I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here

Thirteen years ago, ex-boy band member Ivan Gavrilović was immortalising the joys of fast cars and the first wave of Serbian turbofolk with his cover of 2 Unlimited's No limits, 200 na sat (200 km/h).

Now, via Belgrade 2.0, documentarists Dušan Šaponja and Dušan Čavić have tracked him down to his new life 'killing bugs for a living'.

The Morning After The Semi-Final Before

Among the eight 'eastern European' participants not to benefit from the apparent eastwards slant of the Eurovision semi-final was Croatia: in the same week as the death of the composer responsible for Croatia's first Eurovision entry as an independent state in 1993, Croatia missed out on an appearance in the final for the first time since then.

While Serbia's Marija Šerifović enters the final as joint favourite with a ballad not so unlike Croatia's own entries from the mid-1990s, Dragonfly and Dado Topić didn't stand out from other straightforward rock entries (Iceland and the Czech Republic), none of which made it through.

Several readers' comments on the relevant Jutarnji list article seem to have it in for HTV head of entertainment Aleksandar Kostadinov, who strongly associated himself with the uncharacteristic Dora winner from the outset. Eurovision's importance to HTV - dating from the days when taking part offered a symbolic confirmation of Croatian statehood - is such that not qualifying for the final is the entertainment equivalent of the Croatian (or the English) football team not making it into an international tournament: should anyone be held responsible, the chances are it would be Kostadinov himself.

HTV's head of contact (interactive) programming Mario Sedmak might be among the favourites to replace his current line manager Kostadinov, now that the Strictly Come Dancing and Just The Two Of Us imports have given him two successful music shows to his department's credit. Web portal Index's solution is simpler: bring back Tonči Huljić, the populist pop producer responsible for three (or maybe four) of Croatia's six top ten finishes (and whose pan-pipe-inflected song for Jelena Rozga was widely supposed to be the Dora favourite this time).

Yet despite Eurovision's current affinity for folk-pop, when it comes to Croatia it seems you're still damned if you do and even if you don't: glancing over the ten qualifiers, there are at least two which Croatia could have matched while keeping its cultural values reasonably intact. If Bulgaria's ethno-techno percussion is qualification material, so too might be Mojmir Novaković's work with Legen and Kries, and if Georgia can incorporate sword dancing into a Eurovision performance, could anything be done with Korčula's renowned Moreška? Ultimately, however, it depends on national folk-music establishments: Bulgarian percussionist Stoyan Yankoulov might be happy to co-operate, but Novaković, for instance, has been much more sceptical about folk music compromising with showbusiness.

Croatia is nonetheless tangentially represented in Saturday's final: Alenka Gotar's Slovenian entry Cvet z juga (Flower from the south) has been written by Croatian songwriter Andrej Babić...

Assorted Blogosphere Pessimism

Anti Turbo Folk is naturally unhappy at the announcement by Osijek security entrepreneur Alen Borbaš, organiser of the annual Folk Hit of the Year ceremony and regular turbofolk defender on Croatian talk shows, that he will shortly launch a record label in Croatia to release music by pop-folk singers such as Siniša Vuco and Vesna Pezo and distribute CDs from the largest folk label in Serbia, Grand Productions.

Borbaš is already the Croatian representative for the transnational pop-folk channel Balkanika Music Television, so a record label would be a logical next step towards a cross-media platform - a prospect at which ATF is pessimistic, fearing that 'this primitive kitsch aesthetic' will begin to develop an institutional base of media support.

Elsewhere, a no more optimistic East Ethnia has its own suggestions for the new Serbian cabinet of Tomislav Nikolić.

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...

Every Week Is Turbofolk Week

Via Bosnia Vault and Yakima Gulag, the International Herald Tribune profiles Balkanika Music Television, the pop-folk satellite/cable channel broadcasting to Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, Bosnia, Albania and, since January, Slovenia. The pan-ex-Yugoslav reach of TV Pink and the Braća Karić channel is one thing,but IHT's Matthew Brunwasser points out that Balkanika takes the transnational enterprise another step forward:

'Perhaps the most novel aspect of Balkanika is that it is completely multilingual: programming switches back and forth among any of 10 languages. This means most of the channel's viewers at any given time are hearing a language they don't understand.

