Queer As Turbofolk (Part II): Body Politics

Welcome back to QAT, where it’s time for some more turbofolk therapy. In this edition, we’re looking at videos by the genre’s biggest female performers of the past decade. Videos that portray them as imperious hypersexual figures surrounded by objectified bodies at their disposal. And so without further ado, let’s begin today’s treatment with an intimidating, lesbian-themed music video full of women in fetish masks.

“It’d be a shame, a really big shame, if you didn’t accompany me to the toilet,” sings Nikolija, presumably not looking for someone to hold her handbag while she reapplies her makeup in the mirror. Catchy and impactful, Ćao zdravo was one of 2013’s biggest songs in Serbia, and the video is notable for how it toys with gender expectations, with singer-rapper Nikolija adopting an aggressive masculine role throughout, even going as far as lip-synching Teča’s guest rap (the man himself doesn’t even appear). Unsmiling and unglamorous, she’s a threatening sexual huntress with a group of pliant, feminine women on leashes at her mercy, their faces and voices hidden behind what look like gas masks. Had a slightly different artistic approach been taken, this clip would be easy to classify as faux-lesbianism for the male gaze, but titillating men is clearly not a priority here – there’s a distinct lack of femininity and little in the way of glamour, flesh or colour, plus the sexuality is cryptic and hinted at rather than overt. Most strikingly of all, there’s a cold, blunt intensity to the whole package that I find incredibly compelling.

We’ve seen female pop singers with men on leashes many times before – in Kisski’s Nashi parni molodci (the Russian answer to turbofolk if ever there was one), Rebeka Dremelj’s Vrag naj vzame and Melissa Lopez’s Point Of No Return. A feminine diva turning the tables and objectifying men with a coy wink to camera has almost become a standard trope in pop music. What we haven’t seen before in a mainstream video is a threatening, masculine woman doing the same with women, without a trace of coyness, flirtatiousness, or “lads’ mag lesbianism” (of the “two blondes eating bananas in a bubble bath” variety). This is what’s so great about Serbia’s divas – they’re not afraid to be scary. With a few exceptions like Pink, Gaga and Beyonce, big-name Western female pop stars play predominantly disempowering and subordinate roles like naughty schoolgirl (Britney – who was accused of copying Ćao zdravo in her video for “Work, Bitch”), gangster’s moll (Rihanna), perpetually drunk, easy party girl (Kesha, Miley), saucy goofball minx (Katy Perry) and sex kitten (Christina, Mariah, everyone else) – roles that play up to patriarchal paradigms rather than challenge them. By contrast, Serbia’s roster of leading ladies – bronzed, toned and megaboobed though they may be – seem freer to adopt forceful roles and be genuinely commanding and intimidating. From JK to Goga, Nikolija to Ana Nikolić, many of the biggest turbofolk divas are simultaneously hyperfeminine and hypermasculine: they’re dominant, uncompromising personalities that overtly wield sexual and social power on screen and stage. Many videos feature them with hosts of attractive, scantily-clad men at their beck and call, like a Balkan subversion of U.S. hiphop videos where male rappers seem permanently surrounded by available female bodies. And while I’m no fan of the Dunja Ilić video in which she suicide-bombs a wedding, or the one which opens with real footage of a nuclear weapon test and ends with her petrol-bombing someone – as both tastelessly go too far in their effort to shock – their existence illustrates a point. The force of personality exhibited by the women of turbofolk not only contrasts with Western pop but also with the pop-folk of neighbouring countries: for instance, Bulgarian chalga singers like Gina Stoeva, Emanuela and Alisia are a much more suppliant, conventional bunch. In the fantasy world of chalga, the men are the gangsters while the women are decoration – whereas in much of contemporary Serbian pop-folk, it’s the other way round. This is the case too in Nikolija’s eponymous follow-up, which sees her flirt with Milan Stanković in a club before ending the night on the roof accompanied by a group of masked, bare-chested thugs who seem to answer to her.

Turning the clock back, I judge 2005-2007 to be the period when turbofolk really shook off its tarnished 90s past and started making a case for itself as a dynamic, progressive, provocative art form on its own terms. It’s from here on in that the genre’s sound and look started to become more experimental, club-oriented and queer. For my money, the best example of an incredibly impactful turbofolk video featuring a threatening, hyperfeminine diva is Jelena Karleuša’s Upravo ostavljena from 2005 – a chaotic, unnerving leather-clad fever dream that opens with a minute of shouting and sirens before the melody begins, as a tattooed JK (wearing a mask, arm-length gloves and enough makeup to qualify for Harun Yahya’s sex cult) strikes poses to the beat. It’s unsettling, outside-the-box and evidently not designed for the straight male eye.

