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Posted by return to the underground June 17, 2023

(ex Yugoslavia) Croatia - Slovenia - Czechoslovakia - Serbia - Bosnia & Herzegovina - Skopje - Montenegro - Poland - Bulgaria - Hungary - Romania - Slovakia Albums Covers - Informations - Groups - Photos - Labels - Mp3`s -Links

The Yugoslavian progressive scene was one of the biggest in Europe, yet its beginning were not all that easy and the development happened later than in the western world. The first really progressive album appeared only in 1972, while the majority of progressive bands thrived more in the mid 1970 and towards the end of the 1970s. The peculiarities of Yugoslavian prog were great reliance on jazz music, hard rock, as well as the use of Balkan themes......~

Korni Grupa’s Poema 1941. and the Politics of Rock

Perhaps more than any other genre, rock music in Yugoslavia elicited strong ideological investments and disinvestments. For the Festival, rock music was a vehicle to bridge the generational and ideological conflicts, and bring youth on board the socialist project. Their strategic use of rock music to promote socialist ideology and national cohesion also served to demobilize and discipline its subversive potential, reflecting wider recognition of the subcultural power of rock music. For Glavan, rock music was the ideal medium for engaging youth with socialism, primarily as a meaningful alternative to the commercial world of zabavna-pop. In contrast, for most rock journalists in Yugoslavia, rock was the subcultural voice that opposed rather than served the socialist program. But for all their die-hard defense of rock’s subcultural potential, these critics seemed prepared to overlook the patriotic exigencies of many rock artists, for instance Yu grupa, who named themselves after Yugoslavia and gave concerts on the Day of the Republic state holiday, or the keyboardist Tihomir Asanovic Pop and rock singer Dado Topic, who wrote songs like “Zem-Ijo majko” (Mother Land, 1974) and “Domovino” (Homeland, from Domovino moja album, 1979). Moreover, one of the outspoken critics of the regime, the rock journalist Aleksandar Zikic (1999, 129), hails Topic as the most important Yugoslav rock singer of the pre-punk era, even though Topic sang saccharine slageri about Tito (in Pesme Titu [Songs about Tito], 1977) and made the promotional propaganda mini-album Vodilja (The Guiding Idea) for the 1983 Congress of the Communist Union of Yugoslavia (with Pepel in kri).¹⁷ Indeed much journalistic and academic writing on socialism and rock music (Zikic 1999; Tome 2010) is predicated on binaries of repression and resistance, conformism and youth autonomy, official culture and counterculture, which misrepresents the multitude of coexisting perspectives shaped by “lived” socialism. As Alexei Yurchak (2005) has astutely argued in relation to Soviet late socialism, modes of operation between individuals and the state were more complex, and such binaries diminish the critical role of agency, as illustrated by my final case study Poema 1941. (Poem 1941; hereafter 1941).

Following a commission from Radio-televizija Beograd (RTB) for Kornelije Kovac to compose songs based on the poetry of the celebrated Partisan poet Branko Copic, Kovac devised a concept album with seven or eight songs based on his choice of Copic poems (Kovac, pers. comm., May 3, 2014). Kovac, who trained as a classical pianist at the Sarajevo Music Academy in the late 1960s, emerged through Sarajevo’s rock scene with the band Indexi before embarking on a successful career with his own progressive-rock band Korni grupa in Belgrade (1968-74). His Korni band famously developed a dual approach that Zikic dubbed a “Trojan horse tactic” (1999, 119-36), with experimental progressive rock that was part of the local andergraund scene, and more commercial pop songs that tailored to the mainstream zabavna market. Yugoslav rock critics, however, accused Kovac of an “aesthetic selling out,” and even blamed him for the downfall of rock ‘n’ roll (Ibid., 126-27; Kovac in Arnautovic 2012,157). Yet the criticism of Korni’s zabavna-pop success not only disregards the important reasons for such decisions - from economic imperatives to a lack of audience for their highly experimental works - but also diminishes the canonic legacy of their highly developed and experimental rock forms, as in “Prvo svetlo u kuci broj 4” (The First Light in the House No. 4,1970), “Put za istok” (Road to the East, 1972) and 1941.

Korni recorded and filmed 1941 at Radio Belgrade’s Studio 6 in March 1971, with their then lead singer Dado Topic, and guest vocalist Josipa Lisac. Commemorating thirty years of the socialist revolution, 1941 was broadcast on television on March 24, 1971, and this also became Korni’s first album, not released until 1979. Shot as a black-and-white video directed by the renowned director and rock champion Jovan Ristic, 1941 narrates a story of Partisan struggle, bravery, and sacrifice. In the cinematic opening, the camera zooms around barbed wire and machine-gun props to the sounds of grenade launchers and marching footsteps. The drums introduce a marching theme, which acts as a recurring leitmotif, and the music unfolds through a series of classical, jazz, funk, folk, and progressive rock passages that evoke early King Crimson and later Pink Floyd. The music and the narrative are integrated into a polished musico-dramatic text envisioned as a cantata, which aligns the work with the similar genre popularized in Soviet Russia.