While Slavic-language speakers can understand each other at least somewhat, Albanian, Greek, Turkish and Romanian are unintelligible to speakers of other Balkan languages.'

(Although a travelling cover version is still a travelling cover version.)

Meanwhile, this week's issue of Croatia's Arena magazine reports on falling attendances for Croatian performers in the diaspora (usually thought of as a reliable cash cow) and the trend for the owners of Croatian clubs to hire cheaper and more popular folk singers from Serbia or Bosnia instead. According to Ivan Sokić, the owner of several clubs and bars in Munich:

'There's a new generation of Croatian emigrants coming to our nightclubs now. Most of them speak German in the club, they bring their German and Italian friends and tell them that folk-type [narodnjačka] music is actually the melos of their homeland.' Moreover, he continues, Serbian channels like Pink and OBN Televizija are available in Germany and young people happily watch them.

'Those channels are available in almost all the cable packages. And I have to say they're very neutral. You can also see [Croatian singers] Severina, Goran Karan and Oliver Dragojević on them. You can't feel any national colour, and looking at the SMSs they show at the bottom of the screen I can see that young people of different nationalities are communicating. All that is creating a new atmosphere in which young people want to have fun a different way. Add that to the expensiveness of Croatian showbusiness singers, and the result is folk singers [narodnjaci] in our nightclubs.'

To be fair, the same article could have been written ten years ago, when Dragana Mirković first started showing up in Croatian discos around Frankfurt, although with rather less in the way of SMSs...

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...

Let 3: Trouble In Travnik

So, the current state of the Croatian-Bosnian cultural flow seems to be as follows: one batch of a dozen showbusiness-folk singers (with a handful of reinforcements from Serbia) heads one way, and one controversial Rijekan art-rock group Let 3 heads the other.

Or possibly not: a Homeland War veterans' organisation has predictably enough condemned the Folk revija concert scheduled for 7 March in Zagreb (although with the 5,000 tickets rapidly selling out, the 'poor sales' excuse for a diplomatic cancellation isn't going to wash), and Let 3's 24 February concert in Travnik is under threat after the new director of the local Cultural Centre revoked their right to use the hall with not much more than two weeks' notice.

Emir Maličević was apparently concerned at the group's tendency to strip naked on stage and its effect on 'the proper cultural education of the young people who would attend the concert' - although Let 3's gimmick these days, in line with their most recent album Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačka (The Bombing of Serbia and Čačak) - is turbo-punk covers of newly-composed folk music performed in a variety of hyper-Balkan national costumes. (Which they intend as the highest possible degree of irony, and surely not as folk music for people who would never listen to folk music.)

After the ban was confirmed by Travnik council at the weekend, Željko Komšić - the Croat member of the Bosnian state presidency - has now intervened in defence of Let 3, arguing that Bosnia-Herzegovina's international reputation would be threatened by 'any kind of ban in the sphere of culture and the arts' and that 'I know Travnik has never been, nor will it be, a "dark vilayet [Ottoman province]" as some ill-intentioned people want to present it.'

The organisers of the Travnik concert, Alter Art, are collecting messages of support on their website (166 of them, at last count), including a response from the marketing and promotion manager of Let 3's label Dallas: according to Mario Grdošić, 'few people in the civilised world today do not understand creative and artistic freedom, and the basic principles of good pop provocation - and he adds that despite the title of the band's last album they have successfully sold out their concerts in Belgrade and other Serbian cities, plus an appearance at the 2006 Exit festival in Novi Sad.

