Claudia Mayr-Veselinović - Political agenda, nostalgia or commercialism? Political songs of Yugoslavia between support/protest, nostalgia and commercialism
Political songs, in sense of a collective term for songs that seize certain (actual) social questions or (political) happenings in a critical or patriotic way; written or performed to solidarize the society in general or show some state of agitation, are and always have been one of the most popular devices for ideology transfer, the creation of group identity etc. Therefore, political songs are simultaneous bottom-up and top-down (depending on the origin/author and the intention of the song) as well as they provide xenonyms/exonyms and endonyms/autonyms, used to frame the self and/or the other. Third, they provide us with (sometimes fictional) information about historical events or times to come. Popular modern groups as well as old-established performers refer to the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia nowadays in form of glorifying, criticism, or mostly, compare the living conditions and over-all situation than and now in her successor states. The question therefore is, do they (resp. the song) follow a political agenda to support/change something, are these songs and performances acts of nostalgia or is it plain commercialism – referring to the good old times or rather referring to the artists’ old shine and glory?