Songs of seduction: popular music and Serbian nationalism

Abstract

In Serbia, culture is never far removed from politics. When writing about the relationship between politics and folklore, the Serbian ethnologist Ivan * olovi ' commented that Serbian politics is saturated with folklore and that, from the late 1980s, every political leader, without exception, every political programme and every political battle made reference to folkloric texts that resorted to a raft of traditional clichés. The main vehicle for carrying the imagery, values and antagonisms of these mythical tales has been the pesma , which may be translated as either 'poem' or 'song' since the words in Serbian are interchangeable. Indeed, the traditional song has long been embedded in Serbian cultural identity, and has been inspiring Serbian nationalism since the nineteenth century. In the 1990s the stimulation of nationalism by popular and traditional Serbian songs involved a process of ethnification--a cult of the folkloric--in which popular music contributed to the estrangement, alienation and distancing of the Other. This was both a process with roots long buried in the past, as well as one that continued to flourish at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Hudson explores the impact of culture on Serbian politics, especially from the perspective of the relationship between identity formation and ethnic conflict. He investigates the links between popular musical forms and nationalism in Serbia, through an analysis of the lyrics, language and meanings of a selection of songs in a variety of different musical genres that were popular between the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century.