Let 3, A Dictator’s Worst Nightmare In Military Drag? Written by Catherine Baker on May 9, 2023 | 23 Comments

Since ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ won Croatia’s Dora festival in March, Eurovision fans outside the post-Yugoslav region have been getting to know a band who were using their art to mock and shock repressive social forces even before Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia in 1991.

Much as Konstrakta brought Belgrade’s artistic avant-garde to Eurovision in 2022, Let 3 are representing the famously innovative, politically-engaged punk scene of their home town Rijeka, a city which prides itself on its progressive outlook (Croatia’s first lesbian NGO, LORI, was registered there in 2000), and has often been at odds with the national ruling party.

Its surrounding region has a proudly cosmopolitan regional identity, and even longer historical experience of fascist rule than the rest of former Yugoslavia underwent in 1941-5, because it was claimed by Italy after World War I and so lived under Mussolini’s fascist rule between 1922 and 1943. During the disarray of the post-WW1 peace settlement, Rijeka was even taken over in 1919-20 by the world’s first proto-fascist dictator, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is often credited with giving fascism its aesthetics.

In communist Yugoslavia, Rijeka’s student, music and art scene was among the most liberal and anti-authoritarian. Rijeka was one of five or six cities that drove the generation-defining Yugoslav ‘new wave’ of the early 1980s. Before co-founding Let 3, Damir Martinović Mrle (in the purple and rose-pink greatcoat, with the droopiest moustache) was the bassist in the Rijeka punk band Termiti. Their most famous song ‘Vjeran pas’ (‘Faithful dog’) satirised the submissiveness to authority needed to get ahead in the Yugoslav system, for an audience of youth in cities across former Yugoslavia promising themselves never to sell out that way.

After Termiti broke up, Mrle founded his own experimental band, then in 1986 joined his scene-mate Zoran Prodanović Prlja (the frontman who’ll inevitably be called ‘drag Stalin’) in a project they initially called Let 2 (Flight 2). In 1987 they took on more members and became Let 3.

Initially, Let 3 were satirising communist prudishness and conformity in the last years of Yugoslavia. Like other punk bands, especially in Croatia and Slovenia, they also confronted the militarism which had very real effects on their own lives as young men expected to do compulsory military service in the Yugoslav army (indeed, student resistance to conscription was a key part of the Slovenian independence movement which was blooming at the same time).

Images of their early performances show themes which are Let 3 trademarks to this day: huge moustaches, military headwear, and frequent male nudity, all exaggerating symbols of traditional masculinity to the point of ridicule. Sometimes they also employed confrontational drag that laughed in the face of the army’s ideas about what a healthy heterosexual man should be.

In 1990-1, the Yugoslav communist system finally fell apart, non-Serbs and democrats across Yugoslavia feared what would happen if Slobodan Milošević got his hands on federal power, a conservative nationalist party came to power in Croatia’s multi-party elections (which had their last round the very day after Eurovision 1990 in Zagreb), and Croatia and Slovenia both declared independence, only to be invaded by the Yugoslav army, which had taken Milošević’s side.

Ever since, Let 3’s stand has been against the patriarchal nationalism, ethnic chauvinism and religious conservatism that immediately dominated public discourse in Croatia and crowded out any alternative political visions for the independent nation.

By 1996, when they released their double concert album ‘Živi kurac‘ (Living d*ck, or more loosely F*ck all) and co-operated with theatre director Ivica Buljan on an avant-garde production of Jean Racine’s tragedy Phaedra, Let 3 had become an unmissable live act on the Croatian alternative scene.

They introduced themselves to the wider public through stunts such as releasing a completely blank album (which still sold 350 copies), creating another album in a single copy which they refused to release, staging a mock suicide by firing squad on Zagreb’s main square to protest their record company releasing it anyway, and displaying a four-metre-tall monument of a peasant grandmother with an enormous phallus in four Croatian cities and Ljubljana (using the incongruity to suggest that patriarchal masculinity had infected tradition so far that it had even taken over the most absurd figure it could).

To record the female vocals on their song ‘Profesor Jakov’, about an academic abusing his position to have an affair with a young female student, they teamed up with ENI, the girlband who represented Croatia in Eurovision 1997 and are also from Rijeka. Let 3 and ENI reunited in 2003 when, on a new album showing off their maturing sound, ENI recorded their own version, ‘Mara Pogibejčić’, from the perspective of the student in the song.

