Pop music Archives - Not Even Past

Turbo-folk: Pop Music in the Crucible of Balkan History

Kicking off our new series on digital history projects, Dr. Vladislav Beronja, a professor in the UT Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, tells us about a class project to build a website on Balkan pop music.

By Vladislav Beronja

Turbo-folk—a mixture of pounding electronic beats and trilled vocals—can be heard blasting from cafés, taxis, and dance clubs across the former Yugoslavia. Despite its ubiquity in the region, this Balkan pop phenomenon has been a hotspot of political and cultural controversy due to historical associations with Slobodan Milosevic’s nationalist regime in Serbia of the 1990s. The genre has been accused of valorizing patriarchal values, crass materialism, gangster lifestyle, and—more seriously—war crimes. A closer look at turbo-folk, however, reveals that it has undergone significant transformations in the last few decades.

This spring my students examined turbo-folk as well as the accompanying controversies in the context of an undergraduate seminar, “Punks and Divas in Southeastern Europe: Popular Music and Cultural Identity in the Balkans.” The result is a website titled Old Beats, New Verses: 21 Newly Composed Essays on Turbo-folk, which the class collectively created with help from the European Studies Librarian, Ian Goodale.

Old Beats, New Verses: 21 Newly Composed Essays on Turbo-Folk (via Old Beats, New Verses)

In many ways, “Old Beats, New Verses” is a companion piece to a similar website on punk music, “Yugoslav Punk,” the soundtrack of the last Yugoslav generation characterized by playful rebellion, liberal orientation, and irony typical of late socialism. Turbo-folk, on the other hand, represents for many the soundtrack to Serbian militant nationalism, which stoked the flames of war that ultimately engulfed and destroyed multiethnic Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Drawing on recent scholarship and the wealth of materials available on the Internet, the student essays address different aspects of turbo-folk, from its most prominent divas to representations of gender and national identity to global influences. Many if not all of the contributions challenge the assumptions and stereotypes connected to turbo-folk while still maintaining a critical outlook.

Turbo-folk stands at the complex intersection of the various highly politicized identities in the former Yugoslavia, such as nationality, gender, sexuality, and class. This complex cultural location has been the case from the genre’s inception in newly composed folk or neofolk music. Emerging in 1960s Yugoslavia, neofolk coincided with rapid industrialization and expansion of the urban working class in the fledgling socialist state. The new-fangled genre combined elements of Balkan folk music, strongly inflected by Ottoman colonial legacy in the region, with western pop structures and modern electric instruments. Like its primary audience of recently urbanized peasants, neofolk was almost immediately received with ridicule and scorn by the Yugoslav cultural establishment, even as the communist authorities continued to strategically utilize the genre’s wide appeal. Frequently derided as overly crass, kitschy, and even foreign, neofolk nevertheless occupied a dominant position in Yugoslav socialist culture as its unacknowledged pleasure-filled underbelly.

Tanja Savić-Prostakuša (Bad Woman), 2017 (via Old Beats, New Verses)

Reflecting on this history, many student contributions examine the afterlife of neofolk—and of Yugoslavia—in contemporary turbo-folk. The career of Lepa Brena, the neofolk singer who rose to spectacular fame in the early 1980s, is especially interesting in this respect. Several students examine Brena’s music as a vehicle of contemporary Yugonostalgia—a collective longing for the former socialist homeland that is often mediated through music, cinema, and other products of pop culture. Born into a Bosnian Muslim family, but a longtime resident of Belgrade and married to a Serb, Brena in many ways breaks the stereotype of both the neofolk/turbo-folk performers and audiences as overly nationalistic. Moreover, positive references to socialist Yugoslavia in contemporary turbo-folk, as well as the genre’s popularity across national lines have arguably made it an expression of “identity beyond borders,” as one student essay puts it.

If neofolk is representative of socialist Yugoslavia (and its contradictions), then turbo-folk has become symbolic of its violent dissolution. In the 1990s, turbo-folk became an extension of Slobodan Milosevic’s authoritarian regime in Serbia, when the genre flooded the airwaves, pushing out any oppositional musical voices and subcultures. In this vein, the category of “kitsch” has been widely applied to turbo-folk to describe its aesthetically and politically regressive qualities. Offering a creative reading of Viki Miljković’s 1994 hit “Coca Cola, Marlboro, Suzuki,” an essay by Luis Martinez shows how the kitschy, commodity-filled surfaces of turbo-folk music videos should not be seen as mere escapism, but as unwitting mediators of traumatic and perplexing historical changes in the region.

