• Corpus ID: 18193422

The concept of turbofolk in Croatia: inclusion/exclusion in the construction of national musical identity

@inproceedings{Baker2007TheCO,
  title={The concept of turbofolk in Croatia: inclusion/exclusion in the construction of national musical identity},
  author={Catherine Baker},
  year={2007}
}

• Catherine Baker
• Published 2007
• Sociology

If national identity is constantly redefined through social practice (Edensor 2002:12; Bellamy 2003:29), then Croatia’s cultural politics show those processes frequently at work in popular music (Čale Feldman et al. 1993; Pettan 1998; Pavlović 1999; Ceribašić 2000; Senjković 2002; Senjković and Dukić 2005). This holds true not only for the wartime years, when Croatian popular music was conceptualised as excluding any signifiers of ‘enemy’ Serbian culture, but also for the Yugoslav era (Luković 1989; Rasmussen 2002), and for the contemporary period when cultural products circulate more freely among the ex-Yugoslav states and the youngest music consumers may have little first-hand experience of wartime. This paper deals particularly with ‘turbofolk’, a term carried over from discourses on Serbian music to describe aspects of both Serbian and Croatian musical production. ‘Turbofolk’ acts less as a concrete definition of musical directions, and more as a conceptual category which aggregates connotations of banality, foreignness, violence and kitsch in order to provide critical apparatus with a ready-made strategy of distancing. The anthropologist Anthony Cohen sees boundary-setting practices like these as fundamental in forming and maintaining group identities. Any community, for Cohen, is maintained through continual value-judgements of similarity to/difference from the group, while the similarity/difference boundary is judged according to criteria which require only the symbol, not its content, to be agreed (Cohen 1985:12-14). Community, then, is the product of continual inclusion/exclusion judgements – and also depends on contact with the judged other (Eriksen 2002:12). Since Croatian access to music from Serbia has grown ever easier in the six years since the death of Croatia’s nationalist 1990s president Franjo Tuđman, popular music in contemporary Croatia often reflects this process in action. ‘Turbofolk’ has been used as a symbolic framework throughout this period, but the incursion – or return? – of what turbofolk denotes (showbusiness-folk music using contemporary global standards of production, presentation and promotion) has nonetheless become ever more apparent.