Damir Ljubičić
Robert Špoljar
The Turbo-folk phenomenon is growing by the day among the Croatian youth. People know the lyrics off by heart, and many patrons of Turbo-folk clubs are not embarrassed to say that they are fans of the genre.
“It’s not embarrassing at all. It’s just a form of music. Everyone has their own taste,” said a 21 year old civil engineering student from Zagreb. He also claimed that most of his colleagues at university listen to Turbo-folk. His parents however are divided on the issue.
“Mum used to listen to ‘narodnjake’ and still listens to them from time to time. Dad doesn’t really listen to it and says that I’m a fool,” admitted the student.
Those that listen to ‘narodnjake’, ‘cajke’ and ‘turbo-folk’, are considered by Croatia’s so called cultural and social elite as an inferior fan base, and the music that they listen to is deemed cultural garbage. The fact that the music is not recognised is illustrated by the fact that not one local television show plays the music, other than surreal talk shows like ‘Noćna mora’. However, ‘turbo-folk’ singers fill concert halls, their music pounds in cars all over the country as well as countless cafes, iPods and mobile phones. It has become a cultural, social and political phenomenon that is completely unacceptable to the majority. As soon as Croatian soldiers returned home as victors, a part of Milošević’s political ideology lived on and has continued to spread in Croatia.
‘I love Ceca and Britney’
Seka Alekšić was the first act to hold a large concert in Zagreb. This was held only two days after Serbian rioters attacked and burned the Croatian embassy in Belgrade because of Slobodan Milošević’s extradition. The Bad Blue Boys burned a Serbian flag in protest at Ban Jelačić Square while two thousand of their friends and colleagues from school and university danced the night away at Zagreb’s ‘The Best’ nightclub during Seka’s concert.
Reporters from ‘Nacional’ magazine quoted some unbelievable comments from some of the ‘punters’ at the concert. “I’m totally wasted surrounded by sluts and bandits. My mum told me not to come, but here I am at a Seka Svetlana Alekšić concert. I have to see Ceca and then I can die happy,” said one obviously drunk 17 year high school student. When asked who her favourite singer was, one of the girls said that Ceca was her favourite singer from our (?!) parts, while Britney Spears was her favourite international artist.
After that concert, Seka Alekšić had triumphantly opened the Croatian doors for her colleagues and seen her popularity rise to unprecedented heights.
The popularity of the phenomenon led to Osijek’s Alen Borbaš, owner of a security firm, bringing all the biggest names from Serbia to perform at his ‘Ox’ nightclub and organising Croatia’s first ‘Turbo-folk’ festival and the ‘Hit of the Year’ award.
After a few years, he moved the festival (to the disgust of locals) to the ‘Zrinjevac’ town hall where over three thousand Osječani and fans from other parts of Croatia and B&H packed out the place.
Alen Borbaš, who became Slavonia’s most famous folk promoter, also created his own press label. He created ‘Folk’ magazine which, naturally, promoted acts and events from the world of ‘turbo-folk’. Borbaš is the chief editor of the monthly, while he also employs his wife, sister and other contributors. Borbaš’s magazine is sold in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Bulgaria.
Borbaš became interested in the genre while he was still working as a security guard, where he started to organise his own concerts. Here he noticed that Croatia ‘lacked’ a publication promoting ‘the musical tumor’ as has been dubbed by numerous music critics in Croatia.
‘Born in blood’
What is so attractive about ‘Turbo-folk’ to our youth?
The very term ‘Turbo-folk’ was coined by Montenegrin ‘weirdo’ Antonije Pušić, better known as ‘Rambo Amadeus’. ‘Rambo’ was a musician who used to mix rock, punk and zabavne elements into satirical songs during the dark days of Yugoslavia.
During an interview in the 90s he was asked what he felt about the ‘new wave of narodnjake’ where he critically dubbed the music ‘Turbo-folk’. He included the ‘turbo’ because of the hypnotic one-dimensional beats found in electronic music were used as the foundation of the songs while ‘folk’ was added because of the ‘nice’ oriental melodies and vibrato-laden vocals.
Not even he could have predicted that the term was going to be so accepted that it became the official name of the movement. When asked whether he was proud of the fact that he named the genre a few years ago, Rambo said “I feel the same amount of guilt as Albert Einstein did for the invention of the atomic bomb after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki disasters.”
Serbian intellectuals and people who are concerned with social progress have similar feelings about their ‘national export product’. They cannot believe that the ‘virus’ has been able to spread so far outside their borders.
The success of ‘Turbo-folk’ in the country of its birth can be explained in many ways, but the most logical explanation can come from its conception. In the first installment of this topic, we explained the creation of this ‘sensation’ through its musical evolution. This time we will look at the social aspects of it.
The first ‘explosion’ of popularity came during the war. Villages and towns were burning in Croatia and B&H at the hands of their army and political heads. Masses of radical supporters of ‘Greater Serbia’ demanded further advancements into Croatia and B&H while they kept sending fresh recruits to the Croatian (and Albanian) ‘village bonfires’.
During this wicked period, the biggest criminals in Serbia began to pop up on the scene, and under the wing of the country’s leading politicians, they received important roles. The international sanctions ruined the economy, inflation was out of control with the price of groceries increasing a number of times daily, and money was being printed constantly, adding innumerable zeros to their worthless notes. Serbia was in a state so bad that it was beyond their worst nightmares.