Since the 1990s, the genre has become largely autonomous from regime politics, although the controversies around turbo-folk divas and their fans continue to linger. Many essays demonstrate that turbo-folk has significantly evolved in the 21^st century by reflecting more socially progressive themes. For instance, the genre has started incorporating proto-feminist values and queer aesthetics. An essay by McKenna Gessner argues that contemporary turbo-folk divas challenge normative ideas of femininity and female sexuality. The essay draws examples from Jelena Karleuša and Nikolija’s music videos, featuring dramatic reversals of gendered power dynamics and outrageous “femme” looks. Other contributions are less celebratory, such as Gabriella Velasco’s essay on queer embodiment (or the lack thereof) in turbo-folk. All the essays, however, acknowledge that the nods and winks of turbo-folk divas to their female and queer audiences have become more open and explicit, despite the continued presence of patriarchal and homophobic attitudes in Balkan societies.

Lepa Brena. “Jugoslovenka.”1989 (via YouTube)

The section on turbo-folk and cultural and national identity is the most extensive, and for good reason. Like identity in the Balkans, turbo-folk has always been full of ambiguities and contradictions, which makes it a fascinating object of study. For instance, the influence of Ottoman colonial legacy on contemporary Balkan popular music still remains largely unacknowledged even when it is playfully evoked. Turbo-folk not only adopts Orientalist melodies and themes, but it blatantly copies pop songs from Turkey and the Middle East, simply translating the original texts to bring them closer to former Yugoslav audiences. As Milena Đorđević-Kisačanin’s essay shows, Serbian turbo-folk singers will frequently borrow from Greek pop music to escape charges of “Turkishness.” The same is true of the wider appropriations of Romani music. Roma culture is used to symbolize the unfettered spirit of the Balkans as a whole, even as the Roma themselves remain one of the most marginalized and oppressed group in the region.

The student enthusiasm and the consistently high quality of research during this project have convinced me of the advantages of doing a collective assignment with a strong digital and public-facing component. Together these student essays show the value of intercultural contact, original research, and guided on-line engagement in an undergraduate seminar setting. They also successfully break the surface of the stereotypes of Balkan popular culture to reveal a more complex, layered, and historical image of the region. In this sense, the project can perform the critical work of scholarship beyond the university classroom.

Popular Culture in the Classroom

By Nakia Parker

Popular culture can be a powerful tool in helping students understand history. Music, film, TV, fiction, and paintings offer effective and creative ways to bring primary source material into the classroom. Last fall, I gave a lecture on Black Power and popular culture in an introductory course on African American History. We discussed the influence of Black Power ideologies on various forms of popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, we compared album covers, such as the Temptations’ 1967 album In a Mellow Mood, which has an image of the group in tuxedos and close-cropped haircuts on the cover, singing Broadway standards like “Man of La Mancha,” with another album cover during the Black Power era with the group wearing dashikis, Afros, and singing socially conscious songs, such as “Ball of Confusion” and “Message from a Black Man.” We listened to James Brown’s “Say It Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” and discussed how artists such as Aretha Franklin, who normally did not take a public stand on social issues, would support causes affecting the black community. For example, Franklin posted bail for activist and professor Angela Davis when she was arrested for murder and kidnapping charges. We also talked about how conditions in urban areas and Black Power ideology in the late 1970’s influenced the birth and evolution of rap music and hip-hop culture, from acts such as Run DMC to Tupac to Kendrick Lamar.

angela_davis_enters_royce_hall_for_first_lecture_october_7_1969

Dr. Angela Davis walking to her lecture at UCLA, 1969 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The students were engaged and responded well to the lecture. Many of them commented that considering the Black Power Movement through the lens of popular culture changed stereotypes or misconceptions they previously had of the movement and its proponents. When I asked the class before the lecture what words or phrases came to mind when I said the phrase “Black Power,” some students mentioned the iconic image of John Carlos and Tommie Smith during the 1968 Olympics or they associated the movement primarily with violent rhetoric. In addition, many students’ conception of what constitutes primary sources was expanded. Many were pleasantly surprised to find out that songs and film could be used as primary source material. In fact, for the final project, creating a historical time capsule, many of the students used a song as one of their primary document choices.

