Brand New Your Retro? Yugo-nostalgia and/as Yugo-futurism in alternative and popular music

Abstract

Through its different forms, Yugoslav (popular and alternative) music serves as one of the essential and most common materials of post-Yugoslav collective memory, both trans-nationally and trans-generationally. Similarly, numerous approaches, different theoretical and media discourses, covering the several decades of the musical and pop-cultural production – also known as Yu-Rock – were usually understood as practices of Yugo-nostalgic consumerism. However, this paper opposes such a reading of both (Yugo-)nostalgia and Yugoslav popular and alternative music/cultural scene of the late socialist Yugoslavia. In spite of the seminal notion of retromania, which can absolutely be applied to the revival and domination of the Yugoslav New Wave scene of the 1980s in the last several decades in the regional media- and memoryscape, also against all “top-down” nationally driven restrictions, the afterlife, the reception, and reflection also score different elements and modes related to both the affect and memory, and to the Yugoslav legacies – such as retro-utopia, neostalgia, or Yugo-futurism, and New Yugoslavism – neologisms all coined by or directly applied to the actors of the actual scene. The paper highlights several reflections on Yugo-nostalgia and the utopian and futuristic articulation of both the socialist past and the post-socialist present, as well as the explicit (self-)referentiality regarding the YU Rock/New Wave production as represented and performed by one of its key actors, Disciplina Kicme, i.e. Disciplin a Kitschme, and its similar off projects. The band figures as one of the key representatives of the scene and of the Yugoslav supranational phenomenon. Thus, by looking into their work in the post-Yugoslav period, which combines the elements of nostalgia structurally and thematically, through performance, lyrics, symbols and aesthetics, the paper argues for the emancipatory use of nostalgia rather than a mere retrospective idealization and de-politicized re-branding, namely, as a critical reflection and as a tool to rethink the futures in time of the cancellation of the future.