Two main questions frame Catherine Baker’s study of popular music in post-Yugoslav Croatia. The first question is topical: how does popular music function as a channel of political communication in the discourse of Croatian nationalism? The second question is theoretical-methodological: how can one apply cultural studies’ nexus of popular music and politics from its original UK context to the context of the post-socialist Balkans, particularly ex-Yugoslavia, and in the case of this study, nation-state Croatia?
Addressing the first question Baker appropriately locates her study within the body of literature dealing with the political role of folklore and popular music in promoting projects of modernization, urbanization, and industrialization in the socialist Balkans. She shows how post-socialist Croatian popular music adapted the socialist mechanisms of politicization to the nationalist environment of the newly founded nation-state. Drawing on literature that deals with music and Croatian nation-building, Baker also explains that music could hardly escape invoking political narratives regarding Croatian identity. Songs, performers, and musical institutions are steeped in debates regarding the location of this society in the Balkans, its claimed historical orientation toward Central and Western Europe, the question of accession to the EU, and Croatia’s more recent turbulent historical associations with Nazi Germany (the Ustashi regime) and Yugoslavia.
Methodologically-theoretically, Baker is cautious not to replicate Cold-War Western portrayal of culture in the socialist bloc as essentially political (in contrast with the more contingent discursive link in the West between culture and politics). She studies post-socialist Croatian popular music as a field of political discourse because, in her mind, narratives devised for political purposes affect cultural production in Croatia just as in the UK, US, and elsewhere. Just as in the UK, cultural study of popular music and politics has been in Croatia thus far mostly an internal discourse. Hence, Baker develops both historical and ethnographic perspectives to the social life of musical texts, in order to observe how popular music explicates experiences of borderland, how popular music mediates the politics of “insiders” and “outsiders,” and, most importantly, how popular music does not reflect one political narrative or another but mediates a multifaceted political discourse.
The book is structured in three parts. Parts I and II are historical and span the two decades since the Homeland War—Croatia’s breakaway with Yugoslavia. Part I deals with the first decade after the Homeland War (1991-2000), which was marked by the revivalist nationalist ideology of the Croatian founding president, Franjo Tu?man. Part II focuses on the post-Tu?man period (2000-2008), in which Croatia has been debating between Tu?man’s legacy, ultra-nationalist trends, EU integration efforts, and reconciliation with its former-Yugoslav partner that turned into Croatia’s Other: Serbia. Part III takes a critical approach to studying popular music in the Balkans through the limited national perspective. Baker shows how Croatian popular music has been a product of transnational dynamics not less than national ones.
In chapters 1 and 2, which compose Part I, Baker develops a complex historical perspective on how popular music functioned as a central channel of political communication. Popular music was an arm in the war of independence. After the end of the war, popular music turned into a prime cultural mediator of the Croatian project of nation-building. Musical sounds, texts, and media (national radio, TV, and record labels) performed official and nonofficial narratives of the newly founded Croatian state. Officially, popular music was created to reflect a patriotic vision of a Central European nation freed from the “Eastern Balkans.” However, Baker provides an in-depth analysis of emblematic songs from the war period and afterward, in order to argue that popular music was not a homogeneous broadcaster of the official state agenda. Songs and performers reflected the internal debate between different visions participating in the Croatian national discourse. Patriotic music of that era centered on images of soldiers, enemies, religion, land, gender, and history. Baker argues that both official and nonofficial deployments of these images invoked the complexity of the nationalist agenda, particularly the relationship of Croatia with Germany, which alludes to the WWII Ustashi regime that, in the name of Croatian nationalism, participated in the Nazi genocide.
In chapters 3-5 composing Part II, Baker turns from the historical narrative of Tu?man’s decade to a more ethnographic approach to the contemporary era (the 2000s). Popular music shifts its focus as the political climate in Croatia changed from Tu?man’s nationalist-authoritarianism to pro-EU social democracy. Instead of negotiating between official and nonofficial nationalism, the discursive field of popular music is shaped now by conflicting trends emerging from the local commercial consumer market. The outcome of this shift from state-supported music to market-supported music is seemingly paradoxical. The two most prominent local music genres that mark this era are patriotic popular music, on the one hand, and show business crossover of pop and folk (or as it is more provocatively called, turbofolk), on the other. The former genre celebrates the nation’s breakaway from the “Oriental-Balkan” landscape of former Yugoslavia; the latter brings Croatia back to the Balkans by reminding of the nation’s deep cultural-political ties with its ideological Others: Serbia and Muslim Bosnia. Baker rejects a reductionist interpretation of a political clash between nationalist rock and neo-Yugoslav folk. Instead, she examines how popular music audiences and performers negotiate with the different narratives of Croatian national identity and how they operate on the symbolic boundaries between these narratives.
Chapter 6 in Part III revisits the presumed paradox of how people in Croatia listen at the same time to patriotic songs that commemorate the war with Serbia and to Serbian turbofolk. For Baker, this phenomenon looks less paradoxical if Croatian popular music is located in a wider regional and transnational political discourse. Musical texts in Croatia mediate the breakdown of Yugoslavia in the same way as they also mediate its ongoing legacy. Additionally, music does not reflect the location of Croatia on any side of the border between “Occidental” Europe and the “Oriental” Balkans; popular music is a borderland site because it mediates the experience of this society with national, regional, and global cultural-political flows.
To conclude, the book presents a rich and highly informed analysis of the complex political discourse emerging from popular music in Croatia. Baker avoids falling in the trap of highlighting one political narrative over the other, but leads the reader to the conflicted discourse of the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the formation of post-socialist Balkan/Eastern European nation-states. I do wonder, though, whether the synoptic discursive perspective of the book did not result from the research experience of its author. At the bottom line, political narratives demand people to take sides, to claim affiliation with one group of people and hostility toward others, and to carry the consequences of these identity affiliations. Popular music accordingly exposes people to political judgment, whether they are with us or against us. Baker herself admits that she could not bring herself to communicate ethnographically with people within the pop-folk and ultra-nationalist music circles. She had to observe these musical communicative practices mostly through their media representations (and in the case of patriotic music, by attending a few concerts). Relying on media and what seems to be a fairly homogeneous circle of interlocutors does not reveal the very acute political risks and sanctions people in the Balkans encounter when associating with one music genre or another.
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[Review length: 1213 words • Review posted on March 23, 2011]