“Turbo-folk Rocks!”: New Readings of Turbo-folk

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the ethnographic mapping of the origins of the new alternative scene, based on turbo-folk. Mainly located in Belgrade, this alternative scene has been swindling, over the last couple of years, as the circle of artists (Mangulica FM, Lenhart Tapes, Mega Denke, Gianni Druid, Bombe Devedesetih and others), who freely combine turbo-folk genre with other music forms (electronic music, rap and others) to fulfill modern audience needs. In this research, we will rely on the standpoint that the term “turbo-folk” is not only a tool for music genre’s description, but also a value connotated “floating signifier”, which pumps its content from the certain community’s symbolic repertoire. Turbo-folk showed its symbolic strength in the academic and non-academic discourse, as a tool for cultural switching on/switching off during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, when it was instrumentalised as the constitutive otherness of “urban” (“elite”, “civilised”, “educated”, “cosmopolitan”) population. The basic assumption of this paper is that the disagreement about classifications, the focus of which is turbo-folk, is rehabilitated, recontextualized and revaluated. In this study, we will re-examine the hypothesis saying that the new alternative scene, which is the subject of this research, endeavours to instrumentalise turbo-folk as an arbor of “urban elite’s” cultural critique, its authority and legitimacy of its classification categories.