Alter Art are currently vowing that the concert will go ahead - if not at the Cultural Centre then at another venue. And as for Folk revija? All systems seem to be 'go', despite opposition from Narodni radio's authentic-folk-music DJ Drago Rubalo, who complained to Jutarnji list:

'When was the last time you saw [tamburica singers] Kićo Slabinac or Vera Svoboda on HTV? Domestic television's music programming is too serious and viewers need musical education to follow it. We're dealig with high culture, and on the other hand countless Bosnian and Serbian TV stations, which are accessible 24 hours a day in Croatia as well, are playing turbofolk. People need a rest and
detachment from the grey reality of everyday life, and unfortunately they're finding it on Serbian TV stations.'

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.)

Folk Sans Frontières?

So that's Vuco in Dora, and now - if one can believe everything one reads in Kurir - a whole crowd of Serbian pop-folk singers are getting ready to play the Dražen Petrović basketball arena in Zagreb, rather than the out-of-town nightclubs and discos they've appeared in until now.

Seka Aleksić, Viki Miljković, Hanka Paldum, Indira Radić, Miroslav Ilić, Šaban Šaulić, Šerif Konjević and various others are among the names very tentatively mentioned by the Serbian tabloid, in an article calmly headlined 'Folk singers are charging towards Zagreb!' - at sufficient pace to arrive by late February or early March, according to Braco Zatezalo from Bijeljina's TV BN, which floated the idea in the first place.

The Gazette will believe it when it happens, though...

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?

Folk On Film

London's annual Bosnian Film Festival closed on Sunday with a showing of the new 'European mainstream' film from Danis Tanović and, more relevantly to the Gazette, Danijela Majstorović's documentary Posao snova (The dream job), which investigates women's experiences in the Serbian and Bosnian showbusiness folk-pop industry.

I was excited about this one back in February, when it premiered at a documentary festival in Zagreb, and with good reason. Even if the interviews with Ilinka Maršić, a young girl from Republika Srpska joining an 'orchestra' of miniskirted backing dancers (something which Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love video surely has a lot to answer for?) aren't quite so revealing, there are meatier contributions from the top rank of established stars: Hanka Paldum, Lepa Brena, Beba Selimović and (skipping a few generations) Selma Bajrami, who talks more candidly than one might expect about male managers and (of course) her famous tijelo.

That's Posao snova taken care of, then, but it still leaves me chasing the other film on south-east European folk music that I've been repeatedly told I ought to watch: Adele Peeva's Chia e tazi pesen? (Whose is this song?). In a nutshell, Peeva traced the same folk melody around the Balkans, where her informants are all convinced that it came from their country. (Making it the ancestor of transnational folk-pop such as Tarkan's Simarik or Despina Vandi's Gia?)

While I wait for it to show up on a convenient festival programme or a region 2 DVD, Gergana Doncheva has reviewed it for the new issue of Kinokultura (a Bulgarian cinema special):

'The film explicitly reveals how a popular musical piece becomes associated with any given national imaginary (for example, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, or Turkish). It comes as no surprise that the characters categorically refuse to accept that representatives of a foreign, though neighboring community, could sing the same song and love it as they do. By a bitter irony, instead of dividing them, the song binds together these national territories like a thin red thread, uniting collective memories and personal stories. Above all, however, it shows the typical Balkan predisposition to stubborn negativism.'

Lastly, talking of London and Bosnia, London Sevdah will be posting some recordings on their website as long as ten people leave a comment on their blog and ask for them. At last count, they need seven more!

Severina: Tamburica and Mandolin

The Gazette goes away for the weekend, and Severina decides to tell Večernji list what's on her long-awaited post-Štikla album, about to be recorded in Belgrade with Goran Bregović and the Serbian folk/pop lyricist Marina Tucaković.

Neretva River and SeveFanClub are already on the story - in fact, if the link to the original interview with VL isn't working, SFC carries the full text as well.