Not surprisingly, criminals and smugglers were able to make the most of the poor situation. They imported provisions from across the border and their various ‘contacts’ – crime doesn’t recognise religion, nationality or borders.
If anyone has seen the cult documentary ‘Vidimo se u čitulji’ (See you in the obituaries), they will know what the situation in Serbia was like in those days. If not, YouTube the videos and you will find the shocking real life depictions of that country’s underworld in the 90s.
However much some of you may be thinking that Croatian criminals such as Sliško and Bagarić were the same, they are incomparable. Croatian mobsters could be considered gentlemen compared to this horde of Neanderthals that filled the crime pages of our eastern neighbours’ newspapers.
‘Serbia’s broadening horizons’
Out of this atmosphere of compromised moral and ethical values ‘Turbo-folk was spawned. The hypnotic rhythm served to help Serbian soldiers returning from their western plunders to party in their hometowns. These types of ‘turbo-folk’ debaucheries are well illustrated in Srđan Dragojević’s film ‘Rane’.
Macho blokes with shaved heads wearing heavy gold chains with huge crosses (definitely not an exaggeration), pistols tucked into their belts, wore expensive suits and kept vast collections of luxurious cars while the rest of their country bordered on starvation. Young attractive girls walked hand in hand with these thugs and enjoyed the benefits that they had to offer. They didn’t have to do anything other than look pretty and be good to their ‘sugardaddies’. When these girls eventually got bored and wanted to do ‘something’, their boyfriends would tee up a recording or modeling contract. This is how these girls left the obscurity of anonymity and eventually some even successfully became celebrities in the Turbo-folk scene.
In the meantime, underworld battles had taken the lives of dozens of gangsters. At one time, assassinations of ‘bosses’ were becoming so frequent that even politicians feared for their lives. History shows that they indeed had much to fear when a number of politicians were assassinated with none more high profile than the assassination of Prime Minister Đinđić.
The wife of war criminal Željko Ražnatović Arkan (who was the biggest of the big bosses) Ceca was at the height of her popularity when her husband was shot dead in a Belgrade hotel lobby.
This mafia background has branded ‘turbo-folk’ permanently.
The violence attached to this subculture is of most concern. Shots fired in the early hours of the morning in Croatian ‘turbo-folk’ clubs are not uncommon.
At the time this article was written, we spotted an ad in Jutarnji list that until this point was thankfully absent from Croatian mainstream media. This wasn’t just any old advertisement, but a historic victory for ‘Turbo-folk’. The new album ‘Eksplozija’ by Dragana Mirković (a Serbian Turbo-folk singer) is on sale at all ‘Tisak’ news kiosks in the country for only 39 kuna (less than $10) if you purchase a Slobodna Dalmacija newspaper!
This year signalled the ‘triumphant return’ of Lepa Brena to Croatian soil, and in spite of numerous demonstrations, her concert took place at Zagreb’s new Arena. The negative publicity that surrounded her tour meant that the concert was not a sell out, but 13,000 punters is an impressive number nonetheless.
The opening of a Croatian branch of Belgrade’s ‘Grand Productions’ didn’t even produce a worried glance from Croatian production houses. Not even the possibility of CDs being sold at just 50 kuna or the chance of CDs on the Croatian market being manufactured at their Belgrade plant concern local record companies.
“None of this will shake up the market in Croatia,” said Želimir Babogredac, the president of Croatia Records. He added that the assumption that the average price of CDs in Croatia is 100 kuna are inaccurate.
“Serbian musicians are already available on our market, but they don’t really have a history of selling that well. Possibly only Zdravko Čolić really makes any inroads here. In a year and a half we only sold 300 units of Željko Joksimović’s works,” said a self confident Babogredac. We’ll see if he is so confident in the near future.
On the other hand, popular Croatian singer Jasmin Stavros wasn’t backward in coming forward. “Prices in Croatia should be cheaper altogether. If they’re selling CDs at 50 kuna a pop, I’m sure they’ve made all the necessary calculations. What it means is that CDs should be cheaper everywhere,” said Stavros. However, the arrival of Grand Productions with Pink TV in Croatia concerns the veteran a great deal more.
“They’ll crush us like nuts in a vice. And kids, as soon as they’re born, will grow up singing narodnjake,” predicted the Dalmatian crooner.
Although one could go on about this topic endlessly, it seems rather pointless. When reviewing all the information that makes up the world of Turbo-folk, it leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth and begs the question why we are incapable of protecting our own culture? Of course it’s impossible to put filters on the borders of ‘Lijepa naša’ or to install them in internet modems, but you get the distinct feeling that few people are concerned with the infiltration of strange foreign ‘values’ in our system.
Who knows, maybe those that feel that it is smarter to assimilate and lose our hard earned traditions, language, culture and national identity are right.
Whichever way you look at it, in a world where the fight against the negative aspects of globalisation slowly dissipates, no one asks what we romantics think anyway…
In this day and age where Dragana Mirković’s CDs are sought after like Paris Hilton craves the camera, we can look forward to whomever the next ‘artist’ will be. Following him or her, there will be a hundred more that are ready for their own invasion of the Croatian marketplace.
One thing is for sure, the thought of a ‘Turbo-folk festival’ at Maksimir or Poljud stadiums is enough to make you shudder. There aren’t too many hurdles in the way either. Zdravko Mamić’s love for turbo-folk is well known, as is the fact that many Dinamo and Hajduk players like to celebrate a victory to the sounds of ‘ćirilica’.
God help us when we won’t help ourselves.