Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991 (review)

In her thought-provoking monograph on the shifting relationships between politics and popular music in Croatia between 1991 and 2008, Catherine Baker investigates the complexities, conundrums, contradictions, and varying cultural practices inherent in the topic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates historical sources, cultural theory, textual analysis, oral history, and reception history, her study details how explicit and implicit political narratives in a newly independent state affected cultural production. (Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.) As someone who is not Croatian, Baker provides an “outsider” perspective, all the while integrating the work of Croatian scholars and journalists into her prose. Her exploration of national identity in music concerns the various roles of politicians, political parties, artists, the media industry, and the public in the construction and dissemination of various ideologies through the medium of popular music. Throughout, she pays careful attention to the language politics surrounding various Croatian dialects and their roles in shaping popular music discourse. Most helpful is the playlist she includes as an appendix that lists representative YouTube videos of the music under consideration.

The narrative is divided into three large sections: “Croatia under Tuđman, 1991– 2000”; “Croatia after Tuđman, 2000–2008”; and “Croatia in a Regional Context.” The first part concerns the newly formed government’s interventionist cultural policy, the goals of which were to separate Croatia from socialism, Serbia, and the Balkans. The focus shifts in the second part to events in the 2000s, following the death of President Franjo Tuđman, when more homogenized entertainment formats emerged and the “state withdrew from deliberate projects to construct a new national musical identity” (p. 211). The third part offers insights on relationships between Croatia and its geographic neighbors in terms of cultural production.

“Croatia under Tuđman” includes two substantial chapters, each of which focuses on an especially influential approach to popular music and national identity during the 1990s. The first, “Music at Arms: The Presidential Narrative of the War,” details patriotic-themed songs while the second, “Music for the Nation: Creating a ‘Croatian’ Popular Music,” concerns the creation of an “ethno” (as opposed to a “folk”) style.

Patriotic-themed popular music endorsed an overt and deliberate political agenda to promote Croatia as an independent state with a unique history and culture. The communicative role of popular music was strongest during the Homeland War in the first part of the 1990s, and was subsequently employed to support ideological goals of the new government. Baker describes how music programs constituted a large part of programming on HRT (Hrvatski Radiotelevizija [Croatian Radio-television]), the state-run television, in the 1990s. HRT’s iconic project Stop the War in Croatia was in English and intended for an international audience, while Moja domovina (My Homeland), produced in association with Hrvatski Band Aid (Croatian Band Aid), emphasized Croatia’s natural beauty and the “righteousness of the Croatian cause” (p. 20). Other patrioticthemed songs followed with lyrics about soldiers, enemies, religion, land, gender, and history. The rocker-soldier myth was also developing at this time as images showing soldiers either listening to rock or emulating its iconography infused the media. It is in this context that Baker introduces Marko Perković Thompson, an army volunteer whose guttural voice and political messages played a major role in Croatian popular music, politics, and ideas about identity. Baker returns to Thompson and to the controversies surrounding him several times throughout the book.

In chapter 2, Baker demonstrates how Croatian music was being defined largely by what it was not, emphasizing its difference from Serbian traditions, especially the Yugoslavian “NCFM” (newly composed folk music). She details the creation of “ethno” as a “folklore-based popular music” (p. 79) that was constructed in opposition to NCFM and the simultaneous popularization of the tamburica, a Slavonian folk instrument, as being key to Croatia’s Western identity. The importance...