After dismissing various rumours that she's married/pregnant/moving to Belgrade (which have mainly come from the direction of tabloid 24 sata - the newspaper which did the most to start the Štikla scandal in the first place back in February), Severina gets around to explaining how the still untitled album is shaping up musically: Bregović is currently 'writing the melodies and notes for those brass, tin, tamburica and mandolin orchestras from Županja, Daruvar, Solin and Kaštel' (two inland-Croatian and two coastal towns). Moreover, whether disappointingly or not:

'The new album won't be anything like Štikla at all. Although, alongside two of Bregović's songs from his version of Carmen, there'll be the tamburica and authentic [izvornih] sounds of Croatian amateur orchestras from Županja, Daruvar, Solin and Kaštel, I wouldn't call that ethno.'

(Which makes a change from the Štikla period itself, when she'd much rather have had the song called ethno than something else.)

In fact, it looks less like a different approach, more like a difference in content. Štikla involved various folk song/dance forms from Dalmatia and the Dinaric Dalmatian hinterland (Lika, Zagora, Herzegovina); the album as a whole might have more in common with the time-honoured, uncontroversial Croatian formula of tamburica and mandolin (wasn't that a Zlatko Pejaković song?), 'Pannonian' and 'Adriatic' symbols which ethnomusicologist Svanibor Pettan argues tend to (be made to?) 'appear [...] more refined, more modern, and more Western' in comparison to Dinaric heritage.

Rather than following in the, errr, footsteps of Štikla, one or two songs might actually be more in the style of one of Štikla's only serious rivals during Dora, Ivana Banfić's tamburica-pop Kad se sklope kazaljke - and indeed, we're promised one of the tracks will be arranged by Stanko Šarić from the most famous tamburica-revival band Zlatni dukati/Najbolji hrvatski tamburaši.

So far, so 1990s, perhaps. But what's that, tucked away at the end of the interview, about covering a song Bregović first wrote for the Turkish pop diva Sezen Aksu?

The Dream Job, Continued

Via Bosnia Vault, here's an interview at Pop Matters with the Bosnian film director Danijela Majstorović about her 2005 documentary Posao snova (The dream job).

Posao snova follows a young Bosnian Serb woman's entry into the Serbian turbofolk industry as a backing vocalist, punctuated with interviews with various folk professionals such as Lepa Brena and sevdah star Hanka Paldum.

Majstorović says that 'I thought it would be good to explore the pop culture because it's where you can really see the patriarchy, and corruption and women almost desperate to make the most in such a deviant society.' There's certainly a wealth of material in her subject, and the film came highly recommended by East Ethnia when it was shown in Zagreb this February.

London-based readers will get the chance to see for themselves on 3 December when Posao snova screens as part of Riverside Studios' annual Bosnian Film Festival - also presenting Grbavica, Karaula (the first film to be co-produced by all the Yugoslav successor states - so arguably as Bosnian as it is anything else), and Go west - the latter a three-line whip for any fans of Tarik Filipović, gay Yugoslav cinema and/or emergency cross-dressing.

Croatian Folklore Redux: Anima Croatica

Jutarnji list's big music news today is the issue of a seven-CD box set of Croatian folk music, co-published by the Croatian Tourist Board and the Croatian Composers' Society and titled Anima Croatica.

The compilation, with its cover designed by Boris Ljubičić (the man responsible for all those Croatian chequerboard logos), isn't intended for commercial release, but rather for tourist promotion. Its non-commercial orientation means all the pieces are available for download at the compilation's website.

There's a sense in which every compilation gives editors the opportunity to put forward a particular narrative of the place or musician they're describing (maybe downplaying other aspects as they go), and Anima Croatica is no exception: its concept of Croatian musical culture is based on 'four autochthonous regions: the Istrian region, the Alpine, the Pannonian and the Dinaric-Dalmatian region, also including the regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in which Croats also live, dance and sing.'

The selection, edited by the eminent klapa composer Ljubo Stipišić Delmata, includes four sections - Folklor (demonstrating that 'the question of what sound should represent us in the world and be our sound identity', Sacra (church music and folk songs connected to religious festivals), Klape (which 'has not flinched in front of the false premise that everything klapas sing countas as 'klapa song' - so no sign of the schlager-klapa hit Da ti mogu pismom zvati), and a final CD devoted to Etno, including modern ethno-musicians such as (the usual suspects) Tamara Obrovac, Lidija Bajuk, Mojmir Novaković's two bands, and Dunja Knebl.

