In this article I will try to outline why the rise of ‘Turbo Folk’ in Bosnia makes no sense and should be stopped immediately.
This article was not intended to be written as a formal reference document, but is rather an account of a ‘reformed Sevdah performer’ (myself) who had taken a long time to realise the information presented in the paragraphs to follow.
Historical overview
Bosnia is an incredibly culturally rich and diverse country, which can be considered a ‘European cradle of civilisation’.
Bosnia has existed as a unique geopolitical entity for eleven centuries and was the place where the Charter of Kulin Ban was drafted.
It is the first ever written written charter from the territory covered by ex-Yugoslavia.
Bosnian kings were some of the most progressive thinkers at the time and have left behind numerous priceless cultural relics and rich traditions.
Empirical influences and Bosnian rule
Throughout centuries Bosnia found itself in many unusual political positions.
The presence and spread of the Ottoman Empire and its culture influenced the development of music culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina, particularly a specific lyric form named “Sevdalinka”.
Bosnia was also part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which brought accordion to the country.
In the past Bosnia also ruled Serbia and Croatia as part of its territory.
Throughout these moments of seismic cultural shifts, developments and movements, Bosnia maintained its unique identity and developed its own, highly unique culture.
This culture covered various aspects of life style including food, music (Sevdalinka – Bosnian traditional song), traditional outfits, various traditions such as Bosnian coffee drinking, architecture, interior design, hand crafts, furniture, etc.
Bosnian people stood strong, proud and determined to maintain, develop and continue their own values and culture, without infringing other people’s cultures.
Twentieth century mayhem
The twentieth century brought much turmoil to Bosnia.
While places like America were going from strength to strength, Bosnia did not miss out on being the epicenter of World War I and World War II.
Just as it recovered somewhat fully from the disastrous effects of World War II, Bosnia suffered an aggression from Serbia and Croatia during early 90s.
I cannot think of many countries in the world which have been through three ravaging wars in a single century in the recent history!
Each of the wars which happened in Bosnia had a silent, but incredibly destructive aspect to
it – ‘cultural genocide’!
This is the topic I would like to cover in detail in this short article.
Destruction of Bosnian culture
As Austro-Hungarian empire arrived to Bosnia, it naturally influenced the Bosnian territory with its own cultural values which were radically different to Sevdah and rapidly diluted Sevdah traditions in Bosnia.
Traditional Sevdah instrumentation (Saz) was abandoned, while Austro-Hungarians essentially imposed the use of accordion, Austrian traditional instrument.
Bosnians, in a move to save Sevdalinka songs from total destruction, adapted their interpretations to accordion and made accordion the ‘modern musical heart of Sevdah’.
The rise of accordion based Sevdalinka accompaniments meant that musical values of Sevdalinka had already been altered somewhat, and were therefore no longer kept to their original form.
However, one could argue that the essence of Sevdalinka was still preserved by most prominent accordion performers that emerged.
Yugoslavian cultural imperialism
After the Austro-Hungarian cultural oppression, Bosnia became ‘the heart of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia’ at the end of World War II.
This socialist regime was seen by most as ‘soft’, however in practice it meant that people of Yugoslavia were taught to sing partisan and pioneer songs.
These ‘Yugoslavian folk songs’ somehow grew out of this new political form.
Nobody sings these ‘Yugoslavian folk songs’ today, proving that they were never real folk creations.
Yugoslavian regime ‘softly’ brainwashed few generations of Bosnian youth from knowing and understanding almost anything about their real cultural heritage.
Yours truly was one of the victims of this horrible, long-term brain washing campaign, and proactively shunned any association with Sevdalinka in my early stages of musical education.
During the period from 1950s to 1980s, however, there were some very important Sevdalinka recordings made by Radio Sarajevo which now form a part of an important Sevdah cultural archive.
Turbo folk
One of the biggest cultural evils, which lives in the bones of majority of Bosnian youth today started spreading itself some time in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s.
