which is distant in its temporal as well geographical sense, a present marked by
isolation, the realization of the disappearance of the individual, the awareness of
the transience of life, and the impossibility of communication: “Empty words
travel somewhere between us words travel.”
Similar sentiments are expressed in “Ponekad pomislim,” (Sometimes I
wonder) by Hindustan Motors: the subject’s realization that nobody needs him and
that he has no one to count on, leads him to a misanthropic rejection and isolation
from the world. “Dark side of Me,” by Beastly Stroke, is even more radical in
this—the psychological disintegration of the Self offers an insight into the true
nature of the war. However, only the subject cares and knows about its true nature.
In this he remains alone.
The subversion of the discourse of war is also contained in songs where it
ceases to be a theme and a motif altogether. The strategy is hardly escapist: while
12 Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)

such songs postulate a private and public space that has not been completely
destroyed by war and colonized by nationalism, the social conditions they portray
are still those of contradiction and alienation. For example, the English lyrics of
“Mainthing,” by Down, take a critical stance towards a world characterized by
consumption and accumulation. “Gudra,” by Sikter, is a Bosnian warning against
the danger of drugs and the problems their abuse lead to.
Here, the very strategies of representation that “Mainthing” or “Gudra”
deploy—an excision of war from the social fabric that does not, however, imply a
resolution of social contradiction—also work against seeing the immediate
transcendence of war, i.e. peace, as the absolute deliverance from violence,
alienation, and dispossession. Also, and through the depiction of concerns and
experiences that are immediately recognizable to those outside the war zone, they
force a different consideration of Bosnians and Balkan subjects, as well as the
seemingly opposed periods and topographies of calm and crisis.
Namely, if the case can be made that “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us
that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule,”11
then the manner in which these songs transcend the postulation of temporal and/or
geographic “difference” of the “state of emergency” challenges the normalization
of the misery, exploitation, and violence with which those outside the war zone
themselves otherwise live on a daily basis. This transcendent manner also refuses
the displacement of this condition onto a Balkan other.
Moreover, an uncritical desire for a future deliverance from the exceptional
state of emergency or the belief that it exists with other people and elsewhere, also
forces us back into the embrace of the dispossession and exploitation in which we
all live on a daily basis. Hence, it defers the moment through which we can
challenge the rules by which society is currently ordered.
Is such a deferral the case with songs whose departure from the realities of
Sarajevo seems complete? Examples of this are Gnu’s “Chala,” which describes a
non-compromising motorcycle road warrior always watchful of his brotherhood,
and “A.P. Sound,” by the band of the same name, which in tropes typical of its
techno genre, upholds the sound of the band itself as being the best in town, so to
speak, and invites the audience to display its appreciation through dancing.
But, rather than seeing these songs in terms of a hedonistic deferral
reinforcement of the social order, a manifestation of repressive desublimation, they
can be considered in terms of the political unconscious, that is also motivating all
the other songs discussed so far. This reveals itself as a yearning for the full
realization of a life (precisely because it is postulated in a realm beyond pre-
existing “life scripts,” hierarchy, and labor) that goes beyond not only the
specificities of Sarajevo in particular and the war in general, but also the current
forms of socio-economic and political life globally.
 ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 13