Film and literature are useful in teaching history as well. In the same guest lecture, I showed the students brief clips of how African-Americans were portrayed in the films Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and then compared the two movies’ portrayal of black people as docile and subservient to the scene in the 1975 film Mandingo of the slave Cicero defiantly giving a speech before his execution for leading a slave rebellion. Additional useful films include Saturday Night Fever, which covers more than just disco, addressing topics such as racism, class tensions, religion, and gender dynamics. Apocalypse Now and Born on the Fourth of July encourage students to ponder popular artistic conceptions of the Vietnam War during the 1970s and 80s.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American woman to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Gone With the Wind (via Logo).

For American history before 1865, literature and art can be used as pedagogical tools. When teaching about the formation of “American” identity during the early republic, for example, students might read the short story “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving. Key moments in the story, such as when Rip Van Winkle wakes from his sleep and is confused when he is chased out a tavern and called a spy after he declares his loyalty to the British king, can highlight the upheaval and changes in the new nation after independence as well as the emergence of “American” literature. When discussing the institution of slavery, listening to slave spirituals or work songs can give students a sense of every day life for the enslaved. Finally, when teaching about how Native Americans were portrayed and stereotyped during the late 18^th and early 19th centuries before the period of Indian removal, a good painting to analyze would be The Murder of Jane McCrea (1804), by John Vanderlyn, or reading sections of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. Both of these sources demonstrate two opposite, but common, views of the time about Indians: as bloodthirsty warriors (Murder of Jane McCrea) or as noble beings, communing with nature (Last of the Mohicans). These images can be supplemented with sources that how Native American life was not static, but adapted to their changing circumstances.

Poster from Last of the Mohicans, a 1920 movie based on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel (via Wikimedia Commons).

As teachers and scholars of the humanities, we constantly need to emphasize the relevance of subjects like history. Using past and present aspects of popular culture as a pedagogical tool is a useful and fun way to remind students why history matters.

Great Books on Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Recent years have seen a real flowering of scholarship about the popular music of the early twentieth century. Here are a few of my favorites—and a little something extra.

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009).

An essential book for anyone interested in the history of popular music in the United States, Selling Sounds charts the emergence of a cohesive—and ubiquitous—music industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The fascinating characters that populate Suisman’s story are no lovers of music. They are savvy business men who learned how to transform disembodied sound (whether on sheet music or phonograph records) into hard cash. They also set the template for how music would be marketed for the next 100 years. No book tells the story better.

Elena Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (2011).

Radios became common in American homes during the 1920s. They brought the world into the family room in unprecedented ways. While much of scholarship on radio focuses on the establishment of major national broadcasting networks, The Listener’s Voice reveals the rollicking world of US radio before the majors seized control. Early radio often depended on its listeners to provide content. Through phone calls and letters, listeners created thriving participatory communities over the air. It was more akin to the vibrant world of early internet forums than to the homogenizing, on-way transmissions of later radio and television networks.

John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 (2009).

This wonderful book addresses some of the themes I explore in Segregating Sound—music, race, folklore, and money—from a different angle. Indian Blues tells the fascinating story of the struggle over music and musical meaning between government officials, teachers, and Native Americans in the early twentieth century. While government sponsored programs on reservations and in Indian boarding schools used music as a means to suppress Native resistance and collective memory, many Native Americans used music—be it traditional, new commercial pop styles, or combinations of both—to assert Native autonomy, escape the confines of government proscriptions, and get paid. Fresh, innovative, and well told, Indian Blues offers a story you won’t find anywhere else.

Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007).

This is a slim book about pop diva Celine Dion’s top-selling album featuring “My Heart Will Go On,” better known as the theme from the movie Titanic. It is also one of the best pieces of music writing I have read in years. Wilson, the pop music critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, admits he is not a Dion fan. He then systematically explores her global appeal to discover what he might be missing. The result is brilliant meditation on aesthetics, taste, cultural politics, and pop music history. At times touching and often hilarious, this beautifully written book changed the way I hear music.