That evil was called ‘Južni Vetar‘ (Southern Wind) and it originated in Serbia, unfortunate country which was equally (if not more) subject to cultural genocide like Bosnia.
Southern Wind essentially ‘lifted’ the sound of Lebanese and Egyptian pop, which, for example, can be regularly heard in various Lebanese sheesha bars in London’s Edgware Road today.
This style of techno, quazi pop-folk, fused horribly together into an idiotically appealing bubblegum of subliminal, openly sexual, semi-musical hooks, flooder the Middle East, Turkey, Greece and Serbia, penetrating as far as Bosnia!
The biggest paradox in it all was the fact that this music was marketed around as ‘narodna muzika’ (folk music)!
Turbo folk – the curse of the modern Balkans
Turbo folk has nothing to do with Bosnian (or even Serbian) folk music.
Unfortunately, it’s still going very strong in Serbia, where Bosnian immigrants, lead by Lepa Brena, built an entire empire from selling this recycled tat to unaware Serbian peasants, who enjoy a good ‘booty shake’ after a hard day’s work in the fields.
Many listeners in Yugoslavia were wise enough to realise the Turbo Folk conspiracy.
Much of the youth opted for listening to Yugoslavian rock music, which was a form of ‘musical safe haven’.
This music was influenced heavily by the parallel hippy movement in America.
It is highly paradoxical that the hippy movement was a form of freedom movement where the rock musicians were taking influences from English and Irish folk music and emergent Black folk of modern America and it in itself became a certain form of ‘turbo folk’.
However, it could be argued that much of the music from bands like Leb i Sol (their adaptations of Macedonian traditional songs in specific) and later Yugoslavian rock groups were actual ‘light forms of Turbo Folk’, just delivered in a more tasteful manner.
Turbo folk musical scales are structured in such a way as to induce somewhat a paranoid mental state in a listener, catalysing use of alcohol and smoking of cigarettes along with increased levels of promiscuity amongst men and women, influenced by sexual images within the music and videos of most turbo folk songs.
I have heard a Serbian musician friend of mine make a comment about his analysis which indicated that musical structure of Turbo Folk music had been one of the aiding elements in creating the ‘warring zombie mentality’ amongst the people of the latest war of 1990s in Bosnia and Croatia.
Unfortunately this ‘zombie state’ can also be observed amongst Bosnian youth of today.
Take a seat in Sarajevo City centre and observe a young girl religiously repeat the lyrics of the latest Turbo Folk song, while staring in the distance with an empty gaze in her eyes.
This empty look is a common product of a human being blindingly consuming and following these agitating, irritating, false and highly sexually suggestive lyrics of this ultra-commercial ‘musical form’.
Light at the end of the tunnel
However, two solid decades of recycling the very same, disposable, one-dimensional, ‘musical’ concepts becomes too much even for ‘the zombie’.
New generations of musically educated and gifted Bosnians are starting new movements as an antidote to over-saturation of meaningless Turbo Folk.
Sons and grandsons of Sevdalinka performers from decades ago are starting their own movements and are bringing back to life their own interpretations of Sevdalinkas, while enjoying significant following in the process.
Sevdalinka is coming back as a healing to the cultural and spiritual wounds of Bosnians (and Serbians), who now increasingly want to simply relax and enjoy the simple and highly effective sound and message of this wonderful traditional Bosnian song, which has over centuries filled hearts of Balkan peoples with peace, love, happiness and melancholy
Summary
Bosnia is a land of great and unique cultural heritage, which over the last century has been subject to extreme and systematic forms of cultural genocide.
Commercialised, ad-hoc, fusion styles of music have diminished the significance of Sevdalinka in the ears of every day listener.
Bosnia, however is now coming into a new cultural era, in which the regular person is sick and tired of recycled Turbo Folk rubbish and are coming back to appreciating the real beauties of Sevdalinka and real values of Sevdah heritage.
