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This article brings insight into the production of popular music in the early domestic record industry in Croatia, focusing on the period between the two world wars and on the treatment of foreign songs in local musicians’ translation and adaptation. The translators of foreign songs which were produced by the Edison Bell Penkala record company belonged to the Zagreb cabaret scene and their performances of the songs reflected both the western trends as well as their professional image and cultural background. The occurrence of »panties«, »hearts« and »foxtrots« on early Croatian records point to types of treatment of popular music templates offering different levels of domestication and foreignization within the local popular music production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The basic aim of the paper is both to offer - through critical »reading« of the popular music cultural product in Zagreb between the two world wars - a review of the diversified usable characteristics of particular musical products that circulated on the then-market of symbolic assets, as well as to single out - in the context of accessible testimonies and data on the social and cultural status of music and its participants during that period - the possible functional dispositions which that product, specifically anchored in time and place, used to have. Creating a theoretical basis by drawing on various, primarily cultural and critical comprehensions of popular music, as well as from other broader context components of the functioning of culture, the paper offers a »polygonal« approach to the popular music phenomenon against the background of textual reading off of its articulations and meanings through (not necessarily) musicologically mediated media and analytical procedures. From comprehension of the very phenomenon of the popular and the popularity of music in the period under consideration, through the interpretation of popular music's functional nesting in the sociocultural context, the paper offers indications of certain basic implications of that way of studying music. The work also touches upon an attempt at the conceptual encompassing of music, not only as note and sound structures mediated by media, but also as a broader cultural product that is exposed to diverse usages and different aims, purposes and functions; of which the popular-fictional feature is certainly a significant one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]