How does the Belgrade underground party scene look like trough the eyes on a local anthropologist – read the story of our Serbian EDPI partner.
Underground party culture is one of the biggest youth subcultures in Serbia. As part of a growing global subculture, and a powerful entertainment industry, electronic music lets individuals experience trance and religious rapture, helps them to deal with personal issues, and of course primarily gives them a really good time socially. It is also often said that party culture is closely linked to the use of psychoactive substances. Since I was personally involved in this community in Serbia over the years, I subconsciously learned about the relationship between recreational drug use and the ideology behind the underground electronic music scene. Let me share with the reader my thoughts in this regard. During the late 1990s and at the beginning of the 21th century, the use of psychoactive substances was fairly common among young people attending these parties,. One explanation could be that the popularity of illegal substances was related to living conditions in Serbia by that time. We experienced several wars and bombing, which pushed young people to search for new ways to liberate their minds. The underground party scene was, for some, a perfect way to do it, thanks to the unlimited behavioral freedom, coupled with the sense of belonging to a community. Using drugs gave them a whole new perspective. During that period, the most popular drug was ecstasy, which was cheap, affordable and easily available. There was a wide variety of ecstasy pills available on the market – you could hardly find the same thing twice. Every weekend, there was a new brand of ecstasy on the market. Besides ecstasy, speed was also very popular, while from time to time, even cocaine could be found.