Published on 24th October 2009
Slazem se u potpunosti s articlom, vrlo fino objasnjeno, good job!!! Dosta je vise smeca zvanog turbo folk, dosta..
adis on 24th OctoberI believe Bosnia existed even before Kulin Ban. As Back then nations existed in a tribal fashion, and they were often called by the neerest river to them and guess what, river Bosnia existed even during the Roman times..
Ned on 25th OctoberFair comment Ned. It’s an interesting observation you make. I was trying to deal with the official, written, historical evidence.
Obviously with the possibility of there being pyramids in Bosnia, the whole history may prove to be only the tip of a big iceberg. However, at the time of writing we do not have enough credible evidence to justify this.
We wait to see what ends up being proven or not. However, even the official history shows that Bosnia has existed for over 10 centuries.
World of Sevdah on 25th OctoberWhat can I say? There is hope that Sevdalinke will never die; like Himzo Polovina once sang “Pjesma o Emini nikad umriet’ nece”. Many of the beautiful recordings of Himzo Polovina, Safet Isovic, Zaim Imamovic, Zehra Deovic and others are still available; even though they are hard to come by here. I bought some beautiful albums at Sevdah Kuca in Sarajevo, or on the street across from the Begova Dzamija last summer. Let us hope that the forces trying to shatter Bosnia and to erase its wonderful people and culture will not succeed. I would very much like to return and enjoy more of it. What are the prospects?
Ahmed Karim on 13th NovemberAnyway, I saw also some wonderful youthful performers, like Zanin Berbic, incredibly proficient on saz; he’s still in his teens. It’s too bad that Mostar Sevdah Reunion no longer exist; their CD “A secret gate” has the most beautiful and heartfelt rendition of “Imal’ jada k’o kad aksam pada”; if possible it surpasses even Himzo Polovina’s version. But, many of Himzo Polovina’s older recordings (and theresx are his best) can only be found as mp3 at the bosnaprkosnaodsna web site: a good remastered CD would of course be better.
It’s also too bad I did not find a CD of “Bosno moja divna mila” album, which my father bought when I was 5; which I cherish and treasure; I played it quite often for all the Bosniak refugees whom I met at the Bosnian cultural center in my hometown during the war; all the old people could relate to it; unfortunately the youngsters did not appreciate it so much. One girl even told me that probably her grandmother would have enjoyed it very much. Maybe today they have changed their minds, but I don’t know if young people relate to it much; However, they had a very good sazlija and singer at Sevdah Kuca in the Bascarsija, and all the times I went there it was well visited, adn not just by foreigners. It’s good to know that now high-quality recordings by Emina Zecaj and Amira Medunjanin are available, but I wish the music of the “good old times” were remastered and published in a high-quality edition. and that I could order it from abroad.
Ahmed thanks once again for posting a detailed comment.
We are trying to showcase real Sevdah on this web site and even many of the items which you mentioned can be considered as ‘not real Sevdah’.
For example, the song ‘Emina’ was written by a specific writer, while strictly speaking real Sevdah songs are written by people.
So what you see on this site are those songs which are written by people and there is no one specific author that can be named.
‘Emina’ is a modern song, written in Sevdah style.
I am fascinated by your writings nevertheless.
World of Sevdah on 13th NovemberSlazem se u potpunosti sa ovom analizom i s dozom olaksanja gledam na buducnost nase sevdalinke i sevdaha opcenito kao nacina zivota.
Htio bih napomenuti da slusajuci neke radio stanice u BiH dolazim do zakljucka da cak i neki pjevaci, vjerovatno jadni odrasli u tzv. turbofolku, pjevaju sevdalinku kao turbofolk, sto zvuci jako nakaradno.
Kroz sevdah se protura ekavica, prije bih rekao namjerno nego slucajno (jer u tom slucaju je i to vrsta agresije).
