Turbo-folk
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Turbo-folk is a popular musical sub-genre that originated in the Balkans during early 1990s. Though it is closely associated with Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, it continues to be very popular in the other former Yugoslav republics, namely Macedonia, Croatia, and to a lesser degree Slovenia. Turbofolk is also popular in Bulgaria,Turkey and Greece where it is enjoyed alongside chalga,Arabesque-pop music and Laïka, the corresponding Bulgarian,Turkish and Greek genre.
Origins
The term turbo folk itself was coined by Rambo Amadeus, who used it jokingly during the late 1980s in order to describe his own strange smorgasbord sound combining various styles and influences. At the time, the term was nothing more than a humorous soundbite thought up by a clever musician with a knack for comedy. Obviously, the phrase was somewhat funny since it combined 2 clashing concepts - "turbo", invoking an image of modern, industrial progress and "folk", a symbol of tradition and rural conservatism, suspicious of any inovation. All in all, it was good for a chuckle or two and that was about it.
Five or so years would pass before the term made a comeback. 1993 was a year of severe economic hardship and galloping inflation in Yugoslavia. War was being fought only a few hundred kilometers away and the country was under an international trade embargo; thus, many Serbian citizens sought solace in the escapist sounds of commercial folk music. Though always kitschy in nature and appearance, commercial folk seemed to take its presentation up a notch in this period. Hedonism and a flip-off attitude became prominent themes. Songs like "Ne može nam niko ništa" by Mitar Mirić, singing about a couple's love surviving against all odds but also implicitly defiantly celebrating Serbia's isolated international position appealed to the general sentiment. Still, if there is a single song that launched the turbo folk phenomenon, it would be 1994's "200 na sat" (200 per Hour) - a mindless tune about speed and sports cars performed by Ivan Gavrilović. The same artist later covered 2 Unlimited's eurodance hit "No Limit" as "Nema ograničenja" in which he explicitely mentions the phrase "turbo folk" in the chorus line.
Soon, a distinct style would be known by that name. Short-skirted, leggy girls like Ceca Veličković, Mira Škorić, Dragana Mirković, Snežana Babić Sneki, and so on, all of whom were already established performers (though with slightly more demure attitudes), quickly embraced the new style, letting go of most inhibitions and thus immediately becoming some of turbo-folk's biggest stars.
The mix of scantily clad young females, lascivious stage movements and innocuous, accessible lyrics proved to be the winning combination that launched many turbo-folk careers and ensured high viewership rates for plenty of television stations in Serbia.
Asked to comment, Rambo Amadeus famously quipped: "I feel guilty for turbo-folk as much as Albert Einstein felt guilt over Hiroshima & Nagasaki".
Influences
Production and marketing strategies in turbo-folk emulate and worship global main-stream trends in music, fashion and design. It is basically only the vocals with characteristic rhytmic ululations that distinguish it from Western pop music.
As mentioned, turbo folk is strongly rooted in commercial folk (novokomponovana muzika) which had already been massively popular throughout entire SFR Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s, making it difficult to exactly pinpoint where one ends and the other begins.
Musically they sound very much alike; both are blends of Roma music, Middle Eastern beats, Turkish & Greek pop music, and Serbian brass bands on one side, as well as rock and roll and contemporary electronic dance music on the other. The major difference is in visual and lyrical presentation. Turbo-folk is unabashed in its delivery of in-your-face sexuality with half-naked bodies, banal love stories, and suggestive lyrics, while traditional commercial folk at least tries to put up a more dignified front, though not always successfully. Since both subgenres pick from the same pool of musical talent, the most obvious differentiation goes along the lines of a given performer's age. Younger singers (under 35 years of age or so), especially women, usually play the sex card with provocative, revealing wardrobe on-stage and scandalous, jet-setting, bed-hopping lifestyles off it. Older performers, whether by necessity or by choice, concentrate merely on vocal abilities and usually stay clear of risqué lyrics. In that sense the ages between 35 and 40 seem to be the upper limits for a turbo folk career.
It should be noted that there are those who don't consider turbofolk to be a distinct genre or even a subgenre, but merely the next stage in commercial folk's evolution (or devolution).[1] They point to what they see as a clear generational trend over the last 30 years or so, and their argument goes as follows:
The 1970s commercial folk had the buttoned up Lepa Lukić and Silvana Armenulić as its biggest stars - both of them admittedly populist and folksy singers pandering to the lowest common denominator, but still singers who made names for themselves because of exceptional, or at the very least above average vocal talents. Then in the 1980s, the places at the top were taken over by Lepa Brena and Vesna Zmijanac whose huge popularity was thought to have more to do with their physical than vocal attributes; to some it appeared that their love lives were more important to their popularity than the quality of their music. The fact that the 1990s and 2000s brought Ceca and Jelena Karleuša to the top of the commercial heap was the next logical step according to this view. It was only natural, they argue, that considering the trend up to that point, the next step in commercial folk would be open disregard for the vocals & music and complete focus on the physical.
Social and pop-culture aspects
Initially dismissed as benign lowbrow entertainment targeting consumers' basic instincts, turbo folk began to acquire a deeper social dimension during mid-to-late 1990s. Two events that triggered this in large part were the Ceca-Arkan relationship and the launch of Pink TV.
The former quickly grew to represent more than just a matrimonial union between two individuals, one of whom happens to be a popular singer and the other a paramilitary commander with checkered past. In addition to being a major media event covered live on Pink TV, in the eyes of some, their lavish February 1995 wedding was also the unofficial merger of two worlds.
Left wing criticism
According to this persuasion, turbo folk and Serbian involvement in Bosnian and Croatian conflicts would become inextricably linked from then on.[2] They point to appearance of Pink TV on Serbian airwaves in 1994 along with its considerable commercial success through promotion of this lifestyle as further proof of their theory.
