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3.

Karaoke Is a

Communist Invention!

It Certainly Is!

In the Soviet Union there were postcards that were about the size of a 7” single, and they had recordings impressed on them that one could actually play. One of these postcards turned up in my mail. I put the postcard on the record player and heard a friend’s voice quietly singing away, wishing me all the best from the city he was visiting, Odessa I think. This quirky technological possibility actually existed; the voice of whoever bought the postcard could be recorded on it. This was the first time I ever heard karaoke, and it was in a time when karaoke, officially a Japanese invention, didn’t even exist.

In the seventies and eighties many Yugoslavs would go abroad to buy whatever they couldn’t get in Yugoslavia, or whatever was cheaper abroad. In Trieste, they bought fashionable clothes, jeans, and coffee; in Graz, or in Austrian shopping centers just over the border, they bought food; in Istanbul, fur coats and leather jackets. Eastern European countries weren’t popular shopping destinations. Most of the Yugoslavs who went to the Soviet Union worked for Yugoslav construction firms. They brought home beautiful wooden chess sets, cameras, movie cameras, musical instruments (violins, accordions, trumpets, saxophones), sheet music, classical music records, and easels, canvas, and paint. Particularly sought after were these little wooden chests with oil paints and brushes that you could wear on your shoulders like a pack. Everything was dirt-cheap.

The first time I went to Moscow in the mid-eighties I also bought a little paint set. The amateur painter sitting on a stool at an easel was part and parcel of the Russian Soviet landscape, apparent confirmation of Marx’s utopian vision that under communism people would throw off the chains of exploitation, enjoy their work, and dedicate their free time to the things they loved. A creek and patches of greenery, a chapel in the snow, a snow-laden hill, a frozen lake or lilac in bloom—these scenes were unthinkable without one compulsory detail: the amateur painter capturing them all at his easel.

In the Moscow of the mid-eighties, they thought of me as a “Westerner.” An elegant coat and soft leather boots rising up above the knee from Trieste, Shetland wool sweaters and a cashmere one from London, a good quality Yugoslav overcoat (in Russian a dublyonka), a passport and hard currency (which got me into “Beryozka,” where I bought a fox-skin cap for myself, and Stolichnaya vodka and copies of The Master and Margarita for friends); all of these passed as irrefutable evidence of my “Westernness.” My Russian friends and acquaintances were what we might call fashion “incompatible,” but unlike me, they all had hobbies. Most of them played an instrument, most often the guitar. At evening gatherings they’d take turns playing Okudzhava and Vysotsky chansons, or their own chansons in the style of Okudzhava and Vysotsky. Most wrote poetry or dabbled in painting, and I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t take a decent photo. To me, a “Westerner,” this whole world of artistic amateurism was on the one hand quite delightful, but rather old-fashioned on the other. The truth is, there were all sorts in the underground Russian arts scene of the mid-eighties: amateurs without ambition, amateurs with ambition, swindlers, art lovers, informants, alcoholics, foreigners, political junkies, dissidents, losers, and not least, those who were sniffing around and hoping to be offered membership in the official state artistic organizations, which granted one “freelance” status.[1] There were also those such as Ilya Kabakov, who but a few years later would become darlings of the international art world.

The world of Soviet artistic amateurism seemed old-fashioned to me because by the mid-eighties the Yugoslav culture of amateurism (ham radio operators, choirs, community theatre, film clubs, amateur painters) was on the wane. Yugoslavs had passports and travelled. American films were in the cinemas, everyone had a TV, and these TVs showed popular American shows. Local cultural centers were slowly abandoned, “workers’ universities” offering adult education began to close, and slogans such as “Knowledge Is Power” and “Workplace Education” had simply lost their credibility. Many ham-radio operators had become professional technicians, and many of those involved in amateur film and photography circles, formerly weekend dabblers, had established themselves as artists, most of them as “conceptualists.” Amateurism kept its longest foothold in half-forgotten Esperanto clubs and the lively Haiku poetry scene, whose poets would send their work off to a mysterious Japanese commission, competing for an international Haiku poetry prize. Emerging out of the culture of amateurism, in the 1970s works by Yugoslav primitive artists were elevated to the status of “art,” attracted international attention and the accompanying big bucks, and then together with buyer interest vanished just a few years later.

