Illyrian Gazette

I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here

2007-12-05T09:39:00.000Z

Thirteen years ago, ex-boy band member Ivan Gavrilović was immortalising the joys of fast cars and the first wave of Serbian turbofolk with his cover of 2 Unlimited's No limits, 200 na sat (200 km/h).

Now, via Belgrade 2.0, documentarists Dušan Šaponja and Dušan Čavić have tracked him down to his new life 'killing bugs for a living'.

Yo (Y Yo, Y Yo) Soy Betty La Fea

2007-11-30T13:53:00.000Z

Ugly Betty completists in Croatia have a treat in store: four different versions of the show have been or will be appearing on Croatian television, across the three national channels.

HTV has the US series, RTL has gone ahead with a Croatian/ex-Yugoslav version called Ne daj se, Nina (Hang in there, Nina), and now Nova TV plans to broadcast the original Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty la fea (I'm Ugly Betty) and its Mexican offshoot, which will be the first soap opera to be dubbed into Croatian instead of subtitled.

With thirteen more Betty franchises to choose from (at last count), do we have an idea of how Croatia's soon-to-open digital spectrum might look...?

Monday Footballblogging

2007-11-26T15:33:00.000Z

It's jagshemash from Kazakhstan to Croatia, Andorra and England in the World Cup 2010 qualifiers: half of all three teams' Euro 2008 qualifying group have been drawn against each other again for their next outing. Their new opponents include Ukraine, Belarus, and of course the reluctant homeland of Mr Sagdiyev. (With dozens of Staines Town fans dressing as Sasha Baron Cohen's other character Ali G last week to cheer their team to a shock FA Cup win over Stockport County, expect a run on the moustache market before the Kazakhs arrive at Wembley.)

It'll mean another guaranteed encounter for British comedian Russell Brand with the 'terrifyingly simplistic call-and-response mantra' that put the wind up him at Wednesday night's game - Brand thinks of it as 'a needlessly fascistic form of chanting', and the Gazette suspects it knows it better as 'U boj, u boj, za narod svoj!'.

Chances are, it'll also mean another excuse for the Croatian team to put three goals past an overrated western-European rival, and increase their chances to have another verse of the country's unofficial footballing anthem Neka pati koga smeta named after them.

Baruni's 9-year-old hit has been dusted down for every tournament since 1998, when their manager Miroslav Rus wrote the song to celebrate Croatia's World Cup run where the Vatreni (including one Slaven Bilić) knocked Germany out 3-0 in the quarter-finals. Or as they remembered it:

'Rekli su nam da smo spori, pa su Njemce poslali
A mi smo im dali tricu, pa su kući otišli'

('They said we were slow, so they sent the Germans
But we scored three against them and they went home')

Almost a decade later, the song has become a rather less self-deprecating equivalent of England's Three Lions - although the latter never had occasion to metamorphose into a handball version (Croatia took gold in the 2003 World Championships), a Davis Cup final anthem, or a tribute to skiing siblings Janica and Ivica Kostelić. As the Gazette is sure to be reminded, that's probably because England hasn't even been in a position to sing one. Indeed, if a version about 'pa su došli Englezi' ('so the English came') isn't in the works yet, it's only a matter of time.

Literally, 'Neka pati koga smeta' translates as 'Whosoever it troubles, let him suffer' - but, football being football, 'F*** you if you're bothered' might be more like it.

Musicologists could point to 'Neka pati koga smeta' as the point where Baruni (formed as a neo-tamburica band on the model of Rus's previous project Gazde) cast off the folk waistcoats and crossed whole-heartedly into electrification. For the fans, it's proof that Croatian World Cup campaigns get the anthems they deserve: '98 is legendary on both counts, but Croatia's underwhelming follow-up at World Cup 2002 was accompanied by a just as underwhelming anthem involving pop singers Claudia Beni and Ivana Banfić. 'Hrvatice vas vole' ('Croatian women love you') might have lent credence to the saying that football is a continuation of war by other means (insofar as in both cases women kiss men goodbye to go to a far-off country, pray for them, and cry until they come back), but didn't inspire anything more than an early exit in the group stage.

A new generation of players in 2006, and a new generation of music: rapper Nered was brought in to sing 'Srce vatreno' (Fiery heart) with the Zaprešić Boys collective. Croatia... well, that's where the theory falls down, since they didn't make it through the group stage then either.

Nonetheless, they'd better have a good one lined up for 2010...

Rat Savezu!

2007-11-26T10:53:00.000Z

Welcome another new Balkan blog: Bosnian Football Culture shares the experiences of a Turkish anthropologist in Sarajevo researching how Bosnians make sense of the complicated politics of football.

(At Least) Six Parties In Search Of A Coalition

2007-11-26T10:51:00.000Z

The votes are in after yesterday's election in Croatia: HDZ have 61 Sabor seats, and SDP have 56, not counting the 5 seats voted for by the diaspora which will all but certainly go HDZ's way once they've been counted. Nonetheless, both HDZ's leader Ivo Sanader and his SDP counterpart Zoran Milanović say that they're in talks with other parties to form a government (if only Milanović had been this self-confident when he took over the party leadership in June, he might not be scrabbling for allies now at all).

Javno.hr is playing the numbers game: say SDP brings the urban liberal HNS and Istrian IDS on side. That should give them 67 seats, since Javno found an extra SDP one behind the sofa. HDZ ought to have 66, counting the diaspora, so on comes another round of hunt-the-coalition-partner. The far-right HSP are down to one seat (their leader Anto Đapić), and presumably not even HDZ would have the cheek to make an offer to Branimir Glavaš's Slavonian regionalist party HDSSB after Sanader spent most of last year getting its leader tried for war crimes. Which is exactly why SDP wouldn't dare ask him into government: although, given some of the PM candidate Ljubo Jurčić's off-colour comments during the summer, maybe all bets should be off. The pensioners' party HSU (as tracked by Dr Sean's Diary) have only one seat too, and will probably be auctioning it off to the highest bidder already. The peasant party HSS (5 seats) and shadow-of-their-former-selves liberals HSLS (2 seats) got Sanader out of trouble in 2003, but then there are the five seats for ethnic minorities (who might give SDP a leg up, but then again, might not).

Maybe anyone who can make head or tail of this deserves to run the country...

The Votes Are Not Quite In

2007-11-23T17:21:00.001Z

There's high praise for Slaven Bilić, the manager of the Croatian football team, in Jutarnji list, where Vlado Vurušić applauds him as a model of 'Croatia as it should be' - making him 'the least typical manager Croatia has ever had.'

Bilić has a law degree, has dreamed of playing guitar with Bill Wyman, 'uncompromisingly suspended three important players [...] for sneaking out before the first qualifier against Russia to go drinking with some Dara Bubamara', and 'forced a nation which has often let itself be led by laughable and small-minded racism to love a dark-skinned Brazilian, Eduardo da Silva'. Although, if his work ethic is 'part of the mentality which, he once said, he obtained precisely by living in England' (Bilić is an ex-West Ham and Everton defender)... then please can we have him back once you've finished?

And if he's a socialist who even HDZ loyalists (read: much of the Croatian footballing establishment) have rallied around, shouldn't someone tell Zoran Milanović before Sunday's election?

Celebrity endorsements are nothing new for SDP (though you'd be best advised not to mention Severina in 2003), nor for HDZ, who went as far this year as to add singer Miroslav Škoro to their party list in Slavonia (Jutarnji list's latest poll predicts that he'll get in). The leading Croatian Serb party SDSS is usually a bit more circumspect, but now that Croatia shuttles its dvanaest bodova at Eurovision across the border as often as it does, there may be hope yet - or so the party apparently thought when it signed up Eurovision winner Marija Šerifović for a secret concert at the Zagreb Velesajam during its campaign.

All Change At HTV

2007-11-16T16:05:00.000Z

The game of musical chairs which has been going on at HTV since Vanja Sutlić took over as director of the Croatian broadcaster has finally extended to the Entertainment department, where Aleksandar Kostadinov has resigned.

Marija Nemčić has already been replaced as director of HTV by Domagoj Božidar Burić (the husband of Nemčić's predecessor), and Hloverka Novak-Srzić (director of programming in the late 1990s) returned from an mixed year at Nova TV to become HTV's new news editor.

Jutarnji list speculates Burić has already nominated Kostadinov's successor in the shape of TV presenter Mirko Fodor. With the autumn schedule well under way, the immediate tasks ahead of Fodor (or anybody else) will be to prepare the department for the digital era (HTV3 for entertainment and sport, and HTV4 for rolling news) - and to reform HTV's flagship Dora project so that it produces a Eurovision finalist again...

New York, New York, It's A Wonderful Town

2007-11-07T14:03:00.000Z

And Marko Perković Thompson probably thinks so after a remarkably positive write-up of his New York concert in the Washington Post.

Unlike the New York tabloids' sensational depictions of a 'Nazi rocker', the Post went along to St Cyril and Methodius church and found:

'he sang a lot of fervently nationalistic, mid-tempo rock songs, most of which sounded like Iron Maiden doing Eastern European folk. And he harped again and again on his favorite themes: love of God, family and Croatia. Especially Croatia, which in his music sounds like a place abused for centuries and still under siege.'

Of course. maybe it depends on which diaspora group which journalist happens to talk to...

Another Rainbow Tour

2007-11-02T09:56:00.000Z

Over and above the problems in New York, local papers in other cities on Marko Perković Thompson's tour schedule are also reporting protests: that now makes difficulties in Toronto (where the concert has been moved from the original venue to a secret location, due to be revealed in Croatian churches on Sunday morning), Cleveland, and Melbourne, where Thompson is supposed to perform at a football club's social on 28 December.

Thompson's management - no doubt conscious of how little English-language material on the singer is out there - have responded on his official website with English translations of 18 songs which make up the majority of his most recent set list. Only a handful of the numbers from his Maksimir concert are missing from the list, although the omissions do include his Neka ni'ko ne dira u moj mali dio svemira (Don't let anyone touch my little part of the universe), where he made his most direct response to his domestic critics.

At least the tour seems to be more successful than Croatian music's American adventure in 2006, Severina's ill-fated rainbow tour.

Elections And All That Jazz

2007-10-31T13:30:00.000Z

It's a predictable old place sometimes, Croatia.

When Vesna Pisarović headed to jazz academy in The Hague (making her the only Croatian who's happy to be there?), it didn't take too far a leap of the imagination to expect that her next album would be something in the way of all that, well, jazz.

Neither is it much of a surprise that HDZ's electoral list for Slavonia includes the pop-tamburica singer Miroslav Škoro, the former director of Croatia Records, responsible for one of the best-selling albums of 2005, and sniffily described by Jutarnji list as 'the author of a few tamburica hits'.

If elected, Škoro would follow in the footsteps of Kićo Slabinac, his counterpart in the older generation of tamburica players, who held a Sabor seat for HDZ in the mid-1990s. The Croatian Musicians' Union, for one, would surely look to him to improve the legal protection of domestic musicians by increasing their quota on TV and radio.

And a Happy Halloween to all. It's probably just a coincidence that election candidates have to register today...

UPDATE: Seems HDZ have quite a bit of confidence in Škoro: he's in sixth place on the party list for his constituency, above interior minister Ivica Kirin and defence minister Berislav Rončević.

Hello Elections, Goodbye Maksimir

2007-10-25T16:10:00.000+01:00

There's a month to go before Croatia's parliamentary elections - hot on the heels of the Polish version - and still no sign, as yet, of the media's usual pre-election obsession: which singers will be performing at whose election meetings.

After HDZ's star-studded rallies before the first multi-party elections in 1990, most other parties tried to keep pace, making the 'they got paid how much to sing that?' article as common in the run-up to elections as the run-up to New Year's Eve. The level of excitement in 2003, when Severina sang at ten rallies for Ivica Račan's SDP for a rumoured €200,000, certainly hasn't been matched yet in 2007. Possibly because Račan lost the election in a display of unconvincing populism, which Novi list's Jelena Lovrić described as 'Mala-je-dala politics' in a reference to one of Seve nacionale's tartier songs.

One of Croatian music's biggest draws (for better or worse) will be absent in any case. Marko Perković Thompson, once upon a time a stalwart HSP supporter, will be otherwise engaged on a tour of the US and Canada in November - unless The New York Sun, which described Thompson as a 'neo-Nazi' singer in an article yesterday, has anything to do with it.

New York aside, there's already uncertainty whether his 4 November concert in Toronto has been called off or not: Thompson's tour organiser says no, but a Simon Wiesenthal Center press release states that the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center had the concert cancelled after a complaint to the venue's owners (much the same route taken by a different group to avert Thompson's Amsterdam concert in 2003).

And it's farewell (eventually) to the Maksimir stadium in Zagreb (the venue of Thompson's largest concert this year), due to be knocked down and replaced with a 53,000-seater affair on the city outskirts in Lanište (near the future handball arena) or Kajzerica. Needless to say, the Maksimir site, now owned by Zagreb council, will be sold off for enough money that 'another football stadium could be built with it' instead.

UPDATE: Leave it to Fox News to intervene in the Thompson case as unhelpfully as possible.

Toše Proeski 1981-2007

2007-10-16T12:56:00.001+01:00

Toše Proeski, the Macedonian pop singer, died this morning in a motorway accident near Nova Gradiška, Croatia.

Proeski was one of the most popular singers throughout the ex-Yugoslav states, with best-selling albums in Macedonian, Serbian and Croatian. He represented Macedonia at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004, and regularly won pop festivals in all three countries: in Croatia, he was arguably the most successful singer of his generation from another successor state.

Tomorrow has been proclaimed a day of national mourning in Macedonia.

Fashion Report

2007-10-05T13:49:00.000+01:00

Ex-Yugoslav cover version of the month: Bosnian/Croatian girlband Feminnem and Croatian schlager starlet Maja Šuput getting together on a version of Pusti, pusti modu (Get your fashion on) - originally a hit for Zdravko Čolić some 25 years ago, and now revamped to promote the annual Cro-A-Porter fashion event. (Šuput has a bit of previous in this department, having stood in for Tajči on a cover of Sedamnaest mi je godina a few years ago.)

They probably still have a way to go to match Swedish electro-trio Pay TV's new single Fashion report, which Don't Stop The Pop is all excited about:

'The sublime lyrics of Hakan Lidbo predicts, theorizes and travails the world and its wonderful ethical codes, political labels and designer mistakes. In the song we are presented dialectics placed directly on the dancefloor. This is the queer kind of strut that the likes of Judith Butler of the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley once demanded in her groundbreaking text Gender Trouble and The Politics of the Performative.'

Or more succinctly:

'This is a world where saving the world is a capitalist venture and can only result in air pollution. They are right.'

Eurovision: Picture Worth A Thousand Words

2007-10-03T15:49:00.000+01:00

The Serbian broadcaster RTS has come up with its logo for Eurovision, and the word from Belgrade 2.0 is that it's really quite a shocker.

According to RTS, the designers have chosen 'to create a group of different signs which are united by similar symbolism: Music, Serbia, Europe, Love, Youth, Happiness...', and which probably look an awful lot like a purple plum, a yellow trumpet, a green quaver and a pair of pink lips to you and me.

The full set of sixteen symbols (Ireland's RTÉ will be pleased to see one of them resembling a shamrock) can be combined in various ways so that: 'Instead of one sign which is static and always the same, a whole string of dynamic signs have been invented.'

Didn't we go through this with the London Olympic logo?

Eurovision: Two For The Price Of One

2007-10-03T10:27:00.000+01:00

Crawling back after an extended summer break, the Gazette can't help opening its autumn season with what must be supposed to be the solution to the east/west impasse at the Eurovision Song Contest: starting '08, the event gets two semi-finals instead of one, with all countries having to go through qualifying except the hosts and the lucky four (Britain, France, Germany and Spain) whose national broadcasters are pretty good at paying higher dues to the European Broadcasting Union than anyone else but not so hot at picking an entry that comes anywhere near the top ten.

How far this will keep the various geo-cultural interest groups happy depends on one of the details still being held back - who precisely ends up in which semi. On previous form, one can expect any of the following:

A random draw to be made by minor celebrities from the host country and presented as a pointlessly prime-time event, probably as the half-time entertainment at a beauty pageant;

Some impenetrable UEFA-style coefficient, based on the longitude of the national broadcaster's headquarters, the number of a) Roman divided by b) Byzantine artefacts preserved in the archaeological museum, and per-capita album sales for i) Tarkan ii) Shakira and iii) Gogol Bordello;

A permanently enshrined line down the map which will be guaranteed to upset at least three states which think they should be more western than that, and two which fancied their chances with the easties, but not the Russians or Ukrainians, who seem to know what they're doing wherever they are.

And who gets to watch which semi? That's the hard part, according to Eurovision executive supervisor Svante Stockselius:

'the proposal; is based on the idea that the two Semi-Finals of the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest will be aired simultaneously on Thursday, 22nd of May from Belgrade, Serbia. [...] Each Semi-Final is only being aired in the countries that are taking part, and only viewers from countries that take part in each respective Semi-Final can vote.'

But nevertheless:

'All participating broadcasters can broadcast the Semi-Final(s) they are not taking part in later as well, and the Semi-Finals will be webcasted live through Eurovision.tv. To serve the fans, both Semi-Finals will also be made available on-demand the next day.'

Oh. It must have taken a lot of work for somebody to make the system that complicated. But that's all right, because: 'To produce the two Semi-Finals live on different nights will result in high extra costs for both the Host Broadcaster and the participating Members.' As opposed to the Host Broadcaster having to kit out two venues for the semis instead of one, then.

It's still not certain where that leaves a Big Four broadcaster like the BBC, which wouldn't have to bother with the semis at all if it didn't want to: going by BBC Sport's usual form at tournaments when none of the home nations are involved, we're either in for full-on coverage of Ireland, or a frantic dash between the two feeds whenether something more interesting happens on the other channel, fireworks go up, or that girl whips her top off.

Oddly, none of this seems to have made the Croatian tabloids yet, although they can usually be guaranteed to leap into this sort of thing with a quick commentary on whether or not it benefits the national interest. But it's probably only a matter of time: the Belgrade-hosted show should make for a packed week of showbusiness ethnopolitics in any case, especially for those participants with more interest than your average state in pulling off a good result on the Serbians' home turf while still remaining true to the cherished traditions of national musical culture. (Here's looking at you, HTV...)

The Thompson Letters

2007-07-17T21:22:00.000+01:00

Marko Perković Thompson's reservation on a spot in the news agenda in advance of his Split concert next week has only been made firmer by Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who intervened in the scandal again with an open letter to the singer published in last week's edition of Globus.

In the letter (English translation), Zuroff refers to the numerous responses responses he has received from Thompson's supporters, 'reasonably intelligent people who are convinced that you are neither a fascist nor an anti-Semite' and who 'claim that your sole motivation is pure and noble Croatian patriotism and love of family and the Catholic Church.' He calls on Thompson yet again to clarify his position regarding the Independent State of Croatia (NDH):

'It is precisely because your patriotic credentials are absolutely impeccable that you must be among those who clearly and unequivocally reject the legacy of the NDH and the Ustashe. This will send a clear message to Croatians of all ages that one is not betraying his or her country by condemning the atrocities committed by the NDH and that one can be the most noble patriot by building a homeland which will be a model democracy which accepts minorities and fosters tolerance among different ethnic groups.'

