One of the most famous Band, and probably the first eastern European band, which was aired on MTV, was Laibach. A band, using fascists aehstetics to provocate the Yugoslavian Society, was formed also by fine artists, and one of their goal was also to perform the closeness of totaritarian aehstetics, regardless if its from the left or right political wing. To be honest, I think if you never change your way of provocating, and you always stick to promote fascist aehstetics, than it doesn’t matter if you aim to explain that as subversive.

As we understood, serious pop culture also, as the an cultural opposition, an ideological subjectivation, which provides identity, where high culture is not successful, we focused in our Festival, the serious pop summit (Year: 2004) on bands and groups which manage to intrude the main stream without quoting fascists aehstetics, and still with an certain political message. As an now famous example, Eugene Hütz from Gogol Bordello, performed in our festival together with DJ Derbastler from Kiev and the Artist Mike Hentz. Immigrant Punk and Beats like eastern european Wedding Bands on LSD.

From Belgrade, we had Darkwood Dub, a band which lyrics weren’t explicit political, more they described how for a whole generation the years of war were wasting their best years. Their first release after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, was Zivot pocinje u 30-oj, Life starts with 30th, another masterpiece in their long career.

And in my eyes, the new Video, continues where Zivot pocinje u 30-oj, started. Experimental as usual, high quality production and one of the most interesting bands in the region. Beside huge musical creativity, one of their members, Vladimir Vlidi Jeric, is also a known activist and pubished his opinon on SLUM-TV, in our newspaper (free download).

For more information on serious pop, visit the serious pop category or click in the related posts, where you can find TV reports on the Summit, Video from the Eugene Hütz, DJ Derbastler and Mike Hentz Performance…

Vom Schweigen und Toben

So hatte ich letzten Montag einmal die außerordentliche Gelegenheit im Rahmen des im WUK veranstalteten “SeriousPop” Festivals eine Seite der Musikbranche (die osteuropäische) kennen zu lernen, von der ich vorher partout keine Ahnung hatte, und mit großer Neugierde machte ich mich auf den Weg. Von der für mich dunklen Seite der obig erwähnten Musikbranche, oder besser gesagt Richtung, gibt mir höchstens ein Utensil meiner Plattensammlung punkto YU-Rock Aufschluss, nämlich eine alte Platte mit dem verheißungsvollen Titel “JUGOBEAT!” – 16 Mid Sixties PUNKERS from YUGOSLAVIA. Die schwarze Scheibe habe ich ehedem an den Kais zur Seine um 100 Francs erstanden. Gehört zum letzten Mal gewiss 2000, war ich äußerst gespannt auf die an diesem Abend musizierenden Gruppen 368DX (Russland) und Gogol Bordello (Ukraine/New York).

text from http://www.festivalwelt.de by Michaela Drescher

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Serious POP was a project, started i think in 2002, as a research project – by Andreas Leo Findeisen and myself.

Here is a summary, of course not a complete one, made by 3-Sat, its in german, but with english subtitles.