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The concerts of Balkan
Rock Legends
by Snezana Bukal, writer,
Amsterdam
Ever since I went to the concerts of the Balkan Rock Legends in Amsterdam,
I am looking for words with which to express what I had witnessed. But
the text keeps eluding me, it is constantly coming together and falling
apart, and every time I try to write something I end up where I started.
So tonight I finally started to ponder on what is the cause of the problem
I apparently have with writing something about it. Looking for possible
reasons, I felt there must be something there but I couldn't lay a finger
on it. Eventually I figured I must be tired because when the band left
the stage, I wasn't able to let go and the concerts carried on playing
the music in my mind.
And the thing is, when I went to see the second concert, I was reconciled
with the likelihood of it being nothing like the first one. Which is to
say, that's what life had taught me: happy and beautiful things are little
miracles. And miracles per definition only happen once. But right from
the beginning I realized the second concert was another little miracle.
When the singer Vlado Morrison came rushing to the stage, his performance
left us breathless. To me, he demonstrated that it is the right of every
human being to fall because if you fall you can stand up and fly again.
If one knows how to fly. With other words, Vlado had shown to me that falling
and flying are just two ways of being present in the space. It was incredible
to feel we all can move around freely and happily, sing along, dance, scream,
laugh and cry, and do whatever we feel like, because such was the atmosphere
that Vlado and the band had generated: it was like an out of the ordinary
place was created by playing this music which belongs to a certain generation
of people who were incredibly lucky to be a part of it, and who are aware
of the fact that this music was and is making (world music) history.
But to me, an even more important reason for why we all still love this
music so much is because we feel it posses the power to fulfil us. And
so I strongly disagree with those who insist it is (only) our nostalgia
which empowers Vlado's singing. Moreover, Vlado's power lies in his passion
for music and in his ability to take complete control of the scene, the
stage as well as the audience, from the beginning to the end of the concert.
The other part of this story is, who wouldn't enjoy hearing the songs whose
lines one knows by heart and can recite even if awoken in the middle of
the night. And on top of that, it was just so refreshing to be surrounded
by people who speak (one of) your language(s), so an almost unimaginable
thought occurred to me during the concert: I am here in a huge crowd of
people and I like it. This amassing of positive human energy crammed in
one place must make one think, wouldn't you agree?
What I also noticed was that I was paying more attention to the texts of
the songs that I always knew but evidently never thought about. In the
light of today some of them seem almost prophetic, and some remained as
cautionary as they always were. And some were painfully bulldozed by time!
The latter is also the reason why I felt uncomfortable listening to ''Plamene
zore'' (from the song “Maljciki” by Idoli), I just could not
listen to it the way I used to. The words of this song don't make me happy
anymore and I can't sing and jump and dance to it as I did years ago. This
song brings back memories, which are now too painful to bear. Like the
fact, that I was partying in Belgrade while in the backstage of those present-days
the bloody history was already in the making, and I failed to see it. Instead,
I was busy having fun and sharing in the happiness of everyone at the party
while listening to this and other similar idolatries. But what the hell.
In the same token, I have deeply conflicted feelings for Bora Corba (the
singer of Riblja Corba). Because I truly love(d) their music but nowadays
whenever I listen to it, the whole experience is tainted. When his face
emerges in front of my eyes and I bring to mind his well-known ideological
convictions, I literally get sick to my stomach and feel this urge to scream,
to shout to the public and those on the stage: Enough! But as I said, what
the hell.
At the end of the day however, everything I wrote presents an opportunity
for opening up many new spaces to think, in a different way. And considering
the fact that right now I most of the time feel better when I don't think,
I hereby promise I will continue this story when grey and rainy autumn
days arrive.
Snezana Bukal, writer, Amsterdam |
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Balkan Rock Legends in Amsterdam
by Chris Keulemans
writer and journalist, Amsterdam
Rock music in other languages than English always sounds silly, amateuristic
and sweetly provincial. When I hear French or Italian or Norwegian bands
playing their hearts out, I can always understand that local crowds will
go wild, but to an outsider they sound like grown men who were not brave
enough to go for their boyhood dream, to be a real rocker, and settled
for second best instead. I love certain Dutch-speaking rock bands, but
this is a kind of chummy love, not high admiration.
To this rule, rock in former Yugoslavia was the exception. I have never
been in the country before the war, but now that I know the divided territories
well, I wish I had known the original thing. I wish I had lived in Belgrade,
Zagreb or Sarajevo in the early eighties. The sense of irony about a failing,
crumbling system, the pride of living somehow in the most independent country
in the world, the excitement of finding open spaces for art and ideas where
old structures where falling away, the natural and equal connections to
the outside world – in a strange way, I have become a kind of Yugo-nostalgic
all on my own. Not because I idealize that vanished country, but because
I have the impression that counterculture was at its best there: not free
from real risk and tough opposition, but stubborn and idealistic and funny
enough to claim space for real new ideas.
