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    ROCKN ROLLAND NATIONALISM:

    A MULTINATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

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    ROCKN ROLLAND NATIONALISM:

    A MULTINATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

    Edited by

    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins

    Cambridge Scholars Press

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    RocknRoll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective

    Edited by Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins

    This book first published 2005 by

    Cambridge Scholars Press

    15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

    British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

    Copyright Cambridge Scholars Press

    All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

    system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

    recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

    ISBN 1-904303-56-0

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    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Notes on Transliteration .........................................................................................viForeword, Dave Laing...........................................................................................vii

    Introduction, Mark Yoffe .......................................................................................xi

    Chapter One. Some People in This Town Dont Want to Die Like a Hero:

    Multiculturalism and the Alternative Music Scene in Sarajevo.

    1992-1996, Nikolai Jeffs ...................................................................................1

    Chapter Two. The Decline and Fall of Rock 'n Roll: Main Characteristics and

    Trends of Croatian Popular Music in the Second Half

    of the Nineteen-Nineties, Branko Kostelnik....................................................20Chapter Three. English Folk-RockAn Expression of Non-Belligerent

    Nationalism, Kenneth Roseman ......................................................................33

    Chapter Four. East of Rock: The Development of Finnish National Rock,

    Tarja Rautiainen ..............................................................................................40

    Chapter Five. Retro-Nationalism? Rock Music in the Former German

    Democratic Republic (GDR), Patricia Simpson..............................................54

    Chapter Six. Hungarys Cold War Rock n Roll Spring: An Interview

    with Andras Simonyi, Hungarian Ambassador to the U.S., Andrea Collins

    and Mark Yoffe ...............................................................................................82Chapter Seven. Conceptual Carnival: National Elements in Russian

    Nationalist Rock Music, Mark Yoffe .............................................................. 97

    Chapter Eight. On the Relationship of Global and Local Music Production:

    Mario Marzidovek and His Independent Label

    Marzidovshekminimalaboratorium, Rajko Mursic ....................................... 121

    Chapter Nine. National Zapprobat: Reinterpreting Frank Zappa

    Through a Patriotic Lens, Aaron Mulvany.................................................... 137

    Index.................................................................................................................... 169

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    NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

    Throughout the text we follow Library of Congress system of transliteration.

    The only exceptions are some proper names that are internationally known in

    different transliteration as it happens with Russian names ending in -ii, which are

    rendered in footnotes and bibliographies as ending in -y, like in Dostoevsky, or

    Troitsky, in accordance to a different standardized transliteration.

    Also in the case of Mario Marzidovek (in the essay by Rajko Muri) the name of

    hisIndependent Label Marzidovshekminimalaboratorium is spelled with -sh- as itis known internationally.

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    FOREWORD

    Dave Laing, London

    In what has been voted one of best songs of the rock era, John Lennon asked his

    listeners to imagine that there were no countries and nothing to kill or die for.Imagine is one of the most potent expressions of rock utopianism, in direct line

    from The Beatles "All You Need Is Love" and leading, among other things, to

    Live Aid, that practical expression of rock humanitarianism. Imagine is a plea to

    transcend the barriers of the nation state in favour of a benign globalisation, and in

    that sense, it is a pacifist equivalent to The Internationale.

    Despite those examples and their respective traditions of internationalism, music

    has more often been a vehicle for the expression of both national and nationalist

    identities and emotions. Both subjects are explored in Rock n Roll andNationalism: A Multinational Perspective. In the chapter on the complexities of theretro-nationalism of certain bands exiled by the disappearance of the German

    Democratic Republic, Patricia Simpson reminds us of an important distinction:

    Nationalism implies a conscious cognitive and emotional decision, and thus

    exceeds the contingency of national identity.

    National identity as embodied in the flag and anthem of a nation state can be

    construed as an accident of birth and not an ethnic inheritance; in contrast,nationalism is an ideological identification that requires constant renewal, and is

    often subject to contrasting visions. In the age of president George Bushs one-

    dimensional war on terror, it may be heartening for many non-Americans to read

    Aaron Mulvaneys claim that Frank Zappas carnivalesque oeuvre embodies an

    alternative patriotism that is both dissident and fundamentalist (in the sense of

    adhering to the ideals of the original Constitution of the United States).

    In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, music was an important site of the

    formation and renewal of nationalism. As the work of composers such as Dvorak

    and Sibelius reminds us, such nationalism was often most fiercely expressed by

    artists from nations that did not have their own secure states, but were subject to

    rule or threat from others. In the work of these and other classical composers, the

    national alibi came by way of the articulation of western classical forms with

    elements and themes from folk music, dance, or legend.

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    RocknRoll and Nationalism ix

    At this stage, the third great continent of music (the generally urban and

    commercialised popular genres) was less commonly linked to nationalist feeling.

    Instead, its connotations were those of a foreign or cosmopolitan modernism, and it

    was often seen as a threat to the nationalist coalition of folk and classical styles.

    Nevertheless, these imported popular musicsfrom tango and ragtime to rock n

    roll and punktook on national characteristics, as they were modified by

    indigenous musicians, most obviously by the translation of lyrics into nativelanguages, or substitution of lyrics in those languages.

    In some countries, notably some in the Soviet sphere of influence, rock groups

    were tolerated only if the words were written and sung in the national language. At

    other times in the Soviet era, as Andras Simonyi, the Hungarian ambassador to the

    U.S., points out, censors approved songs sung in English, since none of them spoke

    English and thus were unaware of the ideological content of the lyrics. Elsewhere,

    as Tarja Rautiainens essay on Finland points out, such matters have been subject

    to the play of market forces as well as generationally distinct perceptions of

    national identity.

    A further move in the evolution of nationalist popular music was the application of

    the folk or traditional music alibi to the forms of rock itself in what was often

    called folk-rock or electric-folk and is now frequently assimilated to the vexed and

    contested category ofworld music. Kenneth Rosemans affectionate essay dealswith an English attempt to create through folk-rock what the singer-songwriter

    Billy Bragg calls (perhaps too optimistically) a rational patriotism.

    Rock n Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective is fundamentally aseries of individual essays or reports on the theme of rock music and nationalism.

    In reporting on this theme, the essays also tell us much about the ways in which

    national popular music is transformed into, or replaced by, nationalist popular

    music.

