Roze kiborzi i (de)centrirane ideološke mašine: preobražaji muzičke kulture (turbo)folka
Pink Cyborgs and (De)centered Ideological Machines: Makeover of the (Turbo)Folk’s Musical Culture

Summary/Abstract: Like most post-traditional musical genres that draw upon the global symbolic exchange and consumption, turbo-folk employs different strategies of borrowing, copying, citing and stealing, while at the same time prescribing the desirable form of gender identities and, specifically, desirable femaleness. ‘Turbo-folk’ designates a rather short but nevertheless highly criticized episode of the so-called neofolk culture in Serbia, strongly shaped by the political and ideological transmutations of the nineties. In transitional Serbia, this brief period and its assumed political agenda were quickly transformed towards global pop culture - both on musical, visual and ideological level. A new and heterogeneous post/turbo or post/neofolk musical culture, therefore, emerged and quickly went through several changes that eroded the alleged core of the genre: namely, the sexed and ethnicized body (and vocal embodiment) of the female star seen as a property of powerful men, a specific female turbo-folk public persona staged in order to confirm the regime’s ideology. What happened was that post/turbo-folk came to be ‘one of many’ in the expanded local and regional scene of pop(ular) music: together with social change towards (limited) plurality, this contributed to the more diverse popular concepts of gender identities, to representational strategies where gender, technology and power constantly build unstable and contingent alliances. A new influx of global musical models flooded ex-turbofolk culture: an altered current of transnational musical exchanges and appropriations was born. Leaving aside the argument on ‘authenticity’, in this paper I track three different localizations of a same piece - a Bollywood song that quickly got its Bulgarian (chalga) and Serbian (pop-folk) cover - the latter being a critically acclaimed piece Insomnia by singer Jelena Karleuša. By employing different means (melody and musical style, lyrics, visual staging and the dramaturgy of the musical video, discourses on music etc), popular representations of gender tend to conform to ruling cultural norms, but also, inversely, shape the tensions between dominant (gender) ideology and more or less progressive proliferation of dif erence. I therefore track two axes: the first one points to the alteration of ‘natural’ turbo-folk bodies towards openly modii ed post/turbofolk corporealities where artificiality (mocked as ‘cyborgness’) is positively valued, while also tracing different popular conceptions of gender that the same song as a cultural text enacts in the aforementioned local cultures.

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