Let 3 provoked nationalist politics even further in 2005 when they released their electro-trash album ‘Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačka’ (The Bombing of Serbia and Čačak). Its title at very first glance could be interpreted as an ultranationalist threat towards Serbia and its provincial city of Čačak, if only by someone who knew nothing about Let 3. On the cover, the band posed in traditional men’s folk costumes from across former Yugoslavia, performing the kind of staged kolo dance that used to symbolise Yugoslav ‘brotherhood and unity’, in front of an image of Dubrovnik’s harbour (which the Yugoslav military did bomb during Croatia’s war of independence in 1991).

The idea that a populist ‘neofolk culture’ is to blame for nationalism, ignorance, sexism and warmongering in former Yugoslavia is long-lived in the region’s intellectual and alternative circles across the region. (The phenomenon was nicknamed ‘turbo-folk’ in 1989 by the musician Rambo Amadeus – who represented Montenegro at Eurovision in 2012, and was suspended as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador over allegations of sexual harassment in March 2023).

‘Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačak’ was a full-frontal, X-rated satire of neofolk patriotism across the region. It combined new compositions, mostly with obscene titles, with folk songs from the different ex-Yugoslav nations – including one track named after a Serbian patriotic tune, ‘Rado ide Srbin u vojnike’ (‘Gladly does the Serb enlist’). Few titles could have been more provocative in a country where memories of war crimes committed by Serb paramilitaries and the Yugoslav army were still fresh (and memories of war crimes committed by Croats were still being silenced).

However, ‘Rado ide Srbin u vojnike’ is no ordinary folk tune: its composer Josif or Josip Runjanin was a Croatian Serb serving in the nineteenth-century Habsburg army, and also composed the song that became Croatia’s national anthem, making him ‘one of the strongest connections between the Serb and Croat peoples’.

Listeners expecting to be outraged that a Croatian band was adapting the song’s lyrics, which took on menacing connotations in the twentieth century, would instead have heard a deconstructed, obscenity-laden performance of completely different language intimating that any man who lets himself be taken in to joining the army by patriotic folklore is a fool.

Croatia’s own patriotic folklore came in for the same treatment in Let 3’s adaptation of ‘Ero s onoga svijeta’ (‘Ero from that other world’ or ‘Ero the joker’), the finale of the 1935 folk opera of that name by the renowned Croatian composer Jakov Gotovac. The peasant culture of the Dinaric mountains celebrated in epic poetry, staged by Gotovac and revisited by all the musicians who have popularised its folklore is one of vigorous patriarchs and moustachioed outlaws, producing the toughest soldiers and men. A few years before Let 3’s album, Croatia’s most prominent hard-right folk-rock musician had used the kolo from the finale of ‘Ero’ as the centrepiece of his first stadium concert in Split, which left-wing critics had widely seen as a fascistic spectacle.

Let 3’s ‘Ero’ builds to the same electrified crescendo. Performed by a band of punks in drag and giant fake moustaches, however, it could not be confused with the tune’s nationalistic versions to anyone tuned into Croatian cultural signals – especially not with their women’s choir decked out in the fake moustaches too.

This phase of Let 3’s career also marked their first brush with Eurovision, as guests in the music video for Severina’s entry in 2006. At least until 2023, ‘Moja štikla’ (‘My stiletto heel’) held the crown as Croatia’s most controversial Eurovision entry, for reasons that were not necessarily as visible outside former Yugoslavia. For generations, nothing has weighed more heavily in mainstream Croatian cultural politics than insecurity over needing to be recognised as ‘European’ rather than ‘Balkan’ – even at times like the height of Eurovision’s 2000s ethnopop boom, when ‘Balkan’ might be exactly what ‘Europeans’ want to see.

‘Moja štikla’ took its inspiration from Dalmatian and Dinaric folk traditions and Severina’s sense of humour, satirising Dinaric machismo from a woman’s perspective. Its arranger, Goran Bregović, had won a reputation for repackaging Balkan and Romani folklore, but was controversial because when war came to Bosnia he had left Sarajevo for Belgrade, so also had Serbian associations in Croatia. By the time of Dora 2006, the song’s team (including its composer Boris Novković, who represented Croatia in 2005) had already had to defend themselves against days of allegations that the song contained Serbian folklore, was in Serbian, was ‘turbo-‘folk’, or actually had lyrics by a famous Serbian songwriter instead of Severina – all of which would have made it utterly unsuitable to represent Croatia in patriotic media opinion.