Maybe Zuroff's next letter will be going out to Jadranka Kolarević, the member of HRT's programming council who vigorously defended the broadcaster's decision to show the concert (one of Zuroff's causes for complaint in his original statement on the matter) at the last council meeting (to the discomfort of the council president Zdenko Ljevak):

'Zuroff is forgetting at the same time that his country's army kills Palestinians on their own land almost every day, devastates Lebanon [...] Why did he not protest when the Četniks entered Vukovar? [...] Zuroff is forgetting that the creator of the idea of camps in the NDH was Eugen Dido Kvaternik, a Jew on his mother's side, that the wife of the Poglavnik [Leader] was of Jewish origin, that of 42 NDH generals 8 of them were Jews, that the NDH's artillery commander was a Jew, that Hitler's main investigator for the Near East was a Jew, that in 1945 of the 6 officers at the talks in Bleiburg only three had pure Croatian surnames, while it has been proved for one of the other three that he was a pure Jew.'

Thompson International

2007-07-06T19:27:00.000+01:00

Two weeks after Marko Perković's stadium concert, the promised article has appeared in The New York Times (mirrored at the International Herald Tribune) - where the real targets don't seem to be Thompason's music itself so much as the 'insensitivity to Holocaust issues' that could lead Croatia's education minister Dragan Primorac to tell the NYT's reporter that 'You can't see any antisemitism here' and that only four to five people had been giving Ustaša salutes.

Just as shocking, from the NYT's point of view, is the Croatian state broadcaster HTV's decision to endorse Thompson by broadcasting the concert on Sunday night (which did at least spare Croatian viewers from the Concert for Diana) without any sort of editorial comment. (Of the sort, for instance, that always surrounds talk-show clips of Serbian pop/folk music so as to make it clear that the channel isn't actually expecting viewers to enjoy it.)

Večernji list, meanwhile, is standing by Thompson - as well it might, being among the media sponsors of his current tour. Thompson's response to the criticisms from the NYT and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre:

'I've had enough of these unjustified attacks. I'm a musician, not a politician. At my concerts I sing about love, God and the homeland, only about that and nothing else. I and the members and my band didn't see anyone among the 60,000-plus people at Maksimir [stadium] with Ustaša iconography. [...] All well-intentioned people could read the message we sent with this concert and the songs we sang that night, and that is that Croats above all love their country and respect genuine moral values. [...] I can-t stand my concert being called a fascist rally, because whole families come to it. That means that my seven-month-old daughter Diva Marija, who was at the concert, is a fascist, according to the statements of those who are against my concerts. That's really too much. Why has nobody come to the defence of those wonderful people, the entire families who came to my concert?'

The saga continues on the summer coastal concert circuit, including a date in Split at the end of this month; the city's Poljud stadium will host the climax of a forthcoming leg of the tour.

Feral, Thompson, And Some Czechs

2007-06-28T13:10:00.000+01:00

Feral Tribune is back on its feet after a month of uncertainty - not independently, but as a member of the EPH press group, which already owns Jutarni list, Globus and a variety of other publications including the family/showbusiness magazine Arena. Feral's managing editor Zoran Erceg has cosily told JL that the satirical weekly will continue to be editorially independent, although broader coverage and a graphic redesign are likely now that Feral is financially secure.

Meanwhile, some showbusiness ethnopolitics from further north than usual: the lustration debate in the Czech Republic is spreading into entertainment after the singer Václav Neckář, formerly a member of the late 1960s Golden Kids trio with Marta Kubišová and Helena Vondráčková was accused by Lidové noviny of reporting on his colleagues (including Kubišová, a Charter 77 signatory) to the Czechoslovakian secret police between 1978 and 1987.

Radio Prague reports that Neckář's participation at the annual Trutnov festival (the oldest and largest Czech open-air festival) is now in question unless he provides a written explanation of his conduct at the time, according to a statement by its organiser Martin Vechet:

'Trutnov festival has a very specific tradition which is unusual in western countries. The festival began on the basis of police persecution in communist Czechoslovakia, when police broke up gatherings and illegal concerts, held secretly on various farms. Young people met at such concerts and were dispersed by the police. It would be crass for anyone who even indirectly supported the regime to play at a festival like this one.'

Trutnov first took place as an underground event broken up by the secret police in 1987, and thus celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, with headliners including the Boban Marković Orchestra.

Lastly, Večernji list reports that a New York Times journalist interviewed Marko Perković Thompson after his Maksimir stadium concert. Not that it sounds as if Thompson told us anything we didn't know:

'We talked about my songs, the Maksimir concert, and he was also interested in the iconography. I said that I and my audience, who are people from 7 to 77 years old, are patriots, not fascists. I also mentioned that on several occasions before the concert I said that those who want to wear uniforms ought to wear the uniforms of the victorious Croatian army which won the Homeland War.'

Not that they ever seem to listen...

All Over For Feral?

2007-06-21T17:53:00.000+01:00

Readers of Feral Tribune haven't been in a position to appreciate the weekly satirical magazine's take on Marko Perković Thompson's concert, or, for that matter, on anything else: after 15 years as an independent publication (separating from the Split daily Slobodna Dalmacija when the state took SD over in 1992) the newspaper has controversially been forced to cease publication due to an unpaid VAT bill of €68,000.

From a British perspective, it might be hard to see why the press are liable for VAT at all, but from a Croatian one, that might not be the point: a statement from the Social Democratic Party last week alleged that the government chooses not to pursue the tax debts of certain publishers 'because of the ideological character of their publications' (not to mention those owned by the state - the daily Vjesnik and the national broadcaster HRT), while sticking to the letter of the law in the cases of more oppositional media such as Feral.

Although the government announced its intention to reduce VAT on magazines to 10% from its current level of 22% when news of Feral's debt crisis broke earlier in the month, the magazine is already unable to service its existing debt - a financial situation which its editor Viktor Ivančić blames on 'a cruel corporate diktat' by which large corporations avoid advertising in media which are opposed to government politics.

However, among the widespread hand-wringing on Feral's behalf, there's one note of caution from Jurica Pavičić, a former contributor: namely, if the market is so unforgiving towards publications like Feral, why have its editors never followed the lead of Bosnia's Dani or Serbia's Vreme and elevated it from often puerile satire into a mature news magazine? A case in point is the Croatian weekly Globus - which began as a sensationalist tabloid flirting with the radical-right party HSP, but developed after a change of editor into the focus of support for Mirko Galić's Forum 21 initiative which aimed to detach HRT from direct state control.

Nonetheless, it would be a sad day for Croatian civil society if Feral finally petered out, seven years after losing its 'natural enemy' with the death of the nationalist president Franjo Tudjman. The Galić era, meanwhile, did its petering out some months ago when he took up an ambassadorial post in Paris and was replaced - eventually - by Vanja Sutlić. It's taken some time for HRT to assume its post-Galić shape, but the decisive stroke may have come today when the director of HTV Marija Nemčić resigned - along with her radio counterpart Ivanka Lučev - leaving both no 2 positions free for Sutlić appointees.

Nemčić's resignation is likely to have repercussions in the news department (don't forget 2007 is an election year) - and also at entertainment, long thought of as a Nemčić stronghold under its current editor Aleksandar Kostadinov. The Gazette won't be surprised if the new Mr Music Man turns out to be Mario Sedmak, who'd look like a safe pair of hands after the success of the Strictly Come Dancing and Just The Two Of Us formats.

Once Upon A Time In Maksimir

2007-06-20T12:52:00.000+01:00

The first leg of Marko Perković Thompson's concert tour to promote his Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj (Once upon a time in Croatia) concluded at the weekend, in front of anything between 35,000 and 50,000 people at the Maksimir stadium in Zagreb. Not that one can be sure of the exact attendance: with the concert delayed for 24 hours after a thunderstorm, many attendees from outside Zagreb or Croatia were thought to have gone home, so the gates were thrown open to ensure a full house for the event extensively billed as 'the concert of Thompson's career'.

Thompson's most famous concert to date, at Split's Poljud stadium in 2002, was always going to be a tough act to follow. Poljud came at the height of protests against the indictments of Generals Ante Gotovina and Mirko Norac for war crimes (not to mention the Hague Tribunal's demand that Croatia extradite its former chief of staff Janko Bobetko, made only a few weeks before the concert), and during a thriving movement of Homeland War veterans opposed to the centre-left government of the late Ivica Račan's SDP - a situation which may or may not have been ripe for political manipulation, depending on which magazines you read.

What really elevated Thompson to the status of a social problem was the behaviour of young audiences at Poljud and elsewhere on the 2002 tour, wearing clothing with the Ustaša logo or pictures of Ante Pavelić (the leader of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during the Second World War) and performing raised-fist salutes. A scandal in 2004 when Thompson himself was accused of performing a Pavelić-era song in the diaspora didn't help matters, so over and above presenting a new album, the Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj project has an ulterior motive: to show that Thompson represents all patriotic Croats, rather than a political faction.

To this end, concert organiser Miljenko Ćurić announced before Maksimir that Ustaša insignia were banned by law, although enough U-logo caps slipped through for press photographers to come back with the expected pictures - and in a crowd of howevermanythousand people there's not much one can do about spontaneous chants of the best-known Ustaša song Evo zore, evo dana, evo Jure i Bobana ('Here comes the dawn, here comes day, here come [Crna Legija commanders] Jure and Boban') without causing a more serious incident. (How honoured the said Jure and Boban would actually have been is another question. The average Evo zore-quoting teenager seems to know enough about it to understand that it seriously winds up adults, but struggles with the lyrics as soon as s/he gets into the second couplet.)

Part of the problem is defining what should and shouldn't be thought of as 'an Ustaša symbol'. Evo zore, evo dana, referring to the NDH's elite Black Legion, is pretty unambiguous, but Pavelić's recourse to Croatian history in developing the iconography of his state makes some of the classifications problematic. For the Jewish community in Zagreb, which put up the most resistance to the Maksimir concert, the slogan 'Za Dom spremni' ('Ready for the Home') is unequivocally Ustaša thanks to its adoption by the leader of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić. For Thompson, the slogan has legitimate historical precedents in the battle cries of earlier leaders, and it opens his breakthrough hit from 1992: Bojna Čavoglave (The Čavoglave platoon), with which he described his front-line experience with his fellow villagers at the start of the Homeland War.

Thompson's stardom since has been inseparable from his persona as a veteran (an authenticity which surely helped him capture the moment during 2002), and his appeals to respect the memory of fallen soldiers are still prominent throughout Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj.

Nonetheless, between Poljud and Maksimir the singer has experienced another masculine archetype, fatherhood, and family relationships are a stronger theme on the current album than on any of his previous ones, which were more concerned with relations between grown men (not least comrades in arms). This time around, commemorations of the dead are balanced with songs in honour of Thompson's grandfather, his sons, and his daughter (this last a song in praise of 'Diva Grabovčeva', a Herzegovinan princess remembered for dying in a state of grace when murdered by the Turks) - completing Thompson's triad of values, 'God, the family and the Homeland'.

For the first time in Thompson's career since his 1998 comeback with Prijatelji (one of the first Croatian songs to articulate veterans' resentment), the memory of the war isn't the only aspect of his image, although it remains essential. The concert's organisation itself seemed to point to a subtle reorientation, breaking the tradition of opening the set with Bojna Čavoglave (which was still the plan as late as Thompson's cancelled Sarajevo concert in May) and replacing it with the first track from the new album, the appropriately-titled Početak (Beginning), a song which deals with peace and God's love. Meanwhile, official concert T-shirts have been produced for the first time in green (matching the new album's cover) as well as the traditional black, although unofficial vendors have stayed faithful to the old colour scheme.

(Of course, the most emphatic thing to do would be to drop Čavoglave and the black outfits entirely, but for the sake of consistency it might be a step too far.)

Whether Maksimir reflected Thompson the mature father or Thompson the corporate edition, Sunday's concert seems to have lived up to its billing as a landmark in his career. The evening was just as significant for Tomislav Bralić and Klapa Intrade, who confirmed their place on Croatia's patriotic showbusiness A-list by appearing in the only guest spot to perform their unavoidable hit Croatijo, iz duše te ljubim (Croatia, I love you from the soul) - the cornerstone of the current klapa revival.

No report of the concert was complete without at least one picture of audience members (usually teenage boys) playing up to the camera with Ustaša salutes, although Jutarnji list at first took the trouble to take a wider-ranging look at the crowd - such as a 67-year-old woman who enjoys Thompson's 'national folklore', or a younger woman who has no problems reconciling her Croatian patriotism with her intention to vote for SDP. The most emphatic thing to do might be to deny the Ustaša-cap-wearing types the satisfaction of a photograph rather than framing them with sanctimonious captions about 'the unwanted images' and the like.

Except that then there'd be no scandal to be made, which for the Croatian media (or anybody else's) would probably be a step too far.

UPDATE>: Lupiga and Balkan Baby have been to the concert too.

In Lieu Of A Proper Post

2007-06-05T15:14:00.000+01:00

Croatia's Social Democrats have a new leader: Ivica Račan's foreign policy expert Zoran Milanović, who impressed on his talk-show debut with Aleksandar Stanković, put the wind up PM Ivo Sanader, shows every chance of bringing some West Wing-style gravitas to the Croatian left - and, perhaps most importantly for many SDPites, isn't the populist mayor of Zagreb Milan Bandić.

Marko Perković Thompson's concert in Zagreb's Maksimir stadium in two weeks' time, ending the first leg of the promotional tour for his 2006 album, is being positioned as the domestic concert spectacular of the year (hence the 30-metre swords transferred from his album artwork to the set design). A future leg may well culminate in a similar extravaganza at the Poljud stadium in Split, the site of Thompson's most famous concert in 2002.

Anthropology blog Savage Minds has been watching Eurovision from Finland, in what's presumably the last word on that show this season. Not that one should ever speak too soon.

May We Have Your Votes Please

2007-05-24T16:23:00.000+01:00

The Gazette is one of the nominees for A Fistful of Euros' Best Weblog About Southeastern Europe award, and so are several other blogs it likes to read.

So, 'come on and vote, vote,' etc...

Eurovision 2007: Croatia And The Eastern League

2007-05-15T19:54:00.000+01:00

As for the ongoing resonance of this year's Eurovision result in 'the region': East Ethnia reports that at least two political parties in Serbia are trying to claim some of Šerifović's reflected glory: the Roma Union of Serbia (to which her mother and uncle are affiliated, and for whom she campaigned herself), and the Serbian Radical Party (who claim her grandfather's membership).

Heading slightly north-west, the Croatian view of the bloc-voting controversy is oddly distanced from time to time: talking, like one Jutarnji list columnist, about the eastern alliance' and 'the hurricane from the east' begins to suggest that Croatia doesn't quite belong to it. And then there's Milan Jajčinović in Večernji list:

'Politics also used this year's Eurovision for some messages of its own. Just as in last year's voting by the ex-Yugoslav states - when they mutually handed out points to each other - the European nomenklatura emphasised the signs of normalisation in the states [which had] been warring until yesterday, so does the EU see not only the victory of a good singer in the Serbian song's triumph this year but the victory of a new politics!'

If the bloc situation is one theme of Croatian post-Eurovision coverage, the other is the Beautiful Homeland's failure to qualify for the Eurovision final. T-Portal writes that 'despite the winner's sexual orientation, this year's Eurovision result marks a return to normal after last year's freak show', before turning to the collapse of Croatia's own Eurovision effort:

'Sending an ageing rocker and a buxom blonde who can't sing into the company of transvestives, lesbians, monsters and DJ Bobo, with a song that sounds like a reject from the YURM [rock festival] in 1974, didn't prove to be a winning combination. Last year we could at least hope a good result would come as a reward for Severina's acting abilities.

What was going through the head of [head of entertainment] Aleksandar Kostadinov and the HRT team responsible for Eurovision when they put their money on Dado and Dragonfly isn't clear to us. As it is, we came 30th out of 42 countries, far behind the Serbs, Bosnians, Slovenes and Macedonians. Is there anything worse?'

T-Portal's not the only one to ask. Even Kostadinov's deputy Mario Sedmak, a former head of entertainment itself, argued in Jutarnji list's post-semi-final post-mortem that organisers of the national selection in the future should make it clear to songwriters 'what sort of songs do well in Eurovision, and which ones don't. This year's song didn't make an impression and we didn't have any staging.' (Should Kostadinov have to carry the can for non-qualification, Sedmak could well get to put this into practice next year.)

Pop composer Tonči Huljić, who's frequently steered Croatia into the Eurovision top ten, was guarded on that occasion, recommending only that the song selection should be left to 'professionals' rather than the public and/or a HTV jury; last night's Otvoreno talk show (on HTV), however, saw him more critical of Kostadinov. One of the song's performers, Dado Topić, has criticised HTV's organisation of the song (one 27-minute recording session and no promotional video), and Rock and Democracy suggests that he only reluctantly became involved with the performance in the first place.

And what to do about those pesky blocs? Marija Nemčić, head of HTV and Croatia's most important representative at the European Broadcasting Union, has promised that 'we're already beginning to work on a recommendation for a new format which would avoid the problem of neighbouring states' - and which, if it came from Croatia, might at least be sensitive to the problem of defining permanent Easties and Westies. Although, if the EBU ended up enshrining western and eastern leagues which happened to place Croatia on the western side of things, would that necessarily be a disaster from the Croatian state broadcaster's point of view?

Lastly: Radio B92 celebrates its 18th birthday today, but there's less happy cultural news from Zagreb, where the alternative club Močvara may be forced to close after a town hall decision limiting its bar opening hours to midnight.

Eurovision 2007: Join The Bloc Party

2007-05-15T19:29:00.000+01:00

You can't keep a good Eurovision story down at this time of year, and far less one based on elementary number-crunching and symbolic-geographical stereotypes. BBC News Online rounds up some of the recent calls for Something To Be Done about the contest's east-west division, including Liberal Democrat MP Richard Younger-Ross's parliamentary early day motion to ask the BBC to insist on voting reform, Maltese protest voting and German tabloid sabre-rattling.

Notwithstanding snide columns or the prospect of a Eurovision comedy by the Borat scriptwriter (an almost inevitable combination after the advent of Verka Serdyuchka?), some of the Eurovision blogosphere is having a bash at countering what's quickly become the prevailing myth about the 2007 contest. Even counting only the votes of the less disputably western European countries, or even the remaining participants from 1990, the top of the scoreboard still remains eastern-dominated, although a western-only vote in the semi-final (see comments here) would have sent Portugal and Iceland through qualification at the expense of Moldova and Macedonia.

A possible conclusion: maybe it's currently more profitable to appeal to 'eastern' tastes, since by doing so there's a good chance of appealing to the 'west' at the same time. That might be to do with the various eastern European pop-folk industries' accommodation of contemporary pop/hip-hop production (quite a contrast to the music-for-entertainment-television schlager which tends to represent most of the western entrants), or to do with the glamourised easternness (Turkish, Bollywood, or abstract) occasionally articulated in North American music video.

If the future is pop-folk, at least there's an opportunity for the United Kingdom: British bhangra, a flourishing subculture rarely supported by the mainstream media in the UK (with the exception of the BBC's Asian Network and 1Xtra on digital radio). Angling for the 'eastern' vote, hitting BBC diversity targets and probably scoring higher than the French: it must be worth a go.

If nothing else, it's more ambitious than an air hostess routine...

A European Vote For European Serbia?

