Last week, the band "Black Sabbath" held its farewell concert in its native Birmingham, in the original line-up, led by Ozzy Osbourne, who, due to Parkinson's disease, sang only eight of the greatest hits while sitting. At the concert in front of 40000 people, numerous bands showed their respect by guesting, including "Metallica", "Guns N' Roses", "Pantera", "Slayer", "Alice in Chains", "Mastodon", "Antrax", as well as members of the bands "Red Hot Chili Peppers", "Smashing Pumpkins", "Rage Against the Machine", "Faith No More" and others.
Ozzy sang the entire concert sitting on the black throne of the Prince of Darkness, surrounded by the familiar iconography of demons and devils, his voice served him well, although today he looks like Dracula from Coppola's film. More than 55 years since the creation of the band, it has been shown that along with cult bangers like "Paranoid" or "Iron Man", generations of kids and rebels grew up for whom "Black Sabbath" was a symbol of resistance against every establishment embodied in the symbols of the church.
Hence this much respect, worthy of a special music festival. The drama of Želimir Žilnik remains in our TV history Crno i belo, in which Vlada Jett helps her son and his dark-skinned friend free and "steal" a girl from her conservative apartment. That's when Jet and his band played "Paranoid", of course from "E-major", on some farm, with horses, not to mention at the hippodrome.
On the same weekend, Marko Perković Thompson held his concert in Zagreb in front of half a million people. This concert was promoted for weeks in all state and private media, with the presence of Prime Minister Plenković, Janez Janša and the retired bishop of Sibenik Don Ante Ivas, whose song "Maranatha" was performed by Thompson as a prayer at the hippodrome. In order not to repeat general posts about the vampiric Ustaste, we can immediately say that it is a sort of introduction to the celebration of 30 years since the Storm, when, as they euphemistically say, "the state integrity of Croatia has been completed".
What confuses me is the source of that collective frustration shown by the right- and ultra-right-oriented audience, which was mostly not even born at the time of the Homeland War. All historical plans were fulfilled by Croatian nationalists, from an independent state, through membership in the EU and NATO, reduction of the population of minorities, especially Serbs, to the level of a statistical error, to the increasingly strong influence of the clergy on politics and social life.
Why then is there a need to show this concert as a national pilgrimage for days on HRT news, in all programs. The reports from the highways talked about a logistical nightmare, in the story about the accommodation facilities, the traffic regime, the schedule of emergency services, all the way to refreshments, public address and emergency services, were changed. I find it particularly bizarre how, for example, the host of Dnevnik winks at the reporters when she announces, watch out for the "musical... Storm, at the hippodrome" or the pregame at Bundek. T-shirts and souvenirs with ultra-nationalist and Ustasha messages, or Ustasha jokes like "Za hipoDROM, spremni!" were sold and advertised.
Of course, everyone greeted with that greeting, because of which, along with other symbolism, Thompson was banned from performing in Austria or the Netherlands. On the other hand, I found the outrage of the salon right wing, which was not pleased with this populist, black-sabbath metalized Vlach festival, interesting to me. A passionate diaspora came to Croatia, driven by the economic situation to become guest workers. That's why in the articles of HRT, organized or individual arrivals to the concert are shown in the form of a kind of votive pilgrimage. I saw dozens of buses, from various places, civil servants, who had to go through Knin, or Vukovar, or Dubrovnik, in order to finally arrive at the concert.
Thompson is an example, as his songs actually say, how dangerous it is when you underestimate that lower class, like him who, without his front teeth, in a camouflage uniform, on a tape, brought his first hit from Čavoglav and played it to the guys from "Feral" in Split. Boris, Viktor and the rest of the team found his hard-metal populist vibe funny and bizarre, but it turned out that it was actually the embodiment of the Croatian national myth. It is a moment of glory for the volunteers, which PTSD ate today, as well as the feeling that, while they were at war, a few characters divided and cheaply bought all of Croatia. As for the call from Serbia for the EU to act against the Ustasha, that, of course, will not happen because Thompson is just another consequence of the EU's decision to carry out its expansion through the right-wing throughout Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Thus, today we have an unchangeable right in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, until the attempt to implement a similar policy in Ukraine.
The Union did not trust the reformed communists and socialists, so the patriots and pops were the mainstay of the political transition. Today's kids in Croatia want the glory of the veterans, the taste of victory, just as there is a sick platitude of the "happy nineties", when we defeated NATO with the sounds of turbo folk and dance. That is why I cannot accept the theories of the Croatian MPs in the EU that students in Serbia today are "right-wing heirs of the nineties", because the stars of the nineties are in power in Serbia.
Thompson is actually the complete opposite of "Black Sabbath", not because there are no devils, pentagrams or inverted crosses, but because Thompson is a state populist project that replaces unfulfilled expectations and dreams of Croatia, which will automatically become heaven on earth when it becomes independent. Instead, while the drones were drawing Our Lady, angels and the Knin Fortress in the sky, craftsmen on the ground were selling a bottle of pure Croatian water for five and lukewarm Croatian beer for seven euros.
