Thursday, August 05, 2004

Ethnic Musical Cleansing NPR’s program "The World" had a story on the efforts of Serbia and Montenegro to adopt a new national anthem by the time the Olympics start.  The current anthem, a remnant of the former Yugoslavia, is hated by the athletes. Petra Janjatovic, a music journalist from Belgrade, says there's a strong political impetus for a new anthem: My modest opinion is that the Serbs want a new anthem because most of the people in Serbia want to stay together with Montenegro and in Montenegro it is not the same situation. . . . The goal of the new national anthem is to please, or appease, both Serbia and Montenegro. The federal parliament chose two songs: one Serbian and one Montenegran and decided to combine them into one. There’s a big problem, though . . . Melodically, the two songs don’t have much in common. The Serbian song is a very old patriotic hymn. The Montenegran tune is a folk song with a completely different rhythm. Just try to imagine morphing the themes into a single song. . . If the musical merger fails and the two nations go their separate ways, will Serbia revert to the sort of aggrieved nationalism that precipitated the breakup of Yugoslavia? In that case, an appropriate national anthem would be the following, sung to the tune of "We Shall Overcome": Slobodan Milosevic Slobodan Milosevic Slobodan Milosevi-i-i-i-ic Slobo-o-dan Milosevi-ic Slobodan Milosevic 9:55:41 AM