2007-05-14T13:17:00.000+01:00

Following the line of Olli Rehn, the EU's enlargement commissioner who hailed Serbia's Eurovision victory as 'a European vote for European Serbia', the symbolic connection between the removal of Serbian Radical Tomislav Nikolić as parliamentary speaker and Serbia's 'acceptance' by the rest of Europe has not been lost on post-Eurovision reporters: The Guardian, for instance, headlines its whole-page article 'From pariah state to kitsch victory: how a Balkan ballad showed Europe a new Serbia'.

Jutarnji list likewise emphasises 'how symbolic that victory was in the week where Serbia on account of Nikolić had again become a country dreaded by Europe', and quotes the Vojvodinan parliamentary deputy Nenad Čanak's statement that (Nikolić having called for closer ties between Serbia and Russia) 'Croatia gave us twelve points, so did Montenegro and Macedonia, and Russia [gave us] five. So Tomislav Nikolić has to be dismissed.'

The Guardian's Ian Traynor also interprets the victory as a blow against the 'ear-splitting melange of Balkan rhythms, electronic pounding, and stridently nationalist lyrics' of turbofolk, although Rock and Democracy is less optimistic regarding the longer-term consequences for popular music in Serbia when Eurovision is hosted there next year:

'A mainly eastern bloc led by Ukraine will push into Serbia and then strengthen a growing domestic fruit, and of course you all know that that fruit is called Turbo-folk.'

There's not so much about cultural politics in Serbian tabloid Kurir, which treats Marija Šerifović's win as a victory for the whole nation, celebrated as publicly as the return of sporting gold medallists. (Though Reluctant Dragon, on Belgrade's Trg Republike after Eurovision, couldn't help thinking that some crowd members who were 'chanting nationalistic slogans were nonetheless 'the same people who would probably beat her up in the street if they suspected she was a Gypsy or if it turned out she actually was gay.')

Vote, Vote, Vote, Vote, Vote For The Winners

2007-05-13T14:05:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Marija Šerifović for winning Eurovision 2007, as predicted and celebrated by the Serbian blogosphere. Šerifović said after the show that she 'hopes that next year in Belgrade it will be a music contest again' although - given the rock-chick and chain-mail aesthetic that dominated Eurovision this year after Lordi's victory in 2006 - don't be surprised if it takes on its own sideshow of a contest in fine tailoring and pseudo-lesbian dance.

Outside 'the region' itself, the prevailing frame for remembering this year's Eurovision is likely to be the east/west problem. The geographical spread of points is made particularly graphic at Diamond Geezer, but it's worth remembering it takes 42 countries to make a board-sweeping on such a scale. True, the Saturday top 10 of Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Belarus, Greece, Armenia, Hungary and Moldova is another all-eastern, all-the-time extravaganza (assuming one is happy to amalgamate such an expanse of overlapping cultural markets and musical influences into one 'east').

If East had really outdone West by sheer weight of bloc-led numbers alone, there might be aerious cause for concern, but it's more than a case of one bloc being structurally empowered to always outvote the other. Of the seven western European finalists, none finished higher than the Finnish hosts at 17th, and few even received significant support from their neighbours: no Belgian votes for France, no Andorran votes for Spain, and outside the transnational schlager union of Scandinavia the majority of western countries voted for a predominantly eastern slate.

What can't be accounted for under any nationally-based voting system is the effect of increased migration from eastern to western Europe: organised diasporic voting campaigns are one possibility, but so is the prospect that Poles, Serbs, Armenians and so forth in (say) the United Kingdom might be more likely to watch the show than the host population. (Or even than their compatriots back home?) Again, though, east/west isn't the only axis where this factor operates (those regular Spanish points to Germany mostly come from somewhere).

Nonetheless, it's perceptions that make policy, and the broadcasters who feel as if they have the most to lose are those from the former western European powerhouses of 1970s and 1980s Eurovision who don't have the Spanish/French/German/British advantage (or disadvantage?) of automatic qualification to rely on. Countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, or Sweden, the home country of Eurovision's current scrutineer Svante Stockselius, whose task before Belgrade 2008 is to balance the demands and sensibilities of the 'Big Four', the not-so-big half a dozen, the enthusiastic newcomers and a band of countries who would be horrified to find themselves on the eastern side of any permanent geographical division.

Given which, one can only wish him the best of Swedish luck...

Pre-Eurovision Blog Roundup

2007-05-12T11:33:00.000+01:00

Now that Serbia's Marija Šerifović has negotiated the Eurovision semi-final and seems among the favourites to win full stop, the local blogs have a direct interest in tonight's final: Reluctant Dragon is encouraged by the semi-final performance, and Belgrade Blog fancies its chances of being on the spot of a Serbian-hosted Eurovision next year.

Elsewhere, Dirrty Pop is noticing the east/west issue, Czech Out is in Helsinki, and World of Chig isn't.

The Morning After The Semi-Final Before

2007-05-11T15:38:00.000+01:00

Among the eight 'eastern European' participants not to benefit from the apparent eastwards slant of the Eurovision semi-final was Croatia: in the same week as the death of the composer responsible for Croatia's first Eurovision entry as an independent state in 1993, Croatia missed out on an appearance in the final for the first time since then.

While Serbia's Marija Šerifović enters the final as joint favourite with a ballad not so unlike Croatia's own entries from the mid-1990s, Dragonfly and Dado Topić didn't stand out from other straightforward rock entries (Iceland and the Czech Republic), none of which made it through.

Several readers' comments on the relevant Jutarnji list article seem to have it in for HTV head of entertainment Aleksandar Kostadinov, who strongly associated himself with the uncharacteristic Dora winner from the outset. Eurovision's importance to HTV - dating from the days when taking part offered a symbolic confirmation of Croatian statehood - is such that not qualifying for the final is the entertainment equivalent of the Croatian (or the English) football team not making it into an international tournament: should anyone be held responsible, the chances are it would be Kostadinov himself.

HTV's head of contact (interactive) programming Mario Sedmak might be among the favourites to replace his current line manager Kostadinov, now that the Strictly Come Dancing and Just The Two Of Us imports have given him two successful music shows to his department's credit. Web portal Index's solution is simpler: bring back Tonči Huljić, the populist pop producer responsible for three (or maybe four) of Croatia's six top ten finishes (and whose pan-pipe-inflected song for Jelena Rozga was widely supposed to be the Dora favourite this time).

Yet despite Eurovision's current affinity for folk-pop, when it comes to Croatia it seems you're still damned if you do and even if you don't: glancing over the ten qualifiers, there are at least two which Croatia could have matched while keeping its cultural values reasonably intact. If Bulgaria's ethno-techno percussion is qualification material, so too might be Mojmir Novaković's work with Legen and Kries, and if Georgia can incorporate sword dancing into a Eurovision performance, could anything be done with Korčula's renowned Moreška? Ultimately, however, it depends on national folk-music establishments: Bulgarian percussionist Stoyan Yankoulov might be happy to co-operate, but Novaković, for instance, has been much more sceptical about folk music compromising with showbusiness.

Croatia is nonetheless tangentially represented in Saturday's final: Alenka Gotar's Slovenian entry Cvet z juga (Flower from the south) has been written by Croatian songwriter Andrej Babić...

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Eurovision Voting Redux

2007-05-11T14:23:00.000+01:00

From Riga on the Baltic to Piran on the Adriatic,* there's one thing the ten qualifiers from last night's Eurovision Song Contest semi-final have in common: Belarus, Macedonia, Slovenia, Hungary, Georgia, Latvia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Moldova can all be found to the eastern side of them. At least in the non-qualifying Dutch camp, there are hints of a feeling that the current structure of the contest is over-representing central/south-east European countries and new entrants from the former Soviet Union.

Booing from the arena audience as the final qualifier was announced hasn't helped matters, although the word on the Helsinki street is that the reaction had less to do with an east-west axis, more to do with the Eurovision press and fan corps having massively taken to Andorra's skate-pop boy band Anonymous during rehearsal week.

Complaints of political/neighbourly voting aren't quite the root of the problem: the ex-socialist and eastern-Mediterranean participant countries tend to be smaller, often recently fragmented, and (decisively) more committed to a high-priority eye-catching presentation. For the moment, at least, ethno-pop and folk-dance choreography (culminating this year in a Georgian sword dance) come across as more original than drag acts and tired soul music, although that might not be the case after several more years of the Eurovision Banging Drums And Shouting 'Hey' While Wearing Leather/Fur/Chain Mail Contest. Moreover, take a large multi-national state with a common music market, split it into six or more nation-states with a shared musical past, and any entry which resonates with the populations' musical tastes ends up six times more profitable on the scoreboard than it might have been.

Tempers may be assuaged by 2009, when the Eurovision Broadcasting Union plans to hold two semi-finals to replace the current system that relegates most finalists and all non-qualifiers into next year's semi-final. In the meantime, it would ease political strains a little if some of the four annual qualifiers - France, Germany, Spain and the UK (the four biggest financial contributors to Eurovision) - could contrive to place in the top ten and free up an extra finalist's position or two.

* Poland didn't make it, and Italy have stayed away from Eurovision since 1997, hence the mangled quotation...

UPDATE:: More from the Helsinki street (with bonus commentary from the Icelandic representative).

Top Of The Piramida

2007-05-10T12:47:00.000+01:00

Željka Ogresta's interactive talk show Piramida might have caused enough trouble in Croatia to stall the career of TV executive Tanja Šimić and equate the Homeland War with the Oprah show (at least according to one HDZ grandee), but internationally the format can currently do no wrong: it's just picked up a Rose d'Or at the annual entertainment television festival in Lucerne.

The flagship of domestic entertainment production in Croatia, the Piramida concept - invite three controversial guests a week on to the show, viewers vote to send one into the next round and a house band makes up off-the-cuff songs about them - is just as much a cornerstone of HTV prime time as its foreign buy-ins, such as the Strictly Come Dancing and Just The Two Of Us imports (Ples sa zvijezdama and Zvijezde pjevaju) which have almost overtaken the Eurovision selection Dora as the channel's central musical projects.

Piramida currently airs in Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and (its latest incarnation) Montenegro, but recognition in Lucerne might well enable the format to travel beyond south-east Europe. It's a wonder that more national broadcasters with inconvenient public service obligations and an eye for new sources of interactive revenue haven't had the idea already...

The Gazette gives it a year before Pyramid turns up on either BBC3 or Channel 4. Probably with Davina McCall and Four Poofs and a Piano.

Thompson In Sarajevo: Off After All

2007-05-09T12:15:00.000+01:00

Despite numerous assurances earlier in the year that Marko Perković Thompson's concert in Sarajevo tomorrow would go ahead, the event has now been cancelled with less than 48 hours' notice - Ivica Bikić from the organising committee blaming insufficient security provision for the controversial concert in the face of unspecified threats and an advertising boycott.

Bikić hopes to reschedule the concert for September, although it would then lose its rationale as a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's visit to Sarajevo - which, in the eyes of the various Franciscan officials reported by Jutarnji list as having reservations about such a commemoration, might be all to the good.

Assorted Blogosphere Pessimism

2007-05-08T15:25:00.000+01:00

Anti Turbo Folk is naturally unhappy at the announcement by Osijek security entrepreneur Alen Borbaš, organiser of the annual Folk Hit of the Year ceremony and regular turbofolk defender on Croatian talk shows, that he will shortly launch a record label in Croatia to release music by pop-folk singers such as Siniša Vuco and Vesna Pezo and distribute CDs from the largest folk label in Serbia, Grand Productions.

Borbaš is already the Croatian representative for the transnational pop-folk channel Balkanika Music Television, so a record label would be a logical next step towards a cross-media platform - a prospect at which ATF is pessimistic, fearing that 'this primitive kitsch aesthetic' will begin to develop an institutional base of media support.

Elsewhere, a no more optimistic East Ethnia has its own suggestions for the new Serbian cabinet of Tomislav Nikolić.

Djordje Novković: 1943-2007

2007-05-06T12:24:00.000+01:00

Pop composer Djordje Novković has died at the age of 64.

2007 marked the prolific songwriter's 40th year in showbusiness, and a double CD containing his greatest hits was released only a few weeks ago as part of a series of celebratory events: a special edition of Zuhra light show in his honour was to be followed by an ensemble concert in Zagreb's Vatroslav Lisinski concert hall at the end of the year.

Born in the Serbian town of Šabac (according to the Croatian Composers' Society) or in Sarajevo (according to many of his newspaper obituaries today), Novković studied piano and conducting at the Sarajevo musical academy and began his career as a member of the Sarajevo band Indexi before founding his own group Pro Arte. He moved to Zagreb in 1970 to compose for Croatia's largest record label Jugoton (later Croatia Records), with whom he remained throughout his career.

A pioneer of the Croatian style of pop/folk crossover, Novković already anticipated the characteristic trend of 1990s Croatian pop production in the mid-1980s in his work for the then Sarajevo-based Neda Ukraden, whose hit Zora je (It's dawn) became one of his greatest successes (behind only Stari Pjer by Ivica Percl, which would be re-recorded by Nana Mouskouri as Dans le soleil, dans le vent). After experimenting with singers such as Duško Lokin and Dolores (with whom he tried to revive many of Ukraden's songs in 1993), he achieved some of his biggest hits of the Croatian era on Severina's 1999 and 2001 albums.

Novković's work in the early 1990s included Croatia's first Eurovision entry as an independent state in 1993, Don't ever cry (initiating a still unbroken sequence of Croatian appearances in the Eurovision final), as well as a number of patriotic songs in support of the Croatian war effort (among them Sanja Trumbić's Danke Deutschland and Moj je dragi u narodnoj gardi (My boyfriend's in the national guard)). At least one of his earlier patriotic compositions from the Yugoslav era may stand the test of time for longer: Zdravko Čolić's anthemic Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo (Comrade Tito, we swear to you).

Novković's son Boris is himself a successful musician, mainly a pop-rock singer-songwriter who ventured into folk/pop territory in 2005-06 on the occasion of two Croatian Eurovision entries, as performer in 2005 and composer of Severina's entry in 2006.

Balkan Concerts In London

2007-05-03T10:17:00.000+01:00

Remarkably like the proverbial buses, you wait ages for Balkan concerts in London and then four turn up at once. So far Ivo Papasov with Stoyan Yankoulov and Elitsa Todorova are at the Carling Academy Islington on 5 May; Neda Ukraden and Preslava at Agenda on 12 May; Tijana Dapčević at the Mean Fiddler on 23 May; and Bajaga at the Mean Fiddler on 10 June.

Any more we ought to know about?

Operation Bljesak Anniversary

2007-05-01T10:10:00.000+01:00

Today Croatia marks the twelfth anniversary of Operation Bljesak (Flash), with which Croatian forces liberated western Slavonia in 1995. President Mesić, PM Ivo Sanader and parliamentary speaker Vladimir Šeks have laid wreaths and lit candles in Okučani, while a Zagreb HDZ delegation led by veterans' minister Jadranka Kosor held their own ceremony in Mirogoj ceremony at the Defenders' Cross (a memorial to Homeland War soldiers) and the grave of their party's founder Franjo Tuđman.

The Bljesak anniversary was presumably the occasion for Marko Perković Thompson's concert this evening in Sisak as part of an event organised by the local HSP. (HSP Sisak already introduces its website with a midi of Thompson's first hit on the theme of veterans, Prijatelji (Friends). It remains to be seen whether any Sišćani will use the occasion to express the kinds of sentiments about the late Ivica Račan that one wouldn't write in a condolence book.

Talking of anniversaries, it's also the 300th of the United Kingdom. Any takers for a bet on reaching 350?

UPDATE: courtesy of Neretva River, a proper lowdown on anniversary politics in Sisak.

Ivica Račan: 1944-2007

2007-04-30T11:48:00.000+01:00

Ivica Račan, founder of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Croatian Prime Minister 2000-03, has died. A national day of mourning has been declared in Croatia, although the funeral will be strictly a family affair rather than a state occasion.

Obituaries from Jutarnji list, Davor Butković, Mladenka Šarić, Milan Jajčinović, and Index.

UPDATE: No national day of mourning after all.

Piramida Affair: Homeland War vs. Oprah

2007-04-27T10:08:00.000+01:00

The resignation of Tanja Šimić as director of programming at HTV is on its way to becoming a fully-fledged scandal: while Jutarnji list implies that her 'punishment' for allowing Croatian Serb politician Rade Leskovac to appear on the Piramida talk show threatens to reintroduce the socialist-era crime of verbal delict, her opponents continue to accuse her of an inappropriate attitude to the Homeland War.

Milorad Pupovac, the parliamentary deputy from the Serb national minority, considers that the affair is 'a witch hunt, rather than looking for responsiblity for hate speech':

On HTV certain reporters and editors continually use hate speech, praise the NDH [WW2-era Independent State of Croatia], insult members of the Serb community, relativise war crimes. But to date they haven't been punished.'

HDZ deputy Andrija Hebrang, however, accuses Šimić of not treating the memory of the war with the respect it deserves:

'She apparently can't stand the truth about the Homeland War. When I complained because one programme about the war was being shown at 4pm on a Friday, she said that the Oprah show goes out at the same time as well. With that she was equating the importance of the Homeland War and the Oprah show.'

Were Leskovac's comments a justifiable expression of free speech? Not according to Hebrang, who told JL that 'it isn't an expression of free speech, but an expression of attitudes against the Croatian state'.

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics (Or Not): Eurovision 2007

2007-04-26T10:41:00.000+01:00

From an ex-Yugoslav perspective, the Eurovision Song Contest has come around quietly this year - compared to 2006's ethnomusicological controversies in Croatia and the collapse of the last joint Serbia-Montenegro entry. For a proper Severina-style row over visions of national identity and the right image to present to Europe, one has to turn to Ukraine and drag queen Verka Serdyuchka, whose character of a kitsch village housewife resulted in protests - although further Verkanalysis is the province of the experts.

Potential scandal two involves the Israeli entry, Teapacks' Push the button (another song channelling the overworked spirit of Gogol Bordello), depending on whether it's taken as referring to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinajad or to a generic nuclear madman of one's choice (after all, there are a fair few around): however, the lyrics have been approved by the European Broadcasting Union, despite its rules against 'political propaganda' which caught out Ukraine in 2005 when they entered the anthem of the Orange Revolution.

Climate change being the nuclear disarmament of the noughties, it's no wonder the theme seems to have made its way to Eurovision. Apparently in the green corner: Andorran teen skate-pop band Anonymous (result of a school trip to An Inconvenient Truth?), and possibly Ireland's Dervish (They can't stop the spring), although the Gazette might be thinking of Rachel Carson there. Inadvertently in the other one: the Easyjet-worshipping, innuendo-loving Brits. (Britons who don't agree that Scooch are a perfect snapshot of the national character may have an alternative, for once: Wikipedia currently states that Greek representative Sarbel was brought up in London.)

While Romania has high expectations after several years of showstoppers, Croatia's low-key rock entry by Dragonfly and Dado Topić hasn't attracted the euphoria that surrounded Severina in 2006, but not very much would: indeed, the suspense this time round isn't whether Croatia might win the thing but whether the country will maintain its perfect record of qualifying for every final since its debut as an independent state in 1993. More HTV heads may roll if Vjerujem u ljubav breaks the chain, but otherwise the most newsworthy thing likely to happen in Helsinki from a Croatian point of view would be for the public televote to give maximum points to Serbia again (the Croatian dvanaestica to Željko Joksimović in 2004 made headline news).

