2
"The launch of a new turbo-folk radio station in Zagreb has caused near-panic in the Croatian capital – where threats to its ‘Central European’ identity are taken seriously.
A new radio station launched in Zagreb has attracted an unusual degree of attention in the Croatian capital and caused considerable unease among some people.
The Croatian news site Index noted some of the dramatic reactions from the streets of Zagreb.
“I can’t believe it! Zagreb?” one woman reportedly asked in shock.
“This is embarrassing, because the post-war era can still be felt here,” a worried young man said.
“I think it’s a little primitive, but OK,” a young girl said, while her friend called it “a degradation of culture” that only “people of a lower standard” would listen to.
One might well wonder what Extra FM is broadcasting to inspire such concern. Calls to destroy high culture? To vandalise the monuments and landmarks of the city? Are the vandals at the gates, ready to come in and tear down the cathedral?
No, it’s a radio station that plays turbo-folk music.
Turbo-folk, a term coined by the Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus, is a musical genre combining folk, electronics and pop.
It was forged in 1980s Yugoslavia, more precisely in Serbia, although it is not exclusively a Serbian product. One of its variants exists in Bulgaria, where it’s called čalga.
In the decades that followed, turbo-folk swept the whole of ex-Yugoslavia, moving from the margins of society to the mainstream.
In Croatia, the genre is called narodnjaci (after narod, or folk), or cajke, a more derogatory term, but actually quite mainstream now.
In the 1990s, turbo-folk could be heard only in marginal and somewhat obscure night bars in the Zagreb suburbs, but already in the early 2000s, by the time I was in high school, cajke had penetrated the city centre, becoming a legitimate music genre.
More and more youngsters turned to it, listening to stars like Dara Bubamara, Seka Aleksic, Ceca or the genre’s godmother, Lepa Brena.
There were occasional protests of war veterans and right-wingers when some of these stars came to perform in Zagreb, but the concerts of the Serbian singer Djordje Balasevic, who belongs to a different genre, attracted the same fate. In the post-war reality of Croatia or “post-war era that can still be felt”, as the young man put it, such things were to be expected.
Despite more and more bars and nightclubs turning to turbo-folk, despite more and more people turning towards it, was Croatia’s, and especially Zagreb’s, “unconscious” – or, as Freud would call it, its “id”.
Although we Zagreb dwellers were all aware of turbo-folk’s existence among us, we wanted to keep these socially unacceptable ideas as repressed as possible.
We were like the respectable “family man” who by day is scandalised by prostitution and “dirty whores” and “an abomination of society” – and who by night slips into the nearest brothel to meet his regular sex provider.
Prostitution is not to be compared to turbo-folk, of course, but the hypocrisy that surrounds it is.
Why, after so many years of consuming it, is Zagreb still afraid of a measly little cajke?
The reason, of course, is Zagreb’s officially declared cultural identity.
Zagreb wishes to present itself, both for touristic advertising and as political propaganda, as part of Central Europe, as a “Little Vienna”, built on Austro-Hungarian foundations. That’s how the story goes; Zagreb looks Westwards.
In most of Croatia, especially in Zagreb, the “Balkans” is a coarse term, to used mainly for the country’s eastern neighbours, Bosnia and Serbia. We tend to forget Montenegrins, but when asked about them, we would say: “Yeah, them as well.”
The Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova has called this phenomenon “nesting balkanism”. According to her, “nesting balkanism” is a tendency in each country to construct an identity around the idea that the country southeast of itself is less civilised.
In Croatia, turbo-folk brings associations of the Balkans, and of another coarse word, Yugoslavia, which again leads to Serbia, and that’s where a red light flashes.
One of the main problems is that the genre and most of the songs do indeed come from Serbia.
Although people often say that they dislike turbo-folk because it is trash or kitschy, what they actually dislike is the language it uses. Nothing stings more than Serbian ekavica (mleko instead of mlijeko in Croatian, for milk) buzzing through your head.
As proof of this theory? Take Croatia’s own so-called popular music, zabavna glazba, and tell me that it has some higher quality.
The Croatian female singers signing these tunes are simply replicas and, one might say, cheap rip-offs of their Serbian colleagues.
The Croatian singer Maja Suput is a perfect example. In mid-career, she saw where the audience was turning and changed her persona and songs. She had a few plastic operations, learned how to use PhotoShop and found a new manager to open her the door to a new public and fame. And she made it.
Even the Queen of Croatian pop, Severina, has played with the genre and appearance to appeal to new audiences.
It would not be fair, however, to say that this hypocritical position on turbo-folk is limited only to right-wingers.
It includes the left and the self-proclaimed champions of urban lifestyle who ridicule anything remotely rural – although they are often the first ones to dance to turbo-folk tunes when they are drunk.
These positions on the official left of the political spectrum – I emphasise the word “official” – were formalised in the campaign for 2015 Croatia’s general elections.
Back then, Zoran Milanovic, Prime Minister and head of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, turned on the Balkans, on the East and on cajke.
After accusing the rival right-wing Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ of aiming to turn Croatia into the “biggest Balkan nationalistic, simple-minded kasaba [a derogatory term for a small town]”, he turned on the phenomenon of cajke.
“We are not Prnjavor,” he said, referring to a small town in Bosnia. “I hope no one is offended [part of a sentence that usually leads to chauvinist statements] that we do not celebrate cajke – we are suppressing them, and this will be part of our program,” he said.
Whether these analogies were simply metaphors Milanovic will probably take to his grave – no one ever understood him completely – but even a mention that something, a whole genre, would be banned sounded awful.
If we wish to live in a democracy, and value freedom, why should we or anyone else care who others listen to, or who is performing in a nightclub? If you don’t like it, change the frequency, the channel, or the bar.
To come back to our faithful family man of earlier on. He is not protesting against the legalisation of prostitution because he fears that it will demean women or legalise human trafficking. He simply fears that his wife will find the receipt on his credit card!"
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/blog...tia-05-09-2018
Bookmarks