Yugo Playlist and Book Recommends (Patreon)

Thanks to everyone who tuned into the movie screening stream!  We had a blast and we can't wait to do it again.  As requested, we're going to post a Spotify playlist and some book recommendations for anyone interested in doing a deeper dive.  I'll attach a link to the doc as well for anyone who missed it. For the non-Spotify havers, we've got a solid youtube playlist of a great compilation of electronic music released on the Yugoslavian state label.  Over the years, Jugoton put out some incredibly challenging music for a state run enterprise.  We didn't get into it much on stream but...the general idea behind funding outsider art and music critical of the social fabric was twofold: educate the people by promoting pure Yugoslavian culture and provide a sort of pressure valve for subcultural "protest".  The result was (imo) the most vibrant music scene of the "east".  Compared to the Soviet and other Eastern Bloc analogs, Jugoton was almost subversive. Besides new wave and punk, Jugoton embraced disco (albeit in a anti-capitalist strain), launched hundreds of pop careers and even used it's reach as an ideological "soft power" tool to normalize and introduce Yugoslavian citizens to things like Roma songs or regional folk forms.  

And now...the stuff:

Books 

My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong To You - Aleksandar Hemon

Amazing chronicle of growing up in the last decades on Yugoslavia, a tender but clear eyed biography of family and a really important work on what it means to be part of a diaspora.  Aleksandar was a punk around the same time Every Child Is Born Beautiful was filmed and contextualizes his youth with that of his parents effortlessly. 

Wartime - Milovan Djilas

Djilas was the righthand man to Josip Broz Tito, a guerrilla fighter and brilliant tactician.  He would eventually be pushed out of the Party structure in one of the worst political decisions Tito ever made.  This book chronicles the incredible undertaking of starting a resistance movement, unifying fractious ethnostates and ultimately defeating multiple fascist governments backed by the Nazis and Mussolinis Italy. The tone here is pretty unglamorous and doesn't shy away from accepting the fact that war is a moral quagmire, even if the cause is just.  The picture I walked away with was something rare in these types of books...Djilas half rejects the "great man" theory of revolutionary history and puts the mantle of greatness on the women and men who fought to unify the country. 

A Tomb For Boris Davidovich - Danilo Kis

This book is a dark box.  The structure folds in on itself, reccurs, corrects itself, grows outward. It's a collection of interconnected stories and echoes Grossmans "Everything Flows" in its examination of individuals making choices or individuals having choices "made for them".  The outcome is never good.  There's something haunted and lyrical happening here on the page and even though it's fiction, this novel helped me understand the para-political undercurrent of Balkans better than almost anything else.  It's dark but it's a joy to read.

TUNES -

Spotify YugoParty 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0XlOva5FMPzz0dKe6ilFE3?si=V9zZe7wpQ3G9UVV-tdCUrg

Electronic Jugoton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O4BdSgPPI8&list=OLAK5uy_mhqTJkYy-ghPyR_T7buX4fTsS8fWmuuHU

Thank you all again...and if you've got recommendations of your own please drop them in the comments!