Dejan Milićević, the prolific gay director responsible for the above, also created the clips for Goga Sekulić’s Gaćice and Seksi Biznismen, as featured in the VICE Guide to Turbofolk (“What’s it about? Besides a sexy businessman?”). Both songs posit Goga as a husband-stealing predator.

Released the year after Seksi Biznismen, Selma Bajrami’s Promjeni se is a rollicking dancefloor tune with another fast-paced Milićević-directed video. The song and clip go together perfectly: a furious Selma sings “I hate the whole male gender” as anonymous topless men throw shapes behind her, a contrast that highlights women’s and gay men’s common frustration of being attracted to men but emotionally damaged by their behaviour one too many times. In 2010’s Voli me do bola, one of many genre videos where none of the men have shirts on, Selma taunts a well-muscled stud roped to a chair.

In the clips for Seka Aleksić’s big hits of 2010 and 2011 – Tamo gde si ti and Soba 22 respectively – not a single man is afforded the dignity of a shirt. In the sensual video for the former, directed by fashion photographer Miloš Nadaždin, a sultry Seka marauds majestically through what appears to be a fantasy version of a men’s steam room or gay sauna, inspecting a row of anonymous male bodies. In the latter, directed by Vedad Jasarević of Creative 4D, a regal Seka enjoys a milk bath while being attended to hunky male servants wearing eyeliner. Later, she faces off against a bronzed, topless hunk in a ring of fire. Both videos boast an unmistakably gay aesthetic.

Not to be outdone by Seka, Goga ratcheted up the BPM in 2011 with throbbing dance track Muška lutka (“Male Doll”). In the video, once again directed by Dejan Milićević, Goga paws at a coterie of male models clad only in briefs (and in one case a bow tie) playing the titular dolls.

Our sordid saunter through the history of Serbian shirtlessness takes us next to Sindi’s Telo gori. In this performance on RTV Pink’s Sunday night show “VIP Room” – which claims to be the biggest primetime music show in the Balkans – Sindi flirts with a gaggle of hard-bodied hunks who take their turns to strut down the studio catwalk.

Model Marko Mićović, the first to interact with Sindi in the video above, turns up again shirtless, pumping iron and dripping with sweat in 2012’s Balkan Bachata – an English-language turbofolk song designed for international audiences and released in German-speaking Europe and across the Balkans. In the clip, Belgrade-based Slovenian duo Clea and Kim flirt with a selection of barely-clothed studs in a gym.

Marko appeared again in Mia Borisavljević’s Gruva Gruva, quite possibly the hottest turbofolk video of all time. I’m not going to disappear down a pseudo-intellectual rabbit hole trying to analyse this one – it’s a bunch of buff young male models sprayed orange, larking around on a catwalk wearing nothing but Serbian-flag boxer-briefs, shoes and socks, and inspired post-Ottoman kitsch in the form of fake moustaches and sequined caps. What’s not to love? This video more than perhaps any other shows how comfortable the genre is with male objectification. The aesthetic is unmistakably gay, and yet the video plays with, subverts and reappropriates tropes of national identity. It’s full of flags and national symbols, yet is blisteringly homoerotic and explicitly recasts the country as one where men are sex objects and women pull the strings. Either that or at the time of shooting, the economy was under such strain that the poor lads couldn’t afford clothes and had to come in their pants – which I’m sure is what more than a few people did upon first viewing.

Last but not least, the queerest turbofolk video by a female artist has to be 2013’s Etiketa, in which singer Ljupka Stević is backed by 4 shirtless male dancers wearing high heels, nipple tassels and rubber tights. In the second half of the clip, Ljupka becomes literally entangled with her androgynous male twin – a male model styled to look just like her. The gender-bending on display reflects the song’s lyrical theme of how, when a relationship ends, we leave part of ourselves in the other person and carry part of them in us – an indelible stamp. Men dancing in high heels seems to be in fashion at the moment, as evidenced by Ukrainian boyband Kazaky and the gay French trio that reached the final of this year’s Britain’s Got Talent dancing to Beyonce numbers in stilettos.

All of the above examples make it pretty clear that turbofolk demands reassessment both outside and within Serbia and the Balkans. The still-common view of the genre as nationalist noise for the lower classes doesn’t square well with its reality as a homoerotic fantasy land – pioneered in full mainstream view by gay male directors and creatives – where divas call the shots and gorgeous male models are paraded like beef cattle, for audiences to drool over their rippling flesh in various scenarios. It’s exploitative without ever being seedy (again, unlike Bulgarian pop-folk, which often crosses into cheap and vulgar near-pornography), and I love it. Things have changed a lot in the past decade, and the genre as it stands today demands to be discovered by an international audience, especially a gay audience; I’m surprised it hasn’t yet truly. Here’s to the continued blossoming of turbofolk’s bold queer aesthetic. Now where can I get a pair of those seksi underpants?

