JOŽE VOGRINC Balkanizing the Global with/in Popular Music Studies

(ISH & Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Popular music has remarkably been the exceptional cultural form which has at least partially resisted the affiliation with the more or less official "national cultures" in countries of ex-Yugoslavia, crossing the closed borders and ethnic and social boundaries through live performances or at least on cassettes or CDs. This resilience cannot be ascribed to particular musical styles as their exclusive character, neither can it be successfully interpreted as a property of a modernizing, globalizing etc. movement deriving its strength from international or global economical, political or cultural pressures on national economical, political, cultural policies.

By focusing on the case of a surprising coherence of the "alternative" popular music scene connecting Ljubljana with Rijeka and Pula across the Slovene/Croatian frontier around 1980, it is argued that trans- and non-national popular music cultures depend on local cultural sources and traditions but also directly "cannibalize" "global" styles as immediately relevant to their respective local cultural situations and "needs".

The aim of such an argument is an epistemological as well as a political one: to defuse one-way understanding of globalization and modernization as having impact from outside and above on victims inside and below, and to detach the negative overtones from the term "balkanization" by naming with it the process of always surprising local and topical sub- or counter-cultural uses of the global.