In fact, folk traditions from the Dinaric region are precisely the elements of Croatian heritage that show its national culture is inseparable from the Balkans after all – so in her own way, Severina was also undercutting ethnocentric nationalism.

Severina’s Eurovision performance was accompanied by trained folk dancers from Dinaric towns which had been on the front line during the war, and the expert gajde (bagpipe) player Stjepan Večković from the national folk ensemble Lado, whose authenticity as representatives of Croatian national tradition couldn’t be questioned. (It’s likely among the performances that inspired the advice of ‘Love Love Peace Peace’ to ‘show the viewers your country’s ethnic background by using an old traditional folklore instrument that no one heard of before’.)

For the music video, Severina and her record label took a different tack and gave her sense of humour more free rein. A fifty-foot-fall Severina steps in high heels over prestigious Zagreb landmarks, accompanied by none other than her labelmates Let 3.

Let 3 still didn’t travel to Athens themselves, which might have been to a risk-adverse broadcaster’s relief. As their English-language Wikipedia entry observes, they were fined for performing naked at an outdoor gig in Varaždin later in 2006, and ‘the band’s defence that they had not been naked because they had corks in their anuses did not convince the judge’. In 2008 two of their members had a Sunday lunchtime talk show cut short by simulating corks being ejected from the same place.

Since then, Let 3 have released another live album (‘Živa pička’, complementing ‘Živi kurac’) and gone back to the studio for new projects in 2013 and 2016. ‘Kurcem do vjere’ / Thank You Lord, released as a conservative Catholic campaign group was gathering signatures to force a referendum on constitutionally banning equal marriage, featured Mrle and Prlja on the cover dressed as Catholic bishops holding comically large male organs instead of croziers, and included remakes of some of the band’s early songs plus music from some theatrical collaborations. ‘Angela Merkel sere’ (2016) was accompanied by a statue of the German Chancellor satisfying said bodily need, three years into Croatia’s membership of the EU.

In 2013 both Let 3 and Severina performed at a public concert to mobilise the ‘no’ vote in the 2013 referendum and protect the Croatian parliament’s freedom to introduce equal marriage. However, the referendum passed that December – after a turbulent year for international LGBTQ+ rights in which Eurovision 2013’s interval act celebrated equal marriage in Sweden, Krista Siegfrids had lent her voice at Eurovision to Finland’s own equal marriage campaign, and the Russian parliament had made sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ laws which might have made it illegal to broadcast both those same-gender kisses to under-18s.

Outside the band, Mrle has curated the underground arts venue Hartera for some years at Rijeka’s old paper mill, launched the Sailor Sweet and Salt Festival after Hartera closed, and formed an experimental side-project with his wife Ivana Mazurkijević (Mr.Lee and IvaneSky). He contributed to Rijeka’s pandemic-hit European Capital of Culture programme in 2020 – and didn’t have to look far for partners at the city council, because the head of culture at Rijeka city hall was Let 3’s former keyboardist Ivan Šarar.

‘MAMA ŠČ!’ actually stems from Mrle and Mazurkijević’s co-operation with the director Paolo Magelli, whose most recent project is an avant-garde reworking of the Greek comedy Lysistrata featuring lyrics by the journalist Predrag Lučić, who died in 2018 aged 53. In 1989, Lučić had co-founded the satirical magazine Feral Tribune, which through the 1990s and 2000s published allegations of public corruption and war-crimes cover-ups that no other Croatian publication would touch (and numerous jokes about genitalia and bodily functions, testing their freedom to transgress in Croatia’s new democracy). Routinely hauled through the courts by the Croatian authorities for defamation and other charges (including a 1993 photo-montage cover of Milošević and Croatia’s conservative president Franjo Tuđman naked in bed together), Feral closed down in 2008, but has a foundational place in the history of Croatian satire.

