Jiberi on observation

Anyone who, say, looks into rich illustrated A medical encyclopedia (which I absolutely do not recommend for people with a normal sensitivity threshold); when that's the case, that is. when often the most terrifying phenomena in the cosmos are the most challenging for the exercise of scientific precision, it does not seem illogical for someone to tackle the turbo-folk subculture of the nineties as the most perfect, unattainable form tresha given by this climate, which with its eclectic and yet so original and unrepeatable achievement can rival all the most significant aesthetic and moral horrors and disasters of the rest of the planet.

Ivana Kronja's study "Deathly Glow" deals with this specific aspect intense broadcasting gaps u open universe, in which - the "void" - the researcher finds a whole series of warning meanings and messages. Kronja, of course, is not a "spice" in this field: it has already been dealt with - even if sporadically, due to the very "marginality" of the topic, seen from the point of view of "elite" culture - and some are more diligent researchers on the prehistory of turbo- folk in the form of "newly composed folk music" (Ivan Čolović) or, on the other hand, about the "neo-folk culture" itself from the decade of "warrior chic" and its audience (Milena Dragićević-Šešić, Ratka Marić) published very notable and valuable books and works. Kronja follows in the footsteps of these and many other domestic and foreign authors (at the end of the book there is an exhaustive bibliography; it is surprising, for example, to overlook Eric D. Gordi's extensive and important study on the "culture of power in Serbia", published in America three years ago ), trying to phenomenon turbo-folk shed light on the aesthetic side as well, but no less to place it in the appropriate social context, so that below the first, transparent level of "nebulousness" (which, however, relatively rarely reaches the indecipherable larpurartistic type level: "identity card is empty"...) sketches at least the contours of the value order behind which the moguls and models of the turbo-folk industry stand, or at least support(a) it and parasitize on it, significantly supporting its maintenance. Cronja, therefore, follows the mutation of a startling, patriarchal-authoritarian "cultural model" that during the nineties rapidly and aggressively changes in order to, in fact, remain as much as possible. same; her study deals with the gradual development/degeneration of the original Serbian "folk" into "newly composed music" from the beginning of the 60s onwards, i.e. from the time of the forcibly accelerated, mechanical urbanization of Serbia and Yugoslavia, and the consequent emergence of the numerically dominant paraclass "rurbani" (S. Radojević ) half-hearted who live with a body in the City, and a suffering and maladjusted soul in the Countryside, i.e. in the idealized, kitschy, never-actually-existent vision of the Village as created by their nostalgia, and then the derivation of NNM into turbo-folk, whose main actors and majority audience are members of the Second Generation of suburban settlers (whereas "suburban" is not necessarily their literal, "physical" location), and which on the iconological level adopts "urban" patterns, but densely sifted through their specific sieve (so-called gibberish), and finally further decadence and retardation turbo-folk in the direction dense as the favorite pastimes of members of warrior-criminal subcultures, which - nothing more natural than that - most impressively marked the mass culture and consciousness of the Serbian nineties.

Ivana Kronja is a graduate of FDU, and therefore it is not surprising that the best pages of the book are those in which the author shrewdly and expertly dissects the abundant video production of the turbo folk/dance subculture, finding in their iconography an abundance of "messages" that indicate an essential anachronism and the very deep and somewhat "insidious" conservatism of turbo-folk and its leggy dance-derivative as "opium for the masses", which may not be directly initiated and designed by Milosevic's political establishment (as the bearer of a disastrous decade-long "conservative" experiment) - Kronja wisely avoids the now popular explicit declaration for this "conspiracy theory" - but which in any case suited him, and hence he gave him all kinds of support. The overall turbo-folk/dance narrative, even when masked by superficial "modernizing" and "urbanizing" kerefeks (actually: mostly then!), is entirely focused on reaffirming and "dressing up" in contemporary clothes of patriarchal, nationalist, machismo, violent and criminogenic models of social behavior; that's why turbo-folk seemingly takes over/reinterprets some patterns of contemporary global urban subcultures - which by nature tend towards rebellion, subversiveness and challenging the bearers of social Power - but only in order to emptied od meaning; Cronja, unfortunately correctly, observes that the cataclysmic expansion of turbo-folk in the last decade or so can (and must) be referred to as a "subculture crisis". Um, "crisis"? At one point, that situation was more like clinical death.

The 90s have passed - who is alive, who is dead - and it will be interesting to see how the turbo-folk/dance mutant will "develop" in the changed social circumstances; Picture Dorian Jay it has finally been broken, and what lies behind it now is the uncanny truth of a Great Decay, accompanied by indescribable horror-sounds and sights organized mental (turbo)degeneration.