Turbo-Folk as the Agent of Empire: On Discourses of Identity and Difference in Popular Culture

Abstract

Turbo-Folk is a cultural phenomenon which finds itself at the crossroads of numerous academic disciplines (from which I indiscriminately borrow for the purposes of this article), including musicology, anthropology, sociology, literary, media and urban studies, political science, history, and philosophy. What makes it such an intriguing object of study, however, is its absence from the maps of official academic “geography”: turbo-folk has no academic history, theory, curricula, conservatories, institutes and archives, museum exhibits or public collections. Although recognized as a highly influential and most widespread cultural model in Serbia, it is persistently kept at the fringes of academic concerns. While exploring the complexities of turbo-folk, I have encountered diverse (and sometimes fascinatingly antithetical) definitions of the phenomenon: a) fake folklore—or, rather, “fakelore”—also labeled as kitsch or schund on the grounds of its utter lack of value, as an arbitrary blend of local (traditional) and global pop music idioms; b) “Anatolian howling,” a derogatory term for the characteristic melismatic singing style associated with the Orient; 1 c) a form of mass culture prevalent in socialist Yugoslavia/post