Turbo-folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia

Uroš Čvoro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317006060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Turbo-folk music is the most controversial form of popular culture in the new states of former Yugoslavia. Theoretically ambitious and innovative, this book is a new account of popular music that has been at the centre of national, political and cultural debates for over two decades. Beginning with 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia, Uroš ?voro explores the cultural and political paradoxes of turbo-folk: described as 'backward' music, whose misogynist and Serb nationalist iconography represents a threat to cosmopolitanism, turbo-folk's iconography is also perceived as a 'genuinely Balkan' form of resistance to the threat of neo-liberalism. Taking as its starting point turbo-folk's popularity across national borders, ?voro analyses key songs and performers in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. The book also examines the effects of turbo on the broader cultural sphere - including art, film, sculpture and architecture - twenty years after its inception and popularization. What is proposed is a new way of reading the relationship of contemporary popular music to processes of cultural, political and social change - and a new understanding of how fundamental turbo-folk is to the recent history of former Yugoslavia and its successor states.

Part I
Turbo-nation: Turbo-folk and Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia, 1970–2010

Chapter 1
The People’s Eastern Kitsch: Self-management, Modernisation and ‘Newly Composed Folk Music’ in Yugoslavia

Few performers in the history of popular music are as readily identifiable with a cultural identity and a social and political system as Lepa Brena (‘Pretty Brena’) is with socialist Yugoslavia. Brena’s story was the ‘Yugoslav dream’: born underprivileged into a working-class Bosnian family, Brena (real name Fahreta Jahić) moved to the capital city Belgrade to study, started singing to support herself, and abandoned her studies when her career skyrocketed in the early eighties.¹ During the eighties, Brena became the undisputed star of Yugoslav popular culture, with sold-out concert tours, record-selling albums, a series of films, a celebrated and televised wedding to a famous Yugoslav tennis player (Slobodan ‘Boba’ Živojinović), and even a Lepa Brena doll.

Several key factors can explain the phenomenon of Brena as the first (and arguably only) pop culture icon of Yugoslavia. A large aspect of her popularity was in Brena’s publicly declared Yugoslav orientation – something that was worked into both her music and films, and was a key component of her branding as the symbol of Yugoslav shared culture. Born into a Muslim family, Brena moved from Bosnia to Serbia and spoke in a Serbian dialect. Regularly performing musical duets with singers from all over Yugoslavia, her songs were distinctively pro-Yugoslav, with titles such as ‘Long Live Yugoslavia’ (1985) and ‘Yugoslav’ (1989). Her cross-ethnic appeal made her an ideal figure to fit the image of the entire Yugoslav socialist family.

Brena’s largest fan base was comprised of children who were drawn to her self-deprecating ‘down to earth’ image and her humorous and simplistic lyrics. At the same time, her revealing clothes and use of playful sexual innuendo in her lyrics appealed to the male audience. In addition, her public personality and music also reflected female empowerment and independence. Brena’s success and financial independence were not only the perfectly suited cultural image for the popular imagination of socialism, but were also a powerful symbol of upwards economic mobility that addressed the anxieties of the largely working-class population caught in the economic recession of the eighties. Her upbeat music about ‘the joys of life’ provided a powerful cultural spectacle that contrasted with the shrinking state economy and falling living standards.

However, most importantly, Brena redefined the music industry and market in Yugoslavia through the successful commercial joining of two key elements of socialist Yugoslavia. On the one hand, her show business aptitude maximised on the liberties allowed to commercial enterprises under Yugoslav self-management. Brena’s management and public relations team not only resembled those of top-selling Western artists, but she also co-founded a production company that remains one of the largest production companies in the region today. On the other hand, her highly stylised pastiche of ‘Western-ness’ (use of rock music and clothing style) and ‘Eastern-ness’ (use of folk music instrumentation and provocative lyrics that deal with the urban–rural split) mirrored cultural divides between rural and urban and East and West that underpinned the debates about so-called NCFM in Yugoslavia, and defined the authorities’ relation to the music.