According to JL's critic, Branimir Pofuk, the compilation finally rectifies a situation in which:

Since an independent Croatia has existed, we have been hearing lamentations and wailing over the lack of meaningful presentation of Croatian culture and artistic heritage, over the non-existence of real Croatian cultural souvenirs and so on.

Croatian music publishing and broadcasting is scattered with attempts to put exactly that to rights, including the late-nineties ethno movement of Novaković, Bajuk, and the rest of the usual suspects, plus various attempts by Croatian Television (HTV) to make room in its schedule for 'authentic' folk music.

(The HTV shows do have a tendency to be overtaken by showbusiness: by the time I caught up with this year's Svirci moji, launched at the tail-end of the Štikla case in order to 'show the difference between the more and more ever-present narodnjaci and real authentic folk [narodne] music', its big finale was Ivana Banfić reprising her performance of her own ethno-kitsch Dora entry, Kad se sklope kazaljke.)

There's no trace of the Banfić tendency on Anima Croatica, of course, and even less of the Štikla one. Even though the Putokazi track in its Etno section happened to be first performed at a ZadarFest six years ago...

Football Ethnopolitics: The Fontana Three

After spending the summer titillated by violent incidents in crowded coastal resorts, it's back to the metropolis for the Croatian tabloids, which have been able to start September with one of their favourite stories: a fight in a nightclub which plays narodnjaci, or turbofolk, or 'Serbian narodnjaci', or 'eastern trash [istočnjački šund]', depending on how judgemental a particular journalist wants to be.

This time around, the loxus in quo was the Zagreb club Fontana, site of the first of four such incidents in January 2006. The reason why the story's still current a week later, though, is that among the club's clients that night were three footballers from the Croatian national team who were halfway through a training camp ahead of their European Championship qualifier with Russia.

Or, as Jutarnji list had it:

'Although the three national players did not directly take part in the incident, the fact that they were wildly 'whooping it up' with the help of narodnjaci only three days before the Russia match is shameful for Croatian football. According to Fontana visitors, [Darijo] Srna, [Boško] Balaban and [Ivica] Olić were the main stars among the guests of the folk club where a Serbian narodnjački band was playing that night. Certain Croatian footballers have already shown their inclination towards the eastern melos in narodnjački clubs across Croatia.'

Ivica Olić, Darijo Srna and Boško Balaban were promptly dropped from the squad by the new manager Slaven Bilić, and the team scraped a 0-0 draw against Russia. Srna, at least, was missed, although the Gazette has a minor score to settle with Srna after wasting a slot in its Fantasy World Cup squad on him this year when it could have had Andrea Pirlo instead. Meanwhile, many fans of Aston Villa - where Balaban spent an underwhelming 2001/02 season - would be wondering what Balaban was doing in the national team at all, let alone being sent home from it again.

From time to time, it's almost seemed as if the Fontana Three were more at fault for going out 'to narodnjaci' than for doing it in the middle of a training camp, even though, as Davor Butković pointed out a few days later, they 'wouldn't have been any less guilty if the police had caught them at [alternative club] Tvornica, after a Pixies concert, and if, instead of whisky, they'd been consuming some of the opiates characteristic of the Zagreb 'urban' locale' - although Butković too noted the association between football and narodnjaci going back to Severina's 1998 World Cup anthem 'Djevojka sa sela' (Village girl).

In fact, there's now even a clash-of-cultures theory, as advanced by Milan Jajčinović in Večernji list this week, suggesting that Bilić reacted so strongly to the Fontana Three because their sub/cultural backgrounds are at odds (and, in passing, that Severina's music and the typical folk-club playlist are too entirely different things):

'We've known for a long time that our footballers aren't academicians. But we found out they're crazy for narodnjaci when they went to [well-known narodnjački club] Ludnica in Zagreb to celebrate leaving for [the World Cup in] Germany. [...] The musical differences [between] Slaven Bilić and his former team-mates and current players cannot only be understood on the level of taste. Cultural levels are involved as well.'