Zatim, dolazimo do apsurda da recimo srbijanski pjevaci trudeci se, odlicno otpjevaju sevdalinku razumljivo, na ekavici…S druge strane, bosanski pjevaci se jako trude otpjevati sevdalinku da sto vise lici na turbofolk.
Zamislimo kako slusajuci ove prve, nasa djeca (buducnost) ce misliti kako su sevdalinke zapravo srpske pjesme i na ekavici, a ove druge kako se zapravo sevdalinka treba pjevati kao turbofolk.
Da ne bih bio pogresno shvacen, nemam nista protiv Srbijanaca ni protiv ekavice, tim vise sto je sevdalinka pjesma svih naroda Bsne i Hercegovine.
Protiv sam izokretanja cinjenica i krivog (namjernog ili nenamjernog) tumacenja sevdaha i sevdalinke.
Tahir on 21st February@Tahir Fino sazeto. To je istina koja je jako zalosna. Takodje, mnoga raja koja ne voli turbo folk cesto zamrzi sevdalinku iz razloga sto je ona izvedena kao turbo folk pjesma i desi se dosta zabune da dosta raje misli da je sevdalinka i turbo folk jedna te ista stvar.
World of Sevdah on 21st FebruaryI was in Sarajevo from September 07 until Sept 08, and visited Sevdah Kuca, also I lived on Himza Polovina street up in Bjelava!
. It is quite correct that Turbo-Folk leads to a zombie state of mind. What I find interesting is that a vulgar Arab-Turkish form of pop-music so dominated in Serbia during a time when they were at war specifically with Muslims. Real Arabic and real Turkish music is actually very civilized.
Katja on 14th MarchIt is also quite correct to say that some American rock of the 1960s had some close similarities to Turbo-Folk. So did later developments in Irish and Scottish folk music, both the extreme electric side of it, and the over-produced Windham Hill school of Celtic music. I think what marks Sevdah as distinct is that it is an old school of music, a thoughtful and cultured school of music. I got to hear a lot of it in my time in Sarajevo, not just on T.V. or the radio, but this guy Hadzi Mujo who would sit in his shop and play the saz when he did not have customers, and we would all sit in the shop and drink coffee at my friend’s dress shop. Just remembering that can bring tears to my eyes.
Oh now that I think of it, is Lepa Brena showing the body part it looks like she is showing? Because another thing about turbofolk is the exploitation of women’s bodies gets way out of hand and in a most unattractive way! If one is going to be immodest, one could do it a little more artfully.
Katja on 15th MarchIt’s actually not Lepa Brena but Jelena Karleusa. And yes, she is showing what you think she is showing.
World of Sevdah on 15th MarchHow do you “stop” Turbo Folk….?? How do you “Stop” Rap?? How would you have “Stopped” the Rollng Stones or Punk ????
sergei on 21st April@Sergei You can’t stop it all any more. In a mega-commercial world we live in things like these are going to be popular as they go hand-in-hand with the drug, sex and alcohol driven ‘culture’ the world today relies upon.
It’s pretty clear to me that we are living in a ‘culturally unsustainable’ time, where people globally are being more destructive than constructive in cultural terms.
Whereas before music was about group activities, expression and bonding between people who were performing music together in groups and really respecting it, today music scene is about club stuff and masses of people simply consuming that ‘sound’ while losing their minds.
So the only way to stop turbo folk or stop rap is to change the society, which is going to happen mostly for the economical reasons or due to some sort of natural catastrophe that might hit the planet.
World of Sevdah on 21st AprilBosna or Bosnia comes from the ILLYRIAN word of Bosona meaning Land of Running Water..Bosnians have sufferd all kinds of genocides but the cultural one is the biggest becouse it earases our identity in the balkans and in the world..I am a 24 year old and Sevdah is the music i listen to and love.
