Working Group 3: Popular Music in Digital and Analogue Contexts

Popular music is a prominent means of representing the past in the space of fluid individual conceptions of reality, shaping the listeners’ imagination about the past in accordance with their own acquired experience. The technology of sound recording and reproduction makes it possible to listen to songs, so their recording in the auditory memory of the human mind is done through mnemonics.

Over the past decade, several musical phenomena have appeared in the post-Yugoslav space, engaged with the memory of Yugoslav and postsocialist transitional past. These musical phenomena include popular groups, DJ collectives, tribute bands, and other forms of musical performance. In addition, the playlist formation of Yugoslav popular music and the production of retro-genres, such as yugowave and post-Yugoslav synthwave, have become highly popular on streaming and social platforms.

The online participatory cultures are specifically eager to engage in archiving practices of Yugoslav popular music in the digital media environment, and appropriaton of Yugoslav (and post-Yugoslav, 1990s’) popular music in autohtonic digital and internet genre forms. These phenomena use different mnemonic strategies, ranging from archival purposes to nostalgia and subversive affirmation of the past; all these condition the formation of specific post-Yugoslav appropriation of global music production. 

The objective of Working Group 3 is to map how popular-musical production, distribution, criticism, and consumption engage with memories of Yugoslav socialism, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and strategies of symbolic nation-building of the transitional 1990s in the regional online public sphere and fan communities, and to account for the key actors, platforms, intermedial and transmedial networks, ideologies, and aesthetics at the level of production, distribution and reception.