Back in November 2018, Bulgarian pop-folk singer Galena dropped an interesting new track written and arranged by Daniel Ganev – a profilic songwriter-producer with a number of big pop-folk hits under his belt. Fenomenalen is a sexy, insistent number with striking production, heavy folk instrumentation and an insidious rhythm. The accompanying music video opens tantalizingly with Galena awakening from a pod on board a space station, but fails to make use of its original concept and setting – nothing further happens in the rest of the clip apart from Galena singing in various parts of the station (in her pod, in the corridor, on a biobed) wearing different outfits, as a drone films her. It seems low-budget, even if it isn’t necessarily, and while the aesthetics are great for what they are, there’s no plot or event – Galena is alone throughout, without dancers or a love interest or rival, and the video’s concept has no connection to the song’s lyrical theme of intense physical infatuation. Nevertheless, it’s notched up 20 million views on Youtube to date, which I credit to the strength of the song and performer.
Galena’s live performance of the song at the annual Planeta TV gala a couple of months later is a lot of fun and has a much stronger link to the song’s content, as she toys imperiously with a fenomenalen man. Now why couldn’t he have been on the space station with her? Did he get sucked through a malfunctioning airlock, or leave in a huff because the replicator didn’t know what creatine was?
To my great surprise, a Serbian cover of Fenomenalen appeared this July. And not just a half-hearted or unimaginative one (as Serbian adaptations of Bulgarian songs and vice versa can often be, as evidenced by Indy’s Cka kosmička and Maria’s Da me gali) but a major production created to kick-start the career of new artist Tijana eM (Tijana Milentijević), who competed on Zvezde Granda aged 15 and is now being launched as a breakout act at 20. Žena od sultana is the most skilled adaptation of a song from one Balkan country to another that I’ve seen, one that elevates what could have been a generic cover version into an auteur gesamtkunstwerk that has made huge waves in Serbia and beyond, and – having attracted 10 million views in just 3 weeks – seems likely to be an even bigger hit in its new incarnation than it was in its old.
Adapting the song for Tijana, multi-talented songwriter, drummer and producer Sharan Allegro (Saša Nikolić) of Serbia’s Allegro Band makes no musical changes – the instrumentation and production are kept exactly the same. Allegro Band have collaborated with Daniel Ganev before, and there’s a clear understanding here that his song is already strong enough and is suitable for the Serbian and post-Yugoslav music market in its current, very ‘eastern’-sounding form. Ditching the underbaked space-station concept of the original clip, Nikolić and his production team Sharan Concept seemingly take the song’s Ottoman-style musical motifs as inspiration for a stunning music video in the style of a prestige Turkish drama of the kind hugely popular in the Balkans. The new lyrics (“No-one knows who you’re sleeping with, and that the sultan’s wife is madly in love with you”) and the video’s plot are tailored to each other magnificently; both were written by Nikolić, who also directed the video, starred in it as the titular ‘sultan’, and provided backing vocals together with Sladja Allegro.
The shoot is technically complex, much of it using artificial rain, and has the most accomplished cinematography I’ve seen in a Balkan pop video in years, maybe ever. The color palette is strongly monochrome throughout, starkly conveying a gritty mafia underworld that has been drained of warmth, softness and femininity. By contrast, the shots of Tijana employ vibrant reds and pinks whenever she is alone with her thoughts – toying with a strawberry at the dinner table as she thinks of her lover, relaxing in the pool in a jarringly kitsch swimsuit and sunglasses, and cavorting with her lover while her husband is away carrying out a hit – suggesting she has carved out a secret world of vibrancy and sensuality for herself amid an oppressive milieu.
Just as Tijana is the only character associated with color, she’s also the only character who breaks the fourth wall. Shots like this in particular – where she gives an intense, knowing look to camera as her oblivious husband sleeps beside her – expertly convey the feeling that she’s personally disclosing her story just to us, letting us in on a secret.
There have been plenty of mafia-themed spots over the years, but none of them have had this level of sophistication and characterization – the last crime-themed video that was this hard-hitting and centered a female perspective this strongly was In Vivo’s excellent Divlje snovi featuring Elma Sinanović in 2018. Fittingly given its austere, rain-soaked imagery, this is a video that thrives on gray areas: Tijana, her husband and her lover are all afforded nuance and grace, none of them clearly portrayed as either heroes or villains but as complex, flawed people; the only character clearly shown as a villain is the paparazzi photographer. Many shots use light in interesting ways, lending a sense of furtiveness and of passion thriving in the shadows, and giving the audience the feeling we’re being allowed to glimpse something forbidden.
Interestingly, hardly anyone in Serbia seems to be familiar with the original. So why is this? “Apart from a very brief period in the mid 2000s when Planeta TV and Azis took the whole of the Balkans by storm by the sheer surprise of their comparatively slick presentation, Serbs (and, along with them, all of ex-Yugoslavia) have never really listened to Bulgarian music. Hence hardly any Serbs realize that this is a Bulgarian cover,” Nick Nasev tells me. “It’s the complete opposite to Bulgarians – for instance, Radio Veselina’s playlist is a perfect example of Bulgarian listening habits, where within an hour 50% of the songs are Bulgarian and the other 50% are ex-Yugoslav (mainly Serbian), Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Albanian, with the occasional Arabic and Israeli song and sometimes a Russian song. It’s all a legacy from the final decades of the cold war. In the 1970s and 1980s, communist Bulgaria, Romania and Albania did not allow a commercial pop-folk genre to develop officially, so people in those countries would gladly (and often illegally) listen to radio stations from Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey to hear the pop-folk emanating from there. That’s why 1980s-era Yugoslav turbofolk, pop and rock stars such as Lepa Brena, Vesna Zmijanac, Neda Ukraden, Dragana Mirković, the late Saban Saulić and Srebrna Krila are massively popular in Bulgaria, western Romania and northern Albania, particularly among people in their 40s and 50s. By contrast, Yugoslavia’s music scene fully met the needs of the local populace, and the music coming from neighboring Warsaw Pact/Stalinist countries was so boring that no-one bothered to pay attention to what was happening pop-music-wise across the border. Over 30 years later and that attitude remains, despite the massive changes that have occurred since.”
After the last 18 months of low-key, non-melodically-driven songs heavily influenced by trap and post-trap, I knew Serbia’s pop-folk scene needed reinvigorating. But I didn’t expect a Galena track from 2018 to be the song that would shake turbofolk out of its slumber and remind people of the heights and depth that the genre is capable of. Žena od sultana has been rapturously received by a public hungry for dark, sensual, melodic pop music that doesn’t underestimate its audience and has a strong Balkan sensibility. It’s a triumph, and it’s come just at the right time.
Turbofolked 