    The context for most of the chapters of this compilation is the collapse in the

    nineteen-nineties of the two great federations of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

    To the outsider, at least, these momentous events may seem straightforwardly to

    have resulted in the creation or rehabilitation of many nation states, and the

    resurgence of nationalisms previously repressed by the internationalist ideology of

    the USSR as well as what Branko Kostelnik, in his chapter on Croatia, describes as

    the liberal socialism of the Yugoslav federation.

    These essays, however, have the salutary virtue of complicating such a view. Thechapters on the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence show how musicians have

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collinsx

    adjusted to Russias loss of its metonymic status as the hegemonic republic of the

    USSR. One of them presents the response of popular musicians to the traumatic

    fate of the German Democratic Republic, the only nation state to disappear in this

    era of the proliferation of new states.

    This proliferation has already had its (admittedly minor) effect on popular music

    culture by forcing the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to reorganise theEurovision Song Contest. Because so many states wish to participate, the contest

    now includes a preliminary competition, which results in the fact that no longer are

    all member countries of the EBU entitled to have their national songs performed

    for the Contests hundreds of millions of television viewers.

    The reports from Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are equally

    fascinating in their accounts of the rendezvous of rock and nationalism. Newly

    independent Croatia is shown to be a site of conflict between the westernising

    culture of the political elite, and a more populist trend that has reimported the

    music of the recent enemy (Serbia) under a new guise. In discussing music in

    Sarajevo, Nikolai Jeffs make use of Timothy Taylors application of the concept of

    strategic inauthenticity to describe music that embodies a universal and

    planetary code of rock culture with distinct echoes of John Lennons utopianism.

    In Slovenia, Rajko Mursic narrates the adventures of a music animateur who

    sidestepped nationalism and the state to become a vector in a transnational networkof musical experimentation.

    Above all, Rock n Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective is a book

    full of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called thick description, where the

    authors insights into the detail and nuance of their topics will lead any attentive

    reader to new understandings of what (perhaps sadly) will remain a major theme in

    the study of popular culture for a long time to come.

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    INTRODUCTION

    Mark Yoffe

    Rock n Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective, which brings together

    talents of a number of observers of popular music, came about as a result of myyears long fascination with the interplay between national and international

    tendencies within the rock music idiom. It crystallized at the panels of two

    extraordinary international conferences ( Popular Music and National Culture,Ljubljana, Slovenia, November 2000 and Crossroads in Cultural Studies,

    Tampere, Finland, June-July 2002) at which I met most of the contributors to thisvolume.

    The notion of nationalism as it plays out in rock music first came to me in graduate

    school (in the late eighties) when I was writing my dissertation on the Soviet rock

    tradition. It continued to puzzle me through several fieldwork trips to Russia,

    where I collected historical recordings of Soviet and Russian rock and interviewed

    rock musicians and other members of rock counterculture.

    What struck me as peculiar was the tendency, after the fall of the Soviet Union, forsome of the most illustrious members of former anti-Soviet rock resistance to

    position themselves in opposition to the newly-established capitalist system. These

    groups made a radical swing to the right into the ranks of ultra-nationalism.

    From the moment in the late sixties when Soviet/Russian rockers began to sing in

    Russian, this rock was trying to find its own true and special Russian identity.

    After years of learning and self-discovery, by the mid-nineteen-eighties this

    identity emerged as a clearly defined national tradition, with clearly noticeable

    national characteristics. In the early nineteen-nineties this trend asserted itsspecificity by developing a peculiarly Russian idiom.

    What became apparent was that the clearly nationalist and in some instances ultra-

    nationalist wing of the Russian rock community had adopted an international

    American-British rock tradition as its own, but used it to further a nationalist and

    often blatantly chauvinist and anti-western ideological agenda.

    This seemed funny and almost absurd, and probably could be dismissed as some

    sort of temporary trend or cultural aberration, if not for the inventiveness and forceof talent of some of these artists, as well as their significant influence upon fans

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collinsxii

    from different strata of societynot only disenfranchised youth from the

    impoverished industrial overskirts of big cities, but often students, intelligentsia,

    and bohemians.

    From this observation of processes taking place within Russian rock milieu, I

    became interested in looking at the mechanisms of the adaptation of the American-

    British rock legacy within other national pop music traditions, and also thequestion of weather or not similar ideological shifts were taking place within

    musical outputs of other national countercultures.

    The 2000 Popular Music and National Culture Conference in Ljubliana (four of itsparticipants, including myself, contributed papers here) deeply probed these issues,

    with an emphasis on the rock experience in former Yugoslavia. Three papers from

    that conference are included in Rock n Roll and Nationalism: A MultinationalPerspective.

    Rajko Mursic, a veteran scholar of Yugoslav rock music (and particularly of the

    Slovenian experience), is an author of numerous monographs and articles on

    developments in the Slovenian punk rock tradition. A former rock musician

    himself, Mursic, Professor of Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology

    of the University of Ljubljana,covers in his work the anthropological, economic,

    ideological, social, and identity-building aspects of rock musics influence onSlovenian youth. His works deal with the nationalization of international rock

    music idioms and with the nationalist notions underlying their development.

    Mursics contribution in this volume presents and considers the system of

    distribution of rock music production in Slovenia during the nineteen-nineties.

    Initially, his essay may seem marginally related to the subject of nationalism. But it

    is important to the understanding of the mechanisms behind nationalist rock music

    development. In this context, production and distribution is an apparatus of

    extreme importance, however often overlooked. It goes without saying that withouta system of production and distribution there cannot be a national pop music

    tradition.

    Nikolai Jeffs, a British trained scholar of Yugoslav counterculture, contributes here

    a most fascinating article on the unexpected nationalist sensibilities within rock

    milieu of besieged Sarajevo in mid-nineties. His finds and conclusions strike with

    their freshness and an unanticipated twist of described ideological perceptions of

    Sarajevos burgeoning-under-bullets rock milieu.

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    RocknRoll and Nationalism xiii

    Croatian rock musician, art curator, and rock critic Branko Kostelnik contributes

    an unusual insiders perspective in his journalistic essay on ultra nationalism in

    contemporary Croatian rock and pop.

    Two other veterans of the Ljubljana conference, Aaron Mulvany and I, contribute

    articles that were not presented at that conference, but were inspired by it.

    Two years after the Ljubljana conference, at theFourth International Crossroadsin Cultural Studies conference in Tampere, Finland, I organized a panel entirelydedicated to the subject of rock music and nationalism, and the name of this panel

    has become the title of this book.

    Three of five papers read at that conference are present in Rock n Roll andNationalism: A Multinational Perspective.