Karl Hagstrom Miller on Segregating Southern Pop Music

Ralph Peer shook his head. A scout for the Victor Talking Machine Company in the 1920s, he could not believe the number of white southern singers who dug commercial popular music. “They would come in to me, people that could play a guitar very well and sing very well, and I’d test them. ‘What other music have you got?’ Well, they’d sing some song that was popular on record, some pop song,” he recalled. “So I never bothered with them. They never got a chance.” Dorothy Scarborough shared Peer’s impatience. After collecting African-American folk songs throughout the South in the early 1920s, the white scholar lamented, “How often have I been tricked into enthusiasm over the promise of folk-songs only to hear age-worn phonograph records,—but perhaps so changed and worked upon by usage that they could possibly claim to be folk-songs after all!—or Broadway echoes, or conventional songs by white authors!”

Black Mississippi guitarist Robert Johnson knew lots of songs by white authors. He played them whenever he could. “Robert didn’t just perform his own songs,” his friend Johnny Shines insisted. “He did anything that he heard over the radio. ANYTHING that he heard. When I say anything, I mean ANYTHING—popular songs, ballads, blues, anything. It didn’t make him no difference what it was. If he liked it, he did it.”

Southern musicians performed a staggering variety of music in the early twentieth century. Black and white artists played blues, ballads, ragtime and string band music, as well as the plethora of styles popular throughout the nation: sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Broadway hits. They embraced pop music. Many performed any music they could, regardless of their racial or regional identities. Such variety could appear in the same set as a performer eased from one song to the next. Observers agreed that rural southerners loved all sorts of music. Yet they fought about whether that was a good thing. Scarborough and Peer were not pleased to discover Broadway in the backwoods. A southerner singing pop music was the last thing they wanted to hear.

The meaning and symbolic power of southern music was radically transformed between the 1880s and the 1920s, an era that saw the development of southern segregation, the globalization of US political and corporate empires, and the dissemination of commercial sheet music and phonographs across the nation. During this period, a variety of people—scholars and artists, industrialists and consumers—came to compartmentalize southern music according to race. A fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice, southern music was reduced to a series of distinct genres associated with particular racial and ethnic identities. Music developed a color line. The blues were African-American. Rural white southerners played what came to be called country music. And much of the rest of the music performed and heard in the region was left out. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folksong collections as well as the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records promoted by the phonograph industry. Such simple links among race, region and music were new. They did not reflect how generations of southern people had understood and enjoyed music. Johnny Shines emphasized Robert Johnson’s broad repertoire in a repetitive cadence designed to overcome doubters. His insistence suggests how thoroughly the logic of segregated sound had become common sense—even while most observers acknowledged that it failed to reflect the music actually played and heard by southern people.

The musical color line stretched from the library shelf to the record catalog, from the tent show to the concert hall. The power of folklorists and phonograph companies to control public imagery and shape public perception was far more profound than the power of often-marginalized musicians to counter such claims. Moving from live to recorded performance, from local to national audiences, southern artists jettisoned the broad repertoires that had won them local success. They instead found favor by actively personifying the racial musical categories the academy and the phonograph industry associated with a southern culture defined through its primitivism, exoticism, and supposed distance from modern urban culture.

Artists responded to this conundrum in different ways. Some contested the images created around them, attempting to break their expressive culture out of the confines of commercial and scientific classifications. Others, however, embraced the role of pre-modern primitive. It expressed some of their own misgivings about a modernism based upon their exploitation. Many who came to represent traditional culture, in fact, were not pre-modern but had experienced modernization at its most brutal: sharecroppers, factory workers, and prison laborers. Playing the role of the pre-modern offered them both a voice with which to challenge their conditions and a possible ticket out. Many, however, remained aware that they were entering into a bargain that denied their human and artistic freedom. They stopped singing many of the songs that brought them joy. They pretended their lives could be contained by the categories that confronted them, knowing all along that they owned a world much larger than the one they portrayed. Unearthing their stories can lead us to visualize musical and cultural categories as points of contention rather than assumed points of departure, vibrant subjects for historical research rather than ways in which to limit one’s scope of inquiry. It also can help explain the joyful defiance of singers like Robert Johnson, who gleefully performed anything. And when I say anything, I mean ANYTHING.

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