by Matthew Boyd, Ph.D.

5.

The New Wave

If the 1960s saw electrification and the beginnings of Balkan rock beyond simple repertory repetition, as well as an attempt on the part of Yugoslav youth to take an active part in the political direction of the country, and the ‘70s saw the full melding of folk and Western European forms as the youth turned away from active political life, the dawning of the ‘80s saw the realization of a new mindset and artistry that rewrote the rules for everything: The New Wave.

Former music critic and award-winning Novelist David Albahari, wrote, looking back at the dawn of the new cultural era from the present day, “Rock ‘n roll until then had a minor status in Yugoslav culture, and to mention rock together with Andrić or Kiš represented, at the very least, terrible blasphemy. The New Wave changed that overnight…the most significant aspect, at least for me, [of the new wave] was represented by the feeling that the parallel appearances of the scenes of Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Skopje, and other places would contribute to a new unity.” (Ivo Andrić was Nobel Prize-winning author of The Bridge on the Drina, a historical novel spanning four centuries of a bridge constructed by the Ottomans in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Danilo Kiš is the famous author of the Jorge Luis Borges-reminiscent historical novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.)

The new wave was sprung upon the people of Yugoslavia with the release of the compilation LP “Paket aranžman”, translated as Package Tour. It contained songs from three bands of the burgeoning Belgrade punk and New Wave scene, members of which would go on to form still other even more influential bands in the coming years. The groups included were: Šarlo akrobata, Idoli, and Električni orgazam. We will discuss some of these, among others, in the sections that follow.

Električni Orgazam

Električni Orgazam (Janjatović, 80)

Električni Orgazam was formed in January of 1980 in Belgrade by Srđan Gojković Gile, drummer Ljubomir Jovanović Jovec, and organist Ljubomir Đukić. At their third performance at the Subotica youth festival in summer of that year they scandalized the crowd with an energetic performance resulting in, among other things, a broken microphone and the destruction of the stage lighting. Among the Paket Aranžman bands, they appeared to be most dedicated to a sensationally destructive punk persona. Despite this, of the three bands contributing to that compilation, they were the first to record and release their own debut album.

Punk made a circuitous entrance into Yugoslav life. Having already exploded abroad in the UK and the US, made famous by bands like The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and the Ramones, it entered into the Yugoslav mainstream more as a fashion than as an ethos. The torn clothes and leather jackets that signified disdain for mainstream values that were meant to shock the sensibilities of polite society abroad were brought back to Yugoslavia as haute couture by the privileged children of high-ranking party members and factory management who could afford to travel to the UK and elsewhere. Električni Orgazam rehabilitated the punk image by criticizing the trendiness of punk and bringing it more in line with its roots of non-comformity and class struggle. Their single “The Golden Parrot” sums up this critique:

Idoli

Idoli (Janjatović, 102)

Idoli (The Idols) were a band of the Belgrade New Wave that played with nostalgia and parodic appearances. In 1978 the late guitarist and vocalist Vlada Divljan, bassist Zdenko Kolar, keyboardist Dragan Mitrić, drummer Kokan Popović, and saxophonist Bora Atić formed the band Merilin, later renamed Zvuk ulice, which translates to “Sound of the Street.” They participated in the 1978 Zaječar Gitarijada music festival in eastern Serbia, as well as the BOOM festival in Novi Sad in Serbia's Vojvodina region. Neither appearance attracted enough interest to secure a recording deal. Consequently, the following year they stopped playing under that name.

In 1979 graffiti referencing a group called Dečaci (The Boys) appeared in Belgrade following the printing of a photograph of would-be members of Idoli in the youth press with the caption “Boys emancipate women.” The corresponding graffiti that appeared in Belgrade included the messages “Margita is a boy,” “Boys don’t cry”, and “Srđan, be a man!” Idoli became the official name of the band in March of 1980, and its members included Vlada Divljan and Kolar, drummer Boža Jovanović, and composers and vocalists Srđan Šaper and Nebojša Kristić. All were friends from elementary school or high school. In June 1980 they held their first concert in the storied Belgrade Student Cultural Center (SKC), and released their first single, including the groundbreaking “Retko te vidjam sa devojkama” (“I Rarely See You with Girls”) that same year. In 1981 Merilin and Zvuk ulice drummer Kokan Popović returned to the group. By presenting the appearance of a well-dressed and conventionally straight- laced, doo-wop reminiscent “Vocal-Instrumental Group” (vokalni-instrumentalni sastav), or VIS, the official nomenclature for professional groups licensed to perform publically in Socialist Yugoslavia, they presented an image redolent of a campy ‘50s-‘60s wholesomeness while subversively using mainstream channels to introduce such themes into the popular consciousness as homosexuality, religion, nationalism, and Russian- Yugoslav/American-Yugoslav relations.