    Ljubljana conference veteran and independent scholar of rock music (and multi

    instrument musician in his own right), Philadelphian Aaron Mulvany delivered in

    Tampere (and presents here) a thought provoking, if not provocative, paper in

    which he interprets Frank Zappas musical ideology as an example of positive,

    constructive nationalism, a nationalism that stems from patriots pain for his own

    country.

    Tarja Rautiainen, professor of Music Anthropologyat the University of Tampere,

    gives a most interesting account of the historical development of Finnish rock andthe mechanisms behind the Finnishization of the rock music of Finland.

    Patricia Simpson, professor of German Language and Literature from the

    University of Montana, contributes a profound study of retro-nationalist tendency

    in the rock milieu of former East Germany. She not only gives a very informative

    overview of East German rock history, but also shows how cultural and historical

    nostalgia shapes ideologies behind pop music trends.

    As a veteran of both conferences I choose to contribute an essay on the subject of

    national carnivalesque tradition in Russian nationalist rock music, which I wrote

    for this volume.

    To present the issue of musical nationalism from the perspective of rock criticism I

    invited Washington, D.C.-based veteran rock journalist Kenneth Roseman, who

    has been writing about progressive English and American folk and roots music for

    more than twenty-five years, to contribute an article on highly influential Englishfolk rock. This music has not until now been viewed from the point of view of

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collinsxiv

    nationalism. In an article that describes and contrasts themusical approaches takenby Ashley Hutchings, Billy Bragg, and Jim Moray, he explores the relationship of

    national musical traditions found in their songs to their personal national ideologies

    and their ideas of Englishness.

    An insiders point of view on Hungarian rock comes from Hungarian Ambassador

    to the United States Andras Simonyi, who twice sat down with co-editor AndreaCollins and me to talk about the Hungarian rock tradition and his view of

    nationalism in his countrys rock. Ambassador Simonyi (known in Washington as

    the rockin Ambassador) is well qualified to speak on the subject. As a member

    of Hungarian counterculture in the nineteen-sixties, he played guitar with his

    countrys most celebrated rock band Locomotiv GT. Andras Simonyi presents his

    profound from the horses mouth perspective of the Hungarian rock in an

    opinioned and sometimes provocative manner.

    As is apparent from the descriptions above, the contributors to Rock n Roll andNationalism: A Multinational Perspective consider its subject from vastly differing

    points of view, from rock music insider, to veteran rock music journalist, to

    scholars trained in cultural analysis, anthropology, critical theory,

    ethnomusicology, social studies and literary criticism. Not only do the books

    contributors show different angles of academic and non-academic vision, but they

    write from different perspectives: from national viewing his or her own culture tosavvy international observer.

    The books polyphonic tapestry of ideas, observations, views, and voices on the

    subject of rock music and nationalism represent a tremendously fruitful jumping

    off point for thoughtful further research into the subject.

    Thats why these articles, though exciting and informative by themselves, read best

    in dialog with each other. Readers may disagree with some of the authors. Some of

    the essays inevitably will evoke readers counter arguments. But that is the ideabehind Rock n Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective: to provokefurther thinking and discussions of its exciting and little explored subject.

    A few words regarding the geographical scope of the book (contributions cover

    Finland, the United States, Bosnia, (East) Germany, Croatia, Russia, Slovenia and

    England). We know full well that the list of countries where rock music and

    nationalism find themselves intertwined spans the globe. By presenting a large

    variety of culturally, historically, ethnically, and politically different national music

    traditions, we want to underscore the universality of ideas and mechanisms of

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    RocknRoll and Nationalism xv

    interaction, mutual dependence and influence that can develop between rock music

    and nationalist sensibilities.

    Hopefully in future publications we will be able to see how these tendencies work

    or dont work within the cultures of other nations.

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    CHAPTERONE

    SOME PEOPLE IN THIS TOWN DONT WANT TO

    DIE LIKE A HERO:

    MULTICULTURALISM AND THE ALTERNATIVE

    MUSIC SCENE IN SARAJEVO,1992-1996

    NIKOLAI JEFFS

    I.

    The outbreak of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 marked the more or

    less complete demise of the music scene in Sarajevo, as a number of individuals

    and bands characteristic of the pre-war scene split up and/or left the city. Goran

    Bregovi thus produced music from exile; Zabranjeno Puenje fell apart only to

    rise to prominence again as two different bands, albeit sharing the same name,(Led by the bands lyricist Nele Karalji, the eastern wing based itself in Serbia,

    while its western counterpart, coalescing around the guitarist Sejo Sexon, covered

    Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia.); the members of Plavi Orkestar decided not only on

    exile but on putting their careers on temporary hold.

    Only few bands survived the transition to war intactLezi Majmune, Protest,

    Sikter, and SCH. The latter proved to be a bridge, as well as pivot, between the

    pre-war scene and the scene that existed in Sarajevo while it was under siege.Hence, SCHs tenth anniversary concert in Sarajevo on May 4, 1993, not only re-

    established the concert scene in the city, but also represented the first large

    gathering of people who had stayed behind.1

    Importantly, SCHs sound and style as heard on their CD The Gentle Art of

    Firing(1995), which brings together songs mostly written before the outbreak of

    the war, can also be seen as forming an important context for the scenes later

    production. Namely, SCH played industrial post-punk combined with foreign

    language lyrics often cast in expressionist modes. These charted the fragmentation

    of the society as well as the self, the rejection of a false unity and full realization,

    either on the level of the subject (the bands name is an abbreviation for

    schizophrenia), or in terms of its extension into collectivities of ethnicity and

    nation.

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)2

    In the eighties SCH was relatively marginal in a city where the most successful

    bands tended to performalbeit in different waysBosnianize rock music. This,

    in part at least, was the case with the first Yugoslav rock supergroup Bijelo

    Dugme, led by Goran Bregovi. It was also the case with exponents of the New

    Primitivism movement such as Zabranjeno Puenje and Elvis J. Kurtovi. But, inthe context of the war, the delocalisation of music, as well as the awareness that a

    Bosnian identity could no longer be unproblematically projected through music,

    can be seen as a strategy which also casts SCHs earlier attempts of same into a

    different, more influential light.

    The conditions of life for those who remained in the city after the outbreak of

    the war were unprecedented, but they did not dispense with the creative urge

    It was necessary to find some kind of means to survive: how to find food, how to

    move around the city. Only when this had been achieved could you see how muchfree time you had, and if you had any at all . . . A large number of groups started

    playing, groups on the edge between life and death. You could die any moment.

