Exactly twenty years ago, in 2005, Goran Bregović gathered the surviving members of Bijelo Dugme and took them on a post-Yugoslav comeback tour from Sarajevo via Zagreb to Belgrade. The experienced wholesaler cleverly arranged his last concert, the one at Belgrade's Ušće, on June 28, St. Vid's Day, which was a red date on the calendar in both the former Yugoslavia and current Serbia, as the day on which the mythical Battle of Kosovo took place in 1389: on that day, for example, in 1914, the First World War began with an assassination in Sarajevo, and on the same day in 1919, it ended with the Treaty of Versailles, and on that day, finally, in 1989, the Balkan Wars were announced with a speech by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević at Gazimestan, which ended with Milošević's extradition to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on the same day in 2001.
Vidovdan was obviously a day for historical things, so the great Vidovdan comeback concert by Bijelo Dugme immediately went down in history, surpassing the legendary concerts of Frank Sinatra, Tina Turner and Paul McCartney, who in the eighties at the iconic Maracanã stadium each wrested the world record from each other, and at Ušće, the previous absolute record of the Japanese band Glay, unknown to us, who five or six years earlier were the first in the world to sell two hundred thousand tickets at the Makuhari fairgrounds in Chiba. The renewed Bijelo Dugme sold a fantastic two hundred and twenty thousand tickets for its Vidovdan concert: in the end, they say, there were more people than at Milošević's famous rally at Ušće in 1988.
Which, by the way, was free.
There were, of course, larger concerts, but here we were talking about festivals, there were even audiences of several million people - Rod Stewart at Copacabana and Jean-Michel Jarre in Moscow in the 1990s gathered three and a half million people each - but these, just like Milošević's rallies, were free performances: no one as an independent performer had ever gathered two hundred and twenty thousand people with paid tickets.
For twelve full years, Bregović's Bijelo Dugme's Vidovdan return to Belgrade's Ušće held the world record, until Italian singer-songwriter superstar Vasco Rossi sold exactly two hundred and twenty-five thousand and one hundred and seventy-three tickets for his concert at the Enzo Ferrari Park in Modena in 2017.
And then a few days ago, Marko Perković Thompson sensationally sold out his concert at the Zagreb Hippodrome scheduled for July 5th: in just six hours, an incredible one hundred and thirty thousand tickets were sold, and by the end of the day, in less than twenty-four hours, it was officially announced that a somnambulistic two hundred and eighty-one thousand seven hundred and seventy-four tickets had been sold out. And that's not all: yesterday, a new contingent of one hundred thousand tickets went on sale, and in the end, there will be perhaps more than three hundred and fifty thousand people at the Hippodrome, more than the number who attended the open-air mass of Pope Benedict XVI at the Zagreb Hippodrome in 2011.
Which, by the way, was free.
All the world's media immediately announced that the absolute world record had been broken, and on the same day Wikipedia was corrected and the list of the greatest commercial solo concerts of all time was updated. And so, among the ten bands and singers with the most attended concerts in the entire history of world show business - as many as three from the former Yugoslavia!
Wait, you'll say, how about three?
Oh, how. Beautiful. There it is, next to Thompson and Bijelo Dugme, down a little lower, right below Vasco Rossi, Glay, Paul McCartney, Tina Turner, Frank Sinatra, Luciano Ligabue and Bruce Springsteen, in tenth place on the list of the best-selling concerts of all time - Ceca!
Oh yes, Ceca Nacional, Svetlana Ražnatović, the so-called Serbian Mother, who gathered one hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred fans at the beginning of her “Poziv” tour at the same Ušće. When? Twelve years ago, in 2013, of course - on Vidovdan. Ceca is not only the only woman among the top ten, along with Tina Turner, but with another concert at Ušće - the one from 2006, in front of more than one hundred and twenty thousand people - she is the only one in the whole world, among both male and female performers, to appear in the top twenty twice!
In vain, there, to the white world, Sinatra, Springsteen and McCartney, in vain for the Rolling Stones and U2 and Queen and Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson and Madonna and Shakira and Robbie Williams, they cannot do what one Bosnian and Herzegovinian band, one Serbian singer and one Croatian singer can do: they can only dream of selling one hundred and fifty thousand tickets, and they cannot even do that until two hundred and eighty thousand. Thompson's record is even crazier, because unlike Dugmet and Ceca, whose fan base is much wider and encompasses the entire former Yugoslavia, including Croatia - and especially unlike Springsteen, the Stones or U2, whose fan base is the entire world - Thompson is listened to and attended by only Croatians, whose entire population would fit into Rod Stewart's concert at Copacabana.
Balkanology, the favorite Western phenomenology, now has a new topic: what is it about music that attracts Balkan peoples so en masse to suburban meadows and horse racing tracks, what do they have in common, that they gather at concerts more than at revolutions and papal masses, with three of their names in the top ten in history? And together, they turned out to be Marko Perković and Ceca Ražnatović, or Bijelo Dugme: if Dugme was, in fact, the greatest rock'n'roll group in the history of the former state and its music scene, and it was, then Thompson and Ceca are exactly all that remained after its collapse.
Groups, former countries, music scenes, whatever.
Bijelo dugme was, in fact, Yugoslavia, and Goran Bregović, as its Tito, did not even bother to prove otherwise, on the contrary: in the final phase, his band iconographically, ideologically and musically looked and sounded like a state project. Even today, there are theories that the State Security was behind Dugme, which conceived SOUR Bijelo dugme as a Yugoslav response to the ideological deviations of youth counterculture and phenomena such as the new wave or, even further, Laibach. Of course, such conspiracy theories are incredibly entertaining: at one time, for example, the Bosnian reisul-ulema Mustafa Cerić, dead serious, revealed that “a whole series of great Bosnian-Herzegovinian writers, from Skender Kulenović to Mak Dizdar, had to write as the political order of the time demanded of them”.
I, for one, would like to live in a country whose party committees and secret services already had the intelligence and talent of Goran Bregović, let alone Mak Dizdar. However, if the Yugoslav state had had that intelligence and talent, it would not have fallen apart.
White Button thus disintegrated together with the state without which it had no meaning, and from its ruins grew two extremely rare and cruel, precisely Dvorniković-esque characterological mutations: to Bregović's folk-rock, "whoever loved me, thunder killed him", Cvetak zanovetak from Čavorađa, pardon Žitorađa, continued with "do you remember, my beautiful thunder, the ground beneath us cracked", crowned as the queen of Serbian turbo-folk, something like Raskopčano Button - then cementing her status by marrying a war criminal and his belated death - while the warrior from Žitoglavo, pardon Čavoglavo, continued with "The Supreme anger erupts like thunder, and there is never peace in my people", crowned as the king of Croatian turbo-wolf, cementing her status by celebrating war criminals from the first and second Homeland Wars. In short, something like Crno Button.
"Spit and sing, my Yugoslavia," sang Bijelo Dugme, and then Yugoslavia, what will it do, spat and sang.
Since it has now been empirically proven that the Yugoslav space is a global cultural and political avant-garde, a good twenty-five years ahead of America and Europe, the response and a million-dollar concert by a major Western band, such as the Rolling Stones, should only be expected in about a quarter of a century.
Provided, you understand, that they fall apart by then.
The Stones, America, Europe, whatever.
Bonus video:
