Fluid Revivals: Đorđe Balašević, Zvonko Bogdan, and Retouring to Restore a Hydrological Imaginary in the Trans-Danube

• In Event: Danube, beyond the Blue: Riparian Power and Musical Affect in Southeast Europe

Abstract

This paper examines popular music revivals in two Serbian-based singers’ postwar Croatian tours that mobilize affective commitments other than nostalgia. It analyzes musical fluidities in the material and symbolic navigation of post-Yugoslav performance networks, focusing on the Danube: a borderriver that centers the region’s interconnected industrial and cultural attachments, yet also physically and politically separates former Yugoslav republics. Reviewing hydrological conceptions of territorial belonging in the late-Yugoslav period and in the 1990s as expressed in their ballads and reception history, it shows how the singers (Đorđe Balašević and Zvonko Bogdan) reestablished their interrepublic tours with the backing of tambura bands, a tradition that Croatian politicians deployed as the country’s national music during its war for independence from Yugoslavia (Baker 2010) but that is also well established among Roma, Serbs, and Croats in Northern Serbia. As workers, these performers navigate ethnically based citizenship laws’ disparate economic implications for border crossings. The Danube’s resonances are thus manifold for these performers and the tambura musicians in Croatia who both patronize and compete with them: it can afford material and symbolic connections to the world beyond the former Yugoslavia, a local boundary with economic implications, a focal area of regional ecology and agriculture, and a diminished remnant of the prehistoric Pannonian Sea. Through interviews and fieldwork with the musicians, the paper argues that Balašević, Bogdan, and their bands engage in a Pannonian economy of love that has proven more efficacious than nostalgia for responding to recent political and socioeconomic changes in the European Union.

Author

• Ian MacMillen, Yale U