    Everything was dangerous. It was dangerous to go and get bread, it was dangerous

    to go and visit your neighbour living across the road . . . People started gathering in

    the streets, in cellars, anywhere they could play. In the beginning, they were usually

    out of tune and out of practice, trying to make electronic music without electricity.2

    Thus, a new Sarajevo scene emerged from the ruins surrounding it.

    The concern of this essay will be to outline not only the scenes brief history

    and socio-political context, concentrating on an analysis of the compilations RockUnder The Siege (1995) andRock Under Siege B (1996), but also its philosophy of

    multiculturalism, as one of the most important issues relating to the cultural forms

    arising out of the war, and their ability to confront the tasks war necessitates.

    First though, it is important to note that the discourses and practices of

    multiculturalism identified as emancipatory have usually postulated the need for

    the full recognition of cultural difference based primarily on ethnic collectivities as

    the enabler of a more equitable, tolerant, social, and historical dynamic.

    Such is also the dominant discourse of multiculturalism in the specific context

    of Bosnia, where the recognition of cultural difference postulates social space asthe sum rather than the transcendence of cultural differences comprising it.

    Therefore, and to give a practical example, it sees social space as ideally

    ecumenical rather than secular.

    Of course, in conditions of war, the recognition of cultural difference and thepractices of tolerance arising from it seem a necessary and obvious task. However,

    the hypothesis put forward here is that the philosophy of multiculturalism as

    discernable on the Sarajevo scene is difference blind.

    In order to understand multiculturalism as discernable on the Sarajevo scenes

    appeal, it should be remembered that in a war underwritten by violent nationalisms,where cultural difference literally becomes a matter of life and death, the resolution

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    ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 3

    of the oppositions generated by conflict can be false if the principle element that

    organizes social lifebetween destruction and ethnic cleansing on the one hand

    and peace and parity on the otherremains intact.

    At the same time, the postulation of the recognition of collectivities of cultural

    difference as offering full realization to the individual can lead to a condition, notonly of an a priori, but also singular, extension of individual identity into the public

    sphere and hence the postulation offrom the part of the collectivitylife-

    scripts that have certain expectations and demands with regards to the proper

    manner in which individuals should act, for instance, as patriotic and therefore

    also as heroic Serbs, Muslims, and Croats . . .

    This can affect relations between the collectivities themselves, and recognition

    of their difference can lead to a possible situation of neo-racism, which upholds

    the separation of these collectivities, precisely in the name of the retention of the

    ideal of cultural difference. Also, the final horizon of the cultural difference, itsend of history, is bounded and contained by its realization in state recognition

    and/or state formation, rather than in the postulation of a possible society andhistory beyond the state itself, including the socio-economic forms of life it

    upholds and those classes, internally as well as globally, in whose interest it is that

    this state of affairs obtain.

    II.

    Its significant here to note that one significant background to the

    multiculturalism of the scene is contained in the multicultural make-up of Sarajevo.

    Bands that emerged from the siege included Muslims, Croats, Serbs, others as well

    as individuals of mixed parentage. Similarly, their audiences were not ethnically

    cleansed either.

    In terms of age structure, at one point the scene was more or less dominated by

    fifteen or sixteen year olds. This is partly a reflection of the degree to which bands

    that had younger members had a greater chance of continuing playing together, asthey were subject neither to mobilization,3 or compulsory labor. Hence, younger

    band members could spend more time making music.

    Nevertheless, if the war opened up possibilities for a new generation, it did not

    open up possibilities with regard to gender. This is surprising because waron the

    most immediate level, through the mobilization of men to the frontusually opens

    up the somewhat emptied public sphere for women, who fill it up and are

    empowered by taking up roles previously monopolized by men. Despite this

    tendency, the Sarajevo scene was, and today still is, a predominantly male scene

    (in terms of band members), with women emerging only in secondary roles asradio editors, concert organizers, and music journalists, etc.

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)4

    During the war, culture was an integral part of the struggle, and music was no

    exception in this. While Sarajevo would be shelled to the tunes of traditional

    Serbian folk music and kolo dancing around the heavy artillery pieces, syncretic

    musical forms such as newly composed folk music, known locally as novo

    komponovana narodna muzika, and/or straight rock and pop, would also contributeto the drawing of real (in terms of definite topographies, locations), as well as

    symbolic, boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

    In these forms, the denunciation of one group and the upholding of another (for

    instance, honourable Serbs, as opposed to cowardly Muslims and Croats) was often

    achieved through recourse to past historical performances. In this way, culturally

    determined songs not only pre-empted the identities of their audiences,

    determining certain courses of social action, but also tied them in with specific

    political structures, and elites and their ideologies. This would be done through the

    specific deployment of the names of historical, political leaders, or theforegrounding of various classes and formations (soldiers, military units) not only

    as representatives, but also as representative of the ethnic groups in question.The musical delineation of the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion was not

    only confined to extreme Serbian nationalists. Indeed, the official and government

    controlled media of Bosnia-Herzegovina would also favor songs expressive of

    definite ethnic collective identities. A telling example of this is the manner in

    which, in late 1993, government controlled TV and Radio Bosnia-Herzegovina

    would start and finish their news bulletins with a song performed by the choir from

    the Gazi Huzrevbeg Mosque.This song was associated with the Muslim nationalist party SDA and was

    understood by staff and audience alike as further signal of Muslim political

    predominance, or even of Islamization.4 On the other hand and in the same year,

    the privately owned Radio M, broadcasting from within Sarajevo, was attacked by

    members of the Bosnian Army, in part for playing Serbian songs.5

    This was when the city was, as is the case today, officially multicultural. The

    scene itself did not abstain from the cultural, nor the actual, battles being waged at

    the time

    During the war, a genuine underground has been operating in Sarajevoin its

    most literal meaning of cellars, garages and different improvised shelters, in time of

    a total struggle for survival. For those young people this was the crucial moment of

    the struggle. For many of them, a guitar in a hand had the same weight as the gun

    that awaited them in the trenches after rehearsal.

    The cruciality of the moment of struggle is reflected not only in the spectacular

    growth of the scenethe thirty new bands to emerge from the siegebut also of

    its immense popularity. For instance, segments of the radio program No Sleep till

    . . , that aired demo tapes of the Sarajevo scene and were broadcast on Radio Zid,

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    ROCK 'N' ROLL AND NATIONALISM 5

    the citys most popular FM radio station, commanded large audiences, up to 2,000

    callers per night when the telephone lines where open.

