ANTINOMIES OF THE YOUGOSLAV ROCK-N-ROLL IN THE SIXTIES

Text topic: Studies

Text author: Никола Божиловић

The author gives a parallel comparative overview of the Yugoslav society in the 1960s on the one hand, and the rock-n-roll music which established itself as a dominant music trend of the young generations of the decade, on the other. An attempt is made to answer the question of how rock culture as a phenomenon of capitalist and imperialist America has found a place in the cultural map of a socialist anti-imperialist country such as Yugoslavia. The article considers the “crossroads” in which Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia had found itself: while the society had programmed its development in accordance with the materialistic grounds of Marxism (with relevant ideology) its culture unintentionally followed the Weber idealistic perspective. The author aims to prove a thesis under which rock-n-roll, although it came from outside, was not forcefully imposed to Yugoslavia (economically or politically) because rock-n-roll itself represented opposition to the dominant culture of the American society in which it originated. In this part of the article, the author holds an argument with the conspiracy theorists who believe that rock-n-roll had the role of a Trojan horse that would later speed up the ruin of communism. The main reason for such a quick and warm reception of rock-n-roll by the young is found in the fact that even pre-war Yugoslavia had a well grounded tradition of jazz and pop music with adequate culture that rock-n-roll leaned on and enriched. However, rock-n-roll was not that simply assimilated in the land of the communist and antifascist fight heroes. Its acceptance entailed many contradictions, quite different from the ones that were dominant in the USA or Great Britain. The contradictions here arose from the features of the social system and the traditional cultural patterns. According to the author, the acculturation wave that carried the rock-n-roll to Yugoslavia was successful because rock-n-roll is the kind of music that has universal significance and outreach. It cannot be clean cut down to the attributes of its overall esthetic expression – social, anthropological or psychological.