This may be immortalising a hideously bad prediction, but the Gazette won't be surprised if the Croatian public develop a sudden affection for Montenegro instead, or rather, for Stevan Faddy's Ajde, kroči. Whatever the European public at large may think of the formula of folk-song-style lyrics plus electric guitar, it's tended to do well in Croatia: ask Siniša Vuco, or Marko Perković Thompson, or for that matter Bijelo Dugme, who started it all in the first place.

Especially after the Severina case, though, it's hard to picture Croatia selecting it for Eurovision...

Piramida Affair: Tanja Šimić Resigns

2007-04-25T16:39:00.000+01:00

Two significant movements in Croatian television today: comedian Zlatan Zuhrić Zuhra is leaving Nova TV despite being one of the channel's flagship stars, but, more seriously, Tanja Šimić has resigned as programming director of the state broadcaster HTV after taking responsibility for the comments of Croatian Serb politician Rade Leskovac on the Piramida talk show.

Leskovac, currently president of the Party of Podunavlje Serbs and once the leader of the Serbian Radical Party in eastern Slavonia during the Homeland War, appeared on Željka Ogresta's show on 11 April. His words verbatim aren't easily to hand, but it appears that 'among other things, he stated that Croatia is not a democratic state of law and that the Serbs in Croatia and BiH are not to blame for the recent war.'

Over 350 telephone complaints (and the usual discontent from veterans' groups) followed the broadcast, and a HRT Council meeting the next day held Šimić responsible and accused her of 'not taking into account the protection of national interests, particularly those connected with the Homeland War, and the highest professional standards and ethical principles'. The subject had apparently been tabled by councillor Jure Njavro, who had complained that Piramida had never invited a leading member of any Homeland War organisation on to the show, and that Ogresta had not warned Leskovac 'not to use hate speech'.

Šimić, often a close collaborator of the current director of HTV Marija Nemčić, has been temporarily replaced by sports editor Željko Vela. Hopefully the process to name her permanent replacement won't be as difficult as last month's selection of Mirko Galić's successor as director-general of HRT (overseeing both television and radio): after a closed council session ended in no clear victor and the deputy president of the council hitting a female councillor with a shoe, the position had to be re-advertised and an acting DG appointed (who turned out to be the pre-vote favourite Vanja Sutlić) so that Galić could take up his appointment as the new Croatian ambassador to Paris.

All bets are off on where this leaves Nemčić's standing in the race to formally take over from Galić, having surprisingly not entered the original election for DG)...

Thompson, Insignia And The War

2007-04-16T13:12:00.000+01:00

Coincidence being what it is, who knows whether the beginning of Thompson's tour in Vukovar on Friday or the escalating controversy over its Sarajevo leg prompted the singer to give an interview to Jutarnji list at the weekend.

Needless to say, the opening exchanges relate to the Sarajevo concert, regarding which Thompson emphasises that 'the most important reason for me going to Sarajevo is the charity concert whose profits are intended for the construction of a Croat Catholic Home, at the invitation of the Croat Catholic Society and Father Ante Jelić' - and that the rumour that 'they are even calling on Sarajevans, Bosniaks, to come to the [concert venue] Zetra and demonstrate' is an unneccessary 'invitation to conflict'.

As regards the Ustaša merchandise often seen among sections of the audience at his concerts, Thompson argues:

'As far as iconography is concerned, on stage I've often said that everyone who feels the need to wear military insignia ought to wear the insignia of the victorious Croatian army from the Homeland War. I always emphasise that, but again, I repeat, I can't dictate what people wear. Moreover, if there's anything illegal there, services exist which are responsible for dealing with that.'

There's a fair point here: why has 1990s military iconography failed to resonate with young people (or with the people who order and sell the merchandise in the first place) in the way that Ustaša imagery has done, for all the short-lived cult status which attached to various contemporary army brigades in 1991-92? Where are the T-shirts, caps and football scarves commemorating the 1st Guard Brigade (Tigers), the 4th Split Guard Brigade, the 101st Zagreb or the 204th Vukovar? Why should it be so much easier to find Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara on the internet than the briefly famous anthem of the 101st?

Talking of Jasenovac, which Thompson was infamously accused of performing in 2004, he'd be glad to clear that up as well:

'I have my own official repertoire, and that song has never been in it. Of course, I didn't even write it either, I've never recorded it nor do I stand behind those lyrics. Those aren't my principles, nor are they any sort of human principles. My songs are about love of God, the family, the homeland and man. There's no way I'll allow people to attach things to me which are nothing to do with me.

--But there were still occasions when you used to sing that song too.

--Those weren't occasions, that was a time when everyone sang all sorts of things. The Honmeland War wasn't just a physical fight with the Četniks, but also a psychological war. We know what all the Četniks sung and how people sang to them. Dragging all that out of the context of that time isn't fair. All that was a crazy time. But, I say again, I won't allow people to burden me with that. Only a sick mind could have done what Denis Latin did when he played that song on his show edited with footage of corpses floating down a river and then asked his guests "What do you think of this Thompson video?". I still have lots of problems because of that today.'

That would be that for the Thompson interview, if the interviewer himself hadn't dedicated his regular column in the same newspaper today to a post-mortem of it, reflecting particularly on Thompson's defence of the 'Za dom spremni' slogan (used as the introduction of his wartime debut hit Bojna Čavoglave (Čavoglave Platoon)) and going on to lament that:

'there are few people who can and will express with equal strength both their love for their homeland and disgust at every sort of crime which has ever been committed under the mask or in the name of that love. Just as there are terribly few people who are prepared to defend the principles of antifascism and, with the same bitterness and with no excuses, reject and condemn all the hideous crimes committed under the mantle and insignia of that civilisational and human commitment.'

Irregular Blog Round-Up

2007-04-16T13:06:00.000+01:00

Belgrade Blog and Bosnia Vault are supporting Dejan Anastasijević, the Serbian journalist whose home was attacked a few days ago.

And Dumneazu posts on the relationship between Hutsul/Ruthenian music (the source of a certain Ruslana's folkloric identity) and Jewish Klezmer music:

'Perhaps this is why Hutsul identity is so enticing to Ukrainian pop culture - it offers Ukrainian-ness without the Petlura massacres. It juxtaposes Ruthenian partisans fighting a guerilla war into the 1950s as opposed to the Ukrainian Wermacht divisions fighting for the Nazis. Notice: there is a severe historical difference between the Western Ukraine and the Eastern Ukraine, especially as regards violence aginst Jews. Should the inhabitants of the modern Ukraine be held responsible for history? What is Ukrainian history? And what will Ukrainian history become?'

Second Kontakt: Thompson In Sarajevo

2007-04-13T13:25:00.000+01:00

The ongoing row over whether the Croatian patriotic singer Marko Perković Thompson should be allowed to perform in Sarajevo to mark the 10th anniversary of the papal visit to the Bosnian capital has now made its way on to Nova TV and Hloverka Novak-Srzić's Kontakt talk show. Kontakt's last musical excursion, into the question of whether the Folk revija concert ought to be allowed in Zagreb, achieved swift results, with the event being cancelled less than 24 hours later. Judging by the outcome of the Kontakt phone-in vote (viewers were asked whether they considered Thompson a 'rocker-patriot' or an 'Ustaša', 77% of them opting for the former), the majority of its audience won't be hoping for the same effect in this case.

This time out, Novak-Srzić hosted Senad Avdić (editor of the newspaper Slobodna Bosna), Boris Kožemjakin (president of the Sarajevo Jewish community, and one of the first to protest against Thompson's planned concert), and Ante Jelić, president of the Croatian charity which had invited Thompson in the first place.

However, Jelić's determination that the concert will go ahead unless actually banned by the Bosnian authorities may now be tested by the government of Sarajevo canton and its culture minister Emir Hadžihafizbegović, who considers that the case has been escalated into a political scandal and that no contract has yet been signed for the use of the advertised venue, the Zetra arena. While the local authority certainly plans to commemorate the Papal visit, Thompson's appropriateness for the anniversary is another question, the local authority's attitude being that 'xenophobic messages of the kind there are at Marko Perković's performances do not belong in this city, which has much experience of the consequences of national misanthropy.'

UPDATE:: Reuters has now picked up the Sarajevo story - and there's an extensive interview with Thompson in Jutarnji list this weekend. (Thanks Shaina and Observer!)

All Hail The Barracudas

2007-04-05T19:16:00.000+01:00

If you happened to work in the cultural department of Zagreb council, Croatia's victory at the world water polo championships in the early hours of Sunday morning meant primarily: less than 48 hours to organise a two-hour concert on Zagreb's main square to celebrate the fact that - in the words of Baruni's ever-adaptable football song - 'Neka pati koga smeta, Hrvatska je prvak svijeta' ('If you don't like it it's your problem, Croatia are champions of the world').

A similar doček on Trg Bana Jelačića four years ago, honouring Croatia's world-champion handball team, ended up remembered for the wrong reasons when Marko Perković Thompson was greeted by fans near the stage with raised-fist salutes - much to the dismay of Zagreb's then mayor Vlasta Pavić, who had allegedly never wanted him there in the first place. Pavić's deputy at the time, one Milan Bandić, is now in the mayoral seat himself, but the politician who endeavours to be all things to all Zagrepčani couldn't repeat the invitation: even with a major new album to promote, the devout Thompson doesn't perform during Lent.

Indeed, as late as Tuesday morning, nobody seemed to know very clearly who was coming; Oliver Dragojević arrived as planned, but despite expectations there was no sign of Miroslav Škoro - although his place and Thompson's was ably filled by Tomislav Bralić, whose ubiquity over the last six months is owed entirely to his patriotic klapa mega-hit Croatijo, iz duše te ljubim (Croatia, I love you from the soul) - originally performed at an army song festival (Hrvatski pleter) in 1997, but revived in 2006 for a klapa spectacular in Hajduk Split's Poljud stadium. In fact, for the coastal-dominated water polo squad (who specially requested Mišo Kovač to play them out), Bralić is somehow more appropriate than his Slavonian or Zagoran models - offering patriotism and the sea in the same package.

Representing the hosts, meanwhile, was the task of veteran rock band Prljavo Kazalište (that's as in veterans of rock, not rock by veterans, although their guitarist Damir Lipovšek-Keks has been moonlighting as producer of the new Thompson album) and a surprise opening act - Žiga i Bandisti, whose album of Medjimurje folk songs arranged for a brass band turned out to be another of late 2006's sleeper hits, if not quite northern Croatia's answer to the Bralić phenomenon.

That said, Bralić and Žiga have both been responsible for some surreal musical experiences of late. If klapas aren't supposed to perform in stadiums, then Ljubav se ne trži (a Medjimurje standard) really isn't supposed to have a trumpet bridge. And teenage girls really aren't supposed to link arms when they hear that trumpet bridge at, say, a waterpolo doček in the middle of Zagreb and start dancing a kolo to it the way that can be guaranteed to happen at any house party when somebody thinks it's a good idea to put on the Goran Bregović soundtrack to Underground.

And somewhere there were water polo players, weren't there?

Surrealist Hit Parade

2007-04-02T19:38:00.000+01:00

A heavyweight of retromaniac ex-Yugoslav TV (re)launches tomorrow on Bosnian federal television and Croatian RTL: a revival of the 1980s Sarajevan sketch show Top lista nadrealista (Surrealist Hit Parade), renamed Nadreality show for noughties use. Most of the original nadrealists have been reunited for the thirteen-episode occasion, although the new series is without Branko Djurić (acting in Slovenia) and Nele Karaljić (who moved to Belgrade on the outbreak of war in Bosnia).

However, another Croatian-Bosnian showbusiness axis is a little strained at the moment - specifically, the one relating to Marko Perković Thompson's upcoming concert in Sarajevo, scheduled for 10 May to mark the tenth anniversary of the Papal visit to the Bosnian capital and organised by a Croatian Catholic charity organisation. The Sarajevan Jewish community has protested against the concert on the grounds that Thompson represents fascism and, in the words of Sarajevo Jewish president Boris Kožemjakin:

'Sarajevo and BiH nurture centuries-old religious tolerance, and so we're sure that neither this city nor this state needs a concert like that.'

The concert's organiser, Father Anto Jelić, has replied that he never heard Thompson sing a nationalist song, so Bosnian portal 24sata.info, with the assistance of YouTube, has offered him the opportunity to find out. Indeed, 24sata also reports that the Bosnian Jewish community, the Veterans' Union and the League of Anti-Fascist Combatants are promising an anti-fascist counter-concert if the Thompson event goes ahead.

(In its time Thompson's debut wartime hit, Bojna Čavoglave (Čavoglave Platoon), also acquired a Sarajevo-themed version performed by persons unknown, but that isn't quite the point.)

And lastly, to complicate the transnational web of ex-Yugoslav showbusiness even further: factoring in the Montenegrin side of the polygon is probably overdue. Leo Miler's overview of Montenegrin pop for T-Portal concludes that 'Montenegrin showbusiness is closer to Split than Belgrade', focusing on the ballad-dominated repertoires of Vlado Georgiev, Sergej Cvetković and Bojan Marović:

'Their lyrics and music, arrangements, and the choice of instruments itself, has no folk elements whatsoever. There's no sign of the (folk-style) accordion, let alone the leading instrument, various sorts of pan pipe.

Some people complain they sound too like each other, but one could say the same about, for instance, [Dalmatian singers] Giuliano or [Goran] Karan on first listening.'

Seems Montenegro has coped pretty well with the absence of the doyen of Yugoslav-Mediterranean pop, Oliver Dragojević...

Glembays And Vampires Revived (But Not Kasandra)

2007-03-12T17:33:00.000Z

While Severina herself is starring in Rijeka's much-publicised production of Gospodini Glembajevi (where her co-star, Galliano Pahor, was half of a duet competing in Dora this year), Croatian musicians - at least the ones Jutarnji list spoke to this week - have been assessing Dado Topić's chances for Eurovision in terms which aren't particularly favourable to Moja štikla.

Mišo Kovac is expecting a top ten or even top five finish for Topić on the grounds that 'all in all, we've got good-quality assets up our sleeve, unlike last year when we sent turbo-folk into the world', and Vladimir Kociš Zec, late of Novi fosili, is inclined to agree: 'Last year Croatia sent a folk song [narodnjak] into the world wrapped up as fake pop-etno, and this year it's playing fair.'

Returning to Gospodini Glembajevi, it's no ordinary production of the Miroslav Krleža classic, which begins to answer the question of what Severina's doing there. The play's turned into a semi-musical, Severina and Pahor swap roles for some of the action, and Baroness Castelli's death is staged in a way apparently recalling actress Ena Begović's fatal car accident. However, Severina's theatrical engagement has been controversial enough to be the subject of Mirjana Hrga's talk show Epicentar at the weekend. After coming in for severe criticism from musicologist Jagoda Martinčević, Severina acquitted herself rather more honourably than, say, Bora Dordevic (a previous recipient of the Epicentar treatment) - telephoning the studio to challenge Martinčević.

Leave it to the Swiss, meanwhile, to take the task of succeeding last year's horror-costumed Eurovision winners Lordi as literally as they could: summer hit merchant DJ Bobo will be presenting Vampires are alive, with the usual Colonia-type dance beat and also, one morosely supposes, the predictable staging. At least one of the Gazette's family is likely to pedantically point out that vampires are disqualified from being alive by virtue of having already been rendered undead, or to ask whether [insert name of teenage female contestant from Estonia, Moldova etc.] is supposed to be Buffy.

Any obvious connection between Severina and Vampires (alive or undead)? No; but that might be different if early-1990s dance star Kasandra hadn't abruptly vanished from the Croatian scene with several of her contemporaries. While Severina was still being marketed as the brunette Tajči, her then rival Kasandra was playing the sex symbol card, dressing up as things (including the vampire-themed video of I've Got A Feeling, post-Thriller but pre-Backstreet Boys), and celebrating the 1994 launch of the Croatian currency, the kuna, by posing for the centre spread of Globus draped in nothing but pine martens (kune in Croatian).

Wonder who'd do that sort of thing today?

Montenegro Where You Least Expect It

2007-03-08T22:21:00.000Z

Place one: in flag form, hanging from every other official flagpole in Zagreb (the other 50% are waving Croatian ones), but it turns out it's to do with an upcoming state visit.

Place two: This week's issue of Croatian women's magazine Tena, which would have coincided with the Folk Revija concert if it had actually gone ahead tomorrow, includes a not unsympathetic six-page report on 'Who are the turbo folk queens?': Stoja, Indira Radić, Dragana Mirković, Donna Ares, Goga Sekulić, Olja Karleuša and Maja Marijana. (Wonder if somebody commissioned an article a little bit too early?)

Tena seems to have heard somewhere that Sekulić, a Swiss passport holder, apparently submitted a song to the Swiss Eurovision pre-selection but had it turned down. As a Montenegrin, she might have been better off looking closer to home: TVCG received a total of 16 submissions for the 10 slots in the Montenegrin final, and three of them had to be disqualified anyway because the authors weren't actually Montenegrin.

~~But not~~ place three: Looking across the Drina, Dado Topić provided the interval entertainment at the Serbian Eurovision pre-selection in the company of Marija Šestić, Alenka Gotar, and Karolina Gocheva - in their capacity as the already-selected Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian and Macedonian participants. Absent, however, was the Montenegrin representative Stevan Faddy, suggesting that even now the Montenegrins aren't themselves on hand to cause a fuss during Belgrade's final, Belgrade is perfectly capable of making a fuss out of them. Wouldn't it serve all concerned right if Montenegro and Serbia exchanged 12 points in May?

As for the Serbian contestants themselves, Belgrade Blog has been keeping an eye on those: the handful of audience-drawing pop-folk singers, headed by Mira Škorić, dropped out at the semi-final stage (seemingly one thing one can always rely on at Beovizija: even, or perhaps especially, Jelena Karleuša came bottom of the semi in 2004) and the final - ongoing as the Gazette writes - is being contested between various cod-Latino numbers, ambitious ethno (Slobodan Trkulja and Balkanopolis), and the fans' favourite Marija Šerifović with yet another Lane moje rehash. Which is by no means a disadvantage, thinking of the success of Hari Mata Hari's Lejla in 2006.

Although, chances are Šerifović wouldn't make it on to Croatian radio half as often...

UPDATE: Stevan Faddy has joined the interval mini-reunion. Not that the Sava Centar audience seem particularly happy with it, but if they've been patient enough to sit through Mambo jumbo serbiano...

Dora 2007: The Votes Are In

2007-03-05T19:26:00.000Z

So it's Dragonfly and Dado Topić to represent Croatia at Eurovision in Helsinki: an uncontroversial enough choice, although Topić's intention to sing entirely in English might have been unthinkable a few years ago.

One really can't find much fault with T-Portal's assessment of the result: 'If Eurovision were a football tournament, we'd all agree that the manager had chosen a defensive formation with few ambitions to attack.' That sounds awfully like several years of England teams at the turn of the decade, and we know what happened to them, although with Eurovision's current ethno-schlager reputation, you could see the Topić-Dragonfly combination as a bravely experimental selection (a la Terry Venables' famous 'Christmas tree') which will either carry the team to the final or knock them out in the group stage. (At least there aren't any penalty shoot-outs in Eurovision for them to lose.)

The biggest disagreement between this year's Dora jury and the audience was (as ever?) in the field of what (not) to do with folk music. Podravina ethno-musician Miroslav Evačić (featuring vocals from Istria's Livio Morosin) took high marks from the jury but hardly anything from the telephone vote; the opposite happened to Klapa Maslina, performers of the pop-Dalmatian mega-hit Da ti mogu pismom zvati, even though they can't have got many votes from the public in Slavonia.