Denis i Denis

Denis i Denis (source)

No overview of the New Wave in the Balkans would be complete without mentioning at least one example of its concurrence with the synthesizer-pop trend then dominating the world. Denis i Denis, of Rijeka, Croatia, were a duo of keyboardist, producer, and singer Davor Tolja and singer Marina Peražić. They traded in cutting-edge electronic music with exaggerated sexuality, exploring the influence of new technology on everyday life while titillating fans with Peražić’s breathless delivery. An example of this is her performance on 1982’s hit Program tvog kompjutera (a program on your computer). The listener is called to a playful awareness of the novelty of the synthesizer sound with the lyrics referencing computer technology. This is combined with the story of a cat-and-mouse flirtation between a man and a woman on a date. There is an overt attempt to humanize the technology that is changing the relations between people, with the singer, Marina Peražić’s gasps on cue with her lyrics’ reference to losing her breath, reacting to being in her lover’s embrace, etc., that solidly grounds the new form of synthesized new wave music in with the Balkan tradition of verbal playfulness and joking flirtation. In this song, the machine becomes human through metaphor, and the joining of the vocals of Tolja and Peražić in the ending refrains emphasize a will toward freedom by the two lovers instead of submission to the dictates of technology.

Zana

Zana (Janjatović, 247)

Zana was formed in 1976 by gymnasium schoolmates Radovan Jovićević and Zoran Živanović Kikamac under the name “Suton,” meaning twilight. Radovan brought his girlfriend Zana Nimani into the group, and they began to play under the name Zana in 1979. “Dodirni mi kolena” (“Touch my knees”) is the title track of the Belgrade group Zana’s second LP from 1982, released on the label Jugoton. On it, the group plays with the pop sensibility of ABBA to engage in a humorous send-up of consumerism. It was recorded in Sweden to exacting standards that led to spectacular success, but the band tended to disappoint audiences with their ability to reproduce the recording live. This hit song, with its endless list of transactional demands, played up the strange relationship between consumerism and intimate relationships that were appearing in the context of the development of social classes in a previously largely egalitarian socialist society to hilarious effect.

Ekatarina Velika

Ekatarina Velika (Janjatović, 78)

Ekatarina Velika was formed as Katarina II in February of 1982 and was one of the most popular acts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia until the death of singer and guitarist Milan Mladenović of pancreatic cancer in 1994. By 2000 all of rest of the band’s active members save for one had died as the result of the heroin and AIDS epidemic that had devastated the Yugoslav New Wave youth cultural scene. By 2000 the only surviving full-time member was keyboardist Margita Stefanović. Croatian rock critic Ante Perković, as part of his book-length essay on the impact of the New Wave youth culture, Sedma republika: Pop kultura u YU raspadu (The Seventh Republic: Pop Culture in the Breakup of Yugoslavia), cites a 2000 concert featuring Stefanović and other fill-in musicians performing a tribute to EKV as one of the first signs of a return to a “normal” supra-national state of things in the territory since the breakout of civil war. In his estimation, the appeal of the group had been so universal that the performance of their music represented a sign of the desired return to an important norm of civil life following the tumult of the ‘90s. Stefanovic herself succumbed to the long-term effects of heroin addiction and HIV in 2002 at the age of 43, her country and most of her closest friends already gone.

Their lyrics allude to the possibility of a social order that is not dependent on political or geographical boundaries. In these songs, they emphasize the importance of a supra-national moral state organized around a utopian vision of inclusiveness and the clarity that remains after political obfuscation is removed from play.

Post-Yugoslav Panoply

A vibrant music scene continues to thrive all over the Balkan peninsula in the republics of the former Yugoslavia. This tradition is carried on by independent rock labels and bands such as Belgrade’s Repetitor, brash and sexy synth-pop acts like Zagreb’s Lollobrigida, moody urban rock with slick production like Belgrade’s Autopark, hip hop, and confrontational punk like Bosnia’s Damir Avdić. This is not even to mention the thriving techno music scene that crosses borders throughout the region, uniting people who may officially speak different languages, but who can all dance to the same rhythm.

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