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may, perhaps, owe its roots to veterans’ officially enshrined role as such in Tito’s Yugoslavia.32 The simplest of Thompson’s political messages is found in Iza devet sela (2002), a song which represents perhaps the clearest Croatian example of the nexus between folklore and politics, which forms the basis of Ch olovica’s work. In Ch olovica’s perspective, folklore does not only stimulate patriotic sentiment but also lends legitimacy to political projects, a process frequently assisted by neo-folkloric producers themselves.33 Having already noted the political projects Thompson hopes to legitimize, it remains to assess his use of folklore and, in fact, Thompson, whose roots are in the mountainous Dalmatian hinterland, draws from a pool of motifs similar to those employed in Serbian neo-folk. Perhaps most striking, given Ch olovica’s description of the ‘miraculous companionship of heroes, fairies and wolves’ associated with certain mountains including Thompson’s own Dinara,34 is the refrain of Iza devet sela, ‘Gdje su vuci, vile i hajduci | tamo gdje sam roœen ja’.35 The ‘fairy of Velebit is crying out’ (‘velebitska vila doziva’) for the betrayed veterans on Reci, brate moj, and the Dinaric wolf reappears in Thompson’s 1998 song Vjetar s Dinare (The Wind from Dinara), which, for once, expresses family rather than combatant nostalgia.36 For a festival of newly-composed folk music held in 2000 in the Bosnian Croat town of Neum, Thompson rearranged the traditional Kupres folk song Moj Ivane, which deals with a village boy snatched away from his beloved by the ‘accursed fate’ (‘sudbina kleta’) of war. Notable, too, is Thompson’s use of the decasyllabic lyrical pattern associated with folk epics, not only on Ivane but also on Kninska kraljica and Pukni puško (Fire, Rifle, 1998), which both eulogize the experience of the front soldier, and on Ivane Pavle II, his 2003 composition to mark the Pope’s visit to Croatia. The relationship of listeners to lyrics is a contested matter among analysts of popular music, but one may contend that lyrics provide a channel to convey the song’s meaning, giving access to its ‘implied narratives’.37 They are, however, supported by other indicators of those narratives, which include both the song’s musical characteristics and non-musical indicators such as the performer’s styling and presentation. Musically, Thompson typically uses introductions resembling traditional Dinaric flutes and stringed instruments, occasionally simulated by electric guitar, and Geni kameni in particular reinforces its image of continuity between modern and ancient-mythic times by concluding with a neo-traditional flute arrangement of the introductory theme which had been originally played in the bombastic style of an American metal guitarist. The ululations of a female vocalist 32 See Wolfgang Hoepken, ‘War, Memory and Education in a Fragmented Society: the Case of Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Societies, 13.1 (1999), 190–227, 196–97. 33 h Colovica, p. 83. 34 h Colovica, p. 128. 35 ‘Where are the wolves, fairies and hajduks | there where I was born’. 36 See Zh anica, pp. 265–66, for a discussion of the deep roots of wolf imagery in hajduk folklore and the frequency of the rhyme vuci-hajduci. 37 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 169.