“BLOK BRO, BROOKLYN BRO” A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF THE CORRELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND THE PLACE ON THE EXAMPLE OF AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH STUDY OF THE HIP-HOP CULTURE OF NEW BELGRADE

Abstract

New Belgrade is the Belgrade City municipality separated from the “Old City” of Belgrade by the Sava River, and is one of the parts of the city characterized by a pronounced growth both economically (a large number of companies, shopping malls) and demographically (the continuous growth of new residential blocks and inhabiting of the same) in the last ten years or so. Yet, the first associations with New Belgrade are its characteristic social-realistic architecture (concrete buildings), a high population density, and a confusing subdivision into city blocks similar to the concept of American ghetto-like neighborhoods. The focus of our research presented herein is the analysis of the images of New Belgrade which are possible to find in the songs of hip-hop musicians from New Belgrade. Our basic starting thesis implies that music constructs the identity of a specific space or place, for which reason, in our approach, we are emphasizing its fundamental feature – communicativeness, and therefore it is not perceived from a musicological or aesthetical perspective. The primary research method we are relying on is the qualitative one, based on the analysis of the selected texts of the hiphop songs in which a mention is made of New Belgrade and which New Belgrade in presented in, based on which we endeavor to abstract a corpus of the meanings that are attributed to this part of Belgrade.