9

Serbian Turbo-Epics: Genres, Intertextuality, and the Play of Ironies*

Marko Živković

In an article entitled “Whose are Gusle? The Political Fate of a Musical Instrument,” the noted Belgrade ethnologist Ivan Čolović claims that the invocation of gusle in political communication usually serves the function of establishing legitimacy. Gusle are usually seen as the symbol of the voice of the people: “Those who successfully align themselves with gusle are supposedly claiming to speak for the people and to be of the people” (Čolović 2003).

Gusle played a similar legitimating function among Albanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Croats, especially during their respective struggles for national emancipation. Čolovic says that all these Balkan nations were often oblivious to the fact that what each claimed as a unique identity marker was in fact shared by their closest neighbors, and in turn, that each neighbor claimed it as uniquely theirs with equal vehemence. That various Balkan peoples extolled what was essentially the same instrument (with minor varia-tions in form and name) was either ignored, or if noticed, could even be used to claim that these others were actually descended from one’s own

* Forthcoming (May 2011) in P. V. Bohlman and N. Petkovic, eds. Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

group. Such a move was particularly dear to Serbian national ideo-logues, Čolović argues.

Even in the period leading up to the bloody break–up of Yugoslavia, Croats and Bosniaks, not just Serbs and Montenegrins, could still insist on gusle and epics as a major part of their national identity.1 With the advent of war, boundary reinforcements occurred and each community selected only some from a pool of largely shared traits as markers of their identity. It is in this way that epic poetry accompanied by gusle became exclusively associated with the Serbian community, particularly with the Bosnian Serbs.

Rather than emphasize gusle and epics, Croats and Bosniaks found it increasingly odious to lay claim to something Serbs brandished so prominently as their emblem. They opted for other instruments as their national diacritics and in a fairly neat division, Bosniaks opted for the saz and Croats for the tamburica (Laušević 1994).

Together with the segregation of national traits stands the tendency to convert these traits from diacritics, or badges of identity, into essences. Indices of identity are transformed into icons of identity in a process that Gal and Irvine call “iconicity” (Gal and Irvine 1995). Thus gusle and epic ballads came to be seen not merely as indicators of ethnic distinction, but as expressions of the “inherent nature or essence” of a group, in this case the Bosnian Serbs. On this point all seemed to concur: the Croats and Muslims, the foreign journalists, and, of course, the Bosnian Serbs themselves. All seemed to agree that gusle and epics were the essence of Serbdom; they only differed as to how they evalu-ated this supposed national essence.

Nothing shows this ironic collusion more vividly than Pawlikowski’s 1992 documentary Serbian Epics. In what has become a legendary scene, Radovan Karadžić, the leader of Bosnian Serbs, plays gusle in the house where Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the Romantic language reformer and collector of epic songs—the true father of the Serbian nation—was born. And not only does Radovan Karadžić choose to play gusle in Vuk Karadžić’s house (now a museum), but he also claims direct descent from this ancestral figure by comparing a dimple in Vuk’s chin with a similar one in his own, seemingly oblivi-

ous to the extremely negative connotations of that act suggested by Pawlikowski’s deft editing. Pawlikowski juxtaposes images of the forbidding limestone peaks of the Bosnian Dinaric Alps with images of Bosnian Serbs listening to their epics performed on gusle and their guns firing into besieged Sarajevo. “Bosnian Serbs are at the moment perhaps the most hated group of people in the Western world,” runs the opening statement:

Pictures of Muslims in concentration camps and stories of atrocities and murder have caused horror and indignation. What is not so widely known is that Radovan Karadžić, the Serbian leader, thinks of himself as a poet. Whatever one thinks of his poetry, or his political position, there is no doubt that the peas-ant tradition of epic verse which has survived since the Middle Ages in the mountains of Bosnia combined with an irrational view of history has helped fuel the horrific conflict in what was once Yugoslavia (Pawlikowski 1992).2

Gusle and epics are obviously a mark of something negative for Paw-likowski. For Karadžić they clearly represent something good, perhaps even sacred. What they seem to agree on is that gusle and epics are indeed the essence of Serbdom.