    In addition, the whole scene came to represent the cultural identity of the city to

    the outside world. Hence, the July 28, 1994, concert by SCH, Lezi Majmune,

    Sikter, and the Moron Brothers was broadcast by MTV. Soon after, the RockUnder The Siege concert, organized by Radio Zid, powered by generators and held

    during a short lull in the conflict on January 14, 1995, was described in the words

    of one its organizers as . . . the best concert in Sarajevo ever. I cannot remember

    better one because simply there was not any . . . Another most poignant testament

    to the cruciality of this moment can be discerned from the CD compilation RockUnder the Siege (1995), which was recorded live at the afore mentioned concert.

    In Rock Under the Siege, the techno funk track Rock Under Siege, byOrnamenti, uses a mixture of Bosnian and English to outline the dire conditions of

    life in the city, while at the same time calling for its liberation. The song offers proof of the ability and resolve to carry out this dual task by self-referentially

    drawing attention to its heavy bass line, a triumph over the conditions in a citywithout electricity.

    Such a doubling of the tasks of actual and cultural liberation and the previously

    quoted equation of the guitar and the gun, however, should not lead us to conclude

    that there was, with regards to the alternative music scene, a coextensiveness which

    recalls similar conceptions postulated in the course of various colonial, liberation,

    and revolutionary movements.

    One way to show the problematic relationship between the political-militaryand the cultural spheres is to show the context for the relationship between the two,

    with a particular emphasis on how Radio Zid, being the patron of the alternative

    music scene, entered this relationship.

    Thus, Radio Zid, while undoubtedly contributing to the defense of the city and

    its externalisation, can be seen as forging, on the terrain of culture, a discourse and

    practice opposed to those shelling Sarajevo, and (in contrast to the political and

    military command structures within the city itself) the cultural forms as well as the

    nationalist ideologies underwriting them.

    Needless to say, such resistance brought on problems. While the initial RockUnder SiegeCD (masterminded by Radio Zid) received international coverage andreviews in The New York Times, Billboard, and Time Magazine, making Radio Zida veritable cultural institution, reactions from the Bosnian government were hardly

    accommodating. Thus, in January 1995, the Bosnian government attempted to

    mobilize Radio Zids staff, a move that can be interpreted as an attempt to disperse

    the enemy within.

    One can easily understand why Radio Zid could be seen as a threat to the

    government. Its mission was simpleto overcome all the walls that divide people

    (the translation ofzid is wall). One of Zids methods for overcoming these wallswas to forge a multiculturalism that rejected dominant forms of nationalism,

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)6

    regardless of their particular ethnic affiliations, and combine this multiculturalism

    with the articulation of a civil society independent of party political interests.

    Thus the alternative music scene (then its own specific multiculturalism) can be

    analysed on a number of different levels. As pertains to the question of genre

    choice, the scene adopted and advocated what it saw as the universal andplanetary code of rock culture. Of course, there were also a few techno bands on

    the Sarajevo alternative music scene. Their emergence is quite striking, because if

    it is relatively easy to play proto rock on an acoustic guitar, while banging out

    rhythms on pots and pans in periods when the city was without electricity, then

    there are no acoustic samplers to offer the same for techno!

    The specific form of rock during the siege was marked by a sharp break with

    the hegemonic tradition of popular music, in rock as well as novo komponovana

    narodna muzika, as it existed in the city before the war. Syncretic and hybrid, such

    music scored some important domestic and international success (for instance, byKalesijski Zvuki or, more importantly, by Goran Bregovi in his Time of theGypsies soundtrack from the late eighties, or those produced in exile for the films

    Arizona Dreamingand Underground.). In contrast, and for the new bands

    emerging out of the siege, there was No more Balkan inspiration, folk motifs, or

    traditional sounds mixed with modern trends.

    The importance of this refusal can be better appreciated in the context of the

    war and the earlier mentioned specific manner in which the scene entered the

    cultural struggle. Forms deemed local and traditional can be considered

    ethnically determinate, and as such have the possibility to play into the hands ofone or another nationalism.

    Diachronically, the adoption of syncretism can signify delving precisely into

    the tradition that the nationalist elites were also busy unearthing. Synchronically, it

    can reach beyond urban areas (as the epitome of modernity) into the village (the

    location of tradition), and reinforce what many saw as the real cause of the war: the

    primitivization and ruralization of Bosnian social life, its domination by small

    town philosophy. The latter is expressed succinctly below

    The spirit of the small town is between the tribe and the world; it is not an urbanspirit but one opposed to the city and civilization, close, finished, petrified spirit of

    the tribe, finished in the time which is gone and unrepeatable, the spirit from the 14 th

    century, living like a ghost in the consciousness and soul of certain classes of the

    people. It tends to revive in its unchanged form and content. The fact that its

    realization is impossible leads towards a monstrous behavior towards oneself and

    the world in the form of aggression, destruction and self-destruction.6

    Of course, oppositions of the traditional and the modern, the local and the

    global, or their tie-in with definite topographies, such as the village and the city,

    are not without problems. The division between rural (traditional, monocultural,intolerant, local, closed), and urban (modern, multicultural, tolerant, global, open),

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    can be seen as metaphysical and ideological in the sense that the divisions are

    somewhat predicated on topographical and temporal sectioning off, as well as

    hierarchization in relation to subjects, forms, practices, and ideologies that have a

    simultaneous existence in the city and the countryside. Precisely because of this

    simultaneity, they also refuse historicizing.However, the false opposition of the country and the city is not necessarily

    resolved through its seeming transcendence as witnessed in some strategies of

    syncretism and hybridity, which combine, for instance, urban rock with rural folk.

    The reasons for this are similar to the reasons why such strategies do not

    necessarily resolve the problem of ethnic and nationalist determination. Namely,

    the composite elements in a given hybrid form can still be seen as retaining their

    original auras, these being coupled, not deconstructed, by hyphenation. Even if

    these forms are not specific in their ethno-nationalist designation, they can still be

    perceived as postulating the necessity for a continued divide between the city andthe country, or a generalized ethnicity, as a necessary determinant of cultural

    expression and of political life.In this context, the only example of hybridity on the Rock Under The Siege

    compilation can be thought of as undoing the relativizing claims of hybridity itself.

