Dža ili bu

A band from Belgrade „Dža ili bu“ was founded on the Labor Day, on May 1, 1987. The first set consisted of Nebojsa Simeunovic Sabljar (rhythm guitar), Dusko Milojevic (bass), Dejan Milojevic (drums) and Stojan Radicevic (guitar, vocal). By the end of the 1980s, they went through the usual initial stages in the development of each band - recording demo materials and changing members. The first songs "Mamin novi usisivač" (Mom’s new vacuum cleaner”) and "Crveno" (“Red”) were recorded at the beginning of 1988, and at the end of that year, Stojan Radičević came to the band, where Sabljar enters, while the guitarist becomes Goran Majkić.

The first cassette release with 15 songs, called "Lepa kaseta" (“Nice cassete”), is published in 1991. The next album, "Hey, Sailors", with the subtitle "Split Winners '91", came a year later. The band had already profiled its expression through a combination of hard guitar sound and texts with a social theme, with an emphasis on the period 1945-1990. and life in a country that was rapidly falling apart at the time. As the radio and concert albums from the album, the songs "Long live Stalin and the World Revolution", "Queen of the Pica Park" and "Victory and Defeat" were singled out, and the band intensively played at that time, so in 1992 they were declared a group of the year.

The second album, entitled "Saving a fish stew requires a high concentration" was recorded in 1993, and the band continued the manic started on earlier editions. The songs "Comrade Tito is hiding in the cave" and "Great World Conspiracy" depict the time of communism and the post-communist period, while the song "Friends" speaks directly of the lost generation of the 1990s that lost their heads in the Croatian and Bosnian battlefields and is one of the first songs of that kind in the ex-YU period in general.

The album "The Terrible Court" appeared at the end of 1995 and is one of those that convincingly presented the terrible situation in Serbia in that period. With the song "Interesting Geography", "Land of the ostrich" and "Some Other City", the songs "Eternal Hunting" and "Rise and Run" were also best accepted. The first three of course are stories for themselves. The number of "Interesting Geography" was parodied with the then-political propaganda plan of the war that allegedly led to the liberation of the territory. "The Land of the ostrich" is a great allegory on a country where people stab their heads in sand, not wanting to do anny what is happening around them. For the song "Some Other City" for a while, she rummaged about her theme of xenophobia, that is, hatred of refugees who massively rolled into Serbia, mostly after the "Storm" action in 1995. Sabljar was often able to explain that it was not about this, but about anger towards the so-called urban peasants that in the nineties flooded the cities, bringing primitivism and arrogance as a way of life, fostering them even as a style.

During 1996, the band left guitarist Goran Majkić, who first went to the army and then to the US studies. It is replaced by Igor Panic with whom band recorded a new album titled "As if nothing was there" in late 1997. The album was released early next year and is the latest studio release of the band in the nineties. There followed "Live", a record by which the band ends its publishing and concert activity in a decade.

P.S.

A break in the work of the band in the period 1999-2003. year, mostly due to bombings and later events. Since 2005, they have been activated again, first through the compilation edition "Retrovizor", which served as a repetition of materials for the new generation. The 2007 album "Ultra Mouth" followed, in which the band made a turn to the industrial sound, then in 2013, the studio album "Cookie Summer" and the expanded compilation "Retrovizor 1987-2012" appeared, so that the current album would be released 2016, entitled "Seven Forces".

P.S. 2

The singer and frontmen of the band Nebojsa Simeunovic Sabljar got this nickname because he spent his childhood in Libya and his father's hobby was gathering a saber.