UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

spectacle for which that audience has gathered.‖ 165 Although the ―reality of our cultural economy
is that the communal bond unifying such an audience is most likely to be little more than the
common consumption of a particular performance commodity,‖ 166 the individual‘s experience is
influenced by her own rendition/identification of the commonality ‗presumably‘ residing in or
being transferred by music. Thus music does work as a social adhesive, as a platform for shared
experience for various populations, sub-cultures or shared-interest groups.
Relevant for this study, however, is the ‗capacity of music to capture a specific historical
moment,‘ dimension, a feeling, and transmit it along into the future. There, in the future, clearly it
has to be ‗de-captured‘ decoded into the present mind of the listener in a specifically distinct
historical, socio-cultural situation. The strategies, roughly, are two: to just consume such music or
in fact use it to establish an engaged relationship with the past, one‘s own and that from which this
music came. What is crucial in this respect is the investigation into how the music is dealt with,
interpreted and remediated today (therefore I am not looking into the particular production modes
or genre specifics; this is not a history of Yugoslav popular music, rather an insight into the
archaeology of vinyl music). The space-time, the past or history captured within the songscape(s)
works in close interaction with one‘s very private set of experiences and feelings in the present
and is also in constant interaction with the realm of the ‗anticipated‘ collective. Listening to a song
can take us back to when we listened to a certain kind of music, it can remind us of what we were
doing and/or feeling at the time, and it can invoke a certain feeling of a time, Zeitgeist. Yet it can
also serve to narrate a specific view/understanding of the past by virtue of transmitting the
audiovisual images of the world no longer present, but highly mediated, and re-placing them into a
world today. And it is through this lens that I look at Yugoslav popular musical heritage.
I have argued above that music can serve as a sort of social adhesive and an individual cultural
vortex, yet the question arises whether music is capable of transmitting more than personal
experiences. To put it differently, is it ever possible to gain through the music of a certain period
access to the gist of that specific period (not physical of course)? Due to the massive mediatisation
of the quotidian, I think popular music can in fact re-presence, if but a fraction, a scent of times
passed ... it can provide a glimpse into the socio-cultural environment of Yugoslavia. What is
more, music and audio recording can be used in trying to ‗control‘ the inaccessible past. 167 Yet,
the desire to control the past via navigating, managing, appropriating it representations, is further
complicated in DME where the replication, mixing, sampling meshing add to the malleability,
165 Philip Auslander, Liveness, Performance in a mediatized culture, New York, Routledge, 2008, 65.
166 Ibid., 64.
167 Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, ―Introduction,‖ 20.
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