Various competitors would have been forgiven for feeling slightly aggrieved on Saturday night: Ivana Radovniković, who was placed into the same semi-final as Feminnem despite their both appearing with a big-band song and Charlestonesque choreography; Jelena Rozga, whose romantic ballad might have benefited from minimalist Lane moje-type staging rather than the fairytale cast it ended up with; and Danijela Pintarić, whose well-placed performance of Moj svijet recalled Croatia's string of top-ten Eurovision results from the mid-90s - but who entered the competition as a reserve entry too late for the song to be included on the official Dora CD.

Indeed, there's already an internet petition to send Pintarić to Eurovision instead - although somehow, unlike last year, it's probably not going to be talk-show material.

Folk Revija: A View From Tamo Daleko

2007-03-03T19:34:00.000Z

Four days after the cancellation of the Zagreb Folk Revija has been more than enough time for the Serbian tabloid Kurir to gather half a dozen vox pops from Serbian showbusiness and make it look as if the event's collapse was all the Croats' fault, or in Kurir's words that 'it's been shown for the umpteenth time that our singers are undesirable in Croatia!' - including a particularly nasty rumour, first launched by organiser Braco Zatezalo in yesterday's edition of the paper, that one of the women involved had received a threat of rape.

The quoted singers themselves are a little more understanding, distinguishing between 'lots of people there [who] like our singers and Serbian music' (Sanja Đorđević) and an identifiable group to blame (be it the veterans' association, the Croatian media, or Croats who 'would rather their children listened to Chopin and Mozart').

The story on the Croatian side, meanwhile, is a much more mundane one of unverifiably disappointing ticket sales and an unclear destination for the ticket revenue. (The circus itself has been rescheduled for late April in Ljubljana, perhaps resuming the city's mid-90s function as a performance site for Serbian acts who weren't quite welcome in Croatia yet.)

The observation that whatever happened at Folk Revija would set the agenda for impressions of folk in Croatia applies, with this sort of escalation, as much to Serbia as it does to the host country. Is it really such a good idea for the prevailing Serbian tabloid memory of the case to be that Vukovar veterans threatened Serbian singers so severely that the show had to be called off for their own protection?

Folk Revija: Another One Bites The Dust

2007-02-28T17:49:00.000Z

Looks like the Zagreb Folk revija concert is off, according to, as it happens, Nova TV and Dnevnik.hr: either it's down to the usual excuse of poor ticket sales, or organiser Braco Zatezalo's allegation that 'Croatian patriots are threatening folk singers'.

Hloverka Novak-Srzić and the Kontakt team, after the battering (and inadvertent advertisement) they gave it on last night's show - which you can now watch by following the link on Dnevnik's page - are likely to be quite pleased with themselves...

Folk Revija: First Kontakt

2007-02-28T17:31:00.000Z

Next month's Folk revija concert in Zagreb took another step towards scandal-hood on Tuesday as the subject of Hloverka Novak-Srzić's daily political talk-show Kontakt.

While December's turbofolk edition of Denis Latin's Latinica was concerned with understanding the social background of turbofolk, Kontakt set itself the simpler question of whether the 'turbo folk review in Zagreb' ought to be banned. (Not quite, was her guests' consensus, but it didn't mean they had to be happy about it.)

What may prove to be two decisive arguments against the concert were put forward by Damir Jašarević, a representative of the veterans' group which has declared its opposition to the event: firstly, should a venue (the Zagrebački velesajam) ultimately owned by Zagreb council be hosting turbo folk concerts, and should a broadcaster (BN Televizija from Republika Srpska) which he linked to Ratko Mladić be allowed to be the media sponsor of any event in Croatia?

(The veterans were initially no happier with Nova TV itself last month when Novak-Srzić's channel-mate Mirjana Hrga decided to invite the Serbian nationalist rock singer Bora Djordjević on to her own show to discuss the Serbian elections; however Hrga's demolition of Djordjević's support for the Četnik movement ought to have soothed the most fervent patriot.)

Duško Ljuština appeared 'in the name of the city of Zagreb's office for culture, education and sport, as a theatre man and an old rocker' to defend City Hall's position, but not too vehemently: indeed, the tone of Ljuština's and other guests' remarks was that the talk-show itself might have the unwelcome side-effect of advertising the concert even more effectively than the posters stuck up at various locations around town. (Which seem to be getting torn down much more often than the ones for Zagreb's next big klapa concert or ethno-blues musician Miroslav Evačić.)

Unlike Jašarević, Ljuština, or musicians' lobbyist Paolo Sfeci (taking ample time to warn that folk singers were mainly coming to Croatia without applying for work permits or paying tax), Osijek's folk entrepreneur in the making, Alen Borbaš, hardly got a word in edgeways (also unlike Latinica, where he had a good 6-7 minutes to put his own patriotic credentials as a Croatian veteran and volunteer who deserted from Yugoslav army service into play), although did have space to imply that it's 'turbofolk' if you don't approve of it and 'folk' if you do. (For the sake of objectivity, I should probably be switching between both.)

Borbaš has experience with similar events in his home town, where his annual Folk hit godine concert was refused permission by Osijek mayor and HSP leader Anto Djapić to hire the municipal stadium; undeterred, he's currently Balkanika television's representative in Croatia, and plans to become the Croatian distributor for the leading Serbian folk label Grand Productions.

With 68% of callers to the Kontakt phone poll voting that the concert ought to be banned, the Folk revija looks to be on believe-it-when-you-see-it status.

As of last night, that is, when Blogger wasn't working...

Every Week Is Turbofolk Week

2007-02-26T20:06:00.000Z

Via Bosnia Vault and Yakima Gulag, the International Herald Tribune profiles Balkanika Music Television, the pop-folk satellite/cable channel broadcasting to Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, Bosnia, Albania and, since January, Slovenia. The pan-ex-Yugoslav reach of TV Pink and the Braća Karić channel is one thing,but IHT's Matthew Brunwasser points out that Balkanika takes the transnational enterprise another step forward:

'Perhaps the most novel aspect of Balkanika is that it is completely multilingual: programming switches back and forth among any of 10 languages. This means most of the channel's viewers at any given time are hearing a language they don't understand.

While Slavic-language speakers can understand each other at least somewhat, Albanian, Greek, Turkish and Romanian are unintelligible to speakers of other Balkan languages.'

(Although a travelling cover version is still a travelling cover version.)

Meanwhile, this week's issue of Croatia's Arena magazine reports on falling attendances for Croatian performers in the diaspora (usually thought of as a reliable cash cow) and the trend for the owners of Croatian clubs to hire cheaper and more popular folk singers from Serbia or Bosnia instead. According to Ivan Sokić, the owner of several clubs and bars in Munich:

'There's a new generation of Croatian emigrants coming to our nightclubs now. Most of them speak German in the club, they bring their German and Italian friends and tell them that folk-type [narodnjačka] music is actually the melos of their homeland.' Moreover, he continues, Serbian channels like Pink and OBN Televizija are available in Germany and young people happily watch them.

'Those channels are available in almost all the cable packages. And I have to say they're very neutral. You can also see [Croatian singers] Severina, Goran Karan and Oliver Dragojević on them. You can't feel any national colour, and looking at the SMSs they show at the bottom of the screen I can see that young people of different nationalities are communicating. All that is creating a new atmosphere in which young people want to have fun a different way. Add that to the expensiveness of Croatian showbusiness singers, and the result is folk singers [narodnjaci] in our nightclubs.'

To be fair, the same article could have been written ten years ago, when Dragana Mirković first started showing up in Croatian discos around Frankfurt, although with rather less in the way of SMSs...

Dora 2007: Anything But Štikla, Including Peter Pan

2007-02-23T19:30:00.000Z

The spirit of Natalija Verboten, or more precisely of her meticulously-rehearsed on-stage chaos, lived on in this year's Slovenian Eurovision selection and is likely to be revived yet again at the Croatian version (Dora), thanks to favourite (or 'favourite'?) Jelena Rozga promising Jutarnji list that she'll be escorted on stage by Peter Pan, Snow White and/or Little Red Riding Hood. (It's only thanks to the small matter of copyright that viewers were spared Harry Potter and Gandalf too.)

While Verboten's effort SOS owed a lot to the Swedish schlager school (perhaps an awful lot, for viewers who had already encountered Linda Bengtzing's Alla flickor), Rozga's is musically located closer to home. Ilko čulić's Dora preview article in Globus this week (headlined 'The crusade against nightclub-singers [cajki]'), confirming the impression of the 2007 line-up as an anything-but-Moja Štikla affair, saw Rozga's song Nemam (I haven't got) as 'some sort of Balkan folk-pop mix in which Thompson’s Dinaric pastorals rub up against the old hits of Neda Ukraden'.

There's surely more than a hint of the Lane moje-Lejla axis too - a technique which has resulted in second place for Serbia-Montenegro and third place for Bosnia-Herzegovina, both of whose delegations were sensible enough to opt for a minimalist performance with no interference whatsoever from the collected cast of classic Disney movies. (Eurovision rules restrict groups to six members - a rule which has already caused difficulties for some members of the twelve-piece Klapa Maslina in Dora - so audiences are at least unlikely to be treated to an entire complement of Lost Boys or Seven Dwarves.)

East Ethnia and, naturally enough, Anti Turbo Folk are both on top of the Folk revija story - with the latter pointing out that Croatian impressions of the genre, outside the folk subculture itself, are likely to be formed for the immediate future by whatever happens, or doesn't happen, at the Zagreb Velesajam in a couple of weeks' time. Just as the January 2006 nightclub shootings cemented the relationship between turbofolk and violence in the public imagination (in contrast, there was little sign of any impending moral panic when shots were fired at the Zagreb alternative club Gjuro on New Year's Eve), or Jutarnji list's poll of teenagers last March made it proverbial that '43% of teenagers listen to narodnjaci', expect another round of agenda-setting to come out of Zagreb's first non-nightclub folk concert in the history of independent Croatia.

For the moment, the fact that articles on Folk revija are appearing in the metro section rather than the showbusiness pages already seems to suggest that the ideal reader isn't necessarily supposed to be treating it as a source of enjoyment...

Let 3: Trouble In Travnik

2007-02-21T19:53:00.000Z

So, the current state of the Croatian-Bosnian cultural flow seems to be as follows: one batch of a dozen showbusiness-folk singers (with a handful of reinforcements from Serbia) heads one way, and one controversial Rijekan art-rock group Let 3 heads the other.

Or possibly not: a Homeland War veterans' organisation has predictably enough condemned the Folk revija concert scheduled for 7 March in Zagreb (although with the 5,000 tickets rapidly selling out, the 'poor sales' excuse for a diplomatic cancellation isn't going to wash), and Let 3's 24 February concert in Travnik is under threat after the new director of the local Cultural Centre revoked their right to use the hall with not much more than two weeks' notice.

Emir Maličević was apparently concerned at the group's tendency to strip naked on stage and its effect on 'the proper cultural education of the young people who would attend the concert' - although Let 3's gimmick these days, in line with their most recent album Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačka (The Bombing of Serbia and Čačak) - is turbo-punk covers of newly-composed folk music performed in a variety of hyper-Balkan national costumes. (Which they intend as the highest possible degree of irony, and surely not as folk music for people who would never listen to folk music.)

After the ban was confirmed by Travnik council at the weekend, Željko Komšić - the Croat member of the Bosnian state presidency - has now intervened in defence of Let 3, arguing that Bosnia-Herzegovina's international reputation would be threatened by 'any kind of ban in the sphere of culture and the arts' and that 'I know Travnik has never been, nor will it be, a "dark vilayet [Ottoman province]" as some ill-intentioned people want to present it.'

The organisers of the Travnik concert, Alter Art, are collecting messages of support on their website (166 of them, at last count), including a response from the marketing and promotion manager of Let 3's label Dallas: according to Mario Grdošić, 'few people in the civilised world today do not understand creative and artistic freedom, and the basic principles of good pop provocation - and he adds that despite the title of the band's last album they have successfully sold out their concerts in Belgrade and other Serbian cities, plus an appearance at the 2006 Exit festival in Novi Sad.

Alter Art are currently vowing that the concert will go ahead - if not at the Cultural Centre then at another venue. And as for Folk revija? All systems seem to be 'go', despite opposition from Narodni radio's authentic-folk-music DJ Drago Rubalo, who complained to Jutarnji list:

'When was the last time you saw [tamburica singers] Kićo Slabinac or Vera Svoboda on HTV? Domestic television's music programming is too serious and viewers need musical education to follow it. We're dealig with high culture, and on the other hand countless Bosnian and Serbian TV stations, which are accessible 24 hours a day in Croatia as well, are playing turbofolk. People need a rest and
detachment from the grey reality of everyday life, and unfortunately they're finding it on Serbian TV stations.'

The Old Croatian Soap Opera

2007-02-15T20:02:00.000Z

When a brief article in Kurir at the end of January mentioned plans for BN Televizija from Bijeljina to organise a large-scale concert of Serbian and Bosnian showbusiness folk singers in Zagreb's basketball stadium in late February or early March, the Gazette resolved to believe it when it saw it. (Which, given the Gazette's current on-location status, can be taken quite literally.)

To mangle an English proverb, great showbusiness-ethnopolitical oaks have a habit of growing from little acorns in Kurir; or, at least, that's how we ended up with such a fuss over Severina's 'Moja štikla'.

Now that there are half a dozen posters between my flat and the station for a BN Televizija Folk revija to be held at the Zagrebački velesajam (Zagreb's sprawling trade-fair complex) on 7 March, involving Šerif Konjević, Halid Muslimović, Viki Miljković, Mina Kostić, Goga Sekulić and 8-10 other singers (although neither of Bijeljina's own two contributions to the narodna scene, Lepa Brena or Seka Aleksić), it looks as if Zagreb may be set for the highest-profile pop-folk event since Željko Joksimović played the Dom sportova in November 2004, bucking the usual trend of folk performers appearing in out-of-town nightclubs. (The event's even being trailed on a Slovenian listings site; and yes, Joksimović counted as a folk singer from this end.)

Except, according to the Bosnian edition of Svet, or rather Svijet, there's (not very detailed) word of opposition from the Croatian Musicians' Union (HGU), an organisation once renowned - under its former president - for opposition to Serbian performers (most of all Djordje Balašević) appearing in Croatia. If that's the case, though, the Bosnian media knows more about it than their Croatian counterparts.

There is, in the meantime, news from Večernji list that another Serbian pop-folk singer, Ana 'Romale, romali' Nikolić, has been lined up for a leading role in a new Croatian soap opera, 'Strast koja ubija' (Deadly passion).

(The old Croatian soap opera, Turbofolk, continues.)

Comeback Of The Week: Tajči

2007-02-15T19:28:00.000Z

Yes, the Gazette's fallen back on recycling old headlines, but Tatjana Matejaš Tajči is starting to make a habit of this.

Jutarnji list has the not entirely surprising story that Zagreb's all-things-to-all-people mayor Milan Bandić has associated himself with a Herzegovinan peace marathon from Grude to the Marian shrine of Medjugorje (there's a shorter Ljubuški-Medjugorje leg for the less athletic) under the title of 'Trčimo Gospi' (Race you to the Lady'). Having raced each other to the Lady, runners will be rewarded with a post-marathon concert featuring Herzegovina's biggest star Mate Bulić, his brother-in-musical-arms Marko Perković Thompson and - rather than, say, Miroslav Škoro, who's usually the other member of that trio - former teen-pop star Tajči.

After leaving the heights of late-Yugoslav showbusiness for America in 1991, Tajči got into the Ohio/Illinois Christian music scene under her married name of Tatjana Cameron (with a year-round repertoire of musical spectacles for churches) and dropped back to the old country last summer to perform at - where else - Medjugorje. It can't have escaped her attention that, while she's been away, patriotic showbusiness with a side order of charismatic Christianity has become big business in her domovina, with the same Thompson at its vanguard.

On the other hand, it's quite literally a band of brothers as things stand: Croatia's been without a female religious-patriotic headliner since Vera Svoboda faded from the spotlight along with the rest of the tamburica scene (although Doris Dragović made quite a claim to the position in the early 90s). Gap in the market, anyone?

Votes From The North, Flower From The South

2007-02-03T23:54:00.000Z

When Croatian televoters gave a maximum 12 points at Eurovision to Serbia-Montenegro's representative Željko Joksimović in 2004, Jutarnji list headlined one of its articles with the apparent paradox that 'Hrvati vole narodnjake' ('Croats love folk songs').

With the victory of a song by a Croatian composer in the Slovenian Eurovision pre-selection this weekend, it might be worth keeping an eye out for headlines along the lines of 'Slovenci vole Hrvate' ('Slovenes love Croats') - a situation which, from the point of view of Slovenian foreign minister Dimitrij Rupel, would be every bit as paradoxical.

Rupel, embittered by a series of pedantic border disputes with Croatia which resulted in an exchange of diplomatic notes a few days ago, went on record earlier in the week as stating that 'Croatia needs us more than we need them' since Slovenia will have a say in Croatia's entry to the EU, and the vice-president of the Slovenian Parliament, Marko Pavliha, called on Slovenians to holiday at home on Triglav rather than on the Croatian coast.

Summer will prove which option turned out to be more attractive for Slovenians, but it turns out almost immediately that at least 44,000 of them (judging by the figures in the final round of voting) either think a Croatian songwriter can do a better job at Eurovision than his domestic colleagues or couldn't really be bothered either way. More precisely, that's Croatian songwriter Andrej Babić, who travels to Eurovision with opera singer Alenka Gotar and their song Cvet z juga (Flower from the south) four years after sending Claudia Beni to Eurovision for Croatia and two years after girlband Feminnem represented Bosnia-Herzegovina on his behalf.

In the meantime, Babić has concentrated his efforts on the Slovenian pre-selection EMA, composing songs for Saša Lendero in 2005 and 2006. Both the Babić-Lendero efforts scored highly with the public televote but poorly with the expert jury in the 50:50 weighting system employed by RTVSLO until this year (likewise other folk-pop and turbo-polka acts such as Atomik Harmonik, Rebeka Dremelj and Natalija Verboten), leading to suspicions that either Babić's nationality or the 'southern' flavour of his music might have counted against them. (The songs themselves both ended up translated into hrvatski for festivals in Montenegro and Croatia.)

However, this year's televote-only system - potentially to Rupel's and Pavliha's chagrin - produced a convincing victory for Gotar and Babić over the nearest rival, Bitka talentov casting-show winner Eva Černe, and 12 other contenders for whom spectacle was the order of the day. (Gold flags, red dresses with ">metres-long trains, a guest appearance by the Phantom of the Opera, vaguely lesbian dancers, and a song apparently set in a nuclear plant...)

Clearly, Cvet z juga hardly hides its southern inclinations, but a glance over the last few EMAs would suggest that the heart of Slovenian pop in general is currently being drawn - as in the old Doris Dragović hit Srce vuče južnom kraju - to 'southern parts', whether Croatian or even further south and east.

Severina's old Eurovision and pre-selection routines? Ask Rebeka Dremelj and Steffy (who cleverly turned up with a brass band months before Seve's album with Bregović is even due to be released). 1940s costumes and a list of as many European capitals as Flamingosi could fit into three minutes (before their pre-selection dissolved into chaos, but that's another story)? That'll be Don Corleone, third-placed this weekend. And the 'turbo polka' of Atomik Harmonik and their rivals Turbo Angels? Surely not too far away from turbo folk...