And moreover: 'When the team went out to narodnjaci to celebrate their qualification for the World Cup, the only one to refuse was Niko Kranjčar, saying that he didnt listen to that sort of music. Maybe they even teased him that he didn't know how to have fun, but the guy with a different education, a Viennese childhood and Zagreb refinement showed that his cultural matrix was something completely different from the matrix of the Balkan south-east.'

What may or may not be the last wsord on the matter belonged to the president of the Croatian Football Federation, Vlatko Marković, who praises Bilić today as 'a moral vertical. An intellectual. An exceptional footballer', and, needless to say, is also put on the spot about the narodnjački connection:

'The team until yesterday was a 'Dinaroid' one, hard and stubborn boys, many of them gastarbeiter kids. Maybe some of those folk [narodna] melodies, which we're inclined to immediately call 'narodnjaci' in a pejorative sense, were also a particular link with the old region. Not every narodnjak is Ceca - as it's often interpreted.'

But tell that to the authors of this poem...

Turbofolklore: Aleksandar Kostadinov

Jutarnji list's detailed Štikla coverage continues with an extensive interview with HTV's head of entertainment, Aleksandar Kostadinov, who is naturally 'not surprised' at the weeks of Severina-related controversy and very satisfied that Dora was watched by 'more than half of Croatia'.

Asked whether Severina's song counts as 'ethno or turbo-folk, Kostadinov unambiguously replies:

'That song has nothing to do at all with turbo-folk. Turbo-folk is Serbian newly-composed music performed by, for instance, Lepa Brena and Jelena Karleuša. I don't like that sort of music, and I don't follow it.

--Still, many people have compared Severina and 'Moja štikla' with Lepa Brena and 'Sitnije, Cile, sitnije'. But, while you didn't let Lepa Brena appear on HTV in the autumn, at the same time you chose Severina to represent us in Eurovision. Can you explain that?

First of all, I have nothing against Lepa Brena. I don't even know her. I presume she's an OK person, her husband is [tennis player] Boba Živojinović... But, I consider there's no place for her songs on our national television station. As long as I'm the editor of entertainment programming, such songs will not be put on air.'

Kostadinov is also asked to comment on whether 'Štikla' also contains elements of Montenegrin folklore, as claimed by another jury member Željen Klašterka. (In fact, Klašterka referred to elements from Montenegro and Herzegovina; and it may or may not be wise to advertise a Montenegrin connection right now.)

'Nobody is disputing that. In that song there are indeed traces of folklore from this region present. Derivaties of the ljerica and similar instruments also exist in a part of Montenegro, only they are differently used.'

Kostadinov continues by dropping hints that a 'euro-disco' remix of Štikla would be extremely well received, 'Not at [Zagreb turbofolk club] Ludnica if that's what you're thinking,' but at Euro-disco clubs 'with a slightly gay audience.'

On the first version of 'Moja štikla',

'The lyrics were different. The first version was about a Croatian sokol [falcon] and it was patriotic [domoljubna]. However, the melody itself stayed very similar, apart from the so-called Bregović break-beat. From time to time, he interrupts the basic melody with that beat and throws in 'kvrc-kvrc, štrc-štrc, sss-seks'... That's typical for him.'

In fact, for Kostadinov it seems to be precisely this contribution - itself controversial - which distinguishes 'Štikla from the dreaded turbofolk:

'Štikla is a pop song with a break beat which might remind [one] of Shakira [or] Bijelo dugme. There are people from Lado in the ensemble, and I don't know who associates Lado with turbo-folk. There's also a ljerica there, a specific instrument in the linđo, and rere which is sung in the Drniš, Zagora and Herzegovinan region.

