Children of bitter beats

In 2023, the world marked the fiftieth anniversary of its appearance repa. On that occasion, no significant jubilee event was held here, although it has been clear for a long time that hip-hop has become a generally accepted part of the local general culture. After all, the first rap attempts here appeared more than four decades ago, somehow when in the rest of Europe (see: "The Master Scratch Band" - "Degout" EP, for Jugoton 1984).

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The history and development of our hip-hop is therefore recorded and analyzed in a very instructive way book, which recently appeared under its full name Little black music: hip hop nation, national history, the state and its enemies, by Dragan Đorđević. The first version of this unique writing was completed in 2009, only to appear on bookstore shelves in 2016, as the only work written on this topic in our language so far. In an unusual twist, we now have before us a rather altered new edition, published in late 2025 in the Official Gazette.

Let us immediately emphasize that it is excellent that this was done, and the author was allowed to make important additions and reword the entire text - the new version is visibly more mature, upgraded with numerous data and richer in insights that we did not have the opportunity to encounter before. That's how we got it A little black music from 2025, as a key edition for understanding the phenomenon of hip-hop, not only in the former Yugoslavia and Serbia, but also in general.

First of all, Dragan Đorđević (Ph.D. at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade) should be acknowledged for carefully defining and reflecting on the meaning of all the manifestations of this subculture, and especially for faithfully translating its meaning into a close dictionary. mainstream vocabulary of our culture. Even this intellectual achievement would be valuable in itself, since it provides us with a reliable linguistic foundation for later possible academic research on the emergence and role of hip-hop in our region.

But that's just the beginning, since we Little black music offers a comprehensive account of the history of the arrival, domestication and development of hip-hop in our country, which turns the book into a serious cultural research document. Before us, however, we have a polemical text that glorifies some actors, criticizes others, and others both glorifies and criticizes, depending on the stage of their career, and the reading flows through a dialogue with the scene - witty and with a lot of twists, just like the music it describes. Along with all that, a vivid narration Little black music does not lose a single moment of its factual basis, precisely recording the most important subcultural achievements and breakthroughs of each individual domestic rap star, especially interpreting the significance of the appearance of all the mentioned street heroes.

The book is occasionally grandiose in its momentum and a bit messy in its attempt to map all the possible trends of hip-hop in these parts, and it is also enriched with numerous bare-bones photos "from the scene" and associative illustrations by Vladan Jeremic. However, the spread and diversity of the hip-hop scene itself is of such a nature that a different approach would not even correspond to its reality. Little black music is thus made up of three large units that deal with different aspects of its existence. "Part One: Nation" (chapters: "Noise and fury. Misunderstandings with hip-hop" and "Boom hip-hop nation and generation"), sheds light on the origin of domestic rap, placing it in the context of the world movement; "Historiographic mix-tape" (chapters: "Scattering hip-hop history", "Beatology", "The fight for hip-hop language and spelling" and "For the archeology of our time"), is an extremely exciting section because it reveals the main bearers of rap in our country and explains their evolution, while following the transfer of the main black subcultural codes into local cultural patterns; "Hiphop Commonwealth" (chapters: "The State on the Move" and "The State and its Enemies") offers a conclusion by which we return to the basic philosophical assumptions of the hip-hop worldview, that is, the role Codes, which as a concept unites everything that makes up the soul of hip-hop (so that something does not remain unclear: the state and nation mentioned here are "hip-hop country" and "hip-hop nation").

An unforced parallel with the famous book emerges The Seventh Republic Ante Perković, according to a comprehensive procedure that unites the regional experiences of an entire generation with rap in the former Yugoslavia. With Perković, it is a matter of reading rock and roll as a special republic of the SFRY, in which all of us who were united by rock music remained to live. I Little black music is the expression of an entire generation. Only after reading it becomes clear that for that generation, rock and roll was no longer enough as a musical and social form, and during the great robbery of Yugoslavia in the nineties, it found an authentic expression that would accurately describe the social reality of that time and what was really happening. The youth lived in the ghetto all over the former country. Hip-hop was that extremely reduced form of music that could be performed without instruments and without electricity if needed, and to say everything straight-to-the-head, grappling with unadorned reality, without excessive poeticization. The hell of the last decade of the 20th century in our region favored the development of ex-Yu rap to such an extent that it slowly became established as top music made by young people for young people. Their pop language and only theirs.

In all this analysis, the positive influence of Predrag Vukčević/ Bega Fanko, and his thoughts on the origin and transplantation of rap in our country, expressed in an exceptional autobiographical book, is evident. Good rap. (Except for the reference collection of songs Resigned: 100 best texts of Serbian hip hopa, we don't have any other books in our language with the topic of hip-hop.) Little black music therefore, it is recommended as an essential reading from which one should begin to deal personally with this phenomenon.

For most of its history, which has been going on for decades, hip-hop has been neglected by local music critics, who often do not even have a sufficiently developed vocabulary to follow its changes in content and style. Only for us Little black music offers a serious insight into its genesis, directions of development and place in our society. There is no doubt that it is a capital edition when we talk about domestic music writing.

For all "singers of stories". For the team from the region.

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