UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Essentially, what the music blogger does after obtaining the record in one or another way
physically, she digitises it. This implies ripping the vinyl using a gramophone and a digital
recorder; classifying the tracks and ordering them into a folder (album>author>track name) and
adding the scanned or photographed artwork/record cover. The final stage is uploading
compressed (zip or rar) files to one of the many file-sharing sites (e.g. megaupload.com, drop.io,
rapidshare.com ...). The blog post contains a link to that remote storage service website.
Now the question that pops to mind is: Why would someone want to do this? It is a time and
money consuming pastime: to find all these records, to buy them, to digitise them, to spend that
much time doing all this for free while still make a living. Yet this is an activity that clearly thrives
as there are people who believe that musical past should not be forgotten and therefore they invest
considerably into making it available (in the case of Yugoslav music to predominantly post-
Yugoslav public) worldwide.
This is particularly interesting in view of the fact that all this music would otherwise be
unavailable, forgotten and in many cases gone forever. In the case of Yugoslav music thus
preserved and shared and in view of the country‘s history, its demise and the post-Yugoslav
realities, music blogging is all the more important socio-cultural practice which in effect is above
all about the preservation of the past. The case of Yugoslavia is somewhat specific: the country
disintegrated in 1991 and plunged into wars out of which several new states emerged. In the
processes of nationalisation/‗independentalisation,‘ the former republics, now independent states,
suffered a considerable, self-inflicted, memory loss. The newly forming countries and the up-andcoming
elites, supposedly cleansed of the communist wrongdoing, tried to eradicate the once
common past by supplanting it with newly established national(ist) narratives. This in essence also
meant an attempt (on the level of political discourses) at breaking any links with the Yugoslav
commonly shared field of popular culture. Apparently and not surprisingly this was a flawed
attempt, as it is fairly unreasonable to expect social and cultural bonds to break overnight,
particularly in the era of ‗mediated everything.‘ This, among others, decidedly contributed to the
emergence of Yugonostalgia. Moreover, as pop-cultural pasts ‗normally‘ tend to find ways into
the pop-cultural presents and are in many cases, in the western hemisphere at least, successfully
commoditised, the ‗cultural cooperation‘ in post-Yugoslavia was soon re-established even in the
most war-and-hatred-stricken areas.
But in the case of Yugoslavia any such activities were actively discouraged (which by no means
implies there were not ways, quite to the contrary) or plain impossible due to the politicobelligerent
situation. In a situation that pre-empted any overt dealing with the recent past, the
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