Belgrade, Serbia

Blue Trabant, my love

Published: April 4, 2007

Continuing the series unofficially titled “the posts that make you feel sorry for not knowing Serbian language so you too could enjoy the lyrics of some great Serbian bands.”

Atheist Rap is just one of the many bands directly influenced by Pekinska Patka. I remember buying their first official tape Maori i crni Gonzales couple of days before we went to some school trip back when i was in 8th grade primary school, i think it was in ‘93 or ‘94. I took the tape with me, somehow it ended up in the buss’ cassette player, and before you knew it, the whole class was singing ORA je pravi nacin da – da, da, da, dadadada, da! even though i doubt it that any of us knew what ORA was at the time.

The real revelation came in the form of their songs dedicated to old East German cars: Trabant and Warthburg, and later, the song dedicated to Pekinska Patka which eventually made me track down and buy a pirated CD (original CDs of older bands were not available at the time) of this great band i wrote about in the previous post.

Atheist Rap concerts full of senseless dancing, chanting and pogos were, of course, another cool discovery that came couple of years later. I can’t really tell on how many AR concerts i have been to in my life, but i do remember them being pretty active in one period – and as i can see on their official web-site, still are today, although in somewhat changed lineup.

One of the things i liked about the band, besides the wacky lyrics and catchy punk tunes (often directly stolen from some other famous local or foreign band, such as Obojeni program, Clash or Ramones) was their direct anti-war and anti-Milosevic-regime attitude, probably best displayed in following lyrics:

I don’t wanna die,
Die in Sarajevo fight,
Die for the blood-red gang,
And listen to bang-bang-bang.

Other interesting trivia – which Dejan already had mentioned on his blog they were one of the first Serbian bands to play in Srebrenica after the war.

Also, this was one of the first Serbian bands i heard with significant influence of hip-hop in their songs, which will later turn out to be one of my favorite genres, so you can expect to hear about some Balkan hiphop bands on this blog too in the future. But let’s stick to the punk rock for now, shall we?

For the end of this post, enjoy the Blue Trabant song, performed here live in KST

Approximate chorus translation:

Blue Trabant,
my love
station wagon Trabant,
every man’s dream,
Blue Trabant,
blue as the sky,
station wagon Trabant,
all made of plastic!

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