Queer As Turbofolk (Part I): “Eastern Europe Is Homophobic”

You’ve read Lily’s How to write about the Balkans piece. Here’s my take on how to write about “turbofolk”.

Talk about Ceca and Arkan, the widow and the warlord, their televised wedding and her house arrest for illegal arms possession and massive embezzlement. About kafanas and nationalists, gap-toothed unsophisticates drinking their cares away and firing shotguns in the air as they dance to cacophonous oriental melodies warbled by barely-clothed gangster’s molls. About glamorous clubs full of silicone starlets and gun-toting mafiosi. Make it foreign and scary. Less civilized than “our” music and nightlife. Root it in the Milošević era, ignoring any evolution in the almost 15 years since, ignoring Yugoslavia’s preceding musical history, and ignoring comparable pop-folk genres that emerged in many European countries during the 1990s as musicians augmented traditional sounds with new technology. Most of all, emphasize your disdain for it. Postmodern irony and Western cultural supremacy demand that you look down on this giddy alien music and those who enjoy it, without considering classism, balkanism or social context.

Ignore the fact that Bosnian, Croatian and Romani singers are hugely popular in Serbia as you paint it as a still-intolerant nationalist nightmare. Overlook that a lesbian singer of Romani heritage won Eurovision for Serbia in 2007 with an uncompromisingly queer-themed performance. In fact, remain blind to the queer side of Serbian pop culture in general – even though it’s pretty hard to miss when today’s music videos, performances and concerts spill over with oiled-up orange muscle men, fierce divas, flamboyant drag performances and even rainbow flags, all to a soundtrack of sick synths and thundering club beats. Ignore the fact that Belgrade’s most prolific and successful music video director, whose work has helped shape the genre’s entire look, is openly gay, as are many of his industry colleagues. It’s not just in America and Britain that gay men historically shut out of other spaces find a natural home for themselves in the entertainment industry.

But what’s that cry I hear over the horizon? “Eastern Europe is homophobic” goes the chorus from the West – often hand in hand with “Eastern Europe is racist” – by people who may not have even been there or know much about the region and are prone to view it as a monolithic, undifferentiated whole. And while it’s true that non-heterosexuals are worse off legally and in many cases socially in the eastern half of our continent than the western half (as can be seen from this map), something I by no means wish to trivialize or diminish, this strictly binary view ignores all kinds of nuances and differences on the ground, while not-so-subtly positing Western Europe as a rainbow paradise – along the lines of “We’re civilized here, we even let our gays get married and appear on television, not like those backward peasants over there who persecute them!” Catherine Baker has written here about gay rights and Western homonationalism in relation to the Sochi Olympics, Serbia and Eurovision. Added to which, in any less-well informed discourse about “Eastern Europe”, the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Albania tend to be lumped together with the Warsaw Pact states, which not only experienced a very different implementation of Communism to the Western Balkans but also varied greatly to each other, with Hungary much more liberal than Poland, and East Germany and Romania far more claustrophobic and surveillance-drenched than either.

In reunified Germany, people even have the luxury of being able to stigmatize their backward post-Communist neighbours while keeping things strictly domestic. This August, I saw a comedy pilot on German TV where, as a skit, West German comedian Jan Böhmermann was filmed going about his daily business in the city while wearing a Hitler moustache. (Sew up my sides already.) The segment was introduced as follows: “What would it be like to have a Hitler moustache? A question that, apart from in East Germany, pretty much no-one has asked in the past 70 years.” Ascribing neo-Nazi sentiment solely to East Germans while erasing its existence in West Germany in the space of just two sentences – now that takes skill (and shocking arrogance). I find it grimly fascinating when people try to absolve their societies of all prejudice like this, even the very possibility of prejudice, by casually projecting it onto a convenient Shelbyville.

In relation to race, while out with friends in Germany, I once heard a young American comment that Eastern Europe was racist because there were “no black people there” (clue: it’s because they weren’t involved in transatlantic slavery, and from the end of World War II to the collapse of Communism were largely closed societies with very low immigration. Also, there are, just not very many). Similarly, in his broadly enjoyable travelogue Dawdling By The Danube, English writer Edward Enfield describes Vienna’s lack of diversity (!) and is bemused by how few visible ethnic minorities there are there compared to London, wondering whether this is due to racism, before it is explained to him that Britain’s large non-white populace is tied to his country’s colonial history.

