Music, Politics, and Violence

2. The Afterlife of Neda Ukraden: Negotiating Space and Memory through Popular Music after the Fall of Yugoslavia, 1990–2008

60 chapter two The Afterlife of Neda Ukraden Negotiating Space and Memory through Popular Music after the Fall of Yugoslavia, 1990–2008 catherine baker An essay by Dubravka Ugrešić tells the story of the singer “Neda U.,” who “came from Sarajevo, and her songwriter, N., [who] came from Zagreb.” Neda “became . . . a Serb” during the war in Croatia when the Yugoslav National Army (jna) and Croatian Serb rebels opposed Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia. Neda’s music was no longer played once war broke out, but a young Croatian singer re-recorded her hits “to make N.’s music Croatian again.”1 The singer, Neda Ukraden, had performed some of the 1980s’ most famous Yugoslav pop songs. The songwriter, Ðor
e Novković, had composed extensively for Ukraden and many other singers based inside and outside Croatia. Novković would be integrated into the restructuring of Croatian culture, entertainment, and media initiated by Croatia’s nationalist government during and after the fall of Yugoslavia. Ukraden, who moved from Sarajevo to Belgrade when war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1992, would not. This chapter uses the course of Ukraden’s career during and after the disintegration of Yugoslavia to illustrate how musical biographies become subject to recontextualization and reworking in conditions of ethno-political conflict where nationalists perceive ambiguous figures as threats. Former Yugoslavia had been a federal state containing many options for ethnic identi fication and allowing for persons, texts, and symbolic cultural markers to be identified in multiple ways. Yugoslav policy did not aim to erase ethnic identifications completely but rather to force them into the background and foreground a consciousness of “brotherhood and unity,” within a con- Neda Ukraden and Pop Music after the Fall of Yugoslavia / 61 text of official fear of overt nationalism as a denial of Yugoslavia’s legitimacy .2 Between 1990 and 1992, political competition for resources after the collapse of state socialism fractured this Yugoslav state into nation-states based on a different single dominant ethnic identity in each entity. To make the existence of each new nation-state meaningful, multiple identities had to be erased in a violent process this author has described elsewhere as a “war on ambiguity.”3 It is well-known that the goals of nationalist leaders in what proclaimed themselves the successor states of Yugoslavia were achieved through wars that, in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, used the strategy of ethnic cleansing to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and displace yet more people from their homes in order to create ethnically homogenous, nonambiguous territories. These acts were paralleled by nonphysical interventions against markers of Yugoslavia (ethnic ambiguity and socialist iconography) in many other fields of life; indeed, in Slovenia, which underwent only ten days of war while separating from Yugoslavia, this symbolic violence was the primary form of discursively establishing the nation-state. The many attempts to accommodate the ethnically complex figure of Neda Ukraden within one or another national narrative, either as a member or more often as an excluded Other, took place in this context and can be best understood by turning to a subfield of nationalism studies that focuses on the ideological work of nationalism in the everyday. Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism identified the daily reproduction of the nation in “the embodied habits of social life,” such as handling currency, as creating reminders of nationhood that were so familiar they operated on an unconscious level.4 This perspective has since been applied specifically to popular culture by Tim Edensor.5 The nationalizing regimes of Croatia and other new nation-states with a similar logic were striving for this very outcome: to create so coherent and strong a national identity among members of the majority nation that it might go unmarked. Contradictory sources of ambiguity, such as a musician who could equally well belong to several nation-states at once, had either to be incorporated or excluded. The power of nationalism to destabilize national and international politics received more attention in the 1990s than at any time since the end and aftermath of World War I, when the uncertainty over which nationalist claims to the territory of former multinational states would be recognized had similarly been internationalized as a political problem. Responding to events in former Yugoslavia, a major theme of many 1990s works on nationalism (such as Michael Ignatieff’s Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism) was how its ethnic dimensions could legitimize and...