EMA quote of the evening, however, belonged to co-presenter Mario Galunič, explaining the task ahead:

'We need a song that Europe can't ignore. So that they will say "Very good! Very interesting song from... Slovakia!"'

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Multi-Channel World

2007-02-03T23:11:00.000Z

There's unfortunate news for Ceca Ražnatović, whose performances and videos have apparently been dropped from the playlist of the Serbian channel TV Pink after a witness in a court case against the Zemun Clan accused her of suggesting the kidnap of Pink's owner Željko Mitrović. In certain quarters, Pink and Ceca have been all but synonymous, despite Mitrović's attempts to take his station upmarket by cutting back the amount of newly-composed folk music it broadcasts.

Should the collapse of Ceca's relationship with Pink become permanent, it'll be almost as unfortunate news for tabloid picture editors across the ex-Yugoslav region, who like nothing better than to illustrate the briefest mention of Pink with a picture of the woman herself. (Of Ceca, that is. Not of Pink.)

In the long run, however, one wonders if the image of Mitrović and his channel might benefit from 'dececaizacija', if its first associations - according to a Globus journalist who interviewed him in 2005 - remain 'the folk programme, silicone beauties and prettifying the wartime reality of Serbia under sanctions.'

The contemporary TV Pink now uses 12 studios across the ex-Yugoslav region and is broadcast in every ex-Yugoslav state except Croatia (although Croatian viewers with the right satellite or cable connection can pick up the Pink BiH signal). However, Mitrović has shown interest in investing in the 'huge potential of the Croatian media market' (as he told Globus) for some time - whether by buying into its largest record label Croatia Records, building a film-making complex in the country, or becoming involved with one of the private national terrestrial channels, Nova TV.

Turning to some (for now) thoroughly unrelated news: Večernji list reports that multi-channel digital terrestrial television is coming to Croatia, with 32 new channels expected to go live across the country by the end of 2009 and concessions to be awarded in 2008. (If you thought the politics involved where four national channels were concerned were intricate enough, wait until there are 36 of them.) Assuming the Croatian digital landscape evolves in the same way as the UK's, expect the multiplex to be made up of existing channels broadening their portfolios, plus new arrivals taking their first steps into the national media market.

New arrivals like... well, perhaps like Željko Mitrović?

Hard Rock Domovina

2007-01-29T17:40:00.000Z

Last year's winning Eurovision song Hard rock hallelujah has been given a somewhat tongue-in-cheek new lease of life by Croatian pop DJ Zlatko Turkalj - as a band-aid get-together encouraging listeners to choose domestic music. According to the text that rolls Star Wars-style over the introduction to the song's video:

'In an age of general globalisation we need to stay our own, to give more appreciation to what we Croats are musically recognisable for: from unrivalled klapa song, indomitable and inspirational tamburica, brilliant schlagers, high-quality pop [zabavne] music with a long tradiion, to rock, pop and dance which recently get more recognition in the [rest of the] world than at home.'

Turkalj's version of the song, premiered on his Turki party show as part of his Slušaj hrvatsko (Listen Croatian) campaign and titled To je tvoje (It's yours), involves cameos from various well-regarded Croatian singers, mainly at the respectable pop end of the pop-rock spectrum - so that's names like Mišo Kovač, Tereza Kesovija, Gabi Novak, Arsen Dedić, Tony Cetinski, Vanna, Nina Badrić, Boris Novković and Indira Vladić, rather than the patriotically-preoccupied singers who might have come up with the idea off their own bat. (To be fair, Miroslav Skoro figures in the To je tvoje line-up too, but that can generally be said for any band-aid.)

Indeed, it's perhaps a wonder that Marko Perković Thompson didn't take it into his head to make free with Hard rock hallelujah (Lordi being one of the rare acts who make more of an on-stage spectacle than him) - especially since he has previous rock-schlager form with his cover version of Abba's Super trouper five years ago. (Iza devet sela (Behind the nine villages) is a charming fable of 'vuci, vile i hajduci' (wolves, fairies and bandits) and why one should always turn right instead of left, even at the crossroads.)

Thompson has other business on his mind this week, though: his promotional visit to a Frankfurt record shop to sign copies of his Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj (Once upon a time in Croatia) album was called off, possibly because of threats from diaspora Serbs, possibly because of fears that local teenagers from both diasporas might conduct a re-enactment of the brawl at the Australian Open, or possibly because organisers realised that the shop simply wouldn't be big enough to accommodate demand.

Still, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good; he still found time for lunch with Mate Bulić.

Bora Djordjević on Epicentar: Aftershocks?

2007-01-28T21:54:00.000Z

Despite threats from a group of Zagreb war veterans that they'd intervene to prevent the transmission of Mirjana Hrga's Epicentar talk show when she interviewed the Serbian rock singer Bora Djordjević, there's been little sign of recriminations after last week's show was successfully broadcast.

The major charge laid against Hrga's Nova TV colleague Petar Vlahov when he went to interview Ceca Ražnatović in January 2005 was that he hadn't asked her the key questions - her attitude to the aggression against Croatia and her response to accusations of involvement in the conspiracy against Zoran Ðinđić - which would have transferred the interview out of the realm of entertainment television and into the field of big-P Politics.

No such allegations could apply to Hrga, who put Djordjević over the political barrel for 25 minutes on last Sunday's show, starting with the question 'Are you a Četnik?' (Djordjević: 'Absolutely', although the two speakers arrived with rather different understandings of četništvo, with Djordjević maintaining that it stood today for 'being proud of what you are'.) Half an hour later, Hrga's audience were well-informed about Djordjević's performances in Serb-occupied Knin and his insistence that conversations about Srebrenica should also remember 'the number of Serbs who died' - and were left under no illusions what Hrga's most vocal guest, HSP (Croatian Party of Right) leader Ante Djapić, thought about it.

(The only shame for viewers who might have liked to know a bit more about the Serbian elections is that Epicentar's other Belgrade guest - Sonja Biserko from the Serbian Helsinki Committee standing in for an unavailable Nataša Kandić - got no more than six or seven minutes of screen time: a quarter of the space allotted to Djordjević.)

Mirjana Hrga, for her part, has been attracting more attention than ever since the interview, at a time when one might expect the press to be focusing on the impending arrival at Nova TV of her old talk-show rival Hloverka Novak-Srzić. Jutarnji list and Globus both carried interviews with Hrga this weekend, in which she explained why she'd invited Djordjević for his first post-war appearance on a Croatian political show:

'Given that there’s radicalisation on the Serbian [srpska] political scene, and surveys are showing that Šešelj’s radicals and Koštunica’s party are getting more and more votes, it was completely logical for me to invite someone on to the show who sang to that same Koštunica for Serbian New Year, and who even without Kostunica fills stadiums and performs in front of 25,000 people. Moreover, he wears Četnik coats of arms on his jackets, he publicly declares himself as a Četnik, he promotes radical ideas… For me that too is Serbia. We in Croatia can’t pretend that Serbia is in Africa. It’s our neighbouring state, and I want to show what’s going on there, I want to say that two Serbias exist.'

As for her guests from the Croatian side - particularly Djapić and veterans' representative Mladen Pavković - Hrga told Globus that:

'I wanted Đapić, as a representative of the Croatian right wing: I wanted to confront him with some, conditionally put, right-wing political option in Serbia, but it turned out those are two [different] worlds, that Ante Đapić is a top European [vrhunski Europejac] for what the other side offers. And I wanted a representative of the branitelji, because they are the people who defended Croatia from just the sort of opinions and plans that Čorba was talking about. I exceptionally respect the branitelji, so I invited them on. I know that for them it was a painful evocation of those memories.'

Folk Sans Frontières?

2007-01-24T18:34:00.000Z

So that's Vuco in Dora, and now - if one can believe everything one reads in Kurir - a whole crowd of Serbian pop-folk singers are getting ready to play the Dražen Petrović basketball arena in Zagreb, rather than the out-of-town nightclubs and discos they've appeared in until now.

Seka Aleksić, Viki Miljković, Hanka Paldum, Indira Radić, Miroslav Ilić, Šaban Šaulić, Šerif Konjević and various others are among the names very tentatively mentioned by the Serbian tabloid, in an article calmly headlined 'Folk singers are charging towards Zagreb!' - at sufficient pace to arrive by late February or early March, according to Braco Zatezalo from Bijeljina's TV BN, which floated the idea in the first place.

The Gazette will believe it when it happens, though...

Dora 2007: He Will Rock You?

2007-01-23T18:36:00.000Z

There's no sign of Goran Bare, as it happens, but the list of contestants for the 2007 edition of Dora, Croatia's contest to choose a representative for Eurovision, is still verging towards the upmarket - albeit the usual sprinkling of complete debutants and reality TV show cast members.

Several of the performers have Eurovision experience, including Vivien Galletta and Naim Ayra (both members of Put in 1993), Claudia Beni, Goran Karan, and Feminnem, who competed for Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2005. There's a fair smattering of swing (the Sick Swing Orchestra and Marko Tolja), and a couple of names who interpret 'folk music' in quite a different sense to Severina's Moja stikla: Klapa Maslina (responsible for one of umpteen versions of the Dalmatian standard Da te mogu pismom zvati) and Miroslav Evačić, an ethno musician who mixes blues and Podravina folk music, making him the mid-noughties answer to Istrian-jazz doyenne Tamara Obrovac.

In fact, the list as a whole might look like two and a half dozen attempts to define the antipode of Štikla if it wasn't for the incongruous inclusion of a certain Sinisa Vuco - a singer whose association with 'turbofolk' is even more ingrained than Severina's. Vuco's repertoire, with emphasis on the pleasures (or otherwise) of drinking, sex and supporting Hajduk Split, musically might not be too dissimilar to Marko Perković Thompson's, only with less historical mythology and much more accordion. (In fact, here are the two of them in the company of Dalmatian diasporic singer Dražen Žanko.)

In all other respects, though, the two singers have taken paths as diverging as the average Jeffrey Archer plotline - Thompson inclining towards the patriotic (and vowing never to perform in Serbia), while Vuco has since signed for Lepa Brena's Grand Productions and regularly appears on TV Pink or duetting with Serbian-based singers. (They include Vesna Zmijanac, Neda Ukraden, and Mitar Mirić, with whom Vuco covered Queen's We Will Rock You as Volim narodno - I love it the folk way.) For much of the 1990s, indeed, Vuco claimed that his music had been banned by the then management of Croatian Television (HTV) because of its similarity to folk from Serbia and Bosnia.

However, it looks like Vuco's performing with a 'rock composition' by Fedor Boić, rather than with one of his more narodnjački compositions. Which might be just as well. Would HTV really want to go through that again?

Anyone For Handball?

2007-01-20T12:41:00.000Z

A metro system for Zagreb might still be many years away, but the metropolis might soon share a less welcome characteristic with the Gazette's home town of London: losing out on hosting a world sporting championship because the venues weren't ready in time.

London had to hand over the 2005 World Athletics Championships to Helsinki because the British government abandoned a planned new stadium at Picketts Lock and the IAAF didn't much fancy shifting it to Sheffield; Zagreb's flagship event - in partnership with five other Croatian cities - is supposed to be the men's handball world championships in 2009, for which seven new stadia with between 3,000 and 12,000 seats each need to be built.

However, the Croatian government's decision to bypass the usual process of public tender for building projects so that the stadia can be built quicker has turned into the scandal of the week, and the government's U-turn yesterday takes the process back to square one - with proposals to reduce the number of host cities or even handle the whole thing from Zagreb, and crossed fingers that the International Handball Federation will be more patient than the IAAF.

Now Jurica Pavičić in Jutarnji list has questioned why the Croatian state puts such emphasis on sport in the first place:

'For the sake of sport, the Croatian administration is willing to amputate part of a military base and expropriate agricultural land. For the sake of sport, magnificent buildings get built which are not a realistic priority. [...] Nobody except sport has that sort of social power in our society - not science, not technology, not business, not art. Try and imagine in your wildest dreams a situation like what we have today with handball except that the reason is not sport. Try, for instance, to imagine the authorities expropriating a navy yard or preparing a special law because they want to - let's say - build a top-class brain institute.'

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Epicentar

2007-01-19T12:07:00.000Z

Two years ago, Nova TV caused the television scandal of the month when their journalist Petar Vlahov went to Belgrade to interview Ceca Ražnatović for his Drugo lice talk show. Now another Nova TV show, Mirjana Hrga's Epicentar, is proving that the channel is no believer in the law of once bitten, twice shy.

Hrga's show on Sunday evening is scheduled to discuss the Serbian elections, and particularly the popularity of the Radical party. Epicentar's favoured expert to provide the Radical point of view? Serbian rock singer Bora Đorđević from the band Riblja čorba.

Perhaps predictably, Hrga has since received threats from the Society of Zagreb Defenders of Vukovar, a war veterans' group whose president Damir Jašarević told Jutarnji list, using much the same rationale as the protests against Drugo lice in 2005:

'We would accept the programme only if Đorđević would talk about what he knows about the Knin prison, the missing and fallen soldiers [braniteljima]. Everything else is rubbing salt into the wound when one knows that 1,200 Croats are still listed as missing. Therefore we will use all our means to prevent the programme going out. We're not afraid of prison.'

The Ceca Ražnatović Drugo lice never made it on to the air, but Hrga seems to have stronger support from the channel, which has even been rumoured to have hired security guards to ensure that Sunday's show can go ahead.

Comeback Of The Week: Lepa Brena

2007-01-15T16:28:00.000Z

It's the logical conclusion of Croatian retromanija: according to Jutarnji list, Yugoslavia's emblematic 1980s folk-pop singer Lepa Brena is planning a concert tour of Croatia, starting with Zagreb in 'late summer or September'.

Brena says that she's decided to tour Croatia because 'I see that retro is in fashion, mid-80s music, full of romance and love' - but is ruling out recording any duets with newer singers because they are 'complicated to record'. (Yes, that includes Severina, who's been talking about her new Bregović-produced album again ahead of her next theatrical appearance.)

Meanwhile - it's obviously one of those weeks - Bora Đorđević from the Serbian rock band Riblja Čorba will be appearing on Mirjana Hrga's talk show Epicentar to discuss the Serbian elections (on which East Ethnia and Anegdote have already contributed their own lucid thoughts). For any of its readers who might have been asleep during the last seventeen years, 24 sata's article on the show gives no more or less introduction to Đorđević than that 'at the beginning of the war the Serbian singer declared himself as a Četnik and it is well known that he politically belongs to the Radicals.'

Zagreb Slang: What Goes Around Comes Around

2007-01-13T14:49:00.000Z

Today's Večernji list has a story on the latest generation of youth slang in Zagreb. In the usual Sve je isto, samo njega nema (It's all the same, only Tito isn't here) way of these things, the online commenters are pretty convinced that most of it comes from 1960s Sarajevo, Serbian films' Belgrade slang via Slavonia, and almost anywhere else other than originally from Zagreb.

UPDATE: Thanks Dejan for more on šatrovački back-slang!

The Race Is On, Don't All Rush At Once

2007-01-10T19:01:00.001Z

While the Gazette was drafting its first post of the year about the Croatian pre-selection for Eurovision yesterday, the thought occurred to it that if Morrissey was really talking about Eurovision with the BBC (as if it hadn't all got improbable enough when Lordi entered), then anything's possible. Gibonni? Darko Rundek? Goran Bare?

Now it seems that Večernji list has got there first as far as Goran Bare is concerned. And one can safely say the concept of Goran Bare showing up at Eurovision is every bit as improbable as Morrissey doing the same thing.

All in all, the potential names being mentioned for this year's Dora so far include Tina Vukov, Luka Nižetić, Vanna, Feminnem, Raspashow, Emina Arapović, Ivana Radovniković, Damir Kedžo, a trio of Mladen Burnać-Davorin Bogović-Ivanka Bolkjovac (two rockers and an opera singer), and Kraljevi ulice (the 2006 runners-up) in the company of Sandra Bagarić. Respectable pop or rock musicians (or at least internationalised-talent-show graduates) the lot of them, without a trace of what one might call 'localised musical content' but would probably call either 'ethno' or 'turbofolk': suggesting that Lordi have had just as much of an impact on HTV's thoughts as, two years ago, did Željko Joksimović's second place for Serbia-Montenegro did. (One suspects that whatever the final Dora line-up is, it might as well be titled 'People the Jury Thought All Sound the Least Like 'Moja štikla'.)

Wait till Eurovision itself, and it may well turn out that Lordi's victory owed less to their position as a credible metal alternative and more to their rocking up on stage with monster costumes, battle-azes, pyrotechnics and expanding wings - a level of stagecraft which would even outdo Darko Rundek.

Who might count as too 'ethno' these days, anyway...?

Women In The Media (And In The Charts)

2007-01-02T12:34:00.000Z

The official Croatian singles chart, HRtop20, has published its chart of 2006, which actually bears quite a resemblance to any weekly chart from August/September. And isn't it funny how the Bosnian Eurovision entry comes in at no 2 on the zabavna chart, while Croatia's own representative only makes it into no 15?

Moving towards something much more heavyweight: via Bosnia Vault, MediaCentar Sarajevo has published its new book of the representation of women in print media in Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania. Look out particularly for Danijela Majstorović and Vladimir Turjačanin's discourse analysis of images of women in Bosnian tabloids; Mima Simić's discussion of Croatian and Serbian teenage girls' magazines and their promotion of 'active heterosexuality', Sanja Sarnavka and Suzana Kunac's in-depth analysis of the Ana Magaš murder case in Zadar; and Ivana Kronja's reflections on 'the link between political extremism and pornography' in Serbia.

First Post Of The Year

2007-01-01T12:45:00.000Z

BBC News Online has welcomed Bulgaria and Romania to the EU with an overview of their potential musical and televisual contributions to the Union. (Lots of chalga on the Bulgarian side; not so much manele on the Romanian.) On the micro level, here are some returned welcome greetings from the town of Csikszereda.

Meanwhile, East Ethnia sadly reports the death of Croatian sociologist Srđan Vrcan.

Comeback Of The Week: Zdravko Čolić

2006-12-29T15:08:00.000Z

Via Jugoslavija Yugoslavia Jugoslawien, Tamara Skrozza in Vreme marks the release of Zdravko Čolić's new album Zavičaj with an overview of his career:

'Among the petty Cecas, Leontinas and Joksimovićes, who pride themselves on their voice, build or status, Čola still remains untouchable. There are no music academies or producers who will drag Čola's vocal talents out of them; no evening classes which will teach them how Čola behaved in the age of his greatest fame; no magazine which will ever make a star out of them such as Čola has been and remained...'

And at least Čolić, unlike Seka Aleksić or Jelena Karleuša, has never felt the need to start a fashion line...

Tuesday Odds And Ends

2006-12-19T11:54:00.000Z

The Gazette opened its inbox today to find multiple emails about the 'Chinese turbo-folk star' making waves on the Banja Luka nightclub scene. According to the Hina report in Večernji list, Chi Xsiao Yin moved to the city with her parents in 2001 and has since been 'throw[ing] the audience into a trance with the hits of Lepa Brena and Ceca Ražnatović' under the stage name of Ćin-Ćin.

I'm undecided whether or not this is a fair swap for a planned Chinese TV remake of the cult Partisan movie Valter brani Sarajevo (Walter defends Sarajevo)...