I remember bits and pieces from the time of Yugoslav cultural amateurism. The small town in which I grew up had a “House of Culture” with a library, a movie theatre, a music school, and an amateur theatre with an impressive number of productions under its belt. My friend Alma’s father, a printer by trade, always played the leading man, and Ivanka, a typist and local beauty, the leading lady. In one production my father, who really didn’t have a clue about acting, had a bit part as an American—because he was tall. The general consensus in our small town was that only Americans were tall. The audience was particularly enamored with the Hawaiian shirt he wore. We called it a havajka (a “Hawaiian”) because it was brightly colored, the general consensus being that only Americans wore colorful shirts. The local audience enjoyed the performances, mainly because everyone had a personal connection to the actors. People often laughed in the wrong places, or commented loudly on this or that scene, but, having forgotten that the actors were their next-door neighbors and friends, they cried in equal measure.

All in all, alongside the cult of “technological progress,” culture itself was a “cult” ideological tenet under socialism. Education and self-education were the obligations of every progressive socialist individual, and love of the fine arts went hand in hand with humanism and the development of the well-rounded socialist personality, all of which found expression in “artistic” amateurism.[2]

With the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia in the early nineties and the emergence of new states and the ideology of nationalism, the practice of amateurism has seen its re-articulation. Today, as before, institutional, financial, and media investment is geared towards nurturing local folk traditions (songs, dance, customs), there being both ideological and commercial imperatives at work. On the one hand, local folk traditions are useful in cultivating regional identities, and on the other, they’re handy in developing regional tourism. Under communism, folklore festivals offered symbolic support for the brotherhood and unity of the nations and nationalities[3] of Yugoslavia, and today these very same festivals offer symbolic support for the particularities of national and ethnic identities. The thing is, communism or post-communism, Eastern European amateurs dance their ring dances and pluck their tamburice[4] in exactly the same way they have danced and plucked down through the ages. It’s just that every now and then the ideological pretext changes.

Although the beliefs that culture was a matter for the people (and not just the elite), and that one day everyone would get to try his or her artistic hand, were firmly rooted in the practice of the communist culture of amateurism, the practice was never intended to undermine the canon. Amateur and “professional” art (literature, painting, ballet, opera, theatre) existed alongside each other. Amateur art tried to imitate professional art, but never set out to take its place. Amateurs knew they were amateurs and left the power games, turns, shifts, and battles over the canon to professional artists. Technology, market principles, globalization, and the death of communism have radically altered the order of things. The utopian cliché that one day everyone will get to try his or her artistic hand has actually become the dominant and completely chaotic cultural practice that we know today. Communism came to power with the Great October Revolution and ended as fiasco. But communist ideas (Technology for the people! Culture for the people! Art for the People!) have risen from the ashes, successfully realized in the Great Digital Revolution.

Karaoke for Comrade Tito

Let’s imagine that in the future archaeologists will be able to put geographical regions through scanners, like the ones airport customs officers use to check our suitcases. Imagine the relief—no more futile digging in the wrong places! Now let’s imagine putting Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, through this kind of scanner. Millions of mysterious phallic objects would show up on the imaginary scanner’s giant screen. “What the hell is this?” the shocked archaeologists would ask. “What kind of relic could this be? What kind of civilization? A civilization that worshipped the phallus?”

It was a country that worshipped one man, not necessarily his phallus, although from a (psycho)analytical perspective we probably shouldn’t exclude the hypothesis. The mysterious phallic object was neither a phallus nor a police baton. It was precious cargo. The object was known as the relay baton, was made mostly of wood, and in the middle had a hollow, and in this hollow, just like in a bottle, there would be a letter—containing birthday greetings for Tito. Yes, the man’s name was Tito. And yes, the catchy brevity of his name contributed much more to his popularity than commonly thought. On this score, there isn’t a president, not even Obama, who has ever come close. If this kind of thing weren’t important, Bono would have called himself Engelbert Humperdinck.

The relay baton—both a letter and letter box in one—was shaped like a torch, easy to hold, and easily passed from hand to hand.[5] In May of each year every village, town, and city in the former Yugoslavia would organize a youth relay (Tito’s birthday was also Youth Day), and the baton was passed from one pair of hands to the next. The baton was meant to symbolically link all Yugoslavs, all the country’s nations and nationalities, and on May 25th, Tito’s birthday, the baton would finally arrive, to much fanfare, in Belgrade. The boy or girl of the year would run the final stretch and solemnly hand the baton to Tito himself. The relay batons were unique handicrafts, and competition was fierce to make one’s baton more original, beautiful, and impressive than the rest.