    Thus Vera by Bedbug, is announced as a folk song. It then leads on from a

    Balkan unaccompanied vocal in Bosnian to a syncretisized Balkanic bridge with

    guitar riffs reminiscent of the eighties hit Suada by Plavi Orkestar. The main part

    of the song dispenses with its Balkanic elements and turns to hardcore. Sung in

    English, this original seems to return its opening to its proper status, rendering itsfolk elements as sentimental and kitschy, the object of parody rather than serious

    attention, superseded by a form that seems to express more relevance. It is

    modernizing and universalising in relation to its predecessor.

    The hardcore of Vera on Rock Under The Siege is not the exception, but therule. Hardcore as well as other subcultural musical forms were dominant on the

    Sarajevo scene. Of course, subcultural forms were present in the city before the

    war, but with its outbreak, their popularity was somewhat radicalised. The reasons

    for this can be considered in psychological, economic, and political terms. Thus,

    when Primo Oberan travelled from Slovenia to Sarajevo, he was surprised by thepopularity of raw guitar music outside main trends. Oberan first understood this

    popularity in terms of a lack of a fresh flow of musical information predicated on

    the conditions of the siege, but only later came to realize it as the integer of a more

    emotional context of cultural reception. Marinela Domani and Amir Hodi

    explained to him that

    Rage Against the Machine and Clawfinger are bands, which were more popular

    in Sarajevo during the war than anywhere else in the world. Both have the kind of

    energy and rebelliousness that is very familiar to an isolated group of people.

    Listening to this kind of music was one of the few opportunities to go wild and

    forget. If, that is, you had somewhere to listen to it.7

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)8

    Important though these moments of imaginary flight were in terms of offering

    temporary emotional relief from the constant pressures of war, in the context of

    Sarajevo under the siege going wild while listening to Rage Against the Machine

    and Clawfinger, the desire to forget the realities of Sarajevo should not be seen so

    much in terms of a manifestation of escapism (as a form of final disengagementwith social reality), as it should be seen as an abstention from the tasks of its

    ultimate transformation,

    Subcultural forms are by definition those arising out of economic, political, and

    aesthetic marginality; they are particular forms of empowerment in conditions of

    general disempowerment, alienation, and dispossession. They refuse the

    reproduction of these conditions by remaining outside the dominant modes of

    social life. Indeed, desiring energy and rebelliousness can be read as desiring

    subjectification, self-expression, and self-realization in a context in which these are

    generally absent. This is an understandable emotion given the conditions of siegeand the experiences of objectification arising out of being the daily target of

    bombing and sniper fire.The affinity felt with subcultural aesthetic forms not predicated on the

    experience of actual and immediate warfare in its classical sense also signals just

    how much feelings of frustration can traverse zones of war and those of peace.

    That these feelings can engender sentiments that can be recognized by those living

    in the conditions of extremity reveals the conditions of a perceived normality as

    somewhat false.

    Apart from this, affinity with global subculture reveals how expressions and projections of the transcendence of existing social conditions, laid down by the

    political and cultural elites internal to Sarajevo, fail to arouse the same conviction.

    This sense of disengagement with the narratives of these elites, narratives they

    expected the minnows to sacrificially realize, is aptly caught in Karim Zaimovis

    characterization of the impetus behind the Sarajevo scene: There are some people

    in this town whose main goal is not to die like a hero.

    Questions of language choice as well as questions of genre have an important

    place on the Sarajevo scene. Here and certainly, the use of English became more

    widespread than before the war. Its deployment can be seen as a way to externalizethe conditions within the city and Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole. Such

    externalization could mobilize opinion abroad and hence bring about more decisive

    outside interventions to end the war. Thus Meldin Hota, of D. Throne, once

    substantiated his bands use of English by noting that since everybody in the city

    knows about the war, the task is to communicate this experience to the outside

    world.

    The necessities guiding such externalization (and this argument also pertains to

    the problematics of genre choice) are one reason why we cannot dismiss the

    cultural forms discussed here as mere manifestations of cultural imperialism.These strategies also avoid the reproduction, and challenge the monopoly, of

    the imperialist culture seemingly being internalized by the periphery. Foreign

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    language use can be seen as wresting the imperial linguistic standard from the

    metropolis itself. The English lyrics of the scene under siege are often marked by

    individual mannerisms that evade the standard and engender a plurality within the

    English itself. At the same time, such communication to the metropolis undermines

    its image of the other. What is absent in this communication is the reproduction ofethno-nationalist ideology as expected of the Balkan subject. Moreover, the lyrics

    on the scene are marked by a critical stance towards the socio-economic order that

    the metropolis epitomizes.

    Foreign language use can also internally subvert the dominant ideological and

    political structures own postulations of cultural determination and necessity and the

    final limits of creative freedom within these. Embarking on singing in English or

    German during the days of socialist Yugoslavia could prompt an almost Pavlovian

    denunciation by the authorities of these examples of western decadence or Nazisympathies. In the context of emergent nationalism in ex-Yugoslavia, the

    denunciation of foreign language lyrics in popular music would be based on a

    romantic nationalist view of language as the highest expression of a peoples culture

    inherently springing from their land. Thus, as one authority critic explained: Some

    of them write in English as if they were ashamed of their mother tongue. I doubt that

    these people would be willing to protect our country if it were necessary, since they

    seem to surrender to foreign influences so easily.

    With the break up of Yugoslavia, such conceptions of language not only pitted

    the pure mother tongue against that of the seedy foreigner, but also gave rise to thelinguistic wars paralleling the actual ones raging at the time. In this context, usages

    of Serb, Croat, and Bosnian were being redefined in strict ethno-nationalist terms

    in order to bring them more in line with the desired and properethnic identity oftheir speakers. The consequences of this were the ethnic cleansing of languages

    for instance of Turkish elements in Serband the rise ofwar newspeak, in whichthe adjectification of ethnic identity was idiomized to serve functions of the

    glorification of the Self and the denigration of Other.

    Archaisms and neologisms were also used in this process, an example of which

    would be Jugo-unitaristic srbochetnik bandit groups, as well the substitution of previously common place names with other ones in order to reflect the proper

    ethnic identity of their constituencies.8

    In contrast, the adoption of English can be used to avoid the reproduction of

    such war newspeak, and hence address an audience without necessarily

    interpellating it into a given ethnic and national identity. The same refusal can bediscerned in connection with the actual contents of the lyrics. These, regardless of

    whether they are in English or Bosnian, are marked by a complete absence, in

    contrast to propaganda songs, of positing the subject in terms of definite and

    determining ethnic identities; there is no ethnic naming of the friend nor the foe,no presence of Muslims, Croats, and Serbs in the songs, nor any postulations of

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)10

    our culture and practice against theirs: nothing which could be traced back to

    singular ethnic origins.