This chapter locates the cultural and political position of NCFM – the precedent for turbo-folk – within the social, economic and political changes that arrived with the introduction of Yugoslav ‘self-management’ socialism (1950–1987). Self-management introduced a shift to a market-based economy that enabled the growth of the entertainment industry and development of popular culture in Yugoslavia. Coupled with the improvement in living standards in the sixties and seventies, the spread of literacy, the investment in press, radio and later television, and the development of recording and film industries, popular culture came as a direct consequence of socialist modernisation. Yet, because of the idiosyncratic economic, political and cultural position of Yugoslavia, the popular culture that developed also had a distinctive and peculiar character.

Yugoslavia was a liminal space located between divergent and contradictory historical processes: socially, it was oriented towards the East; politically, it was non-aligned and oriented towards the developing world (at least after the sixties); and economically (and politically, to an extent), it was oriented towards the West. Much in the same way, popular culture in Yugoslavia occupied the position between the historical roots in Eastern tradition (Ottoman and Byzantine) and Westward leanings. Politically, it was socialist and yet it was consumerist, like its capitalist counterparts. Following from this, it was caught aesthetically between socialist realism and Western postmodernism. Writing in regard to the ‘Americanisation’ of Yugoslav popular culture in the sixties, Radina Vučetić argues that, although after 1948 Yugoslavia began to turn increasingly towards the West, this turn was never completed, which resulted in a ‘Janus-faced’ country with a Janus-faced popular culture that was Eastern as much as it was Western.²

NCFM played a crucial role in Yugoslavia’s political and cultural dialectic, becoming the cultural mediator between two sides and the ground on which cultural anxieties were enacted. The appearance of NCFM is thus not only synonymous with the appearance of the entertainment industry, but is also deeply reflective of its ambiguities. Appearing with sixties modernisation in Yugoslavia, NCFM used traditional folk music instrumentation, while incorporating new elements such as electronic instrumentation, Euro-pop melodies, oriental melodies, Gypsy music, as well as Greek, Mexican, Spanish and even rock elements. However, between the sixties when it first emerged, and the eighties when it reached its peak of popularity, NCFM moved further and further away from anything resembling ‘folk’. As Ivan Čolović demonstrates, the stylistic experimentation, transformation and departure from the ‘ideal’ of folklore in NCFM was often perceived as a form of degeneration.³

As this chapter will show, these peculiarities of popular culture were never reconciled, and the perception of NCFM demonstrates how they were translated into a series of oppositions that include cosmopolitan–primitive, rural–urban and European–Balkan. Importantly, these distinctions were not based on musical differences, but were purely cultural constructs born out of specific sociocultural circumstances. By tracing the relations of the Yugoslav state to NCFM, it can be argued that NCFM occupied an ambiguous place within this system. This ambiguity enabled the growth and flourishing of the music industry, while also ensuring that the music remained at the margins of the official system of values. At particular moments of ‘socialist development’ – the seventies and eighties – NCFM was discussed through the frame of cultural values (kitsch) or ethnic identity (orientalisation) that became key points around which collective identity was articulated. These cultural signifiers were not only crucial in the formation of cultural self-perception in Yugoslavia, but continue to inform debates about NCFM and turbo-folk in the present.

Self-management

The question of addressing the history of Yugoslavia after World War II and its violent disintegration in the early nineties is a complex and difficult one. In a region still coming to terms with its recent history, it is not sufficient to recount what happened, and, in any case, this would be beyond the scope of this book since the very act of reading and interpreting Yugoslav history is charged with political implications. The process of recounting and interpreting history is marked by ongoing questions of historical responsibility for the dismantling of a multiethnic country, genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, economic collapse, the destruction of the social support sphere, and the privatisation and criminalisation of the new states by ‘national elites’. Equally, any attempt is characterised by the presence of a network of mythologies that continue to surround perceptions of Yugoslavia and its history. These mythologies are vast, and range from the ‘cult’ leadership of Josip Broz Tito, Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia’s political neutrality (non-alignment), liberalism, the economic system of self-management, and the multiculturalism of Yugoslavia, to the political crisis following Tito’s death in 1980, the historical role of the communists, the role of the international community in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the media-generated stereotype about ancient ethnic hatreds. Insofar as these mythologies continue to inflect discussions of Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav states, it can be argued that they constitute retroactive self-fulfilling ‘truths’ of cause and effect – namely, that the violent civil war is the ‘truth’ of Yugoslavia, that nationalism is the ‘truth’ of multicultural ‘brotherhood and unity’, and that the economic collapse is the ‘truth’ of self-management.⁴ The history of Yugoslavia emerges from the constellation of these mythologies that are, crucially, generated in almost equal parts by local and international perceptions.