The day after Tito died (May 4th, 1980), the photographer Goranka Matić began taking pictures of the displays in Belgrade shop windows. She called the series “Days of Pain and Pride,” the cliché on which the Yugoslav media seemed to have agreed. Overnight, ordinary people—hairdressers, butchers, and bakers—became artists. Tito’s portrait with a black mourning crepe was the connective element in the many fantastic, touching, and grotesque amateur art installations. In one window display Tito’s photo is happily set among fresh fruit and vegetables. In another Tito’s portrait is among funeral candles. Then there is Tito’s portrait with typewriters. Tito with sporting apparel (a tennis racket levitating from the side of the frame). Tito in the window of a hairdresser’s, wedged among photos of young beauties who are showing off the latest styles. Tito in a cake shop window, among the cakes. Tito in a butcher’s window, surrounded by legs of lamb, the butcher wiping his tears. Tito in a barbershop window (an enormous comb suspended overhead). Tito’s picture on the wall of a hardware store, the photo taken through the glass display, on the left a board reading Signs for Public Display (the kind hung in public spaces), on the right, the shop’s advertising slogan—A Man Doesn’t Have Spare Parts—and in the middle, Tito’s portrait and a mourning crepe.

In April 2009, Belgrade’s 25th of May Museum hosted an exhibition of gifts given by Yugoslavs to Tito, the majority dating from the early seventies. Only a fraction of the diverse collection was actually exhibited. In Tito’s lifetime, staff at the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia had diligently archived, classified, and numbered the items, and in the automatism of their jobs probably never thought that this “rubbish” would ever see the light of day. Following Yugoslavia’s disintegration the archive gathered dust, and only today, thanks to enthusiasts, is this enormous collection slowly having its time in the spotlight. The overwhelming visitor interest was propelled by a number of factors, including the twenty-year stigmatization of communism, Tito, and Titoism; the tacit prohibition of “everything Yugoslav” (particularly in Croatia); the aftershocks of the nationalist hysteria and war; and finally, by the fiasco of the nationalist-inspired state projects and the inability of today’s leaders to create “respectable,” and at least semi-reliable, states.

The “women’s” gifts include embroidered pillows, hand towels, knitted sweaters, gloves, tapestries, cushions (in the shape of a red star!), stocking caps, dolls in folk costume, children’s slippers and clothing, Tito’s portrait imprinted on silk, and hand-woven rugs bearing Tito’s image, among them a bizarre specimen with the motif “Josip Broz’s Sons Žarko and Miša Visit Their Father after His Operation.” The many embroidered messages bear congratulations, little verses (The bee belongs to the flower, Tito belongs to the world!), and political slogans (Let’s go the unaligned route!). The “men’s” gifts are more “sturdy,” either cast in metal or carved from wood, often representing the sender’s trade. The gifts include a stuffed trout (from a fisherman); a stuffed snake (!); die-cast figurines of workers, cranes, cars, trains, yachts, boats, planes, ovens, ink pots; ash trays (Tito was a smoker); car-shaped cigarette lighters; and even oddities such as a mini artificial leg (from an orthopedic factory), a mini dental surgery (from the Yugoslav Dentists’ Association), and a false tooth mounted on a plinth (from the Yugoslav Dental Technicians’ Association). Some gifts distill the essence of Yugoslav ideology at the time, as understood by the sender, the amateur artist. Carved from a tree trunk, Ivan Demša’s “Trunk of Peace” is emblematic in this regard. Tito’s head grows out from the top of the tree, or, in other words: Tito is a tree, and his branches wrap themselves around the globe. Birds sit on the branches of the “Trunk of Peace” and build their nests, symbolizing the strength, fertility, and global reach of his pacifist politics.

