Folk Revija: A View From Tamo Daleko

Four days after the cancellation of the Zagreb Folk Revija has been more than enough time for the Serbian tabloid Kurir to gather half a dozen vox pops from Serbian showbusiness and make it look as if the event's collapse was all the Croats' fault, or in Kurir's words that 'it's been shown for the umpteenth time that our singers are undesirable in Croatia!' - including a particularly nasty rumour, first launched by organiser Braco Zatezalo in yesterday's edition of the paper, that one of the women involved had received a threat of rape.

The quoted singers themselves are a little more understanding, distinguishing between 'lots of people there [who] like our singers and Serbian music' (Sanja Đorđević) and an identifiable group to blame (be it the veterans' association, the Croatian media, or Croats who 'would rather their children listened to Chopin and Mozart').

The story on the Croatian side, meanwhile, is a much more mundane one of unverifiably disappointing ticket sales and an unclear destination for the ticket revenue. (The circus itself has been rescheduled for late April in Ljubljana, perhaps resuming the city's mid-90s function as a performance site for Serbian acts who weren't quite welcome in Croatia yet.)

The observation that whatever happened at Folk Revija would set the agenda for impressions of folk in Croatia applies, with this sort of escalation, as much to Serbia as it does to the host country. Is it really such a good idea for the prevailing Serbian tabloid memory of the case to be that Vukovar veterans threatened Serbian singers so severely that the show had to be called off for their own protection?

Folk Revija: Another One Bites The Dust

Looks like the Zagreb Folk revija concert is off, according to, as it happens, Nova TV and Dnevnik.hr: either it's down to the usual excuse of poor ticket sales, or organiser Braco Zatezalo's allegation that 'Croatian patriots are threatening folk singers'.

Hloverka Novak-Srzić and the Kontakt team, after the battering (and inadvertent advertisement) they gave it on last night's show - which you can now watch by following the link on Dnevnik's page - are likely to be quite pleased with themselves...

Folk Revija: First Kontakt

Next month's Folk revija concert in Zagreb took another step towards scandal-hood on Tuesday as the subject of Hloverka Novak-Srzić's daily political talk-show Kontakt.

While December's turbofolk edition of Denis Latin's Latinica was concerned with understanding the social background of turbofolk, Kontakt set itself the simpler question of whether the 'turbo folk review in Zagreb' ought to be banned. (Not quite, was her guests' consensus, but it didn't mean they had to be happy about it.)

What may prove to be two decisive arguments against the concert were put forward by Damir Jašarević, a representative of the veterans' group which has declared its opposition to the event: firstly, should a venue (the Zagrebački velesajam) ultimately owned by Zagreb council be hosting turbo folk concerts, and should a broadcaster (BN Televizija from Republika Srpska) which he linked to Ratko Mladić be allowed to be the media sponsor of any event in Croatia?

(The veterans were initially no happier with Nova TV itself last month when Novak-Srzić's channel-mate Mirjana Hrga decided to invite the Serbian nationalist rock singer Bora Djordjević on to her own show to discuss the Serbian elections; however Hrga's demolition of Djordjević's support for the Četnik movement ought to have soothed the most fervent patriot.)

Duško Ljuština appeared 'in the name of the city of Zagreb's office for culture, education and sport, as a theatre man and an old rocker' to defend City Hall's position, but not too vehemently: indeed, the tone of Ljuština's and other guests' remarks was that the talk-show itself might have the unwelcome side-effect of advertising the concert even more effectively than the posters stuck up at various locations around town. (Which seem to be getting torn down much more often than the ones for Zagreb's next big klapa concert or ethno-blues musician Miroslav Evačić.)

Unlike Jašarević, Ljuština, or musicians' lobbyist Paolo Sfeci (taking ample time to warn that folk singers were mainly coming to Croatia without applying for work permits or paying tax), Osijek's folk entrepreneur in the making, Alen Borbaš, hardly got a word in edgeways (also unlike Latinica, where he had a good 6-7 minutes to put his own patriotic credentials as a Croatian veteran and volunteer who deserted from Yugoslav army service into play), although did have space to imply that it's 'turbofolk' if you don't approve of it and 'folk' if you do. (For the sake of objectivity, I should probably be switching between both.)

Borbaš has experience with similar events in his home town, where his annual Folk hit godine concert was refused permission by Osijek mayor and HSP leader Anto Djapić to hire the municipal stadium; undeterred, he's currently Balkanika television's representative in Croatia, and plans to become the Croatian distributor for the leading Serbian folk label Grand Productions.

With 68% of callers to the Kontakt phone poll voting that the concert ought to be banned, the Folk revija looks to be on believe-it-when-you-see-it status.