One of the Lučić songs used in LizistRATa, originally written for a Split production of Brecht’s anti-war satire Mother Courage and Her Children in 2013, was called ‘Kupi mi, mama, jedan mali rat’ (‘Mama, buy me one little war’), which inspired Mrle to start conceiving an alternative anti-war opera of his own – the project that became ‘MAMA ŠČ!’. The idea behind the ‘five horsemen of the apocalypse’ outfits in part of their video was already developing before Dora, and earlier versions show the fifth horseman’s blue windbreaker as the campaign jacket worn by volunteers for the ruling conservative party at election time.

By the time Let 3 appeared on Dora, in other words, Croatian viewers had a frame of reference going back more than thirty years for making sense of their uniforms, inflatable missiles and salutes (and for wondering what was going to be under those uniforms when they inevitably came off). While their lyrics describe militarism and machismo, the band’s profile as musicians and their subcultural positioning has already resolved what would otherwise be the ambiguity of where they stand.

If Let 3 as creators shared the misogyny of a song like ‘Riječke pičke’ (where Prlja’s character lists dozens of regions in former Yugoslavia, and declares Rijeka’s daughters are the best because they put out their pičke for him), you wouldn’t find a left-leaning eighties pop icon like Marina Perazić (the former vocalist of pop duo Denis and Denis, also from Rijeka, who has sung at Zagreb Pride) performing it at one of the band’s annual Antivalentinovo (Anti-Valentine’s) gigs – and they certainly wouldn’t have invited her to put those words into her mouth.

Their queer audience in Croatia and the rest of former Yugoslavia likewise trust Let 3 to be on their side against the forces that want to beat them for displaying much tamer forms of affection and gender nonconformity in public than Let 3 have ever put on stage.

Croatia hasn’t qualified for the grand final since 2017 even though in the 1990s it looked set to have a track record like Ukraine’s, and Albina missing out in 2021 felt like a genuine national blow to the dream of, as Roko Rumora puts it, having something to ‘show to Europe and have it recognized as equal, as worthy of inclusion on its own terms.’ If nothing else has worked – why not Let 3?

The Contest’s wider audience has had much less opportunity to witness Croatian cities’ radical performance tradition through their Eurovision ‘window’ than, say, the comparable scene in Estonia (where noise-punks Winny Puhh first took part in the national selection ten years ago). ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ mobilises very different reactions than ‘In corpore sano’, but Let 3 and Konstrakta draw from shared cultural reference points dating back to what the historian Ljubica Spaskovska called ‘the last Yugoslav generation’. (They captioned their photo with her at the Madrid pre-party ‘Konstractor’).

Let 3’s decades-long expertise in creating challenging art makes ‘ŠČ’ the hardest-working single letter in Eurovision history (if you write it in Ukrainian, Russian or Bulgarian Cyrillic – an alphabet which represents another taboo in Croatian public culture, because Serbian also uses Cyrillic, even though neither Serbian or Croatian has Щ/šč as a single letter themselves).

Roll it around a few times, and you might start to find their rhythmic enunciation of ŠČ! evokes military sounds: the roll of the snare drum, the collective stamp of well-drilled boots on the parade ground. This, they seem to suggest, is the sound of totalitarianism and that contemptible little crocodile of a psychopath (‘onaj mali psihopat! krokodilski psihopat!’) who can be sung about cathartically even if, while their political comment is subject to Eurovision rules, he can’t be named. The line expresses a lifetime of protest against such figures, but does risk being heard as stigmatising mental disability, or minimising the premeditated nature of military aggression, neither of which seem like what the band want to say.

Still, many named dictators are already in the sights of ‘MAMA ŠČ!’. The famous ‘tractor’ line could implicate both Putin and his ally Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, whose regime got itself banned from Eurovision a year before Putin’s Russia in 2021, and who gave Putin a tractor for his seventieth birthday last October. (When some Serbian media after Dora took the line as a slight against Serb refugees who fled the Croatian army’s last advance on tractors in August 1995, Mrle took the first opportunity to clarify the band had never meant to punch down.)

Prlja’s greatcoat, cap and moustache clearly suggest Stalin, and the bald-headed man holding the missiles – fellow Rijeka rocker Žanil Tataj-Žak, who Croatians may know best as an ex-vocalist for stadium rock band Divlje jagode – had ‘Njinle’ written on his forehead, backslang for ‘Lenin’, in Dora. Closer to home, the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito (who led the Yugoslav Partisan army to victory in 1945) customarily wore a white military uniform, and Croatia’s first president Tuđman was sometimes mocked for following his lead.