'The boys were wearing costumes from the Neretva region. If someone associates those costumes with Serbia, I really can't help him. I don't understand the statement by [folk musician] Mojmir Novaković from Legen. Because, on 'Štikla' the ljerica plays a melody which, if you were to stamp your feet, is in fact the deaf kolo from Vrlika. And Mojmir, who made his career out of the deaf kolo, claims that 'Štikla' is turbo-folk. Anything!'

And for the record? His own favourite was Massimo Savić.

Slobodan Milošević Dies

Slobodan Milošević has died.

East Ethnia is on top of it already, as are many other blogs. As for the Gazette, not being the editor of Otvoreno it really doesn't feel right to run another string of Severina posts today.

That said, this morning's Jutarnji list was trying to have the final word on why young people in Croatia listen to turbofolk. It takes 29 paragraphs before they mention the usually ubiquitous Ceca Ražnatović, and Zagreb ethnologists Ivo Žanić and Ines Prica have been involved, so this report has more to say than most.

Moja Štikla: In Front Of Europe

The proportion of the Croatian cultural scene instigated by Goran Bregović will go up again in a couple of weeks' time, when his opera Carmen with a Happy End opens in Rijeka. It won't, however, be starring his number one Croatian collaborator, despite some earlier reports. Instead, Vaska Jankovska (a vocalist on his Weddings and Funerals project) will take the title role; Severina, needless to say, has other commitments looming.

Split's daily newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija took longer than most to catch up with Seve, but compensates today with two articles heading its Reflektor supplement.

Among today's snippets are that the song's (second?) most infamous line 'Afrika paprika', it turns out, was apparently thought up as a joke by one of the Matić brothers during a recording session; that Severina didn't know she'd have to take part in the Eurovision semi-final until she was reminded by Petar Grašo's mother; and that she's prepared for some lively press conferences in Athens because 'when they put "Severina" into Google, it could give them absolutely everything.' (Maybe they should try it with Moja štikla, though.)

As for the continued debate over whether or not the song is turbofolk:

'When the attacks began [saying] that my song was turbo-folk, I thought "I can take it", because I've always been accused of evertthing. [...] When we went to borrow the costumes which the Lado boys were going to appear in, they wanted national costume from the Neretva, which I looked at and saw there were buttons which looked like Turkish, oriental decorations, which isn't strange - sailors brought that to our parts. I have to thank the Matić brothers from Čavoglave who sang on my song in the studio and gave it its real form, from which we went forward later. I'm glad that in the song there's linđo, ojkalica, rere and šijalica, and that Stjepan Večković played the ljerica sensationally. When Goran Bregović did the arrangement, he gave him instructions about how to play.'

Meanwhile, Arsen Oremović in Večernji list reflects on 'whether Severina's Štikla is turbofolk and what turbofolk is anyway':

'So Severina's song is without any doubt turbofolk, but here something Serbian is necessarily implied under that term, so the resistance of stars in Croatia to such labels is all the stronger. Far from turbofolk being [...] something of which one should be proud, something to be praised.

'Still, the fact that the people wants to legitimise itself in front of Europe with "Štikla" tells [us] that the audience's general taste is worse than 25 years ago, because then a certain Lepa Brena, despite a forceful campaign and lobbying by her record label, did not manage to march to victory at that year's Eurovision pre-selection with the folk [narodnjačkim] hit "Bum, cile, bum". And today it's not really so impossible to imagine that even Lepa Brena would win Dora if she was extravagant enough to turn up there.'

Oremović also comments on how Eurovision itself:

'still has definite weight only in eastern European countries and the countries of the ex-USSR which like to prove how Europe has reached their borders too by using foreign forms like that. There various fripperies like Eurovision (everything with Euro in the title) become state priority number one.

'Such countries with their Severinas (or, if you like, with their Ruslanas) have shaped the Eurovision musical taste in which Štikla fits in more than well. And when it spreads across the internet that the Croatian singer has her own blue movie which can be seen at such-and-such web adresses, and that is undoubtedly waiting, we can at once begin getting ready for the next Eurovision somewhere in Croatia.'

With plans suddenly reported to build a new conference hall in Opatija on the site of the present Summer Stage, it seems somebody is.