Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of popular music in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav region across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book consists of chapters by leading scholars and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of music in the region that for most of the past century was known as Yugoslavia. Exploring the role played by music in Yugoslav art, culture, social movements, and discourses of statehood, this book offers a gateway into scholarly explanation of a key region in Eastern Europe. An introduction provides an overview and background on popular music in Yugoslavia, followed by chapters in four thematic sections: Zabavna-Pop; Rock, Punk, and New Wave; Narodna (Folk) and Neofolk Music; and the Politics of Popular Music Under Socialism.

This four-volume work is the most substantial and thorough analysis of Yugoslav folk music ever to be published in the English language. In addition to the editorially corrected reprint of the seventy-five Parry Collection transcriptions, first published in 1951, are the 3,449 facsimile reproductions from Bartók's collection of published and unpublished Yugoslav folk song materials. There are, too, instrumental transcriptions from the Parry collection and other sources, hitherto unpublished, and the prodigious Tabulation of Material, amassed from the data inherent in the source melodies, which appears in Vol. II also in facsimile form. Of equal importance is the reprint in Vol. I of the author's index of Serbo-Croatian refrains, which he originally placed in the third volume (Texts) of Rumanian Folk Music for comparative purposes. The editor, Dr. Benjamin Suchoff, provides introductory narratives in which the historical aspect and the chronology of the various manuscript versions are treated. With the assistance of the foremost present-day Yugoslav ethnomusicologists, he has added detailed chapters on related materials that supplement and update Bartók's findings in Yugoslav Folk Music. Dr. Suchoff has also constructed various tabulations, in accordance with Bartókian procedure followed elsewhere, as an aid to the reader. Of special interest will be the computer-derived lexicographical index of themes in Vol. II, which he prepared by extracting the incipits from more than 8,000 melody sections of different content-structure.

From the late-1970s to the late-1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important social and political purpose of providing a popular cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of life in Yugoslav society. The three music movements that emerged in this period - New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans - employed the understanding of rock music as the 'music of commitment' (i.e. as socio-cultural praxis premised on committed social engagement) to articulate the critiques of the country's 'new socialist culture', with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This book offers an analysis of the three music movements and their particular brand of 'poetics of the present' in order to explore the movements' specific forms of socio-cultural engagement with Yugoslavia's 'new socialist culture' and demonstrate that their cultural praxis was oriented towards the goal of realizing the genuine Yugoslav socialist-humanist community 'in the true measure of man'. Thus, the book's principal argument is that the driving force behind the music of commitment was, although critical, a fundamentally constructive disposition towards the progressive ideal of socialist Yugoslavia.

In Western political discourse, Yugoslavia was frequently referred to as a “buffer zone,” its independence from the Soviet bloc being the single most salient factor making it politically atypical. Another enduring metaphor, that of a crossroads between East and West, was often invoked to describe Yugoslavia’s heterogeneous culture, owing as much to its geographic position in central/southeast Europe as to its multinational makeup. Yet, if not solely for its socialist brand of communism, the Balkan-Slavic identity of Yugoslavia’s traditional culture shaped the perception of the country as a part of the east European cultural bloc. Like other cultures on the map of Slavic traditions, Yugoslavia presented the casual observer with a colorful variety of village music, ethnic customs and a proliferating national folklore engendered in festival re-enactments of rural life. Rapid social changes following World War II profoundly affected the country’s largely rural-based culture. Despite enormous evidence of vanishing historic practices, the music rooted in the socioeconomic milieu of peasant society remained the main focus of ethnomusico-logical research interest. Yugoslavia’s contemporary culture, originating in such modem institutions as mass media and the market place, did not receive comparable attention.

Adam Yamey visited Yugoslavia frequently over a period of more than 20 years. He criss-crossed the country from north to south and east to west. During his travels, he stood in the footsteps of Archduke Ferdinand's assassin in Sarajevo and those of Emperor Diocletian in Split, ate Chinese food in Novi Sad and offal at Rtanj, and also played Scrabble with Yugoslavs all over Serbia. In this profusely illustrated, trail of memories, the author describes the friendships that he made with Yugoslavs all over the country, and how these led to his deeper understanding of, and love for their country. As the years passed, the author began noticing small things, which made little sense at the time, but later turned out to be portentous. These were early signs of the troubles that were to lead to the disintegration of Yugoslavia soon after the author's last visit to the country in 1990. Join the author in the exploration of a country that no longer exists.

Sounds of the Borderland is the first book-length study of how popular music became a medium for political communication and contested identification during and after Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia. It extends existing cultural studies literature on music, politics and the state, which has largely been grounded in Western European and North American political systems. It also responds to an emerging fascination with the culture and politics of contemporary south-east Europe, expanding scholarship on the post-Yugoslav conflicts by going on to encompass significant social and political changes into the present day. The outbreak of war in 1991 saw almost every professional musician in Croatia take part in a wave of patriotic music-making and the powerful state television system strive to bring popular music under its control. As the political imperative shifted from securing national survival to consolidating a homogenous nation-state, the music industry responded with several strategies for creating a national popular music, producing messages about the nation and, in the ongoing debates over the origins of the folk music that inspired many songs, a way to define the nation by expressing what Croatia was not. The war on ethnic ambiguity which cut through individuals' social and creative lives played out across the airwaves, sales racks and gossip columns of a small country that imagined itself a historical and cultural borderland. These explicit and implicit narratives of nationhood connect many political phases: the months of fiercest fighting, the stabilised front, the uneasy post-war years when the symbolic frontline region of eastern Slavonia had still not returned to Croatian sovereignty, the euphoria and instability after the end of the Tudjman regime in 2000, and Croatia's fraught journey towards the European Union. Baker's book provides valuable insight into the role of music in a wartime and post-conflict society and will be essential reading for researchers and students interested in south-east Europe or the transformation of entertainment during and after conflict.

Socialist countries like Yugoslavia garnered legitimacy through appealing to social equality. Yet social stratification was characteristic of Yugoslav society and increased over the course of the state's existence. By the 1980s the country was divided on socio-economic as well as national lines. Through case studies from a range of social millieux, contributors to this volume seek to 'bring class back in' to Yugoslav historiography, exploring how theorisations of social class informed the politics and policies of social mobility and conversely, how societal or grassroots understandings of class have influenced politics and policy. Rather than focusing on regional differentiation between Yugoslav republics and provinces the emphasis is placed on social differentiation and discontent within particular communities. The contributing authors of these historical studies come from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, linking scholarship from the socialist era to contemporary research based on accessing newly available primary sources. Voices of a wide spectrum of informants are included in the volume; from factory workers and subsistence farmers to fictional television characters and pop-folk music superstars.