Visiting the exhibition it occurred to me that this heap of “artistic” objects which were anonymously gifted to Tito was a kind of symbolic mega-magnet that had held Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs together. The most popular Yugoslav slogan was We are Tito’s, Tito is Ours, but with the death of Tito, Yugoslavia fell apart, and nobody belonged to Tito any more, because in the simple, physical sense Tito no longer belonged to us. “The art of Josip Broz was called Tito . . . Tito is a romantic pop star, above all he is the realization of the romantic ideal that our life is a work of art.”[6] As far as his media image goes, Tito was a kind of star, a communist James Bond. He wore a white suit, was a man of learning, had a lot of women, was a snappy dresser, smoked expensive Cuban cigars, liked fine wine, adored his two white poodles, and had famous actresses (Sofia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Gina Lollobrigida) and famous actors (Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton, who played Tito in the film Sutjeska) as his house guests. Tito was a “playboy” who dared to say “no” to Stalin. Tito founded the Non-Aligned Movement, played golf and tennis, was a keen photographer, and, judging by the many photos, liked to dance; he even had a yacht. All in all, “he could sit down at the piano, but he could shoot a bear just as well.”[7]

A quick glance at the hundreds of miniature exhibits, and the thought of the thousands and thousands of similar objects stored in the basement of the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia, makes one’s head spin. I asked myself what drove people to embroider, crochet, sew, and braid, to craft replicas of everything and anything, and then send their amateur “installations” to a single recipient, to Tito. And then I thought of the rituals of contemporary pop culture and tried to visualize the millions of letters, gifts, and artifacts that are sent to today’s megastars. At rock concerts girls throw their lingerie on stage, their bras and knickers, in the hope that in a given moment their idol will use their knickers to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and in doing so, symbolically become one with his fans. For the same symbolic reasons, at concert’s end a star strips off a T-shirt soaked in sweat and throws it out into the crowd. Famous tennis players do the same with their sweatbands. Let’s rewind the tape. The grandmothers and great-grandmothers of today’s young girls sent their mothers’ slippers and bodysuits (from when they were babies), the most intimate things they owned, to Tito. Absorbing the sweat of thousands of runners, the relay baton passed from hand to hand and ended up in Tito’s. Symbolically the people became one with their idol, and the idol one with his people.

And so, in the end, why are gifts sent by the anonymous masses karaoke? They are karaoke because the whole point of the gift is symbolic rapprochement with one’s idol. Like the legion of Elvis impersonators who both idolize and carnivalize their “King,” the anonymous singer sidles up to Elvis by doing a karaoke version of “Only You,” but inadvertently soils his aura in the process. The amateur portraits and miniature wooden sculptures of Tito exemplify this symbolic idolatrous “cannibalism,” the idol transformed into his own farce. The gifts sent to Tito are collective karaoke, a mute collective song.

[1]Membership in the official Soviet literary, fine arts, film, and translation organisations gave one the prized status of freelance artist. In the absence of this status anyone who was unemployed could be prosecuted for parasitism (tunejadstvo), the law under which Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years of forced labor in 1963.

[2]The Croatian writer Ivo Brešan’s play Performing Hamlet in the Village of Mrduša Donja (Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja) is a brilliant comedy about an amateur company in an isolated Croatian village. The company performs Hamlet in its local rural dialect, changing the meaning of Shakespeare’s text to suit local ideas and the ideological principles of the (communist) time.

[3]Translator’s Note: In the former Yugoslavia the terms “nations” (narodi) and “nationalities” (narodnosti) had particular meanings. The constitutive nations of the former Yugoslavia were those named as such in the constitution: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, (Bosnian) Muslims (from 1971), and Montenegrins. The “nationalities” designated what in other languages would be referred to as “national minorities,” in this case, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, Czechs, Albanians, and others.

[4]Translator’s Note: A stringed instrument similar to a mandolin used to accompany folk songs, particularly popular in former Yugoslav regions along the Danube River basin and on the Great Pannonian Plain.

[5]“As opposed to the sceptre in the hands of kings and religious leaders, which could not be touched by anyone else, the relay baton gained its symbolic political power from the very fact that it passed through many hands. While the sceptre, one end pointing down towards the earth, and the other upwards towards the sky, is a symbol of its bearer’s connection to a heavenly power and his authority to represent this power on earth, the relay baton was a symbol of the connection between leader and people, of his legitimate power exercised in the name of the people.” (Ivan Čolović, “O maketama i štafetama” [On Maquettes and Relay Batons] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade: 2005)

[6]Rastko Močnik, “Tito: majstorstvo popromantizma,” [Tito: the Mastership of Pop-romanticism] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade, 2005).

[7]Ibid.