This is a very related article illustrating the trash of Turbofolk creation.

http://www.sarajevo-x.com/showtime/tv/cnn-turbofolk-je-smece-od-muzike/120113053

Just posting here for future reference. Included video is a must-see and provides good additional context to what I have written about here.

Internetculture and a do-it-yourself attitude is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s aspiring musicians. More and more people release their music online, across the whole world. And one single user never had more access than now to good music. I think commercialization of music has one big enemy and that’s the open source mentality of more and more people who grow up in this age of internet and free information (and music). So we (good music lovers) have at least that

@World of Sevdah, you shouldn’t talk about stopping rap (actually hiphop). You should say ‘how can we stop bad hiphop?’. Bad commercialized music is seen in every musical genre. To proof there’s good hiphop, here’s one of my favorite artists (rapper of Atmosphere) doing a song acoustic live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P2Xwej_xjM&feature=related

This is music by people who listen to good music themselves, across multiple genres. I see with people around me, the ones who love music put in effort to find more good music, no matter the genre. The simpletons who only know turbofolk, or pop (it’s all the same crap really) don’t.

love, Mirel

The argument here is similar to arguments music ‘purists’ use to discredit new forms/fusions of music. Take the advent of early jazz music before improvisation was integral to the music. Some early jazz musicians looked down upon the “new” improvisational styles of jazz music that began to emerge, which coincidentally enough IS what many listeners today consider jazz to be. Now I’m not arguing that turbo folk or its likes are a new form of sevdah. But to argue that turbo folk depreciates the value of sevdah, even to the average listener, is a strech in my opinion. Especially when you mention things like:

“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.”

AND “the Turbo Folk conspiracy.” OR “Turbo folk – the curse of the modern Balkans”

Since when have the construction of musical scales been able to control/induce certain states in people? This sounds like a rant from my father when I first began to listen to rock/metal/electronic music. (Sevdah would have been my first music for many years). You do make a relevant point here to music, but I don’t see its connection to sevdah. I could easily replace turbo folk with american pop music in the above sentence but I wouldn’t argue that american pop music is destroying traditional american roots music or that it is necessarily related to the heritage of america.

I think the main argument you play across here is related to the fear of a loss of cultural heritage, which is a strong issue especially because of the assimilation of Bosnian youth to new cultures.

I am not attempting to diminish the importance of sevdah, but I think a better analysis of this topic would benefit readers of this site without turning them away. (This article and other text on this site seem to be a little hostile towards music outside of sevdah.) No one wants to listen to an angry musician (not that you are!) ranting about how no one cares about their form of music and how commercial music is no good because it is written by big companies for money. I don’t believe ANY traditional music anywhere will become mainstream again, given the growing globalization (or should I say americanization) of music. But I do truly appreciate this site and your strong will to preserve sevdah in its true form. Any response will be welcome! Thank you again

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).

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.

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.