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Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism

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Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s

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Abstract

This chapter explores the absence of disco from the Yugoslav popular canon and from collective memory, despite its rich presence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and roots this amnesia in the heavily Westernised musical discourse of the time which neglected disco while mythologising Yugoslav punk and new wave for synchronising local with global trends. The chapter pays respect to crate diggers who have recently uncovered the Yugoslav disco sound, and goes on to reconstruct the wider, complex culture which formed around it. Appropriate theoretical framework for the analysis of disco’s many layers here is found in Alexei Yurchak’s non-binary optics of late socialism, which accommodate Yugoslav disco’s contrasting elements: from affluent fans to proletarian dance champions, from funk grooves to Schlager melodies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Elsewhere, I have dealt in more detail with other aspects of Yugoslav disco, such as disc jockeys, disco’s cinematography, and overall codes (Zubak 2016, 2018a, 2020). All of this builds on my ongoing research on Yugoslav and Eastern European socialist disco culture, first exhibited as a gallery exhibition in Zagreb’s Galerija SC and Belgrade’s Galerija Doma omladine in 2015 and 2016.

  2. 2.

    Due to its exceptional theoretical framework that draws on theories of performativity, Yurchak’s study remains dominant in scholarship on late socialism, but it was not the only one. Since the late 2000s and especially the early 2010s a number of volumes have increasingly refuted a Cold War paradigm of fully oppressed communist life, affirming a place for alternative everyday realities, filled with consumption, emotions, and escapes (Crowley and Reid 2010; Fürst and McLellan 2016; Giustino et al. 2013).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to express my appreciation to a number of musicians, dancers, disc jockeys, film directors, scholars, crate diggers, and journalists who shared with me their experiences and testimonies about disco and its reception, which are at the core of this text. These include (in alphabetical order): Mirza Alijagić, Jovan Bačkulja, Slavin Balen, Dragan Batančev, David Blažević, Vladimir Crvenković, Duško Cvetojević, Hamit Đogani, Dejan Gavrilović, Miroslav Gregurek, Željko Kerleta, Janoš Kern, Dragan Kozlica, Goran Marković, Kire Mitrev, Borja Močnik, Gordan Novak, Boban Petrović, Milena Savić, Mirko Sobota, Lokica Stefanović, Dragan Timotijević, Igor Večerić, Dušan Velkaverh, Igor Vidmar, Predrag Vukčević, and Mihajlo Vukobratović. In addition, the writing of this chapter was helped by the support of NEP4DISSENT (COST Action 16213) and the Croatian Institute of History and its project ʻAlternative Cultures and Grey Zones of Croatian/Yugoslav Late Socialism’.

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  1. Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia

    Marko Zubak

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  1. Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Flora Pitrolo

  2. Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia

    Marko Zubak

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Zubak, M. (2022). Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism. In: Pitrolo, F., Zubak, M. (eds) Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_9

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