As of last night, that is, when Blogger wasn't working...

Dora 2007: Anything But Štikla, Including Peter Pan

The spirit of Natalija Verboten, or more precisely of her meticulously-rehearsed on-stage chaos, lived on in this year's Slovenian Eurovision selection and is likely to be revived yet again at the Croatian version (Dora), thanks to favourite (or 'favourite'?) Jelena Rozga promising Jutarnji list that she'll be escorted on stage by Peter Pan, Snow White and/or Little Red Riding Hood. (It's only thanks to the small matter of copyright that viewers were spared Harry Potter and Gandalf too.)

While Verboten's effort SOS owed a lot to the Swedish schlager school (perhaps an awful lot, for viewers who had already encountered Linda Bengtzing's Alla flickor), Rozga's is musically located closer to home. Ilko čulić's Dora preview article in Globus this week (headlined 'The crusade against nightclub-singers [cajki]'), confirming the impression of the 2007 line-up as an anything-but-Moja Štikla affair, saw Rozga's song Nemam (I haven't got) as 'some sort of Balkan folk-pop mix in which Thompson’s Dinaric pastorals rub up against the old hits of Neda Ukraden'.

There's surely more than a hint of the Lane moje-Lejla axis too - a technique which has resulted in second place for Serbia-Montenegro and third place for Bosnia-Herzegovina, both of whose delegations were sensible enough to opt for a minimalist performance with no interference whatsoever from the collected cast of classic Disney movies. (Eurovision rules restrict groups to six members - a rule which has already caused difficulties for some members of the twelve-piece Klapa Maslina in Dora - so audiences are at least unlikely to be treated to an entire complement of Lost Boys or Seven Dwarves.)

East Ethnia and, naturally enough, Anti Turbo Folk are both on top of the Folk revija story - with the latter pointing out that Croatian impressions of the genre, outside the folk subculture itself, are likely to be formed for the immediate future by whatever happens, or doesn't happen, at the Zagreb Velesajam in a couple of weeks' time. Just as the January 2006 nightclub shootings cemented the relationship between turbofolk and violence in the public imagination (in contrast, there was little sign of any impending moral panic when shots were fired at the Zagreb alternative club Gjuro on New Year's Eve), or Jutarnji list's poll of teenagers last March made it proverbial that '43% of teenagers listen to narodnjaci', expect another round of agenda-setting to come out of Zagreb's first non-nightclub folk concert in the history of independent Croatia.

For the moment, the fact that articles on Folk revija are appearing in the metro section rather than the showbusiness pages already seems to suggest that the ideal reader isn't necessarily supposed to be treating it as a source of enjoyment...

The Old Croatian Soap Opera

When a brief article in Kurir at the end of January mentioned plans for BN Televizija from Bijeljina to organise a large-scale concert of Serbian and Bosnian showbusiness folk singers in Zagreb's basketball stadium in late February or early March, the Gazette resolved to believe it when it saw it. (Which, given the Gazette's current on-location status, can be taken quite literally.)

To mangle an English proverb, great showbusiness-ethnopolitical oaks have a habit of growing from little acorns in Kurir; or, at least, that's how we ended up with such a fuss over Severina's 'Moja štikla'.

Now that there are half a dozen posters between my flat and the station for a BN Televizija Folk revija to be held at the Zagrebački velesajam (Zagreb's sprawling trade-fair complex) on 7 March, involving Šerif Konjević, Halid Muslimović, Viki Miljković, Mina Kostić, Goga Sekulić and 8-10 other singers (although neither of Bijeljina's own two contributions to the narodna scene, Lepa Brena or Seka Aleksić), it looks as if Zagreb may be set for the highest-profile pop-folk event since Željko Joksimović played the Dom sportova in November 2004, bucking the usual trend of folk performers appearing in out-of-town nightclubs. (The event's even being trailed on a Slovenian listings site; and yes, Joksimović counted as a folk singer from this end.)

Except, according to the Bosnian edition of Svet, or rather Svijet, there's (not very detailed) word of opposition from the Croatian Musicians' Union (HGU), an organisation once renowned - under its former president - for opposition to Serbian performers (most of all Djordje Balašević) appearing in Croatia. If that's the case, though, the Bosnian media knows more about it than their Croatian counterparts.

There is, in the meantime, news from Večernji list that another Serbian pop-folk singer, Ana 'Romale, romali' Nikolić, has been lined up for a leading role in a new Croatian soap opera, 'Strast koja ubija' (Deadly passion).

(The old Croatian soap opera, Turbofolk, continues.)

