With Srđan Shaper, the former Idol, and today's general manager of the Belgrade branch of the marketing firm McCann-Erickson, we are talking in his office in Čika Ljubina.
Where ti u rock and roll?
From medicine, which Krle (Nebojša Krstić) and I studied at the time. We were drawn to a new wave that was distinctly original music. Something similar happened twenty years before in film, with the French New Wave, when a generation of people who needed an authorial statement found themselves in film. What was film then, was music in the eighties. The new wave meant the discovery of a possibility of freedom that gave someone who was just entering life at the age of twenty the tools to realize that freedom. We then took advantage of that possibility by applying it to ourselves and our environment, which was fascinatingly ready for it at the time. On that, we found ourselves on one side, Krle and I, who thus experienced the new wave, and Vlad, who until then was dealing with some twisted jazz-rock variant of the late seventies and who probably thought that it was better to be with the two of us, who were nothing but amateurs didn't have any musical knowledge, make a band, but to sit with some people who are excellent musicians and deal with pouring from hollow to empty. I remember that Krle had a punk maxim: Noise is for heroes, music is for zeroes. We weren't really noise, but we were for something that liberates, not for music that limits you, because in order to play it you have to play well first. These older musicians were incredibly jealous of us because they had spent years practicing guitar solos that should sound better than anything else, and all of a sudden some kids came out of nowhere who had no idea that a song should even have a guitar solo. , and become even more popular.
Found it th se na plate together sa dva bandage sa kojima some had much toys.
They all saw themselves as music people - we didn't. That's the only difference. We had a slightly more widespread taste in life, and music was a more serious adventure for us. What made us fundamentally different from Charles and Orgasm was that we were prone to constantly questioning and problematizing ourselves. When you look at Koja now and 20 years ago, you see a man who already had an idea in his head back then, and has been pushing it for all these 20 years. I think it's more a matter of character than aesthetics or anything else. That combination of simplicity, reduction in expression according to principle moins as more, which we adhered to at the very beginning, and on the other hand, slaloming between different things that seemingly had nothing to do with each other, it simply suited us better. At that time, if I remember myself, I wasn't impressed with Orgasm, but that's why Charlo seemed very interesting to me. I was always sorry that the song Ona se mind it's not ours and I secretly envied them.
How much je sve what se happened tada had any toys sa Tito's death?
Maybe it did in the sense that it was status quo which until then had been artificially maintained in a moment ceased to exist. At that time, as a 21-year-old man, I had the experience that with Tito's death, a period of life in a virtual closed society in which nothing happened was ending. At that time, I did not have a good sense of how many underground forces were moving. Tito's death did not mean a political change for the better, on the contrary, but due to the disappearance of that father figure, a feeling of individual freedom that did not exist before flowed into the people. I felt then that a realm of unprecedented possibilities was emerging that I did not know exactly what they were. Some of those opportunities turned out to be good, those that happened in the eighties, but some turned out to be bad, those that happened in the nineties. In any case, the new wave happened in a couple of years, actually from the '80s. until '85. - in that period, the emergence, development, rise, peak and beginning of the fall of a generation took place. Everything after '85. was just music, if I may say so.
Cocoa je ideological discourse the new one wave?
We came to music with a fairly clear ideological assumption, which in a more or less hidden or open way came to the fore in everything we did, although there was neither left nor right in any form. There was simply one regime and opposition to it. What guided us was the idea of youth, freedom, forgetting the fear that still existed somewhere. When I say fear, I don't mean only ideological fear, but also the fear of growing up, if you will... These are all questions that ultimately come down to the idea of individualism and populism, not questions of left and right.
Yes li bili against communist?
Vlada and I went to high school together, and like many of our generation, we had a very pronounced, so to speak, anti-regime attitude. We grew up in the time after the fall of the liberals in Serbia in the 1980s, and we somehow experienced that political upheaval as kids. What marked that period in a political sense, apart from Tito's death, was the uprising in Poland in XNUMX. It had ideologically a lot to do with everything that was happening in our country. Orgasm went on a tour in Poland, after them we were supposed to go too, but in the meantime Jaruzelski seduced the military administration, so the tour failed. The idea of "Solidarity" really resonated with many of us, not only Štulic, who had a song Poljska u mom heart. Personally, I was quite fascinated by the idea of "Solidarity". So much so that we wrote a dedication through the journalist Zoran Petrović Piroćanac, who at the time worked in Zagreb's "Start" and had some connections with Poland, and sent the record to Lech Valensa. Packages arrangement.
How much je sve to what se happened sa new by a wave actually left swallow i influence?
Packages arrangement is the ultimate proof that art cannot change the world. At that time, it seemed that the new wave was really radiating something, that many people were affected by it, and that the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility that it carried in the subtext was something that was then dominant in the country in which we lived. And then a nationally determined populism appeared, which completely denied all that, and which actually put a stamp on everything that happened later in our lives. If there was no war and the disintegration of the country, the whole idea would probably be Packages arrangement was less striking and would have been less clearly reflected in the past. Today, it has become a metaphor, a defining factor of an entire era, generation, attitude. That's why twenty years Packages arrangement it's not just twenty years since the release of one record. As for the authors, when you look a little closer, there were actually only seven authors in three bands, of which two are not alive, two are not in music, and three are still active. But there were a lot of people around - journalists, critics, organizers - from Pera Luković to Nebojša Pajkić. Ideology came later. We have all become part of the establishment over time, more or less. But, unlike the sixty-eighth generation, the new wave generation did not make that historic decision to enter the establishment, that's why we don't actually exist as a generation today. Unlike the 68-year-olds, who all together caused a lot of harm to this country, because they were part of one big fraud, the 80's generation remained individualistic and without that Masonic connection that the 68-year-old generation had. And what we were doing was no big scam. That was one great truth of that moment, and that's why it still sounds so good today, after all these years.
