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Chapter 2 | Music Blogging: Saving Yugoslav Popular Music
Sounds threatened with extinction should be noted in
particular and should be recorded before they disappear. The
vanishing sound object should be treated as an important
historical artefact, for a carefully recorded archive of
disappearing sounds could one day be of great value. 130
Introduction
In the post-WWII period of rebuilding, Yugoslavia was undergoing processes of industrialisation
and modernisation, building at that also a new symbolic tissue. The enthusiasm of renewal, at least
in the realm of official politics, was fuelled by the international position of the state and internal
insecurity of the regime which provided raw material for motivating mythology of transition. This
was successfully fuelled into all pores of social and cultural life, one of the crucial vehicles to do
so being music. The everyday life in Yugoslavia after WWII was largely dominated by music, and
continues to do so even today, which presented not insignificant portions of cultural production.
Moreover, music in SFRY was to an important degree a socio-cultural vehicle for articulating
ideological tenets of the state in the making. After the Tito-Stalin split in 1948 and official
dismissal of socialist realism in the sphere of cultural production in 1952, 131 the country and
cultural production saw relative decentralisation and openness of the system towards the West.
This resulted in variety of Western influences (initially predominantly Italian and German, later on
increasingly Anglo-American) ‗invading‘ the sphere of popular culture. Subsequent acculturation
of new ‗foreign‘ forms of expression was inevitable, yet the process resulted in a distinctly
Yugoslav brand of adopted music genres.
Music in SFRY, as Mirjana Laušević argues, allows for three expressive modes to be discerned:
revolutionary songs, the work of cultural and artistic ensembles, and popular music. Where
ideology and popular conception of music ‗agreed‘ throughout the post-war Yugoslav period was
130 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Rochester, VT, Destiny
Books, 1994 [1977], 209.
131 Ervin Dolenc, ―Culture, Politics, and Slovene Identity,‖ in Jill Benderey and Evan Kreft (eds.), Independent
Slovenia: Origins, Movements and Prospects, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994, 69–90, 85.
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