We have more history then allmost the whole Balkans put together and the pyramids are just confirming that.For exaple IGENEA genetics have proved how unique we are.Being 55% Illyrian and only 15%slav.Everywhere you go in the world that knows bosnians they buy into that crap “serbs that converted to ISLAM”and its wrong.
We were Illyrians first and formost.now its a mix of different coltures and empires and religions that makes us so unique..Keep sevdah alive and spread the good culture of the Bosnians around the world. Salam from Bosona
Kalil on 23rd MayWell, I like “Emina” and “Hasanagin Sevdah” very much; I know they were written by Aleksa Santic; but it does not matter; I always thought they have long since become part of the sevdalinke repertory; Aleksa Santic seems to me to be very sympathetic to Bosniaks; At least he understood their viewpoint. “Djela Fato, djela Zlato” if I am correct is from a poem by Osman Djikic; and it was either Safvet-beg Basagic or Aleksa Santic who translated Heinrich Heine’s “Der Asra” as “Kraj tanana sadrvana”. It’s beautiful. But the most pure form of Sevdalinka is on a rare recording collected by Deben Bhattacharya some time in the 1950s or 60s in Sarajevo. It has an instrumental prelude by I think Emir Haskic followed by “Ljubicice i ja bih te brala” and “Banja Luko i ravnine tvoje” .
There was also a beautiful rendition of “Aj aksam doso” by Hasim Muharemovic, also recorded by Deben Bhattacharya in that time, but only available on a long out of print LP. It has also a short instrumental saz piece and what it says on the record “Serbian love song” but I don’t believe it is, because nobody but a Bosniak would play a saz or sargija. And the song does not sound in serb dialect to me. Too bad I can’t upload them nor that I haven’t anybody knowledgeable around to listen and tell me.
Another thing: I listen to very different kinds of music and to a lot of quite heavy rock music too, and I have never experienced that “zombie” state; nor did that make me drink or some such (I don’t even smoke!); then, one could, as some Wahhabis do, consider all music to be sinful: I don’t do that.
And of course I don’t believe that Bosniaks are “islamicized Serbs”. Bosniaks are, and have always been Bosniaks! Of course it is very well possible that a considerable proportion of people in Serbia, in Croatia and Bulgaria converted to Islam; for in teh 17th century Evliya Celebi described that many people in Bosnia as well as in the other Ottoman Balkan countries had become Muslims; what else would they have neded so many mosques for, as you cansee on almost all old pictures of Balkan towns?
Unfortunately, most Balkan Muslims were expelled or murdered in the first anti-Muslim Balkan genocide after the Russian-Turkish war of 1878; and in subsequent waves, that is why in Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia only insignificant minorities of Muslims remain. Not so in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Possibly some Bosniaks really are descended from Serbs who convertted to Islam, or from Croats or Vlachs, but what does it matter today? They speak Bosnian and are at least culturally Muslims, they are one nation. To me, Bosniaks are Bosniaks, and even if by analyzing their mitochondrial DNA it can be proved who their real ancestors were, who speaks Bosnian and is at least nominally Muslim is a Bosniak!
Ahmed Karim on 25th May@Ahmed I have listened to a lot of rock music in the past and have not become a ‘zombie’ as such, but if I compare myself now to how I was 10-15 years ago, I would have considered myself much more of a zombie back then than I am now. My point was around the concept that many people use music as a significant aspect of their life and open themselves up spiritually and emotionally to its influences (at least on the subconscious levels).
In Balkans this happens quite often with people who listen to Turbo Folk and post Turbo Folk lyric extracts all day long on their FaceBook statuses for example. These people are very heavily influenced by this music and tend to actively hate Sevdalinka as they deem it to be boring, old, irrelevant, primitive and so on. It’s a very dangerous cultural situation we are living in today.
World of Sevdah on 30th MayI appreciate sevdah music, but this article is really poor. Let alone your interpretation of political history, there are some facts about music history you should get right.
