Free Rock and Hard Places by Andrew Mueller

Cobain’s suicide, which elicited some sorrow, but little sympathy (“When I heard about Kurt,” one drinker at Trust tells me, “I had just finished a shift at the hospital, and run home through the shelling, and . . . well, for fuck’s sake, you know?” There is no mistaking the disgust in his voice).
    I unearth only one band who don’t look and sound like they should be haunting the coffee shops of Seattle in silly beards and plaid shirts: Beat House Project, an unabashed techno act from the name down. Sarajevo’s dance scene appears pretty well dormant—the first rave in the city was staged by Radio Zid the week before I arrived—although the bleak, otherwordly, electronic atmospherics of Massive Attack and Portishead have touched many a nerve. Most ascribe this torpor to the fact that, in Sarajevo, ecstasy is as rare as non-smokers—and even if you can find a tablet going spare, you won’t get much change from 200 Deutschmarks. Beat House Project have a litany of funny stories to tell about the peculiar difficulties of making music like theirs in a city where, for long periods, there wasn’t any electricity. They have some less amusing anecdotes concerning the five wounds that the trio collected between them during the war.
    Sarajevo’s conversion to loud guitars and inchoate screaming about alienation is a relatively recent development. Zelimir Altarac-Cicak, the veteran Bosnian journalist, DJ and promoter, explains that tastes started shifting dramatically with the beginning of the siege.
    “Before the war,” he says, “only pop music.”
    The sort of anodyne europop he’s talking about was generally sung in Bosnian—or, as the language was known before the war, Serbo-Croatian—and is best exemplified now by the work of a singer-songwriter called Muha, a shy and painstakingly polite man in a beret and an overcoat, who looks and sounds completely unlike someone who wrote his last album in hospital, recovering from wounds sustained in the defence of his city while fighting with a Special Forces unit.
    “But now,” confirms Zelimir, “everything is rock’n’roll, everything is noise.”
    Aida Kalendar, one of Radio Zid’s indefatigable volunteers, puts it another way.

    “You do not,” she says, “spend the whole day being sniped at and shelled and then go home and listen to Blur.”
    The Moron Brothers are another typical Sarajevo rock group. In fact, The Moron Brothers are just typical Sarajevan youth, or even just typical youth. They’re friendly, funny, like a drink and are gratifyingly excited about being interviewed by someone who has met Eddie Vedder twice. And then . . .
    “I met Doma, the bassplayer, in the army,” says Tela, the Moron Brothers’ guitarist. “I’d rather not say which unit, because, well, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
    The Moron Brothers formed in 1993, and have averaged one gig a month since.
    “We already owned most of our equipment,” continues Tela. “We got strings and things like that from friends outside. It was just good to have something to do. Musicians were lucky that way. It helped to be able to get together and sing about . . . well, everything we didn’t have during the war. In fact, about everything, and anything, except the war. We’d had enough of that.”
     
    ON THAT COUNT, The Moron Brothers are speaking for an entire city.
    Six months since NATO’s criminally overdue airstrikes ended the siege, Sarajevo is still palpably exhausted by its long ordeal. Nobody has yet bothered to take down the hand-painted “Pazi—Snajper” (“Danger—Sniper”) signs that hang at the city’s exposed intersections. Many of the metal barricades and tattered blankets that were erected and hung to deter and distract the killers in the hills are still in place. I’ve also noticed that quite a few people tie their shoes strangely, threading the lace straight down one side and straight back up the other, without crossing them