UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

‗state rock‘ bands and sounds, 197 and the numbing effects of the ‗social deafness‘ which up until
late 1970s was preventing much musically engaged response to the state-of-affairs. In fact, the
state politics adopting since the early 1960s the let-go attitude towards rock, effectively turned
many rock projects into harmless, pro-regime or plain de-politicised endeavours. Just to the
contrary of what the rock sub-culture was supposed to represent. 198 The Paraf, among other punkrockers
that decidedly influenced not only musical scene, but ‗disturbed‘ also the political
constellation, 199 is clearly an important reference in bloggers musical (and otherwise) memory of
his youth and the country. And by way of presenting their music, he also engages in analysis of
the music and its musical and culture-historical contexts:
"A dan je tako lijepo poceo" [But the Day started off so nicely] features 14 punk numbers,
although you can almost sense the ‗scent of new time‘ and what the band will be doing
about a year later. The texts move from socio-political to more jokey ones, such as the
one poking Bijelo dugme [Yugoslav band, representative of the so-called shepherd‘s
rock] titled ―Pritanga i vaza.‖ ―T kao krava‖ is about a dear opiate of us (another in a line
of our pot hymns) and one of the strongest, along the ―Visokotirazni Mir,‖ "Morao sam
ici" i "Visoki propisi."
I can‘t help it not to see some influence of our hard rock bands, such as Yu Grupa [...] and
Vatreni poljubac. To be fair, most of our early punk band in the late 1970s were deep into
hard rock, psychedelia and similar. The fact is that our then pissed off punkers perhaps
heard of about ten foreign most famous bands and that they had roots in 1970s hard rock.
Naturally, no hard feelings. 200
In this post, as suggested above, individual recollections are applied on a more universalised
account of that period and music, i.e. the blogger craftily blends subjective and generally accepted
accounts of the past. The comments, however, prove to be a place of dispute or contestation,
contributing thus to the co-creation of the narrative in blog as a 4MO:
Anonymous said...
I saw Paraf live at least 5 times. I used to hang out with them and I know Tica didn‘t kill
himself, but died of heart arrest. Tica RIP. In future please check your data.
July 18, 2009 3:55 PM
Bassta! Pex, a.k.a. Gramofonije Plocanovic said...
Well, I said I apologise in advance for any stupid stuff, particularly this one. As I heard
Tica did die of hear arrest...
July 18, 2009 7:07 PM
safetblaj said...
197 Sabrina P. Ramet, Rocking the State, Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, Boulder, Westview
Press, 1994, 103–132.
198 See Martin Pogaĉar, ―Yu-rock in the 1980s: Between Rural and Urban.‖
199 The punk-rock scene was perhaps the most eloquent in, but not exclusively limited to, Ljubljana, Rijeka, Zagreb,
Sarajevo and Beograd, the larger cities where power resided or where rapid urbanisation was by the time well
underway. The political implications often attributed to punk and new wave in Yugoslavia were by no means part of
the musicians‘ agenda, but rather the ‗incidental‘ consequence emanating from the ‗interaction‘ between the subculture
and power as mediated in the academic discourses which significantly shaped and mobilised social action in
the rising nationalisms in the Yugoslav republics.
200 ―Paraf nas nasusni,‖ Nevaljalaploce, http://nevaljaleploce.blogspot.com/2009/07/uskoro.html, 8 September 2011.
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