Let's Take It From The Top

The Zagreb summer-break spirit seems to have infected the Gazette, which is slowly rediscovering its work ethic just as Catherine starts to wind down hers and think about spending a few days looking around castles in the Zagorje.

In approximately chronological order, these would probably have been full-length posts, if I'd had my act together.

Severina performed her summer season with her leg in plaster after an accident roller-skating in the dark, and revealed quite in passing to Jutarnji list that the team for her new album, due out at the end of the year, consists of Moja štikla's arranger Goran Bregović alongside Marina Tucaković, one of Serbia's most prolific pop/folk lyricists. Even more in passing, she described her 2000 hit Ajde, ajde, zlato moje as 'on the borders of turbofolk', although somehow that's less of a surprise than the Tucaković link-up.

Severina's pre-Bregović version of Štikla, the less comically folkloric Moj sokole, has had the sort of airplay one would expect from a summer hit by one of the most famous women in Croatia. Štikla, on the other hand, has not. Hari Mata Hari's Lejla, on the... third?... hand, has had more airplay than both songs put together. Which of the three would a visiting Martian think had been Croatia's Eurovision entry?

The fifteenth anniversary of Operation Oluja and the end of the Homeland War was marked by an official ceremony in Knin, and an all-day celebration in Čavoglave culminating in a concert by the village's most famous branitelj, Marko Perković Thompson. Thompson's own album, due late last year, may be delayed again now that he and his wife are expecting their third child - to be called Jelena if a girl (after the queen?), and Ilija for a boy (after the saint?).

The onset of Bosnian elections nautrally meant a race for the Croat parties to sign up famous musical names from the domovina. As of Večernji list's article in late August, Hrvatska koalicija (the Croatian Coalition) was counting on three acts who had all, in their time, been the biggest name in Croatian showbusiness ethnopolitics: Thompson, Miroslav Škoro and Prljavo kazalište. HDZ-BiH scooped up most of the other Herzegovinan pop singers of the moment, among them Mate Bulić, Ivan Mikulić, and girlband Feminnem.

Back in May, the Gazette's eye was caught by the line-up for Croatian singer Zorica Andrijašević's forthcoming album, namely, the Serbian folk songwriting team of Zoran Lesendrić-Kiki and Marina Tucaković (again). Andrijašević has now gone one better, according to this week's Arena magazine, and signed for the Serbian folk label Grand Productions - only the second Croatian singer to do so, says Arena, with the first being Siniša Vuco.

As East Ethnia reported at the time, three of Croatia's best-regarded alternative acts - TBF, Let 3, and Damir Urban - withdrew from Zadar's planned new rock festival Ups! when it turned out that the show would be sponsored by the Foundation for the Truth about the Homeland War, the lobby group founded in January with the aim of promoting... well, what else would it promote. The Foundation, apparently, got involved with Ups! 'to show that the historical truth about the Homeland War is not only supported by people who go to Thompson and Mate Bulić concerts', but may instead have helped to suggest the opposite.

The Gazette's more intrigued by who in the first place could have thought it was a good idea to invite the Letovci - whose current album deals with 'the collective memory, collective romances and irritations of the peoples who live in the states of former Yugoslavia', mainly by rearranging old newly-composed folk songs, adding swear words and wearing false moustaches - to a festival sponsored by an Ante Gotovina defence fund. (At least Gotovina never wore a moustache.)

Allowing me a brief trip into Glory of Carniola territory, the Slovenian singer Saša Lendero - who specialises in translating her Eurovision pre-selection entries into Croatian and re-entering them in Budva Festival or HRF - presented her summer hit Ne grem na kolena, currently available at her official site. It seems it isn't just turbo folk - Slovenian turbo polka - which has made it across from the Serbian and Bosnian markets: the trend for covering Greek pop songs has headed west as well. On the way, it's dropped Despina Vandi's Simera off in Croatia as Lana Jurčević's Odlaziš - but this does seem to be a year when Croatian music realised it had a little to catch up on.

Prima Donna: Zorica Andrijašević

The final of the 10th Hrvatski radijski festival - Croatia's largest pop competition - will be taking place in Trogir this weekend.

Among the 24 finalists (who include the Macedonian singer Toše Proeski, a widely-tipped duet between Lana Jurčević and Luka Nižetić, and Marko Perković Thompson with another song from his delayed Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj project) is a familiar name from the 1990s Croatian dance scene, Zorica Andrijašević Donna.

Andrijašević's songwriting team, responsible for most of the songs on her comeback album Snovi (Dreams), are - to say the least - unusual for Croatian showbusiness: Serbian folk composer Zoran Lesendrić-Kiki and the best-known lyricist in Serbian showbusiness-folk, Marina Tucaković.

Closer co-operation with Croatian musicians would be nothing new for Tucaković, who wrote lyrics for a number of Croatian performers during the 1980s, including many songs for Tonči Huljić's group Magazin.

Interviewed about the album in Slobodna Dalmacija in April, Andrijašević was predictably told that 'the majority of people will connect it with turbofolk because it is characterised by the sounds of the Balkan and eastern melos', and asked whether she was 'afraid to record such an album in Croatia.'

For the record, she wasn't; and with Serbian folk music so fashionable in Croatia that tickets for a small-scale Seka Aleksić concert in the village of Sedramić were - reportedly - changing hands for as much as 700 kn last week, it'll be intriguing to see whether many more Croatian performers develop closer links with what are often said to be the Serbian 'originals'.

HRF is broadcast by Nova TV this year, the station which is currently the subject of interest from the Serbian channel (and proverbial home of turbofolk) TV Pink. The channel's owner, Željko Mitrović, has himself been interviewed in Večernji list on his transnational ambitions for the channel:

'It's no longer possible at all to establish a regional character for programming and tele-bridges without information from Zagreb. It seems to us that the entertainment content which would be produced there would be very significant, even if we do not establish a media system in Croatia in the near future.'

Mitrović is nonetheless optimistic about a Nova TV takeover, pointing out the disappointing financial performance of its owner Central European Media Enterprises (which continues to deny any interest in selling the station).

Asked, again, about TV Pink's association with turbofolk, Mitrović stresses that the station's programming has 'evolved so much in its 12-year life that it can be compared with the best-quality American and European programming', that only 5 hours of a possible 168 are devoted to folk music on the Serbian channel today, but that the target audience for 'that sort of programming' ranges from 30% to 70% in various states.

The Croatian media and blogosphere (not least the turbofolk and antiturbofolk blogs) will likely make their own assessment of where the domestic audience falls on a spectrum like that.