Your theory about “turbo folk conspiracy” is simply absurd. First, you confuse the so called “turbo folk” with “neo-folk”. TF did not even exist before nineties and it developed from the “neo-folk” music that appeared in the 1960s. It was connected with the massive immigration of Yugoslav workers to Germany where they were influenced by the music of the immigrants from Turkey and other countries. This is how many “oriental” elements transferred. “Neo-folk” was long neglected and ignored by the mainstream media in Yugoslavia as the communist cultural politics saw it as a deviation of culture, exactly like you do. Only in the eighties did it really emerge to the wider public scene, as one of the many consequences of the political and economic liberalisation after Tito’s death. Since the people of generally rural origin in Bosnia and Serbia liked that kind of music, publishing houses decided to tap into that market. Pop, rock and punk music also became more prominent in media, not because there was a conspiracy but because there was the scene with the audience ready to spend money.
I also don’t quite understand your idea of Austrian imposition of accordion. Those who brought the accordion obviously tried to play local songs with a new instrument. As a musician you should well understand how this happens. There is no politics in that.
To those who like Ahmed Karim don’t know: the people in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Croatia all speak the same language (the grammar is the same, there are some lexical differences). So there is no way you can tell Bosniaks, Serbs or Croats living in Bosnia by the way they speak.
I hope that next time you write about sevdah, you will write more about music and less about politics.
Filip on 5th June@Filip First of all thanks for your elaborate reply – much appreciated that you are participating within a valuable debate (hopefully).
I would strongly disagree with your branding of pre-90s turbo-folk as ‘neo-folk’. It’s simply ridiculous in my view. What you are calling ‘neo-folk’ is simply the ‘Phase 1 of Turbo Folk’ as far as I am concerned. Today’s incarnation of Turbo Folk is a dying breed of music which I am hoping will not exist at all within next 5 years as it has received so many steroids into its cardiovascular system that its imploding from the internal pressure on its own arteries.
Regarding the accordion and Austro-Hungarian Empire, the idea there is that something similar to Yugoslavia and us singing socialist songs happened. One set of instrumentation becomes uncool and another is imported in heap loads. The result is that the new instrumentation takes over. As people require more accordions, the Saz makers run out of business and demand dwindles, leading to a lack of people who know how to make a Saz and smaller and smaller popularity of that instrument.
This happens all the time in modern days and can be called or considered as ‘peer pressure’. For example desktop PCs have been largely superseded by laptops as desktops are seen largely as uncool and not portable. Accordion is a ‘better’ instrument than Saz as it allows two part music to be played, high clarity soloing, more varied sound capabilities and more versatile in general.
I was not trying to say that Austro-Hungarian Empire imposed accordion upon Bosnia, but their coming to Bosnia inevitably meant that Saz was pushed out through economic and cultural trends, just like Yugoslavian songs were pushed onto Bosnia during Tito era (Sevdalinkas weren’t forbidden, but people didn’t sing them as much).
And as the last point, my article here wasn’t of a political kind, but of a cultural kind. The fact that politics often impacts on culture is something I cannot easily change about the world and it would be silly of me to try and amputate politics out of my articles just to try and make a more non-political argument, when politics has played a major role in it all. Nevertheless I think my mentioning of politics in this article has been minimal or as minimal as possible.
And also, regarding the way people speak in Bosnia it’s not quite true that people in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Croatia all speak the same language as I can quite happily recognise people within Bosnia quite quickly even today. They speak the same language crudely speaking, but the dialects are more than recognisable. That plays an important part in understanding Sevdalinka heritage. Words like ‘pendzer’, ‘dunjaluk’ and ‘aman’ for example are not used by all the aforementioned countries’ peoples as widely in regular speak as well as in songs.
My up and coming article is going to be covering the ever-changing type of accompaniment used within Sevdalinka performances. It will not be mentioning politics in any way, shape or form (I think).
World of Sevdah on 5th June