Topic’s dramatic delivery (via Copic’s text) highlights the coupling of “our [Partisan] Army” and the legacy of brave freedom fighters and uprisings waged on “this land,” corroborating Partisan bravery as historically inherent, linked to the folk (narod) who raised their weapons during the National Liberation Struggle (NOB) to proudly defeat the Germans. The subsequent soldiers’ battle is accompanied by a livelier funk-pop track, which shifts gears as the army withdraws at sunset: the music dies down to reflect the danger and the destruction, but soon crescendos through E minor, building tension for Topic’s line “one woman who fell there.” At this point, Lisac walks across the stage and picks up Topic’s final note E, and with aloof vulnerability, couples Topic’s “fallen woman” with her opening line: “I am singing about you Marija, girl warrior, who hid your plaits under the Titovka cap, and with your heart went against the concrete” (from Copic’s poem “Marija na Prkosima [Marija at Prkosi]).

Following a free jazz interlude, Lisac escalates the musico-dramatic charge for Marija’s three attacks on the German bunkers: for the first, Marija’s destroyed village flashes in front of her; for the second, she sees rivers and towns under the spasm of machine gun fire; as she hits the third bunker “death pierced her . . . breaking the wings of this falcon-girl, as a falling star appeared over Kamenica.” In contrast to Lisac’s balmy jazz delivery, Topic raises the energy with the folk-inspired song “Oj Sokole” (Hey Falcon), before concluding with the sombre lament “Hero-jeva majka” (Hero’s Mother) - a mother’s emotional goodbye to her “fallen hero” son, Radovan. A free-jazz piano interlude transitions into a reprise with the opening drum leitmotif, symbolically fusing the two fallen Partisan heroes - Marija and Radovan - with the inherent bravery and sacrifices of their forefathers.

Besides the accomplished musico-dramatic text, 1941 was symbolic because it aired at the height of Maspok in 1971. By 1971, Tito became seriously concerned that Yugoslavia was on the brink of a civil war, and symbolically alluded to the ethnonationalist horrors of WWII with a warning to the Croat Communist leaders: “Do you want 1941 all over again?” (Tito cited in Tanner 2001, 184). Thus 1941 was timely in many ways. Partisan resistance served as the greatest unifying narrative against the ethnonationalism that plagued national consciousness throughout Yugoslavia’s existence, and the sensitivity of Kovac’s text setting, and Topic’s and Lisac’s performances, suggest a genuine level of respect for the text, the poet, and presumably by association its message. Moreover, Korni grupa was hugely popular at the time, a mix of Serbian and Croatian musicians - a truly Yugoslav band (Zikic 1999, 128). By including Lisac, an iconic Croatian singer, Kovac gathered hip musicians who cemented a sense of common purpose: the fallen heroes Marija and Radovan, who died for the nation’s freedom, were now symbolically fused with the liberal ideals offered through progressive rock music and pan-Yugoslav collaboration. The Partisan struggle was a reminder of the shared sacrifices endured during the war, and by implication, the Croatian participation in that historical moment. Lisac’s symbolic performance furthermore highlights the important presence of the memory of women Partisans in Yugoslav public culture (Batinic 2015), which has received considerable scholarly attention recently (Dugandzic and Okie 2016).¹⁸ In the context of Maspok, Korni’s use of the Partisan legacy acts as an early prototype of the New Partisan trend that reinforced the revolutionary Partisan values of WWII as a way to combat ethnonationalist de-Yugoslavization in the 1980s. To date, however, the political implications of this seminal performance, and the work itself, have been overlooked by critics and scholars who generally associate New Partisanism with the mid-1980s Sarajevo rock scene (Misina 2013, 191-223) or the short-lived project from 1972 known as “The Partisan shirt suits well” (“Lijepo stoji partizanska bluza”) (Lukovic 1989, 254-6).

Along with 1941, Korni’s other more experimental TV performances, such as the televised “Put za istok” (see filmography), furthermore counter Glavan’s earlier assertion that creative freedoms were constrained by the music industry or that the most important innovations emerged in subcultural amateur circles. Kovac confirmed that he had complete creative freedom with this work (Kovac, e-mail message to author, May 3, 2014), and according to the cameraman who shot the video, Bratislav Grbic (see filmography), Belgrade National TV offered the technological means through which they could realize and stage their creative vision for 1941. Contrary to Glavan’s assertions, I would argue that the field of socialist politics in Yugoslavia offered more complex and mutually beneficial exchanges between artists and institutions. Certainly Kovac was astute to the market mechanisms, in adopting elements of commercial zabavna-pop, and political demands, by linking rock with symbols of socialist Yugoslavia as an inroad to gain significant media exposure in Belgrade in the 1960s and early 1970s (Arnautovic 2012, 147-9). But even though Kovac denied that he got much support for his experimental music in this trade off (Kovac in Zikic 1999,128; and in Lukovic 1989,226), by any account, it was exceptional to have a progressive rock band in a post-1968 and Maspok climate that was popular on Belgrade Radio and TV, who released multiple singles and an album (1972), and had the first color TV video for the experimental “Put za istok,” at a time when the entire media network witnessed purges, and other socially engaged bands, like Atomsko skloniste, were taken off air (Arnautovic 2012, 153). Additionally, just as rock music was used by the Party and state institutions to spread the socialist message, Korni used a socialist message to spread their progressive andergraund music, which made them important agents in the interplay of the symbolic politics of popular music. Moreover, most critics regard 1941 as the masterpiece of Yugoslav progressive rock, despite the

“state rock” connotations. I argue, therefore, that the 1941 concept album demonstrates that it was possible to create experimental and progressive rock music that was also in the service of the state; that musicians were not necessarily coerced in the process, but demonstrated a vital creative agency; that it was possible to have a mutually beneficial relationship with the industry and state institutions; and that such works could still be respected by hard-line rock critics and audiences alike....~

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