So when my friends Mileta Prodanovic (Belgrade) and Nino Zalica and Edo
Barak (Sarajevo/Amsterdam) introduced me to the bands of those days, I
immediately heard how Serbo-Croatian was a natural language for rock 'n'
roll and new wave music. I still don't speak the language, but the titles
and song lines that my friends translated to me gave proof of imagination,
defiance and wit. Bands like Azra, Zabranjeno Pusenje, Bijelo Dugme, Partibrejkers
and Idoli give me an exciting echo of a time when anything was possible,
anything but the nightmare that followed.
Last Saturday, these sounds came alive in Amsterdam. An old school building
in an unfashionable part of the city, turned into a kind of international
laboratorium, with reggae soundsystems in one corner and Tibetan self-awareness
groups in the other, opened its main hall to the Balkan Rock Legends and
a crowd of over five hundred fans streaming in from all across Holland.
And the strange thing was: nostalgia boomed from front to back and left
to right, but this was nostalgia with no bitter or rancid aftertaste. Judging
as an outsider, I did not sense the self-pity or self-importance that often
accompanies nostalgia, especially the ex-Yu kind. There was neither a tragic
sense over youth lost and country vanished, neither any kind of nationalistic
glorifying of victimhood. That is the kind of nostalgia that I have witnessed
enough to understand it, even when I don't know the language, and I am
allergic to it. This Saturday night it was nowhere to be found.
The crowd was younger on average than I had expected: not only fortysomethings
who have clear and active memories of the early eighties, but also kids
in their twenties who were barely born when many of these songs became
popular. Many of these people have grown up in Holland and settled in here,
others are still struggling to find their place, most have probably found
some kind of balance between Holland and whatever part of former Yugoslavia
they come from. But however long they have lived here, they distinctly
kept their old style – this typical mix of Italian glam and Western
slack, slightly outdated to our eyes but undeniably cool – and, most
amazing, almost everybody knew almost every song by heart. All around me,
I saw faces lit up with excitement and deep recognition, fists in the air,
voices shouting all the lyrics with sheer joy, defying whatever has come
to lie between them and the excitement of the days when these songs became
popular.
The band was admirably tight and professional, without displaying the usual
self-mockery routine of veteran reunion bands. Sergej Kreso was drumming
precisely and guided the band through all the different styles, from hard-rock
to reggae to power ballads. And he was the only one with short hair. Zoran
Serbedzija on guitar and Dario Trobok on bass looked like old-fashioned
long-haired guitar heroes, but performed with the energy of hungry kids.
And the lead singer, Vlado Morrison, combined the hollow eyes and deep
lines in his face of Iggy Pop with the forever skinny sexy body of that
guy from the Black Crowes. Somehow, he was the perfect singer for the occasion:
a powerful high voice, prancing and gesturing to the crowd, macho but modest
enough not to become a caricature of himself. He performed neckbreaking
antics on the wobbly tables that were his catwalk into the crowd. One after
the other, all the classic songs came by, and where some sounded to me
like a naïve mix of English cool and German pathos, all of them had
the instantly catchy hooks and melodies that seem typical of the ex-Yu
rock I know. Instant sing-alongs, all of them.
And then the guest star of the night was announced: Elvis J. Kurtovich,
the front man of the New Primitives from Sarajevo. I had never heard or
seen him before, and he was different from anything I had expected. In
the middle of these long-haired rockers, he appeared in a grey suit, sunglasses,
short grey hair, withdrawn and slightly awkward in his movements on stage.
The crowd cheered, Vlado and the others granted him all the space he needed,
but he didn't seem to be interested in the starring role of crowdpleaser.
Instead, he sang a few songs in an unremarkable dry voice, retreated back
into the shadow and took his time to step back into the spotlights again.
Still, it was undeniable that there was some kind of enigma around this
guy. Something true to his original principles, when he – as my friends
tell me – was an inspirational figure not because he spearheaded
popular music, but instead deconstructed and ridiculized it. Every now
and then, he stepped up to the microphone to singspeak clearly ironical,
dry and witty monologues. All around me, people listened in concentration
and cracked up about the apparently unmistakeable jokes that only he knows
how to make. To an evening that was already clearly on the safe side of
false sentiments, he firmly personified the message: take all of this very
seriously, but never take it seriously at all.
Chris Keulemans
writer and journalist, Amsterdam
www.theamericanineverwas.net |
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