And So To Eurovision

In their close engagement with totalitarian aesthetics, Let 3 are perhaps as close as Eurovision will ever come to Laibach, the Slovenian band who have kept audiences guessing how much they mean when they play with themes and visuals from communist and fascist propaganda for more than forty years. (Laibach did record a song called ‘Eurovision’ in 2014.) Laibach-adjacent, too, are the colours and angles of their background visuals – which showcase drag performer Jovanka Broz Titutka from Zagreb’s radical drag scene (the figure dressed in green gym gear with garish make-up, who belongs to Zagreb’s House of Flamingo).

Like all ambiguous art which questions the allure of military power by placing its style and symbols up front, how well ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ can convey its messages depends on how far the audience realise how the band are inviting them to respond, and what they need to know about them to form that interpretation.

Past Eurovision performances too have faced this issue, sometimes when approaching military symbols through a queer lens. Hatari’s BDSM-inspired performers in 2019 made the views on authoritarianism and military occupation as clear as Eurovision rules would let them (and then more). The grey military uniforms worn by Saara Aalto’s female dancers in 2018 were not as pointedly political but still connected the performance to a long tradition of queer kitsch and military drag, in which a founding father is the artist Tom of Finland – an influence that one Croatian writer has already perceived in Let 3’s peaked leather caps. More obscurely and less immediately queer, the popera act Tosca Beat seemed heavily influenced by Laibach’s staging when competing to represent Slovenia in 2017.

Pro-LGBTQ+ stances and anti-militarism go together in Let 3’s military drag because, according to the politics the band have expressed for more than thirty years, patriarchy, homophobia and male insecurity are root causes of militarism, nationalism and war. The image of Prlja in pink peaked cap, Stalin moustache, lipstick and blusher will obviously get him compared to the graphic of ‘gay Putin’ or the ‘rainbow clown’, which Western campaigners popularised as an insult to the Russian leader when advocating a boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 (part of the background to how Conchita Wurst was received in Copenhagen).

Let 3’s mockery of drag dictators, however, starts at home – where they have been standing up to militaristic, nationalistic, and aggressively heterosexual ideals of masculine leadership in their own context for so long that ‘home’ used to be a different state.

Since winning Dora, Let 3 have begun breaking the fourth wall to introduce international fans to their political context – though still coming back to the jokes about ass-cheeks and mutual sex. On the pre-Eurovision circuit, they have taught multilingual pre-party crowds how to chant ‘MAMA KUPILA TRAKTORA!’, and revived their version of ‘Ero’ – a perfectly-formed ethno-rock banger for fans of ‘Shum’ and ‘Trenuleţul’, but also a track born in resistance against home-grown nationalism and fascism. It will infuriate exactly whom Let 3 want to infuriate that probably the most-watched performance of ‘Ero s onoga svijeta’ outside Croatia this year comes from a band of lifelong antifascists finishes with a punk in pink uniform waving the Progress Pride flag.

Their series of TikToks ‘teleporting’ themselves to Liverpool aboard their golden tractor (which is one way to avoid Brexit border delays) has showcased their friendship with Belgrade’s alternative scene, shouted out to Käärijä, and needled the CEO of Spotify over their share of the streaming fees for ‘MAMA ŠČ!’, but also condemned Putin’s dictatorial aggression against Mariupol, Kharkiv and Kyiv.

Arriving in Liverpool, Let 3 and their tractor have touched down in a country where the forces that want to criminalise drag internationally are gaining ground, drag queen story hours in public libraries are being threatened by the far right, the equalities minister has met approvingly with the governor of the US state passing the widest suite of anti-trans laws, and the UN’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, has just been hearing from trans people across the country about how politicians and the media are whipping up fear against them during his own visit to the UK.

Exhibiting Let 3’s show to under-18s would already have been against the law in Russia and Hungary (which stopped broadcasting Eurovision after 2019), and, since the beginning of April, also in Tennessee.

Let 3’s art may not be for everyone, but the freedom to make it for anyone is the same freedom that lets Eurovision itself be a place of safety for LGBTQ+ fans – and one of the first freedoms that the dictators lampooned in ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ have struck against.

When Let 3 take the stage with their antimilitarist rock opera, they will be playing on the very edge of what it’s possible to say politically in a space like Eurovision – just like they have been doing all their careers.