III.
The alternative music scene peaked in 1995 with the release of Rock Under the
Siege and SCH’s The Gentle Art of Firing. In October of that year, Lezi Majmune,
SCH, Protest, Beastly Stroke, and Adi Lukovac participated in a festival of
Bosnian culture in Prague. Once there, however, the strain of returning to a city
torn apart by war proved too great for the majority of the participants. Thus, the
only intact returnees from Prague were Protest and Adi Lukovac (SCH decided to
call it day). With this, part of the wartime scene came to an end, as did the war
itself with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement of November 21, 1995.
The conditions as well as the actual implementation of the Dayton agreement
left a lot to be desired, even in the years following it. Internal displacement
remained a reality of Bosnian life, and the return of refugees partial if not paltry. In
addition, while there were many who wanted to return home, there were also
numerous others who had little motivation to return to Bosnia under the current
conditions of the country. The political formations that mobilized the populace into
war remained largely intact, and individual identity continued to be
overdetermined by ethnicity when it unfolded into the public sphere. This was not
only predominantly ethnically territorialized, but also still monopolized by
nationalist parties. Poverty and dispossession also remained widespread.
Of course, the “new” conditions of post-Dayton Bosnia prompted speculations
on the nature of the scene. Thus, in the fanzine Rock Under Siege, Adi Lukovac
linked the fate of the scene to that of the country as a whole. According to him, this
fate was not only still developing but also, more importantly, doing so under
conditions of a very uncertain and unstable peace. Thus, the actual existence of a
scene as well as its future was difficult to determine: “ . . . in essence it exists,
however, it is same as a child, changing and growing, and I think that in a year or
two it will be completely different.”12
Radio Zid continued to foster the scene with the release of the compilation
Rock Under Siege B (1996). This was followed by a concert held November 8 − 9,
1996, featuring C.I.A., D. Throne, Pessimistic Lines, Down, Tmina, Protest,
Maelstrom, Moron Brothers, Quasimind, A.P. Sound and Adi Lukovac from
Sarajevo, Deaf Age Against Gluho Dobo from the Bosnian town of Zenica, as well
as Hic et Nunc and It’s Not For Sale from Slovenia.
To some extent, the degree to which some new bands replace those present on
the first Rock Under Siege reflects the flux Lukovac referred to above. However,
the overwhelming picture is that of continuity between both records. There is no
trace of syncretism and hybridity; hardcore and metal as well as English language
lyrics are dominant.
In terms of the concerns of the lyrics themselves, then the retreat into the self, a
radical form of internal exile, as one strategy through which to manage the
discourse as well as actual the effects of the war, declines. This can be seen as a
14 Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)

possible reflection of the relative opening up of the public spaces of the city in the
advent of peace. Nonetheless, the songs on the new compilation still refuse to posit
social causality in ethnically determinate terms and to draw the boundaries of
inclusion and exclusion according to them.
Some also take contradiction to be their point of departure from the social
realities they describe. Through this they remind us not to obscure the geographic
and temporal oppositions that construct peace in the context of the war in Bosnia as
a specific manifestation of the “end of history.” They do not construct or
compartmentalize the Other in a Balkan context, i.e., as inherently ethnocentric and
violent. Also, they do not legitimise the generalized and global “state of
emergency” and the elites who preside over it.
A striking example of all this is the opening track of Rock Under Siege B. The
standard metal format of CIA’s “Enough” is not only substantiated in the guitar
riffs, but also in the song’s apocalyptic imagery, this being presented in English. It
describes the ideology of ethnic cleansing, epitomized in the belief of one land for
one race, not in a particularized Bosnian setting as one might expect, but as a
globally dominant practice in a world otherwise marked by continuous armament
and living under the threat of nuclear destruction. Thus, “Enough” links the
experience of dispossession and violence as it exists across societies and cultures
rather than exclusively within them and reminds us that the New World Order is
hardly one of life in the bliss of eternal peace and mutual understanding.
Concerning other songs on the compilation, the overwhelming absence of the
war in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a specific and definite theme and motif is also
surprising, all the more so when you consider that the compilation was recorded in
the immediate aftermath of Dayton, between January and August 1996.
One way to consider the relative lack of even retrospective accounts of the war
can be to draw a parallel with the experience of socialist Yugoslavia, when
precisely in the aftermath of the war of national liberation (1941 − 1945), and
indeed more or less right up to its demise, the constant invocation and ritualization
of war was a mechanism through which the political elite legitimised its rule, as
well as constructed “life-scripts,” (through which acceptable standards of behavior
and the validity of political demands were defined and judged) for the post-war
generation.
More importantly, rather than the absence of war constituting an erasure of
historical memory, it can also be seen as an avoidance of using history. Here it is
valid to remember the deployment of history in nationalist songs, as a means of
interpellation and mobilization that could threaten the “unstable peace.”
The conditions of this peace (albeit in abstract terms) as the conditions of any
society, are again the object of critique. Thus, we find “Not You,” by Quasimind,
warning of a sense of false salvation coming from the West, or A.P. Sound’s
techno track “Little Ninja (To Whom it May Concern)” trying to make the masses
realize the truth about the elites that preside over them, these being responsible for
the suffering, lies, and death present around the world today. Other tracks with a