Cheyennes at Gazimestan

Writes: Muharem Bazdulj

If we were to judge with a distance of about forty years, based solely on the traces of popular culture, more precisely popular music, the crisis in Kosovo was felt in Sarajevo before Serbia. The key year in which Kosovo became an inspiration for pop music in Serbia is 1986 – that year saw the release of Balasevic's "Bagrenje", as well as Bajaga's "Rimljani" and "Seobe" by the band Kerber. "Zemlja" by Ekatarina Velika came out a year later. Then, Kosovo became an inspiration in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and Nis. In Sarajevo, however, two years earlier, during the infamous Orwellian Olympics of 1984, the song "Cheyennes leaving" by Zabranjeno Pusenje and the album by Bijelo Dugme were released – quite unusually for the band at that stage – and it was called "Bijelo Dugme."

Regarding the inspiration for "Cheyennes," we have a direct admission from the song's author, Nele Karajlic. However, the lyrics themselves leave little room for doubt: "I have a friend, he lives near Napredak / I don't know which tribe he's from as he doesn't wear war colors / With him, I go hunting, hunting for buffalo / And I see the Cheyennes, Cheyennes leaving."

Bregovic, however, as the key "Dugmetov" author decides to perform, as they say, performatively. He had, in fact, a year earlier, on the album "Uspavanka za Radmilu M." included the song "Kosovska" with lyrics in Albanian, which was unprecedented in Yugoslav popular culture. This time the association with Kosovo had to go "without words." And the thing becomes archetypal: the entire album cover features the painting "Kosovka devojka" by Uros Predic. In urban legend, the album is still often called "Kosovka devojka" to this day.

However, the album was officially called "Bijelo Dugme." There are cases in the history of rock and roll where a debut album is named after the band, but it is quite rare for this to be the name of the seventh album. Still, an explanation exists. Namely, the previous singer of "Dugme," Zeljko Bebek, had left the group, so this was the first album with the new singer – Mladen Vojicic Tifa, which means that "Bijelo Dugme" had to be reinvented. Hence, perhaps, the title.

The cover (or "cover") is still more important here. Five years before the famous six-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, when there was almost no talk about this anniversary, Goran Bregovic evokes the most famous painting variation of this historical motif. And although there is no song on the album recognized in the history of popular culture as a song on the Kosovo theme (as the song "Cheyennes leaving" is recognized), such a choice of cover places the entire album under a kind of "Kosovo umbrella." After all, even the working title of the album "We are still here" carries a clear symbolic weight.

The album opens with a cover of the Yugoslav anthem "Hej Slaveni." At that moment, it is impossible to imagine a more "political" prologue, and in the context of the album cover, it is subtly suggested that Kosovo is a Yugoslav issue. The following are songs "Padaju zvijezde" and "Meni se ne spava." These are love songs, without direct political connotations, although the lyric "cold winter, depressive" is not devoid of social atmosphere. The "A" side in the formats of the time (vinyl and cassette) ends with two great compositions: "Za Esmu" and "Jer kad ostaris." Six years after Balasevic with "Rani mraz" sang "Count on us," Bregovic messages "Don't count on me," diagnosing that it rained today, and the radio reports it will rain tomorrow, the depression, it seems, continues, regardless of the season.

In other words, "it's kind of sad." The "B" side opens with the biggest hit: "Lipe cvatu," in which the name of the homeland is directly invoked ("Flat is your Yugoslavia"). Then goes a duet with Bora Đorđevic with the anecdotal point that you never know who can give you a venereal disease. In "Radi radio," everyone is sleeping: from the working class through the CIA and KGB to "our police." So, no one is guarding the order, neither domestic nor global. Finally, the last two songs: "Lazes" and "Da te bogdo ne volim" talk about incurable love, or the impossibility of getting over such love, even if it would, perhaps rationally speaking, be beneficial for the lyrical subject. From today's perspective, we might say that this is how Bregovic loved Yugoslavia, or that this is how most Serbs perceive Kosovo.

In the mid-1980s, especially in Sarajevo, as well as all of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the League of Communists still had a kind of "monopoly on censorship," so artists often figured out how to "package" political messages. Nele Karajlic remembered the Cheyennes, in a similar way that, more or less at the same time, Milorad Pavic remembered the Khazars. Goran Bregovic, however, was guided by the folk saying that "a picture speaks more than a thousand words."