Ništa Kontra Seve

The Zagreb suburb of Zaprešić isn't the happiest place for Severina at the moment, according to the SeveFanClub blog: after postponing a concert there due to food poisoning, the rescheduled concert was interrupted by Dinamo Zagreb fans throwing lighters at the stage when Severina began to sing...

...Nista kontra Splita (Nothing against Split), Dino Dvornik's smash hit from 1995 which quickly became an anthem for Dinamo's biggest rivals, Hajduk Split.

That'll be the problem, then.

(The extensive Hajduk songbook also includes: Mišo Kovač's Dalmacija u mom oku, a Hajdukised version of Magazin's Tri sam ti zime šaptala ime, a certainly unsanctioned version of Novi fosili's Za dobra stara vremena, and a version of the Ustaša anthem Evo zore, evo dana rewritten for the splitski huligani.)

Readers of SFC and Jutarnji list, which picked up the story today, largely seem to be asking what Severina was doing transgressing Croatia's north-south divide in the first place, although expecting Severina not to be provocative these days is a tall order.

The Gazette wonders whether this qualifies Severina, in the footsteps of Doris Dragović (but not quite Seka Aleksić), as the new Kraljica Torcide...?

Ceca Ražnatović: Let's Hear It For The Rainbow Tour

Somewhere down the line, 2006 was supposed to be the summer of Ceca Ražnatović: the so-called first lady of Serbian turbofolk would re-establish herself with her latest album 'Idealno loša' (Ideally bad), freshen up her sound with a little help from Madonna's 'Hung Up', and hold the concert of her career at the Ušće stadium in Belgrade.

June's Ušće concert, at least, lived up to some of its spectacular billing
(the 'highlights' are still clattering around YouTube, if you must), although in front of a mainly teenage audience and without the patriotic flavour that B92's blogger Jasmina Tesanović had been afraid of. Madonna comparisons, however, may be wider of the mark, especially since Madonna devoted the rest of the summer to some equally provocative choreography.

Looking at it musically, Idealno loša didn't quite match the Abba-sampling, aerobics-practising kitsch of 'Hung Up' itself. From a wider point of view, as Tesanović comments:

'Ceca has always idolized Madonna, supposedly using Madonna's show trailer and Madonna's make-up artist, but any Madonna concert would have been vastly better organized than this. Madonna is not a small-time local war-looter like Ceca but a ruthlessly organized global capitalist, so Madonna would have sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of Madonna merchandise to such an adoring crowd.'

News from Ceca's Bulgarian concert, however, leaves the Gazette more in mind of Madonna's alter ego Eva Perón and her anti-climactic Rainbow Tour. According to Tatyana Vaksberg in last week's Balkan Insight, Ražnatović attracted only 3,000 of an expected 25,000-strong audience to her recent concert in Sofia's national stadium, despite sensationalist publicity in the Bulgarian media playing on her political notoriety.

This needn't be a sign that turbofolk is declining in Bulgaria, though - far from it, says Vaksberg, who points to the opening of a new folk-music nightclub (Sin City) and growing sales for Bulgaria's domestic turbofolk - chalga - singers. The emergence of Bulgarian chalga, in fact, owes something itself to Serbian showbusiness-folk music (most of all to Lepa Brena?), and the genres have kept pace ever since: chalga has its fair amount of Serbian cover versions (the biggest name, off the top of the Gazette's head, is Mile Kitić's Šampanjac into Kamelia's Cheluvai me), just as the usual Greek and Turkish transnational favourites are present and correct.

Vaksberg concludes that Ceca's Bulgarian rise and fall - or the replacement of foreign performers by a domestic product - has come all the quicker due to the Bulgarian public's lack of information on the Yugoslav conflicts, meaning that neither Mrs nor Mr Ražnatović carried any 'political context'.

Be careful what you wish for, though, because you might just get it: if what Ceca needs to succeed is notoriety, she has that in spades in the ex-Yugoslav successor states. Slovenia's already been chalked up on the 'rainbow tour', with her Ljubljana show in summer 2005 marking her first performance outside Serbia-Montenegro or RS, complete with a carnival of immigration hitches, protest letters from Slovenian musicians, and riot police outside Tivoli hall.

Will Ceca be engaged to perform in Croatia in, say, the next five years? The bureaucratic, legal and political obstacles would probably be insurmountable (would you want your signature on her work permit when the populist tabloids came knocking?), and she might not even agree to go herself, but that doesn't mean somebody isn't going to try.

And no matter how much Ceca continues to represent Croatia's ultimate Other when it comes to newspaper columnists with turbofolk-loving footballers to disapprove of, the emerging youth folk subculture in Croatia has - according to a Jutarnji list survey this spring - more interest in the newer generation of Serbian singers, including Seka Aleksić, who are challenging for first-lady status of their own.