Meanwhile, on a not dissimilar theme, Henry Jenkins reports from Poland on a brief encounter with Polish reggae.

And it's an early buon Natale from the Burekeaters, who have put up a Christmas tree of which Walter would certainly approve.

Positively The Last Word On Borat?

2006-12-18T11:38:00.000Z

Daniel Marcus in the latest issue of Flow magazine has an extensive article on how 'the former Yugoslavia has caught Borat fever' and how Slovenians can feel superior to Kazakhs, generic easterners and Americans by laughing at the fake documentarist:

'Assuredly, to most Americans, Borat might as well be from the former Yugoslavia – the jokes would work the same to American audiences. In Borat, however, the distance of the character's sophistication from the self-conception of the audience here means that the possibility that Baron Cohen is using Kazakhstan as a stand-in for their own homeland is not even considered.'

One Book: Middlesex

2006-12-15T14:17:00.000Z

Andy at Csikszereda Musings tagged me for this one with the introduction that 'Like a bus, you can wait years to be tagged and then loads come all at once.'

This post has ended up equally like a bus in that when you're waiting for the damn thing, it takes its own sweet time to turn up.

Anyway, a week ago I was supposed to do the following:

Once nominated, name one book you'd recommend wholeheartedly and explain your choice within one paragraph.

Nominate three people that you'll introduce to your readers in one paragraph.

Let these people know that they've been tagged.

Refer back to the person who tagged you, so that readers can travel back as well.

Let's go with Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, then. It's the story of an intersex teenager growing up in 1970s Detroit; two incestuous Greek lovers' escape from Smyrna to America in 1922; and the intersection of big-brush American history and Greek diaspora life in between. Eugenides ties the whole plot up with allusions and foreshadowings as tight as brown paper packages tied up with strings, which appropriately enough makes it one of my favourite things.

Tag, you're it: Katja, who fillets Balkan news and battles storms in the Yakima Gulag; Andrea, an author from Zagreb living in London; and Chig, a pop blogger (etc.) from Birmingham.

Čija Je Ona Livada, Čija Ona Trava

2006-12-15T10:43:00.000Z

In the words of the Herzegovinan folk song Moj Ivane (My Ivan), re-arranged by Marko Perković Thompson in 2000: 'Whose is that lawn, whose is that grass?'

If it's been talked about in the last couple of days, it's probably been Franjo Tudjman's.

Jutarnji list goes into much more detail today about architect Nenad Fabijanić's planned redevelopment of the square into 'a big park with paths, a long pool, a glass pavilion and underground parking.'

The new Tudjmanov trg could eventually host the type of cultural events currently held on Zrinjevac, Jelačićev trg and Cvjetni trg, and even replace the Manduševac fountain as school-leavers' preferred location of watery chaos during their end of year Norijada celebrations.

In fact, the plan seems to have been kicking around Zagreb Town Hall for several years, but according to Fabijanić 'has the greatest urban and social potential in the area of the broader centre of Zagreb', whatever its name:

'When I was working on the project, just like today, I thought that that space could become a city park which could contain various urban functions, from the utilitarian to the symbolic, and become an important social area in the western part of the city where there isn't a single square between Britanski trg and Črnomerec. [...] Whatever name it has received, I see that space as a starting point for the reurbanisation process of the western part of central Zagreb and a place where its urban identity in the 21st century can be confirmed, in which I expect participation by the artistic elite of Zagreb and Croatia.'

All very social and, well, democratic. In fact, art historian Krešimir Galović even recommends that 'monumental monuments' (such as those already erected to Tudjman in towns such as Slavonski Brod) won't suit the space at all, although 'a giant screen' might do the job nicely.

The Gazette doesn't like to be one for predictions, but it's safe to say Ankica Tudjman, Ivo Sanader, Jadranka Kosor and the rest aren't likely to be satisfied with a big screen. Or even the 'single square between Britanski trg and Črnomerec.'

There's not much chance of landing Zagreb with two Tudjman Squares, but it's worth wondering whether the pressure will continue until another prime zagrebački location is named after the late president.

Somewhere like... Zagreb airport, perhaps?

Sing-A-Long-A-Sanader

2006-12-14T18:16:00.000Z

The Tudjmanov trg decision aside, yesterday had an even more direct connection to the late president - it being the seventh anniversary of his death in 1999. With which a government delegation laying wreaths at his grave in Mirogoj cemetery, led by prime minister Ivo Sanader, broke into commemorative song.

Their 20-minute set list, according to Jutarnji list:

Djani Maršan's Bože, čuvaj Hrvatsku (God save Croatia)

Fala (Thank you)

Tereza Kesovija's Moja Dalmacija (My Dalmacija)

Miroslav Škoro/Zlatni dukati's Ne dirajte mi ravnicu (Hands off my plains)

Zovi, samo zovi (Call, just call)

Zdravo Djevo, kraljice Hrvata (Hail the Virgin, Queen of the Croats)

Lijepa naša domovina (Our beautiful homeland)

HDZ deputy Andrija Hebrang tells JL that they decided to sing 'several appropriate, patriotic songs' as background to the 45-minute ceremony, and that one or two of the numbers would have been particularly special to Tudjman - particularly Bože, čuvaj Hrvatsku, which he adopted as HDZ's anthem in the early 1990s.

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Jugoslovenka

2006-12-14T18:01:00.000Z

In 1987, the emblematic Yugoslav showbusiness-folk singer Lepa Brena expanded her multimedia empire that little bit further by releasing a feature film, Hajde da se volimo (Let's make love). Now eerily reminiscent of the ill-fated SpiceWorld, the film's pantomime-style plot saw Brena pursued by Arab sheiks intent on foiling her rendezvous in Dubrovnik with an English promoter who intended her to star in a thinly-veiled analogue of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Two years later there not unreasonably came Hajde da se volimo 2. Among the musical centrepieces this time was Brena's Jugoslovenka, with guest vocals from three regionally representative male stars (Danijel Popović for Montenegro, Vlado Kalember for Croatia, and Alen Islamović for Bosnia) and a syncretic chorus of:

'Oči su mi more jadransko
Kose su mi klasje panonsko
Sestra mi je duša slovenska
Ja sam Jugoslovenka

('My eyes are the Adriatic Sea
My hair is Pannonian wheat
My sister is the Slavic soul
I am the Yugoslav woman')

Hajde da se volimo 1 has been out on DVD for a while, and indeed last Christmas the Gazette nearly ended up with two copies. This year, the DVD of Hajde da se volimo 2 has sensibly been reissued in its 'original version' - so says its packaging - for the '06 holiday market.

Except, it would seem the time for rewriting musical memory isn't quite over yet: the Serbian tabloid Kurir discovered yesterday, for the Jugoslovenka segment, which has been replaced by a clip of Brena performing in Sofia; the best Kurir has been able to get out of the issuers ZAM is that the segment was excised at the wish of the song's composer, Marija Čavić.

Večernji list in Zagreb has now picked up the story of 'Brena's Yugo-trash trilogy' - basically reprising the Kurir title, but adding (with typical cross-border tabloid chemistry) that 'the song was sung together with Lepa Brena by the Croatian singers Daniel Popović and Vlado Kalember.'

Never fear, though: there's always YouTube for these situations.

Tudjman Square: Consensus (Or Not)

2006-12-13T19:35:00.000Z

Jutarnji list is now reporting that the Zagreb City Council's committee on such matters has decided the public space to be renamed in honour of Franjo Tudjman will be - 'the currently unnamed space' between Trg Francuske Republike, Ilica and Ulica Republike Austrije. (So much for Rooseveltov trg and all the other proposals.)

So nobody/nowhere needs to be displaced from public memory after all (except Rudolf von Habsburg, that is: the space is sometimes called Rudolfove vojarne or Rudolf's barracks) and the naming will usefully commemorate 'the space [where] the first president Tudjman held his legendary speech and mass rallies during Croatia's independence.'

Needless to say, not everyone's happy with it. Deputy prime minister Jadranka Kosor has attacked the decision as 'completely unacceptable to [her party] HDZ' and a politicised message from the city's social-democrat mayor Milan Bandić over 'who decides everything in Zagreb'.

Meanwhile, Tudjman's wife Ankica (who's been lobbying for Rooseveltov trg) has complained that Tudjman only held one election rally on the square at a time when he was president of HDZ rather than president of the Croatian state, and moreover that 'it isn't a square at all, but a "named space".'

It's not all bad news for the državotvorni lobby, though: check out the chequerboard-heavy mockups for the square's redesign.

Cikla Nikla, Cikla Nikla

2006-12-13T13:19:00.000Z

Ante Cash, a rapper from Imotski, is promoting his forthcoming album Idemo u varos by pre-releasing one of the tracks, Moja cikla (My beetroot).

Currently available on 24 sata's website, it does for the gajde what Shorty's Dodji u Vinkovce did for tamburica, with less in the way of ethno-politicised history and more in the way of satirising Severina's road to Athens. (There's competition for the Ante Nacionale title, of course, but isn't that the point?)

24 sata profiled Cash, aka Ante Vlašić, in December 2005, when he was sending a copy of his first album U ime oca i novca (In the name of the father and money) to Mr Gotovina himself and, 'since he also sings about injustice against war veterans [branitelji], expects that all patriots who love General Gotovina will listen to him'. As Cash explained at the time:

'My name's Ante anyway, and I come from Imotski, so it was completely to be expected that I'd become Cash. That name's the bomb! Like all Imoćani, I too sympathise with the general so the first thing I'll do at this time is - send my album to him in The Hague.'

Retromanija Miscellany

2006-12-11T14:59:00.000Z

First up, Jugoslavija Druga mentions that Bajadera chocolates (that iconic product of Croatian confectionery) are 50 today. Viki Miljković would no doubt like to celebrate the fact.

The eminent Croatian film director Lordan Zafranović's new project, according to Večernji list, is something of a departure - a pop music show devised by veteran zabavna (light-entertainment) singer Duško Lokin and featuring other performers of his generation. Evergreen club, produced for the satellite Croatian Music Channel, will be offered to other Yugoslav television stations, and might help to allay zabavna musicians' fears that there's never enough space for Croatian music on TV.

Meanwhile, it's time for the annual obsession of Croatian showbusiness reporters: who's going to earn how much for their New Year's Eve concerts. Halfway through Jutarnji list's latest set of figures comes the seemingly no longer controversial information that Doris Dragović will be entertaining the Montenegrin town of Kotor for Silvestrovo (elsewhere in Crnoj Gori, Nikšić gets a cut-price Boris Novković and Budva gets top-dollar Dino Merlin). It's all a long way from 1999, when Dragović's icebreaking NYE performance in Igal kicked off a controversy from which her career arguably never recovered.

Lastly, since we're talking transnational misadventures, it seems that Severina's US tour-that-wasn't from November picked up coverage on Bruce Sterling's blog at Wired as an example of 'cruelly postponed globalizatsiya'. Here's hoping it won't be indefinitely so - and that she finds her way to London in the process...

...A Vrati Nam Franju

2006-12-11T14:36:00.000Z

Neretva River also relays the suggestion from Večernji list that the circus over which Zagreb square should be renamed after late president Franjo Tudjman may finally have pulled into... Britanski trg. Britain out of zagrebački municipal memory, and Tudjman in? It's probably a fair exchange for most, although it's a wonder nobody's yet proposed renaming Britanac after that well-known friend of Croatia, Paul Robinson.

(So far, the inexhaustive list of potential Tudjmanovih trgova (etc.) has included Rooseveltov trg, Trg Francuske Republike, Ulica Hrvatske bratske zajednice, and Zagreb's Pleso airport - all unsuitable in the eyes of one or other Tudjman relative and/or municipal politician.)

Uzmi Stipe...

2006-12-11T14:15:00.000Z

Croatia's Index portal has previous form for uncovering public figures discussing the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in terms they'd rather have kept quiet about: in 2003, Marko Perković Thompson received the unwelcome New Year's Eve gift of discovering that a recording of his performing Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara had been released on to the internet courtesy of the Indexovci.

Now they've done it again - this time with the Croatian president Stjepan Mesić, who is said to have given two speeches at a Croatian club in Sydney in May/June 1992 (partially transcribed in Večernji list thanks to an enterprising Sydneysider) in which he described the Croats as having 'won twice' during the Second World War:

'The Croats won in 1941 when on 10 April they proclaimed a Croatian state. Because the Croats did not proclaim that state because they were fascists, but because they had a natural and historical right to a state. But the results of the Second World War are well-known, but it is also well-known that the Croats won in that war on a second occasion too because they found themselves together with the allies at the victors' table.'

The second speech involved an exposition of the current war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in which 'we are fighting for our own territory, and they are fighting for other people's', then headed off along the same lines, including the rhetorical instruction to those who disagreed to 'go and kneel down at Jasenovac'.

Neretva River has been following this assiduously all weekend, including reactions from Žarko Puhovski (Croatian Helsinki Committee), Vesna Pusić (leader of HNS, to which Mesić belongs), prime minister Ivo Sanader, and Mesić himself - plus the controversy over two Croatian Television journalists who have been suspended for their coverage of the story.

Mesić is holding to the line that he 'never supported the Ustaša regime', separating the idea of statehood from the criminal reality of the regime itself (The League of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of Croatia, for its part, is still behind him), and that the statement - which he no longer remembers giving - must have been a product of its time when 'it was necessary to win over [pridobiti] and consolidate [objediniti] all people in the defence of Croatia from aggression.'

(And when, he could have added, Tudjman's HDZ - to which Mesić still then belonged - was conducting an intricate balancing act between emigres some of whom believed wholeheartedly in the NDH and international sympathies which certainly didn't.)

Ironically enough, Mesić was himself the butt of insults in the final verse of Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara, which called on Our Lady of Sinj to 'take Stipe away and give us Franjo [Tudjman] back' (uzmi Stipu a vrati nam Franju). Is this the first time Mesić and Thompson have actually found common ground?

Whose Is This Carol?

2006-12-06T11:56:00.000Z

Via Global Voices Online, there's a festive version of the Whose is that song? phenomenon at Ukraine List: you might have heard of an American carol called Carol of the Bells (this Londoner only knows it as 'that song in the Christmas episode of West Wing season 2'), but not that it's adapted from a Ukrainian folk song Shchedryk. (Anthony Potoczniak, an anthropologist at Rice, is on the case.)

Meanwhile, Bosnia Vault relays this story from B92 on ex-Yugoslav hip hop's 'musical offensive against nationalist politicians, corrupt businessmen and priests meddling in politics', including artists from Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and Croatia. Says Serbia's Marčelo:

'What we're offering is an alternative to MTV and to American hip hop. Our fans are not looking for a gold chain and a gold tooth. They already have that in turbo folk, so hip hop is seen as something rebellious outside the slimy mainstream.'

One presumes that the Shorty of Marčelo ft. Shorty's 'Definicija' is a different one from the Shorty of Dođi u Vinkovce...

It's Esma Vs. Borat

2006-12-06T11:54:00.000Z

Joining the queue of Americans preparing to sue the producers of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat movie, reports Večernji list, is none other than the Macedonian Roma singer Esma Redžepova.

Redžepova's song Chaje shukarije is used to soundtrack the film's opening sequence, purporting to display the poverty of Borat's home village in Kazakhstan but actually shot in the Romanian village of Glod, largely populated by Roma who have themselves attacked the producers for originally misrepresenting the film as a documentary on the hardship of their village.

Redžepova now claims she was never consulted before the song was included on the soundtrack, which raises the question: who holds the rights to the track and thought that this would be an appropriate project to license them to in the first place?

Anyone For Statistics?

2006-12-05T14:53:00.000Z

Nancy Baym at Online Fandom has cottoned on to the potential of last.fm to feed back listening data from 240 countries, which arrived in my newsreader at just the right time for me to mess about with it.

The list of music deliberately tagged as Croatian isn't as definitive as it could be, but browsing various ex-Yugoslav artists and seeing what last.fm considers to be 'similar artists' based on overall listening habits is the Gazette's official lunchtime time-waste today. Transnational Eurovision fandom throws a slight spanner in the works (especially where Severina's concerned - and why else would Croatians or Andorrans be listening to both Goran Karan and Marijan van der Wal?), but the figures for Miroslav Škoro, Baruni, Seka Aleksić or Mile Kitić are pretty much what one might expect, while Neda Ukraden's eighties stuff obviously lives on somewhere.

On the other hand, that really isn't a nice thing to say about Rebeka Dremelj now, is it?

Folk On Film

2006-12-05T14:19:00.000Z

London's annual Bosnian Film Festival closed on Sunday with a showing of the new 'European mainstream' film from Danis Tanović and, more relevantly to the Gazette, Danijela Majstorović's documentary Posao snova (The dream job), which investigates women's experiences in the Serbian and Bosnian showbusiness folk-pop industry.

I was excited about this one back in February, when it premiered at a documentary festival in Zagreb, and with good reason. Even if the interviews with Ilinka Maršić, a young girl from Republika Srpska joining an 'orchestra' of miniskirted backing dancers (something which Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love video surely has a lot to answer for?) aren't quite so revealing, there are meatier contributions from the top rank of established stars: Hanka Paldum, Lepa Brena, Beba Selimović and (skipping a few generations) Selma Bajrami, who talks more candidly than one might expect about male managers and (of course) her famous tijelo.

That's Posao snova taken care of, then, but it still leaves me chasing the other film on south-east European folk music that I've been repeatedly told I ought to watch: Adele Peeva's Chia e tazi pesen? (Whose is this song?). In a nutshell, Peeva traced the same folk melody around the Balkans, where her informants are all convinced that it came from their country. (Making it the ancestor of transnational folk-pop such as Tarkan's Simarik or Despina Vandi's Gia?)

While I wait for it to show up on a convenient festival programme or a region 2 DVD, Gergana Doncheva has reviewed it for the new issue of Kinokultura (a Bulgarian cinema special):

'The film explicitly reveals how a popular musical piece becomes associated with any given national imaginary (for example, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, or Turkish). It comes as no surprise that the characters categorically refuse to accept that representatives of a foreign, though neighboring community, could sing the same song and love it as they do. By a bitter irony, instead of dividing them, the song binds together these national territories like a thin red thread, uniting collective memories and personal stories. Above all, however, it shows the typical Balkan predisposition to stubborn negativism.'

Lastly, talking of London and Bosnia, London Sevdah will be posting some recordings on their website as long as ten people leave a comment on their blog and ask for them. At last count, they need seven more!

Borat Yet Again

2006-12-01T12:14:00.000Z

Via East Ethnia, it seems a call for papers on '"Borat", Eurasia, American culture and Slavic studies' is doing the rounds in order to make benefit cultural learnings of Slavic Review.

It'll be disappointing if nobody has a go at analysing the movie's not exactly Kazakh soundtrack (not to mention the blatantly Time of the Gypsies-esque baptism to the sound of Ederlezi), but it probably needs a Roma specialist to do it justice.

Any takers?

Otherwise Comeback of the Week: Vanna

2006-12-01T12:02:00.000Z

The Croatian singer Vanna, formerly of ET, is releasing her first new material for four years - the end of an even longer absence than Thompson's, if you count his 2003 song in honour of Pope John Paul II. Accordingly, she's given an extensive interview to Večernji list, in which she reflects on stardom in a country where 'you can see me every Saturday on Kvaternik Square buying tomatoes' and where singers only find space on the state broadcaster HTV if they're presenting talk shows:

'I understand that we miss those 1990s when there was Croatian music on HTV every day, we remember the war years alone when the news and Croatian music were the only programming. Don't get me wrong, I don't want the times when we just had the news and music to come back, but allow me to remember the times when Croatian music experienced its most shining moments.'