This left-wing section of Serbian society explicitly viewed turbo folk as vulgar, almost pornographic kitsch, glorifying crime, moral corruption and nationalist xenophobia. In addition to making a connection between turbofolk and "war profiteering, crime & weapons cult, rule of force and violence", in her book Smrtonosni sjaj (Deadly Splendor) Belgrade feminist Ivana Kronja refers to its look as "aggressive, sadistic and pornographically eroticised iconography"[3]. Along the same lines, British culture theorist Alexei Monroe calls the phenomenon "porno-nationalism" [4].
Furthermore, left-wingers considered Pink TV to be the major pusher of this deplorable material with the calculated intent of providing Serbian citizens with mindless, sugary entertainment to get their minds off the brutal war being waged just across the border in Bosnia and Croatia with the help of the authorities those very same citizens helped elect.
However, turbo-folk was equally popular amongst the South Slavic nations during the brutal wars of the 1990s, reflecting perhaps the common cultural sentiments of the warring sides.[5] When a Muslim market seller in Sarajevo was asked why in the midst of a Serb shelling of the city he illegally sold CDs by turbo-folk superstar Ceca, a wife of the notorious Serbian warlord Arkan, he offered a laconic retort: "Art knows no borders!"
Indeed, one of Ceca's greatest hits at the time, featuring lyrics "If you were wounded, I'd give you my blood..." could be heard in the trenches of both sides.
Right wing criticism
On the other hand, turbo-folk music was not without its detractors on the right wing either. In fact, Serbian conservative nationalists often described it as an example of undesirable Turkish elements, left behind in the national psyche by Serbia's medieval occupiers. Seeing it as something that carries a strong Islamic, oriental, and "un-European" sentiment they talk of it in terms of a repulsive "Teheranization" of Serbia as one of the MPs put it during his speech before the Serbian parliament in the mid-1990s.[6]
Still, turbo-folk had a considerable following among the urban youth, with no parallels in its Balkan commercial folk predecessor. Dizelaši (as they were called, due to their fondness for Diesel clothing), a new stratum of young men favouring a healthy, sporty lifestyle and macho values, widely embraced turbo folk and were for years its core audience.
General non-ideological criticism
As mentioned, turbo-folk culture was, and to a certain extent still is, actively promoted and exploited on commercial television, most notably on Pink and Palma TV-channels that featured many turbo-folk music videos.
These filmed visual presentations are criticized by some for celebrating the external symbols of easy acquisition of wealth, being too eroticized, and promoting violence. However, others respond to this critique by arguing that precisely such semiotic content is representative of the global pop-cultural scene. They point out that an average music video shown on MTV depicts just as many if not more "women treated as objects", golden chains on muscular bodies, and generally everything that is recognized and condemned as banal, sub-intellectual and unsophisticated.
In Western pop-rock music all of this is typically defended as being motivated by its potential to provoke and challenge "safe" value systems of the civic order. The subversive potential of turbo-folk is to be found in the fact that this phenomenon represents an imitation of global trends in popular culture but is, both by its critics and by its fans from abroad (including cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling), treated as in opposition to those trends.
Turbo-folk today
Following the 5th October regime change in Serbia, turbo-folk entered its own transitional phase. Due to the style's ties to Milošević's establishment (whether perceived or not), many Serbian media outlets suddenly weren't as open to it as they once used to be. In some of the media this was a response to an authentic lack of public desire to see and hear something that reminded many people of the lean Milošević years, but for many others, including Pink TV, it seemed like an opportunistic attempt at ingratiation with the new authorities.
Many performers responded by incorporating even more pop elements into their sound, making the line between turbo folk and Western pop blurrier than ever. Ceca, turbofolk's most prominent star, started putting out highly produced records packed with polished dance tracks. One could perhaps make the argument that her recent albums aren't really turbofolk at all, at least not in the original, (early '90s) sense.
This period also saw the emergence of new acts like Željko Joksimović, Romana, Goca Tržan, Leontina, and Nataša Bekvalac, performers who can't really be classified as turbo-folk, but who definitely toy with it in certain capacity throughout many of their songs.
Still, this temporary TV scale-down and partial abandonment by some of its biggest stars never really endangered turbo-folk's survival or its essential popularity. If anything, it provided the opportunity for the genre to reconnect with its rural core, resulting in the emergence of new batch of up-and-comers led by Seka Aleksić, Stoja, Ćana, etc. whose curvaceously earthy looks won them many fans that didn't like the new trend of over-produced, Botox® & silicone enhanced performers such as Ceca and Karleusa.
The others among the more established guard like Aca Lukas, Indira Radić, Viki Miljković, Dara Bubamara, etc. also continued plugging away, and if proof was needed of the overall genre's official comeback (provided it ever truly 'left' to begin with), one need not have looked farther than Ceca's triumphant June 2002 concert before 100,000 fans at Belgrade's Marakana Stadium.
So, contrary to the view that considered turbo folk to be nothing more than a by-product of ethnic conflict and as such possible only within a time and space when society's values are severely compromised (the same view that predicted its quick dissolution once the bloodshed is over and sense of normalcy has returned), the musical style has proven to be a lot more intrinsic and harder to crack.
Today, Turbo-folk is better referred as Pop-folk.
Representative Artists
 | This section's factual accuracy is disputed. |
- Aca Lukas
- Ceca
- Dara Bubamara
- Dragana
- Goga Sekulić
- Halid Bešlić
- Indira Radić
- Jelena Karleuša
- Marta Savić
- Mile Kitić
- Miloš Bojanić
- Mitar Mirić
- Nedeljko Bajić Baja
- Osman Hadžić
- Seka Aleksić
- Sinan Sakić
- Šako Polumenta
- Atomik Harmonik
