Appropriating `Balkan': Rock and Nationalism in Slovenia

Abstract

The article raises questions regarding the relations between rock music and nationalism in former Yugoslavia. The author argues that Yu rock music and culture have with their universal allegiances helped to preserve a degree of sane distance from the feverish outbursts of nationalisms among the significant part of the country's youth during the years of nationalist wars between its former federal republics, meaning that it is possible to understand it as a positive movement in political sense. A special case of Slovenian “Balkan-scene”, however, shows that various appropriations of Yu rock music, which have happened after the dissolution of former socialist Yugoslavia, do not necessarily have the same positive impact. It is true that listening to the Yu rock music and appropriation of what was perceived as typically Balkan life-style by Slovenian alternative youth meant important symbolic challenge to Slovenian official nationalist discouse, but this opposition did little to abolish the stereotyped understanding of the `Balkan' as such. Just as in the official discourse, there was no recognition among the Slovenian alternative rockers of the fact that 'Balkans' is actually a set of rather different ethnicities, cultures, histories, religions, folkways etc., which means that this affirmative appropriation of the concept of `Balkan' basically only reproduced the existing understanding of peoples of the region as fascinating and also sometimes dangerous Otherness