Recycled Music for Banal Nation: The Case of Serbia 1999– 2010

Abstract

In this chapter I address the ways in which popular music genres have been recycled in the Serbian post-socialist political landscape. Specifically, I analyse how Western-styled music production was relocated, both spatially and temporally, from being a vehicle of purported ‘freedom of expression’ in socialist Yugoslavia, to operating as a mechanism of Serbian banal nationalism. During the 1990s, Serbian nationalism emerged as an antagonistic force playing a crucial and dominant role in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and aiming to retain control of vast swathes of land which were (in Serbian nationalistic discourse) perceived as parts of Serbian national territory. The aggressiveness of Serbian nationalism was reflected in various popular music genres, not least in the infamous turbo-folk. Thus, it is important to trace the mechanisms whereby certain products of popular music, through processes of spatiotemporal relocation, were employed in order to banalise the ‘hot’ Serbian nationalism, and represent it in a different, Westernised light. I will show how the pop and rock music became engrafted into seemingly innocuous representations of Serbian patriotism, or ‘civic nationalism’, through widely accepted practices which were even perceived as ‘above the political’ in the everyday jargon.