There’s an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where a society purifies itself of all negative emotions and attributes by creating a creature to absorb them all. The race achieves perfection and transcendence at the cost of birthing a monster of pure misery and hate – one that they, now-enlightened, promptly abandon to a life of pain and isolation. I’m reminded of this whenever the West is lazily held up as a glitter-filled snow globe of harmony, prosperity and diversity, by means of pointing a post-colonial finger at the rest of the planet for being not quite as sparkly, accepting and gay-fabulous as we are in oh-so-civilized Western Europe and North America. We also happily overlook the fact that many of these countries’ laws against male homosexual activity are a legacy of the British Empire, that their enthusiastically anti-gay brand of Christianity is a Western import (first via Europe then America) that has both displaced and been syncretized with indigenous beliefs, taking hold in the psychic space where traditional practices were trampled out of consciousness with the upheaval of European domination, and that in North Africa and the Middle-East, many of the repressive regimes that aren’t exactly très au fait with human rights in general, let alone those of women and woofters, are ones we prop up because the financial interests that govern our foreign policy prioritize secured access to these countries’ markets and resources over the welfare of their people. Here in the West, where women couldn’t vote a century ago (or until 1990 in parts of Switzerland), where sexism and racism are still significant problems, and where LGBTQ+ people still face all kinds of hurdles – like being kicked out of the army, kicked out by their parents or kicked to death in central London – we’ve so recently decided that The Gays Are Awesome^(TM) that we’re keen to not only export this realization to the rest of the world but to roundly condemn entire land masses for not having grokked that “gay is good” when we’ve only just had this epiphany ourselves. Which is to say: just get with the gays, Rwanda! It’s 2014 already!

All of this is a very long prelude to me grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and plunging you face-first into the gay, gay world of Serbian pop culture in the coming parts – into a lurid technicolor fantasy land where queer subtext is sometimes implicit but often right on the surface, and male objectification is endemic. Who’d a thunk that the country we in the West superficially associate with nationalist warmongering, corruption and NATO air strikes (thereby forgetting its Yugoslav, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian history) would have quite possibly the world’s gayest pop music?

Amazingly, I’m not talking about the sort of faux-lesbian antics designed to titillate straight guys that are the bane of Western pop culture. While American and British music videos and advertising bombard us with images of semi-dressed nubile young women on a daily basis, to the extent that those of us not aroused by these images have come to accept them as our society’s wallpaper, Serbian music videos feature just as many scantily clad men than women – if not more. I think the region’s Southern European macho culture enables this considerably: lingering shots of shirtless hunks and glistening musclebound torsos are a common and acceptable sight in media, and are not interpreted as “gay” as they typically would be in the West. Gleeful male objectification is common and real: at the last Serbian concert I went to, in a diaspora venue, the male singer of the house band let women queue up to squeeze his butt and be photographed with it after his performance. An hour later at the same event, headliner Jelena Karleuša pulled a guy out of the audience and stripped him down to his underwear on stage. In the West, these kind of shenanigans would be too gay to fly (for much the same reasons that American men won’t wear speedos or tight jeans).

Meanwhile, our female pop stars are constantly objectified for commercial gain, being variously expected to pout and pose in minimal clothing (of the “two Band-Aids and a cork” variety), dress up in all kinds of S&M apparel, spray cream out of their lady lumps, drape themselves in reptilia, and partake in questionable prison chic and “sexy victim” shtick. With the exception of a couple of acts like LMFAO and Robbie Williams, who used to regularly whip his clothes off back in the 1990s (admirably but perhaps regrettably), this simply doesn’t apply to male pop singers in the English-speaking world, who are rarely physically objectified to any remotely comparable degree. Or can you imagine Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars snogging mechanically and passionlessly on stage during an awards ceremony solely to generate titillation and headlines, Jason Derulo writhing in a ball gag in his latest clip (at least it’d stop him singing his name), Brad Paisley taking up twerking, or Justin Bieber spraying cream out of a giant phallic eclair? (Don’t answer that.)

Now that I’ve set the scene and whetted your appetite, in the coming parts, we’ll look at a selection of flashy and flesh-filled music videos ranging from superficially heteronormative to overtly queer, hear what academics have to say on the intersection of Balkan pop-folk and queer culture, and also sample some videos from the broader post-Yugoslav and Balkan region that mirror the Serbian trend. For now, I’ll leave you with this clip by gay Serbian hip-hop artist Damjan Loš, entitled “Don’t Touch Me, Faggot”. Vidimo se!