Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
sometimes displaced, giving way to a version of history that is such because it feels so” (9), I examine the particular dynamic of affective block that allows such feelings to dominate.
Narratives of the Push toward the Front Lines
Popular music groups referenced “danger” frequently in both wartime lyrics and discursive framings of their work for the armed resistance. For example, the rock band Opća Opasnost (Common Danger, a reference to Yugoslavia’s shelling of Croatian cities) sang numerous songs about Croatia’s war heroes. The band began forming in 1992 when two members were serving in Croatia’s 131st Brigade, uniting poetic textual address with physical military action (Radio Našice 2011). Marko Perković “Thompson,” whose rock career also started while he was serving in the Croatian Army and who, like Opća Opasnost, has collaborated with tamburaši, was criticized for lyrics suggesting aggressive military retaliation in Serbia in his hit war anthem “Bojna Čavoglave” (Čavoglave Battalion). Catherine Baker quotes a Croatian journalist defending the song as “‘not giv[ing] off an atmosphere of malign aggressiveness’ but just reflect[ing] the reality that ‘life is dangerous’” (Kuzmanović 1992, translated in Baker 2010, 38). Aggression and atmosphere (see chapter 4) were already common descriptors of musical affect, suggesting the author’s awareness of music’s potential to move beyond representation to something more pernicious, even as she denied this particular song’s culpability.
Opasnost and opasno (“dangerously”) became closely associated with the war’s effects during this time. In a wartime ethnography of Croatian public culture, Maja Povrzanović deemed fear “one of the most basic and intensive emotions” that “arises as an accompaniment to actual or anticipated danger” (1993, 121). Fear’s intensity as a response to wartime dangers imbued musical performance in Croatia during this period with capacities for aesthetic and affective elaborations of trauma. In tambura and other popular music genres, opasno and opasnost registered as a theme for compositional response to the destruction of battle and bombardment, as one way in which “culture redefines objective situations of danger and threat” and “the terrifying become[s] domesticized, ‘tamed’, or, at least—familiar” (147). Yet even as fear and danger yielded some of their intensity through mediation, the musical vehicles for this redefinition simultaneously became less domesticized, tamed, and familiar, participating in an excitingly dangerous intimacy “formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain” (Berlant 1998, 288).
Alongside invading Yugoslav forces, whose government and peoples they came to represent, neotraditional Serbian “folk” genres such as newly composed folk music (Novokomonovana narodna muzika) and turbo-folk became common targets. Croatian musicians, critics, and journalists denounced these musics’ encroachment on Croatian territories as dangerous. These genres have been popular among some Croats since before 1991. Yet as Catherine Baker demonstrates, Croatian media and society in general denigrated venues that played these musics as “dangerous places populated by gangsters, footballers, prostitutes and celebrities,” and journalists “employed various strategies to mark folk clubs as other and dangerous, such as the use of flood/invasion metaphors” (2010, 149, 153). The tamburaš Veljko Škorvaga restarted Požega’s “Golden Strings of Slavonia” tambura song festival in 1992 “to ‘create new Croatian music’ as ‘a substitute for folk music, especially the newly-composed music we were bombarded with for years,’” “warn[ing] of ‘a danger such a melos might return’” (Baker 2010, 67, citing Škorvaga in Topić 1992). “Pajo Kolarić’s” directors restored their own festival with specifically Catholic overtones, citing Marin Srakić, assistant bishop of the Đakovo-Srijem diocese, on this beloved music’s importance as an alternative to what he called the “racket” (buka) of the discotheques (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1995, 51).
This music’s perceived threat depended closely on its association with Serbs, whom official media often racialized as biologically foreign during this and earlier wars. Tomislav Longinović writes that the “abject position” of Serbs due to their historic colonial subjugation as “serfs” or “servants” (cognates of “Serb”) “makes them ‘black’ despite their genetic ‘whiteness’ in the eyes of the West” (2000, 642). Although “Serbian treatment of the Ottoman colonial heritage […] manifests European fear of contamination with an alien, ‘oriental’ civilization,” their “turbo folk features the ‘oriental’ sound as the essence of racial being and belonging, which it appropriates from the culture of Ottoman invaders as a metaphor of its own colonial power over other Yugoslav ethnic groups” (642). Associations of such invasive, destructive power with Serbian popular music registered in a primary-school textbook’s story of a boy who “had just started school when ‘they’, ‘some kind of bearded army’, arrived with ‘strange songs’ (as in the familiar news image of bearded Četnik paramilitaries occupying Vukovar) and ‘destroyed my city’” (Baker 2010, 44, citing Pilas 1997, 102–103).
Allusions to beards drew on reinvigorated constructions of ethnic difference. These harkened back to stylistic and military opposition between World War II–era Ustašas (extreme Croat nationalists with clean-cut visages who resembled their Nazi allies and Catholic clergy) and Četniks (extreme Serb nationalists sporting beards styled after Ottoman-era Serbian hajduk bandits and Orthodox priests) (Hayden 2013, 7–8). Emphasis on Serbs’ distinct physical features, including facial hair, dates back to the Ustašas’ “aggressive, militant language […] permeated by biological (and, therefore, materialistic) concepts, such as blood, race, and instinct” (Djilas 1991, 114). Though never formalized into a coherent racist theory, such language racialized Serbian enemies “in the same way in which the Nazis treated people they considered both racially inferior and racially dangerous” (119).
In Croatia in the early 1990s, similar sentiments registered beyond neo-Ustaša circles in popular songs about Četniks’ physical, biological, and therefore racial or even taxonomic difference. “[P]rimitives, non-humans, savages, hoofs are common denotations in [sung] statements about the enemy, whose behavior is explained as an animalistic or demonic nature” (Prica 1993, 53). The cover of Zlatni Dukati’s 1995 EP Nema više suživota (There’s no more coexistence) similarly represented Serbs as horned demons whose long, pointed teeth merge into beards as the monsters writhe upward from a can bearing a Serbian banner and resting on a map of Croatia. In turn, Serbian sources sometimes demonized returning Croats as “vampires” who, for instance, reentered Vukovar “like a dance macabre” with “horns, songs and provocations” (Berić 1998, 92). In challenging what they perceived as the combined encroachment of Serbian propaganda, turbo-folk, and neo-Četniks, several tambura bands working within official media advanced a particularly effective discourse: the narrative reclaiming of Croatian lands from Serbia’s physically dangerous army, politically dangerous media, and culturally dangerous music. As these and amateur ensembles confronted their fears and faced such external(ized) threats, feelings of intimacy and otherness also began to accrue around state media narratives of resisting Serbia as a racially dangerous people.
MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND AUTHORITY
To what extent, then, did such narratives also arise from the bottom up? Julia Kristeva notes that in much of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, she distinguished from the ideological tyranny of the thinker-cum-politician an important form of “authority no longer based on the notion of domination but on that of a nature composed of differences” (2000, 67). Kristeva reminds us that “the discourse proper to this other authority […] is, quite simply, narrative” (67). Narrative arises in service not of a sovereign singularity but of a unity of disparate subjects whose authority rests on a commonly analyzed and projected historical trajectory. As I argue here, the narrative of overcoming dangerous Others and their music using both rifles and tamburas resonated with Croat citizens for the authority and responsibility that it recognized and demanded at lower (nongovernmental) levels across the new country.
Philip Bohlman argues that “music intersects with nationalism not simply to narrate the past, but rather to contribute profoundly to the ways we perceive and understand the history of the present” (2008, 261). Michael Largey