    This strategy of non-naming the aggressor through ethnic designation, adopted

    at the beginning of the war and then dropped by the non-nationalistic media, and

    criticized by some as the expression of a false transnationalism,9 does have theadvantage of avoiding the reproduction of the ideologies of ethnic causality that led

    to the outbreak of the war. In this strategy, ethnic particularization not only

    engenders the process of homogenization desired by their elites, but also obscures

    multiculturalism, the degree to which those defending were made up of all of

    ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina (and similarly the territories they inhabited).

    Thus, the strategy of avoiding strict ethno-national designation has the advantage

    of pursuing precisely the point on which it has been criticized as it attempts to

    erase the element of nation from social organization,10 and tries to avoid

    reproducing the very terms under which the siege of Sarajevo was beingconducted.

    The absence of ethnic designation (and the causality as well as homogenizationstemming from it) runs across the whole ofRock Under the Siege. Story from

    Sarajevo, by D. Throne, laments a former friend who crossed over to the other

    side of the frontline and was killed in action.

    The song offers an explanation of the wedge between themreligious

    differencein a manner that signals a lack of belief in its absolute determination.

    And, where the lyrics directly address the friend on the other side and ask if he

    thinks about the friendship when he turns his guns towards the enemy, his friend,the lyrics imply a refusal to completely disown the former friendship and its

    intimate community, while still gesturing towards the possibility of dialogue

    carried out by means other than weapons.

    Such reconciliation is further underlined by the refrain It does not matter, life

    goes on. Of course, this can be seen the ironic deployment of a popular saying

    that enables the management of the harsh life under siege, but it can also be

    understood as an optimistic postulation of a future beyond specific national and

    religious ideologies and the divisions they engender.

    In Story from Sarajevo, if the crossing over of the friend is posited in termsof a particularized act rather then being the a priori fate and realization of every

    Serb (thereby avoiding constructing an essential and necessary link between ethnic

    and religious identity), then A lot of Idiots per Day, by Grafit, again not only

    avoids positing a determinate collective identity that always fully signifies the fate

    of the individual, but also points to alternative life-scripts for those on both sides

    of the frontline.

    Thus, in English, the song sings of a women who left the city of bad rules,

    where shes not been well been killing by her own. A refugee, she still remains

    unhappy, for she is separated from her loved one who has remained in the city andwho, however, also realizes that My life, here is wrong, a lot of idiots per day.

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    [original English preserved] These idiots, the song seems to imply, are not only

    those attacking the city, but also those within it.

    Another strategy that can be seen as subverting war newspeak, is the use of

    irony and cynicism, both figures identified as one of the hallmarks of the Sarajevo

    scene. The Bosnian lyrics of Sarajevo feeling, by the punk band Protest,celebrate conditions of life in the city under siege: one can cry with joy when there

    is electricity, everybody is so happy, they just stay at home, nobody drinks water

    but dew, there is no need to bathe or wash ones hair.

    The song directly addresses those who have left Sarajevo either to seek peace

    and plenitude elsewhere or to participate in its shelling: Our dear friends, come

    back here so that you will see how we much fun we are having here.

    Such ironic celebration is not only a device for emotionally managing the

    realities of life and death in Sarajevo, but also one that in this context dampens the

    resentment felt towards refugees, as well the charges of betrayal they had to face.Even for individuals who were most vocal in their critiques of those who had left

    the city, irony, in the long term, is a safer bet than open hostility. Moreimportantly, irony is also a means to challenge censorship and the stakes of

    transgression against dominant social mores and political structures. These stakes

    and the responses to them were already high under socialism: in war they are even

    higher. However precisely because of its celebrative nature, Sarajevo Feeling

    cannot be understood as demoralizing in terms of the conditions in the city, nor in

    terms of encouraging refugees to leave, a practice not only resented by those who

    stayed behind, but also by the Bosnian government.The context of the violent extension of individual identity into publicly opposed

    ethnic collectivities, the demands made by the representatives of the ethnic

    collectivity in question or the state on individuals regarding their proper realization

    (for instance as heroes), and the determinations and dangers of public space that

    give rise to the objectification and reification of those signified by nationalist

    discourse and living under shelling and sniper fire, can herald a retreat from public

    space altogether. Rijei, (Words) by Pessimistic Lines, describes a happiness

    which is distant in its temporal as well geographical sense, a present marked by

    isolation, the realization of the disappearance of the individual, the awareness ofthe transience of life, and the impossibility of communication: Empty words

    travel somewhere between us words travel.

    Similar sentiments are expressed in Ponekad pomislim, (Sometimes I

    wonder) by Hindustan Motors: the subjects realization that nobody needs him and

    that he has no one to count on, leads him to a misanthropic rejection and isolation

    from the world. Dark side of Me, by Beastly Stroke, is even more radical in

    thisthe psychological disintegration of the Self offers an insight into the true

    nature of the war. However, only the subject cares and knows about its true nature.

    In this he remains alone.The subversion of the discourse of war is also contained in songs where it

    ceases to be a theme and a motif altogether. The strategy is hardly escapist: while

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)12

    such songs postulate a private and public space that has not been completely

    destroyed by war and colonized by nationalism, the social conditions they portray

    are still those of contradiction and alienation. For example, the English lyrics of

    Mainthing, by Down, take a critical stance towards a world characterized by

    consumption and accumulation. Gudra, by Sikter, is a Bosnian warning againstthe danger of drugs and the problems their abuse lead to.

    Here, the very strategies of representation that Mainthing or Gudra

    deployan excision of war from the social fabric that does not, however, imply a

    resolution of social contradictionalso work against seeing the immediate

    transcendence of war, i.e. peace, as the absolute deliverance from violence,

    alienation, and dispossession. Also, and through the depiction of concerns and

    experiences that are immediately recognizable to those outside the war zone, they

    force a different consideration of Bosnians and Balkan subjects, as well as the

    seemingly opposed periods and topographies of calm and crisis.Namely, if the case can be made that The tradition of the oppressed teaches us

    that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule,11then the manner in which these songs transcend the postulation of temporal and/or

    geographic difference of the state of emergency challenges the normalization

    of the misery, exploitation, and violence with which those outside the war zone

    themselves otherwise live on a daily basis. This transcendent manner also refuses

    the displacement of this condition onto a Balkan other.

