Karaoke Culture. Dubravka Ugrešić

[6] As far as his media image goes, Tito was a kind of star, a communist James Bond. He wore a white suit, was a man of learning, had a lot of women, was a snappy dresser, smoked expensive Cuban cigars, liked fine wine, adored his two white poodles, and had famous actresses (Sofia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Gina Lollobrigida) and famous actors (Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton, who played Tito in the film Sutjeska) as his house guests. Tito was a “playboy” who dared to say “no” to Stalin. Tito founded the Non-Aligned Movement, played golf and tennis, was a keen photographer, and, judging by the many photos, liked to dance; he even had a yacht. All in all, “he could sit down at the piano, but he could shoot a bear just as well.”[7]

      A quick glance at the hundreds of miniature exhibits, and the thought of the thousands and thousands of similar objects stored in the basement of the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia, makes one’s head spin. I asked myself what drove people to embroider, crochet, sew, and braid, to craft replicas of everything and anything, and then send their amateur “installations” to a single recipient, to Tito. And then I thought of the rituals of contemporary pop culture and tried to visualize the millions of letters, gifts, and artifacts that are sent to today’s megastars. At rock concerts girls throw their lingerie on stage, their bras and knickers, in the hope that in a given moment their idol will use their knickers to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and in doing so, symbolically become one with his fans. For the same symbolic reasons, at concert’s end a star strips off a T-shirt soaked in sweat and throws it out into the crowd. Famous tennis players do the same with their sweatbands. Let’s rewind the tape. The grandmothers and great-grandmothers of today’s young girls sent their mothers’ slippers and bodysuits (from when they were babies), the most intimate things they owned, to Tito. Absorbing the sweat of thousands of runners, the relay baton passed from hand to hand and ended up in Tito’s. Symbolically the people became one with their idol, and the idol one with his people.

      And so, in the end, why are gifts sent by the anonymous masses karaoke? They are karaoke because the whole point of the gift is symbolic rapprochement with one’s idol. Like the legion of Elvis impersonators who both idolize and carnivalize their “King,” the anonymous singer sidles up to Elvis by doing a karaoke version of “Only You,” but inadvertently soils his aura in the process. The amateur portraits and miniature wooden sculptures of Tito exemplify this symbolic idolatrous “cannibalism,” the idol transformed into his own farce. The gifts sent to Tito are collective karaoke, a mute collective song.

[1]Membership in the official Soviet literary, fine arts, film, and translation organisations gave one the prized status of freelance artist. In the absence of this status anyone who was unemployed could be prosecuted for parasitism (tunejadstvo), the law under which Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years of forced labor in 1963.

[2]The Croatian writer Ivo Brešan’s play Performing Hamlet in the Village of Mrduša Donja (Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja) is a brilliant comedy about an amateur company in an isolated Croatian village. The company performs Hamlet in its local rural dialect, changing the meaning of Shakespeare’s text to suit local ideas and the ideological principles of the (communist) time.

[3]Translator’s Note: In the former Yugoslavia the terms “nations” (narodi) and “nationalities” (narodnosti) had particular meanings. The constitutive nations of the former Yugoslavia were those named as such in the constitution: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, (Bosnian) Muslims (from 1971), and Montenegrins. The “nationalities” designated what in other languages would be referred to as “national minorities,” in this case, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, Czechs, Albanians, and others.

[4]Translator’s Note: A stringed instrument similar to a mandolin used to accompany folk songs, particularly popular in former Yugoslav regions along the Danube River basin and on the Great Pannonian Plain.

[5]“As opposed to the sceptre in the hands of kings and religious leaders, which could not be touched by anyone else, the relay baton gained its symbolic political power from the very fact that it passed through many hands. While the sceptre, one end pointing down towards the earth, and the other upwards towards the sky, is a symbol of its bearer’s connection to a heavenly power and his authority to represent this power on earth, the relay baton was a symbol of the connection between leader and people, of his legitimate power exercised in the name of the people.” (Ivan Čolović, “O maketama i štafetama” [On Maquettes and Relay Batons] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade: 2005)

[6]Rastko Močnik, “Tito: majstorstvo popromantizma,” [Tito: the Mastership of Pop-romanticism] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade, 2005).

[7]Ibid.

      4.

      Karaoke

      People

      Doubles

      Pulsing in the very idea of karaoke is the old legend of the doppelgänger, of the double, the lookalike, the twin and the surrogate. Karaoke-people are wannabes.

      Legends about doubles have always fired the human imagination. With the epochal birth of Dolly the sheep, the first live clone, not to mention the recent first full-face transplant, this intriguing subject has left the unfettered sphere of the romantic and slipped into the domains of ethics, medicine, and the entertainment industry. Worried about the real possibility of the production of doubles, contemporary medicine moralistically trumpets that in life we are all one-offs and that we have but one life. The entertainment industry blares back that the market has room for everyone, secretly hoping that an anonymous karaoke singer will efface Elvis’s performance of “Only You” from the collective memory, while simultaneously doubling sales of his CDs. The entertainment industry lives on recycling, and hailing its significance, theoreticians of popular culture dignify the profits.

      As a child I was riveted by Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper. To me it was a story about risk, and it fueled my childlike fantasy that a little girl, my double, might appear and take my place, prompting a feeling of freedom that was both terrifying and exciting. (What if my double were to usurp my place in my parents’ hearts for good?! What if I could never come home again?!) Whispered among the adults, stories about Tito got my child’s imagination going, especially the one about Tito not being the real Tito, but his double. These rumors were given legs by the fact (real or imagined) that apart from speaking several languages, Tito also played the piano. People could never get their heads around that piano. How, for Christ’s sake, did a poor kid from Zagorje complete a locksmith’s apprenticeship, set up the Partisan movement, defeat the Germans, establish the Yugoslav state, and learn to play the piano?

      Rumors about doubles have often accompanied kings, dictators, presidents, and generals. Irakli Kvirikadze’s film Comrade Stalin Goes To Africa (Poezda tovarišča Stalina v Afriku, 1991) is a bitter comedy about an ordinary Soviet worker, a Jew, who as a result of his striking physical resemblance to Stalin is arrested by the NKVD and drilled for months in how to impersonate Stalin. When the luckless worker finally completes his secret training, news of Stalin’s death arrives from Moscow and the NKVD puts a bullet in his temple. It might seem quite by the by, but today, successfully cloned embryos are destroyed in laboratories when the embryos are between twelve and fourteen days old. For the time being that is apparently the allowed lifespan of a human clone.

      In his 2008 autobiography Feliks Dadajev confirmed the rumors about Stalin’s doubles. Dadajev, an old man pushing ninety, a former dancer and juggler, was Stalin’s lookalike (apart from the ears, “My ears were smaller” claims Dadajev), his official double. Doubles served