Meanwhile, Magazin's first song with new lead singer Ivana Kovač will be Neću plakat' namjerno, which 24 sata is helpfully previewing today. Chances are it might appeal to anyone who enjoys post-2000 Doris Dragović (rather than the harder stuff), or, the tabloid points out, one or two numbers by Ivana's dad.

Comeback of the Week: Marko Perković Thompson

2006-12-01T11:58:00.000Z

There's nothing in the papers yet, but the Gazette's Slavonian grapevine reports that Marko Perković Thompson's long-awaited new album will be released on 9 December. (Surprisingly, perhaps, they've missed the opportunity to release it on the anniversary of Gotovina's arrest, which would be about twelve hours from now.)

Gotovina's arrest, in fact, was one of the excuses for Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj (yes, that's Once upon a time in Croatia) running so late; it seems they haven't delayed it yet again to account for whatever may or may not end up happening to Branimir Glavaš.

Thompson's official site now pictures the album cover and gives a complete tracklisting for the album, and will be releasing an extra set of lyrics every day before the 9th.

Along with the three pre-released hits - Dolazak Hrvata (The coming of the Croats), Tamo gdje su moji korijeni (There where my roots are) and Lipa Kaja (Pretty Kaja) - we're in for nine more songs with the usual mix of medieval personalities (King Zvonimir making his second appearance in the Thompson repertoire after 1993's Anica, kninska kraljica), heavenly figures, and disaffected soldiers from the Homeland War.

And all in time for the Christmas market, too...

Miscellaneous Update Day

2006-11-29T14:50:00.000Z

It's Dan Republike today, which Jugoslavija Yugoslavia Jugoslawien is naturally commemorating.

Irena Maryniak, writing in Eurozine, is casting an eye over Polish representations of migration. Anglo-Polish diasporic media, and, of course, the figure of the famous plumber.

Continuing the diasporic theme, via Global Voices Online, an insight into how Armenian diaspora televoting works.

Croatian headline of the week is 'Sve je isto, samo playbacka nema' (It's all the same, only there's no playback'), from a Jutarnji list retrospective on the annual Zagrebfest. Musical story of the week, meanwhile, is probably the arrival of the reunion tour by the Macedonian rock group Leb i sol.

And don't miss the Bosnian Film Festival (starting tomorrow with Ahmed Imamović's Go West) if you're in London.

Severina's Rainbow Tour: A Croatian Story

2006-11-22T21:20:00.000Z

Ask showbusiness manager Zoran Škugor, as Večernji list did on Monday, and he'll tell you that Severina's flop in the diaspora is due to her lack of a 'Croatian story' compared to Miroslav Škoro and Marko Perković Thompson, who literally and metaphorically perform their ethnicity at every opportunity:

'She doesn't number herself with the schlager singers [zabavnjaci] nor among the representatives of Dalmatia, but she has more and more of a pop-folk accent [na narodnjak]. [...] I'm sure that now she'll turn towards Serbia as much as she can and it's no wonder she chose Goran Bregović to write songs for her.'

(And look what happened when he was only her arranger.)

Severina's successfully toured Australia in the company of other Croatian singers, though (usually involving fetching pictures of Seve cradling a koala) - and the complaint that Croatia (diaspora included) is too small a market for Croatian singers is hardly new to autumn 2006. Indeed, two weeks ago Severina's manager Tomislav Petrović depicted the tour's national neutrality as an advantage:

'Unlike performances organised by Croatian parishes where musicians usually play two or three sets during the evening which also includes dinner, this time it's a real concert tour. We don't think that [church-organised] type of performance is bad, but Severina has outgrown it.

'[...] I didn't ask whether they [Arx International] are Croats, Serbs, Slovenes... Kazakhs. Their nationality really isn't essential to the job, and so far they've fulfilled all the conditions we agreed. Personally I don't have a problem on that question, and I even see that Croats are already working with Serbia in a big way. It's ultimately out of place to talk about the nationality of the people organising the tour, just as it's out of place to talk about whether Severina will be singing in America to Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks... or Kazakhs again? Severina will sing to everyone who goes to her concert.'

It's been clear for some time that Severina also belongs to Serbian showbusiness as far as the media there are concerned: add up her invitations to TV Pink awards shows and the extent of her coverage in Serbian tabloids like Svet. As a 'regional' star, she's surrounded by yet more sets of people and firms looking to promote, represent and generally make money out of her image.

Throughout spring, Severina was receiving (and taking part in) the musical version of the debate: if it's Croatian, can it be anything else ex-Yugoslav? And if it includes anything else ex-Yugoslav, can it be Croatian at all? The collapse of her American tour perhaps reflects the offstage version of the same problem (and in fact, there are a few hints that 'Štikla' didn't help Severina's standing with the Croatian diaspora). Can a Croatian singer have another ex-Yugoslav audience? And if she has another ex-Yugoslav audience, can she be Croatian at all?

Political circumstances and the structure of the media have changed since Doris Dragović fell foul of the same questions in 1999 with her (in)famous performance in Montenegro for New Year's Eve. (At the invitation, it tends to be forgotten, of a Croatian priest.) Nonetheless, the answer to whether Severina is just a Croatian star continues to be summed up by the British comedy catchphrase: 'Yeah but, no but'...

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Severina's Rainbow Tour

2006-11-22T21:14:00.000Z

When I heard Severina was off on a tour of North America this November, I wondered briefly whether the schedule would touch down in Washington DC, where I spent most of last week at a not unrelated conference.

No such luck, and while I was in Washington, it turned out that the entire tour had been called off, ostensibly due to incredibly poor ticket sales - only several dozen at each venue, and as little as 20 tickets (or even just 8?) in LA.

Croatian tabloid 24 sata has been almost gleeful about the whole thing, reporting Severina's landing in Atlanta, bomb threats to the venues in Vancouver and Los Angeles and the eventual cancellation of the whole schedule through a reporter already accompanying Seve on her rainbow tour.

Now she's back in Zagreb, the root of the problem seems to be resistance from the Croatian diaspora towards her performing in larger concert venues (the Atlanta concert was booked for the CBS Center) rather than diaspora clubs owned and operated by Croatian emigres - and/or a semi-organised campaign against a Croatian singer's tour being operated by a Serb-American firm Arx International. (Arx's upcoming attractions include concerts by Indira Radić, Kemal Monteno, Zdravko Čolić, Bijelo Dugme and Rade Šerbedžija - hardly a narrowly Serb line-up, although there's of course no sign of the usual Croatian-club diaspora performers, who operate through other channels.)

Arx's Miloš Marić has since told the Serb-American magazine Objektiv that he believed sections of the diaspora sabotaged the LA and Vancouver legs in particular by refusing to accept advertising or posters, as did a Serb radio station in LA 'which did not want to run the ad because Severina is a Croat'. However, he praised the Croatian Chronicle newspaper for prominently advertising the tour, and emphasised that:

'Of course I can't talk about a boycott from the entire Croatian community, because I don't believe the people who work in those media have that much influence over the whole community or that the entire community in those cities is homogeneously negative.

Marić's colleague Žana Jovanović Savić has also blamed the diaspora, including a Croat radio station in New York whose editor 'openly boycotted us, describing our collaboration as unnatural.'

The same line, perhaps unsurprisingly, comes from Serbian tabloid Blic - although no mention there, or in the dependably outraged Kurir, of the Serb radio station in LA.

Continued

News from the Back Garden

2006-11-14T13:56:00.000Z

Via East Ethnia, some exciting news from the Gazette's own back garden: a London sevdah group, joining the Bulgarian/Romanian/Macedonian/Greek/etc folk ensembles already active in the capital.

London Sevdah formed in May 2004, and aims 'to promote Bosnian music heritage (sevdah music) throughout London, United Kingdom and globally.' Unfortunately, I've just missed their performances at the Museum of London, but here's looking forward to their next...

Turning to a rather larger interpretation of back garden, Diamond Geezer questions how Britain ended up with two Remembrance Day silences and how the day ought to be commemorated full stop. (Conclusion: certainly not with a live classical-crossover performance from All Angels and a GMTV host...)

Severina On Schedule

2006-11-10T14:45:00.000Z

Yet another Večernji list interview for Severina, who's had a busy week - in between performing Moja štikla in a rock arrangement during a big Boris Novković concert in Zagreb, and rehearsing her role as Baroness Castelli in a new production of the classic Croatian play Glembajevi.

Next she'll be off on a tour of North America, where the Congress Theatre in Chicago is apparently billing her as the 'Croatian Madonna.' (That's the 21st-century singing one, not the 1st-century praying one, whose Croatian incarnation is already quite well spoken for by a certain Tatjana Matejaš.)

Otherwise, Severina has little to add to last week's interview with VL which finally indicated the contents of her made-in-Belgrade album. As she says this time:

'The new songs shouldn't be compared with 'Štikla' [...] Maybe what the album does have in common with 'Štikla' is that those little amateur orchestras from Županja, Daruvar, Solin, and Kaštel will perform on it, like the ojka singers from Sinj and the Matić brothers performed on Štikla. And on one lovely tamburica song Zlatni dukati are also appearing for me.'

Oh No, Not More Borat

2006-11-10T14:30:00.000Z

The Gazette wasn't best pleased at the idea that Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat movie would be soundtracked with an assortment of mainly Romanian and Macedonian Roma music, but Ilko Čulić in today's Jutarnji list is rather more enthusiastic. In fact, he's holding out hopes that the CD might turn out to be a big break for bands such as Mahala Rai Banda and Kočani orkestar:

'One shouldn't at all reject the possibility that the film's huge success might be reflected in multi-million sales of the soundtrack album, which would completely change the western perception of Balkan music or east European music in a wider sense. Film hits sometimes have a heavy influence on activating musical trends, and the best example is the soundtrack for Tarantino's Pulp Fiction which stimulated a worldwide revival of surf and twang music.'

We'll have to wait and see on that one, but there's no disagreeing with Čulić that the Borat producers mised a trick by overlooking a certain conceptual punk band from Rijeka:

'There are a whole lot of songs in the opus of Rambo Amadeus which could have been made for the aural illustration of Cohen's stunts, and an even better choice could have been Let 3, who share with Borat other similar preoccupations beyond false moustaches.'

Still, they could always team up with Mahir Cagri...

Glad Tidings: Marko Perković Thompson

2006-11-07T19:55:00.000Z

Većernji list reports that Marko Perković Thompson's third child (and first daughter) is going to be called - not Jelena, as previously thought, but Diva Marija. Just like one of the songs on his next album.

No, that isn't a mash-up of Dana International's Eurovision winner and its Croatian cousin, but refers to a 'heroine from the Croatian past' who, thanks to a certain Madame Callas, is almost impossible to google. (If she'd been due any earlier, would she have been named after Thompson's summer hit Lipa Kaja (Pretty Kaja)?)

Diva Marija joins her older brothers Petar Šimun and the topically-named Ante, which brings the Gazette to a link from Neretva River. Ivo Fabijan singing in honour of Tomislav Merčep and Branimir Glavaš, anyone?

Severina: Tamburica and Mandolin

2006-11-06T12:12:00.000Z

The Gazette goes away for the weekend, and Severina decides to tell Večernji list what's on her long-awaited post-Štikla album, about to be recorded in Belgrade with Goran Bregović and the Serbian folk/pop lyricist Marina Tucaković.

Neretva River and SeveFanClub are already on the story - in fact, if the link to the original interview with VL isn't working, SFC carries the full text as well.

After dismissing various rumours that she's married/pregnant/moving to Belgrade (which have mainly come from the direction of tabloid 24 sata - the newspaper which did the most to start the Štikla scandal in the first place back in February), Severina gets around to explaining how the still untitled album is shaping up musically: Bregović is currently 'writing the melodies and notes for those brass, tin, tamburica and mandolin orchestras from Županja, Daruvar, Solin and Kaštel' (two inland-Croatian and two coastal towns). Moreover, whether disappointingly or not:

'The new album won't be anything like Štikla at all. Although, alongside two of Bregović's songs from his version of Carmen, there'll be the tamburica and authentic [izvornih] sounds of Croatian amateur orchestras from Županja, Daruvar, Solin and Kaštel, I wouldn't call that ethno.'

(Which makes a change from the Štikla period itself, when she'd much rather have had the song called ethno than something else.)

In fact, it looks less like a different approach, more like a difference in content. Štikla involved various folk song/dance forms from Dalmatia and the Dinaric Dalmatian hinterland (Lika, Zagora, Herzegovina); the album as a whole might have more in common with the time-honoured, uncontroversial Croatian formula of tamburica and mandolin (wasn't that a Zlatko Pejaković song?), 'Pannonian' and 'Adriatic' symbols which ethnomusicologist Svanibor Pettan argues tend to (be made to?) 'appear [...] more refined, more modern, and more Western' in comparison to Dinaric heritage.

Rather than following in the, errr, footsteps of Štikla, one or two songs might actually be more in the style of one of Štikla's only serious rivals during Dora, Ivana Banfić's tamburica-pop Kad se sklope kazaljke - and indeed, we're promised one of the tracks will be arranged by Stanko Šarić from the most famous tamburica-revival band Zlatni dukati/Najbolji hrvatski tamburaši.

So far, so 1990s, perhaps. But what's that, tucked away at the end of the interview, about covering a song Bregović first wrote for the Turkish pop diva Sezen Aksu?

Retromania: Kviskoteka

2006-11-06T12:10:00.000Z

The popular Yugoslav TV quiz show Kviskoteka - the Millionaire of its day - was revived earlier this year in Croatia by Nova TV, complete with its original host Oliver Mlakar.

Now the Serbian tabloid Blic, via Seesaw, is reporting that Lazo Goluža, owner of the Kviskoteka licence for Serbia, is in talks with TV B92 to produce a Serbian version where 'questions from Serbian history, geography [and] literature would dominate in the quiz.'

It's not all fragmented national mediaspaces, though. As is the way of these retromaniac things, there'll also be an annual special in Zagreb uniting the 'winners from Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia.'

Enthusiastic Do Kraja

2006-11-01T18:20:00.000Z

Edward O's pop blog Enthusiastic but Mediocre has been running the Croatian pop-rock chart past its resident panel, which came out in favour of Colonia's Do kraja as 'one of the best Eurodance songs I’ve heard since whatever the last completely brilliant Colonia single was'.

Wonder what they'd have made of the semi-schlager - or semi-folk - zabavna chart?

Intellectual Property: Beyond Queen Anne

2006-10-30T14:59:00.000Z

The UK's Institute for Public Policy Research has issued a report calling for the government to rethink its approach to intellectual property rights.

The UK press's angle on the report has stuck to the quick headline of why Queen Anne made it technically illegal to copy music on to a computer from your own CDs. The authors (William Davies and Kay Withers) do indeed argue that legislation hasn't kept pace with technology, but the full text is a meditation on the philosophy of intellectual property, an analysis of what intellectual property can do for the UK economy, and how works being in the public domain can actually add economic value, all with a minimum of acronym soup. In short, they want to argue that:

'the legitimate role for IP is to protect content sufficiently so that it can be commercialised over the medium term, but not to protect it so much that it can't be enjoyed by the public in the short term, or preserved for future generations in the long term.'

Davies and Withers do a valuable job of balancing the economic and cultural benefits of IP, and end up opting for a Danish-style model similar to the Open Access movement in academic publishing, while as far as economics are concerned: 'wherever content is made more searchable and accessible, it must also be made more purchasable'.

A key influence is Chris Anderson's idea of the 'long tail', which argues that digital distribution makes it profitable to sell a multitude of obscure items to a few consumers each. Early this month Universal released 250,000 previously unavailable tracks from its (western) European back catalogue for digital download only, putting the long tail approach into action. (It's good news for Noir Desir and Chris de Burgh.)

Separately, the UK Open Rights Group is throwing copyright term extensions into the debate - and a Treasury report on intellectual property is due before the end of the year. What's made copyright the temporary issue of the week? According to Boing Boing, it's because, with a 50-year UK copyright term on musical recordings, anything recorded in 1956 loses copyright protecton in a couple of months' time - freeing up the beginnings of rock and roll, and heralding more and more of a record-industry headache year on year.

Looking further afield, the Convergence Culture Consortium blog kept us updated last week with the news that Japanese broadcasters and music publishers have had over 25,000 items of media removed from YouTube. Clips from the Comedy Central station, including The Daily Show, have reportedly already been removed from YouTube for copyright violation, and the US majors have been pawing the ground at the site for some time, but the Japanese connection brings to mind the knock-on effect that YouTube's shiny new corporate focus will have on its possibly quite unexpected function as a channel for communication among diasporas.

(Or even between diasporas: the comments on one clip of the Bulgarian chalga singer Kamelia's Cheluvai me included one from an ex-Yugoslav of some description informing them that Mile Kitić's Šampanjac had got there first.)

Somebody with a faster internet connection than the Gazette probably ought to be starting a proper virtual ethnography on what Eric has started to call JuTube before its ex-Yugoslav TV clips (including material which has been even less available than the Universal back catalogue) start going the way of the Japanese content.

That's if anyone can agree on who owns the rights and ought to be making the complaints...

UPDATE:: Henry Jenkins of MIT on the YouTube buyout, participatory culture, and (buzzword bingo) Web 2.0.

Borat Marches On

2006-10-26T12:41:00.000+01:00

As the release of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat film approaches, the fake Kazakh reporter seems to be approaching critical mass.

Aside from the soundtrack issue covered here a couple of weeks ago (the film's music comes mainly from Macedonian and Romanian Roma bands), Boing Boing runs up a list of similar abstractions, such as the Cyrillic font that means gibberish in Cyrillic, and Borat's faux-Kazakh language turning out to be Hebrew (which Baron Cohen seems to use for note-taking while in character).

Evonomic anthropologist Grant McCracken, meanwhile, has been running a series of posts on how Borat apparently shows up American credulity and the boundaries of scandal.

All of which means that at some stage I'm probably actually going to have to go and see the thing...

Once There Was An Album

2006-10-25T19:14:00.000+01:00

More than a year ago, Croatian singer Marko Perković Thompson announced plans for a new album, Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj (Once upon a time in Croatia). A title like that suggests a high dose of heroic history and mythic timelessness, which - with emphasis on the 'timelessness' - has already come true. Two new additions to the Perković family delayed recording somewhat, as did the arrest of Ante Gotovina last December, which the Gazette would happily bet inspired some new material.

In the meantime, one Miroslav Škoro has temporarily cornered the market in patriotic, semi-diasporic showbusiness, leaving Thompson with some catching up to do.

Večernji list, however, is reporting that the final work on the album may be completed by the beginning of December. Given Thompson's (controversial) star status in Croatia, such news would surely be gratefully received by his label's executives, if anybody actually knew which label it's going to be coming out on.

Thompson likes to present his guiding themes as 'God, the family and the homeland', and all three look set to be present on Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj. Sine moj is dedicated to his oldest son Šimun, and a title like Dida i Petrovo Polje (Grandpa and Petrovo Polje) suggests it'll be harking back to Thompson's home region of Dalmatinska zagora.

It would be unprofessional to speculate what grandpa might have said/thought/done at/about Petrovo Polje, but Thompson's previous form might make many people curious about whether and how he'll touch on one of the more historically significant epochs in grandpa's life.