Chapter Twenty-three

Balkan Beat

Heroes

‘This is the story about the times when they were big and I was little’. In this way the political commentator Igor Mirković introduced his 2003 rockumentary film Sretno dijete [Lucky Kid]. The ‘they’ in his narration referred to his onetime heroes, the performers associated with the so- called ‘New Wave’ movement that dominated Yugoslav popular music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mirković looks back, in other words, from one century to another, and from one political system to another. And as the title of his film indicates, he sees that earlier stage of Yugoslav popu- lar culture as a kind of golden age. It is a story of idealism (a privileged moment in the narrator’s life remembered and treasured), but also of some loss of idealism on the part of the heroes themselves and of at least one member of their public. In the closing moments of the film Mirković remarks: ‘I lost that fantastic naïve ability to admire them [the heroes] unreservedly’. Even so, his love for his golden age is everywhere apparent; the memories are an active part of his present. Nor is he alone. Sretno dijete centres around a reunion of some of the key personnel in Zagreb in 2003, but to track down his heroes Mirković has to travel far and wide: to Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Utrecht and New York. Some are still involved with music, some are not; some have achieved material suc- cess, some have not. Most are cooperative, and the personal reunions, the exchanges of memories, make for genuinely interesting footage. But one of the most influential of them, Branimir (‘Johnny’) Štulić, proves elusive to the end. Although he retains a messianic aura in former Yugoslavia, even today, Štulić has consistently resisted all attempts to draw him out of his secluded private existence in Holland. Accordingly, he refuses to play Mirković’s nostalgia game, a game in which multi-sited interviews set in the present are juxtaposed with footage recorded in the Yugoslav capitals, Zagreb in particular, back then in the golden age. Naturally this juxtaposition invites us to reflect on what might have been lost. For one, there is the excitement and energy that derived from a specific place at a specific time; and in this respect the Kulušić Club in 596 chapter twenty-three

Zagreb, where you rubbed shoulders with your heroes, might almost be compared with the Cavern Club in Liverpool back in the 1960s.1 The Yugo- slav capitals may indeed have felt ‘at the edge of the world’, as Mirković puts it, during the Communist era, but for a brief period at least they throbbed with the energy of a vibrant, defiantly self-confident youth cul- ture, played out against a background of decaying socialism. For Mirković, and for others of his generation, Zagreb was the only place to be during this explosion of punk-rock culture, prior to its anaesthetisation by the culture industry. Compare this energy, the narrator seems to say, with the standardised and stereotyped pop-folk played all over the Balkans today. For another, there is the idealism. When Jura Stublić, the frontman of the band Film, tried to articulate some of the values associated with the New Wave, he remarked that he and his colleagues disliked ‘people with money’. And it is true that, at least in the early stages, the heroes made rel- atively little from record sales or gigs, and that money was not really what motivated them. Again we are implicitly invited to compare this punk- rock anti-materialism with the image and ethos associated with today’s heroes. Who, we ask, are today’s heroes? Are they the turbo-folk divas of the culture industry, with their kitsch palaces and saccharine sentiment, all available on tap through the TV music channels? Could they even be the machismo heroes of gangster land, no doubt deplored in reality, but idealised and even celebrated in some of the ‘trash’ imagery of pop-folk videos? None of it is quite that simple, of course. For one, Mirković him- self makes no such direct comparison with today’s popular music. For another, it would be a mistake to translate an autobiographical film into straightforward social commentary. And for yet another, today’s pop-folk constitutes neither a uniform repertory, nor a repertory entirely lacking in critical edge. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that New Wave fans of a certain generation find it hard to understand how young people today can idolise figures such as Dino Merlin. Mirković’s film unfolds against a background of political events. We see in rapid succession first the celebrations surrounding the fortieth anni- versary of Tito’s regime and then the public mourning that attended his funeral. We see the small-town atmosphere of Zagreb in those days, a town where just about everything was closed by 10 pm. We see the evi- dence of economic collapse in the 1980s: the power cuts and electricity

1 See Cohen 1991, 15, for a discussion of the shaping elements created by local contexts.