Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Dora 2007: He Will Rock You?

There's no sign of Goran Bare, as it happens, but the list of contestants for the 2007 edition of Dora, Croatia's contest to choose a representative for Eurovision, is still verging towards the upmarket - albeit the usual sprinkling of complete debutants and reality TV show cast members.

Several of the performers have Eurovision experience, including Vivien Galletta and Naim Ayra (both members of Put in 1993), Claudia Beni, Goran Karan, and Feminnem, who competed for Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2005. There's a fair smattering of swing (the Sick Swing Orchestra and Marko Tolja), and a couple of names who interpret 'folk music' in quite a different sense to Severina's Moja stikla: Klapa Maslina (responsible for one of umpteen versions of the Dalmatian standard Da te mogu pismom zvati) and Miroslav Evačić, an ethno musician who mixes blues and Podravina folk music, making him the mid-noughties answer to Istrian-jazz doyenne Tamara Obrovac.

In fact, the list as a whole might look like two and a half dozen attempts to define the antipode of Štikla if it wasn't for the incongruous inclusion of a certain Sinisa Vuco - a singer whose association with 'turbofolk' is even more ingrained than Severina's. Vuco's repertoire, with emphasis on the pleasures (or otherwise) of drinking, sex and supporting Hajduk Split, musically might not be too dissimilar to Marko Perković Thompson's, only with less historical mythology and much more accordion. (In fact, here are the two of them in the company of Dalmatian diasporic singer Dražen Žanko.)

In all other respects, though, the two singers have taken paths as diverging as the average Jeffrey Archer plotline - Thompson inclining towards the patriotic (and vowing never to perform in Serbia), while Vuco has since signed for Lepa Brena's Grand Productions and regularly appears on TV Pink or duetting with Serbian-based singers. (They include Vesna Zmijanac, Neda Ukraden, and Mitar Mirić, with whom Vuco covered Queen's We Will Rock You as Volim narodno - I love it the folk way.) For much of the 1990s, indeed, Vuco claimed that his music had been banned by the then management of Croatian Television (HTV) because of its similarity to folk from Serbia and Bosnia.

However, it looks like Vuco's performing with a 'rock composition' by Fedor Boić, rather than with one of his more narodnjački compositions. Which might be just as well. Would HTV really want to go through that again?

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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

The Race Is On, Don't All Rush At Once

While the Gazette was drafting its first post of the year about the Croatian pre-selection for Eurovision yesterday, the thought occurred to it that if Morrissey was really talking about Eurovision with the BBC (as if it hadn't all got improbable enough when Lordi entered), then anything's possible. Gibonni? Darko Rundek? Goran Bare?

Now it seems that Večernji list has got there first as far as Goran Bare is concerned. And one can safely say the concept of Goran Bare showing up at Eurovision is every bit as improbable as Morrissey doing the same thing.

All in all, the potential names being mentioned for this year's Dora so far include Tina Vukov, Luka Nižetić, Vanna, Feminnem, Raspashow, Emina Arapović, Ivana Radovniković, Damir Kedžo, a trio of Mladen Burnać-Davorin Bogović-Ivanka Bolkjovac (two rockers and an opera singer), and Kraljevi ulice (the 2006 runners-up) in the company of Sandra Bagarić. Respectable pop or rock musicians (or at least internationalised-talent-show graduates) the lot of them, without a trace of what one might call 'localised musical content' but would probably call either 'ethno' or 'turbofolk': suggesting that Lordi have had just as much of an impact on HTV's thoughts as, two years ago, did Željko Joksimović's second place for Serbia-Montenegro did. (One suspects that whatever the final Dora line-up is, it might as well be titled 'People the Jury Thought All Sound the Least Like 'Moja štikla'.)

Wait till Eurovision itself, and it may well turn out that Lordi's victory owed less to their position as a credible metal alternative and more to their rocking up on stage with monster costumes, battle-azes, pyrotechnics and expanding wings - a level of stagecraft which would even outdo Darko Rundek.

Who might count as too 'ethno' these days, anyway...?

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