The launch of a new turbo-folk radio station in Zagreb has caused near-panic in the Croatian capital – where threats to its ‘Central European’ identity are taken seriously.
A new radio station launched in Zagreb has attracted an unusual degree of attention in the Croatian capital and caused considerable unease among some people.
The Croatian news site Index noted some of the dramatic reactions from the streets of Zagreb.
“I can’t believe it! Zagreb?” one woman reportedly asked in shock.
“This is embarrassing, because the post-war era can still be felt here,” a worried young man said.
“I think it’s a little primitive, but OK,” a young girl said, while her friend called it “a degradation of culture” that only “people of a lower standard” would listen to.
One might well wonder what Extra FM is broadcasting to inspire such concern. Calls to destroy high culture? To vandalise the monuments and landmarks of the city? Are the vandals at the gates, ready to come in and tear down the cathedral?
No, it’s a radio station that plays turbo-folk music.
Turbo-folk, a term coined by the Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus, is a musical genre combining folk, electronics and pop.
It was forged in 1980s Yugoslavia, more precisely in Serbia, although it is not exclusively a Serbian product. One of its variants exists in Bulgaria, where it’s called čalga.
In the decades that followed, turbo-folk swept the whole of ex-Yugoslavia, moving from the margins of society to the mainstream.
In Croatia, the genre is called narodnjaci (after narod, or folk), or cajke, a more derogatory term, but actually quite mainstream now.
In the 1990s, turbo-folk could be heard only in marginal and somewhat obscure night bars in the Zagreb suburbs, but already in the early 2000s, by the time I was in high school, cajkehad penetrated the city centre, becoming a legitimate music genre.
More and more youngsters turned to it, listening to stars like Dara Bubamara, Seka Aleksic, Ceca or the genre’s godmother, Lepa Brena.
There were occasional protests of war veterans and right-wingers when some of these stars came to perform in Zagreb, but the concerts of the Serbian singer Djordje Balasevic, who belongs to a different genre, attracted the same fate. In the post-war reality of Croatia or “post-war era that can still be felt”, as the young man put it, such things were to be expected.
Despite more and more bars and nightclubs turning to turbo-folk, despite more and more people turning towards it, was Croatia’s, and especially Zagreb’s, “unconscious” – or, as Freud would call it, its “id”.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