    Moreover, an uncritical desire for a future deliverance from the exceptional

    state of emergency or the belief that it exists with other people and elsewhere, alsoforces us back into the embrace of the dispossession and exploitation in which we

    all live on a daily basis. Hence, it defers the moment through which we can

    challenge the rules by which society is currently ordered.

    Is such a deferral the case with songs whose departure from the realities of

    Sarajevo seems complete? Examples of this are Gnus Chala, which describes a

    non-compromising motorcycle road warrior always watchful of his brotherhood,

    and A.P. Sound, by the band of the same name, which in tropes typical of its

    techno genre, upholds the sound of the band itself as being the best in town, so to

    speak, and invites the audience to display its appreciation through dancing.But, rather than seeing these songs in terms of a hedonistic deferral

    reinforcement of the social order, a manifestation of repressive desublimation, they

    can be considered in terms of the political unconscious, that is also motivating all

    the other songs discussed so far. This reveals itself as a yearning for the full

    realization of a life (precisely because it is postulated in a realm beyond pre-

    existing life scripts, hierarchy, and labor) that goes beyond not only the

    specificities of Sarajevo in particular and the war in general, but also the current

    forms of socio-economic and political life globally.

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    III.

    The alternative music scene peaked in 1995 with the release ofRock Under theSiege and SCHs The Gentle Art of Firing. In October of that year, Lezi Majmune,SCH, Protest, Beastly Stroke, and Adi Lukovac participated in a festival of

    Bosnian culture in Prague. Once there, however, the strain of returning to a city

    torn apart by war proved too great for the majority of the participants. Thus, the

    only intact returnees from Prague were Protest and Adi Lukovac (SCH decided to

    call it day). With this, part of the wartime scene came to an end, as did the war

    itself with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement of November 21, 1995.The conditions as well as the actual implementation of the Dayton agreement

    left a lot to be desired, even in the years following it. Internal displacement

    remained a reality of Bosnian life, and the return of refugees partial if not paltry. In

    addition, while there were many who wanted to return home, there were also

    numerous others who had little motivation to return to Bosnia under the current

    conditions of the country. The political formations that mobilized the populace into

    war remained largely intact, and individual identity continued to be

    overdetermined by ethnicity when it unfolded into the public sphere. This was not

    only predominantly ethnically territorialized, but also still monopolized by

    nationalist parties. Poverty and dispossession also remained widespread.

    Of course, the new conditions of post-Dayton Bosnia prompted speculationson the nature of the scene. Thus, in the fanzine Rock Under Siege, Adi Lukovac

    linked the fate of the scene to that of the country as a whole. According to him, thisfate was not only still developing but also, more importantly, doing so under

    conditions of a very uncertain and unstable peace. Thus, the actual existence of a

    scene as well as its future was difficult to determine: . . . in essence it exists,

    however, it is same as a child, changing and growing, and I think that in a year or

    two it will be completely different.12

    Radio Zid continued to foster the scene with the release of the compilation

    Rock Under Siege B (1996). This was followed by a concert held November 8 9,1996, featuring C.I.A., D. Throne, Pessimistic Lines, Down, Tmina, Protest,

    Maelstrom, Moron Brothers, Quasimind, A.P. Sound and Adi Lukovac fromSarajevo, Deaf Age Against Gluho Dobo from the Bosnian town of Zenica, as well

    as Hic et Nunc and Its Not For Sale from Slovenia.

    To some extent, the degree to which some new bands replace those present on

    the first Rock Under Siege reflects the flux Lukovac referred to above. However,

    the overwhelming picture is that of continuity between both records. There is notrace of syncretism and hybridity; hardcore and metal as well as English language

    lyrics are dominant.

    In terms of the concerns of the lyrics themselves, then the retreat into the self, a

    radical form of internal exile, as one strategy through which to manage thediscourse as well as actual the effects of the war, declines. This can be seen as a

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    Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds)14

    possible reflection of the relative opening up of the public spaces of the city in the

    advent of peace. Nonetheless, the songs on the new compilation still refuse to posit

    social causality in ethnically determinate terms and to draw the boundaries of

    inclusion and exclusion according to them.

    Some also take contradiction to be their point of departure from the socialrealities they describe. Through this they remind us not to obscure the geographic

    and temporal oppositions that construct peace in the context of the war in Bosnia as

    a specific manifestation of the end of history. They do not construct or

    compartmentalize the Other in a Balkan context, i.e., as inherently ethnocentric and

    violent. Also, they do not legitimise the generalized and global state of

    emergency and the elites who preside over it.

    A striking example of all this is the opening track ofRock Under Siege B. Thestandard metal format of CIAs Enough is not only substantiated in the guitar

    riffs, but also in the songs apocalyptic imagery, this being presented in English. Itdescribes the ideology of ethnic cleansing, epitomized in the belief of one land for

    one race, not in a particularized Bosnian setting as one might expect, but as aglobally dominant practice in a world otherwise marked by continuous armament

    and living under the threat of nuclear destruction. Thus, Enough links the

    experience of dispossession and violence as it exists across societies and culturesrather than exclusively within them and reminds us that the New World Order ishardly one of life in the bliss of eternal peace and mutual understanding.

    Concerning other songs on the compilation, the overwhelming absence of the

    war in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a specific and definite theme and motif is alsosurprising, all the more so when you consider that the compilation was recorded in

    the immediate aftermath of Dayton, between January and August 1996.

    One way to consider the relative lack of even retrospective accounts of the war

    can be to draw a parallel with the experience of socialist Yugoslavia, when

    precisely in the aftermath of the war of national liberation (1941 1945), and

    indeed more or less right up to its demise, the constant invocation and ritualization

    of war was a mechanism through which the political elite legitimised its rule, as

    well as constructed life-scripts, (through which acceptable standards of behavior

    and the validity of political demands were defined and judged) for the post-wargeneration.

    More importantly, rather than the absence of war constituting an erasure of

    historical memory, it can also be seen as an avoidance of using history. Here it is

    valid to remember the deployment of history in nationalist songs, as a means of

    interpellation and mobilization that could threaten the unstable peace.

    The conditions of this peace (albeit in abstract terms) as the conditions of any

    society, are again the object of critique. Thus, we find Not You, by Quasimind,

    warning of a sense of false salvation coming from the West, or A.P. Sounds

    techno track Little Ninja (To Whom it May Concern) trying to make the massesrealize the truth about the elites that preside over them, these being responsible for