In this sense, popular culture and music in Yugoslavia might be understood as both a key part in the structure of these mythologies and as way of unlocking, reading and rethinking them. As Ante Perković remarks, socialist Yugoslavia was a pop creation, and the role of popular music and popular culture remains crucial to understanding the political and symbolic structure of Yugoslavia.⁵ Popular music played an important role of cultural mediator in the sixties and during the political turmoil of eighties and nineties, and has continued to do so in the last two decades.⁶ Popular culture, and popular music in particular, thus has a more complex relationship with the mythological ‘truth’ of Yugoslavia. It is an expression of mythologies, such as the liberalism, multiculturalism and nationalism of Yugoslavia, and the only remaining ‘living’ trace of them. In particular, it is an expression of the mythology of workers’ self-management. Self-management is an important starting point in this discussion because it formed the framework for the creation of popular culture in Yugoslavia, and because, according to Slavoj Žižek, it remains one of the main mythologies that shaped the views of Yugoslavia.⁷

As Ian Parker argues, one of the structurally necessary founding myths of the post–World War II Yugoslav state was that Tito had led a revolutionary movement that defied Stalin and created a socialist transformation of society: ‘Tito steered the Yugoslav revolution towards a more open, democratic form of self-management socialism, during which it was necessary to break with Stalinist bureaucratic traditions and adopt a third-way non-aligned position between capitalism and communism’.⁸

For Parker, even though this characterisation could be argued to be wrong in almost every respect, self-management is of interest because it is symptomatic of how this representation of the Yugoslav state has generated a mythology. One of key aspects of this mythology was the idea that Yugoslav workers should be responsible for their means of production. Introduced between 1952 and 1954 by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a socialist version of autogestion – in contrast to the Moscow-style central planned production – self-management was promoted as the highest level of democracy.⁹ The split from Stalinist centralism introduced a more decentralised political system, marked by increased international mobility of its citizens and economic and cultural exchanges with the West as key characteristics of Yugoslav socialism.¹⁰

Popular culture was a crucial symbol of Yugoslav socialism; however, it was not the only one. In addition to popular culture, fashion played a significant ideological role in promoting the openness of Yugoslav socialism:

Shopping trips to the West, known as shopping tourism, began in the 1970s, and eventually developed into a complex activity that combined leisure, education, rebellion, fun, and semiotic warfare, all on a mass scale … Yugoslavs who crossed the western borders to buy … never openly protested against the system, and hardly ever felt strongly against it. Shopping tourism effectively legitimized the Yugoslav socialist system.¹¹

If there was a ‘style’ of Yugoslav socialism, it can be argued that it was based around commercialism and consumption. Accordingly, if the split from Stalin was a politically motivated move seeking to create a new identity, this identity developed around increased openness to consumption.

Thus, while self-management’s immediate effect was economic, its application marked a shift in the entire field of government and society.¹² Self-management introduced a shift towards a market-based economy that removed government subsidies because it expected the manufacturing industry to generate profit. According to Zoran Janjetović, these changes in economic management shaped popular culture in Yugoslavia for the next four decades. Cultural turning towards the West and the general liberalisation of culture, coupled with a higher autonomy in the operation of factories and companies, meant a heightened degree of dependence on the market.¹³ This was particularly important for the entertainment industry, which, in contrast to material production, could not dep...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• CDedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Three Stories of Turbo-folk
• Part I Turbo-Nation: Turbo-Folk and Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia, 1970–2010
• Part II Turbo-Culture: Cultural Responses to Turbo-Folk
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index