In the 1830s, Vuk Karadžić published his collections of Serbian epic poetry. The Serbian oral tradition became fixed once and forever in writing. From the heroic societies of patriarchal mountaineers, the epics migrated into school textbooks to become the backbone of Serbian national ideology and state–building. A century later, in the 1930s, Milman Parry stayed away from Serbian epic singers precisely because they were mostly literate and simply performing the fixed songs from Vuk Karadžić’s canonical collections. As Lord puts it forcefully:

Those singers who accept the idea of a fixed text are lost to oral traditional processes. This means death to oral tradition and the rise of a generation of “singers” who are reproducers rather than re-creators. Such are the men who appear in costume at

folk festivals and sing the songs they have memorized from Vuk’s collection. You or I could do the same with a certain amount of training and with a costume. These “singers” are really counterfeits masquerading as epic bards! (Lord 2000, 137)

It is ironic, if I may say so, to see Radovan Karadžić claiming direct genetic descent from Vuk Karadžić and singing an epic song that he claimed was passed orally from generation to generation in his family, in the very birthplace of the man who irreversibly transformed the oral tradition into literary canon. It is ironic, but only to those sophisticates who have read and taken to heart Parry and Lord’s position. Their distinction between true oral composition and literacy is actually of no concern to most of Radovan Karadžić’s audience.

By playing gusle in the birthplace of Vuk Karadžić, Radovan Karadžić engages in what Čolović calls “war propaganda folklorism.” Politicians, Čolovic says, “garnish their militant speeches with quota-tions from epic poems and popular proverbs and references to personal-ities who symbolize national identity… The aim of this strategy is to suggest that whatever is sought, desired or offered in these messages reflects the deepest feelings of the nation and represents the voice of the people, vox populi, and not the master’s voice” (Čolović 1993, 116–17).

Briggs and Bauman refer to this strategy in terms of what they call the “intertextual gap.” The fit between a particular text and its generic model, they argue, is never perfect.

When viewed diachronically or vertically, the fit between a particular text and its generic model—as well as other tokens of the same genre—is never perfect; to paraphrase Sapir, we might say that all genres leak. Generic frameworks thus never provide sufficient means of producing and receiving discourse. Some elements of contextualization creep in, fashioning indexi-cal connections to the ongoing discourse, social interaction, broader social relations, and the particular historical juncture(s)

at which the discourse is produced and received (Briggs and Bauman 1992, 149).

The process of linking particular utterances to generic models, here Serbian epic songs, necessarily produces an intertextual gap. Given the gap, however, one could either pursue the strategy of minimizing or maximizing it. Radovan Karadžić is certainly trying to minimize the gap between what epic poetry used to be in the old heroic times and the present moment in which he performs before Pawlikowski’s camera lens.

National Epics and the “Second Serbia”

I now explore an internal Serbian rift that exists between certain kinds of national ideologues prone to epic rhapsodizing (minimizing the intertextual gap) and what could be best covered by the umbrella term “Second Serbia,” that is, the urbanized, cosmopolitan, Europe–oriented part of the political spectrum.

Gusle played a prominent role in the war propaganda. The content of the newly–composed epics was most often extremely nationalistic and the most prominent guslars and guslar associations were openly patronized by military and police institutions, as Čolović amply docu-ments. All this, says Čolović, made gusle an odious sign for critical intellectuals, peace movements, and promoters of civil society and European integration. Gusle, then, became a “symbol of backwardness, anti–modernity, militarism, an instrument of the hate–talk.” When asked “whose are gusle?” many then answer—“Not mine!” (Čolović 2003).

This distancing could be seen as part of a classification struggle, a judgment of taste in a Bourdieuan game of distinction (Bourdieu 1984). Rejecting gusle and epics as a genre then becomes an assertion of cultural superiority as gusle tend to be associated with less educated, less “cultured” folk. What I should like to explore is not the clear, overt expression of hate, distaste and rejection in this struggle, however

ubiquitous it may be, but the use of irony, satire and/or parody—a cluster of related strategies for which the assertion of superiority is often seen as a core function.

Irony involves the act of recognizing an incongruity between what is said and what is meant. The ironic act immediately creates communi-ty and intimacy between the author and the audience (who gets it) and implies that those who do not get it range anywhere from mildly naïve to plainly idiotic. What makes irony poignant is the risk of not getting it. However, there is also the opposite risk of reading irony where it was not intended. In both cases, there are pragmatic consequences for all concerned: intimacy, derision, embarrassment, or worse. Irony, says Wayne Booth, “dramatizes each moment by heightening the conse-quences of going astray” (Booth 1974, 23). It could well be that “build-ing of amiable communities is often far more important than the exclusion of naïve victims” (ibid., 28). I, however, want to start by investigating what can happen when irony and parody seem primarily aimed at putting the opponent down. It is also true, Booth concedes, “that even in the most amiable irony one can always imagine a victim by conjuring up a reader or listener so naïve as not to catch the joke; no doubt in some uses of irony the fun of feeling superior to such imag-ined victims is highly important” (ibid., 27–28).

Briggs and Bauman suggest that music has a particularly strong potential to foreground and thus maximize intertextual gaps when used in parody and satire (Briggs and Bauman 1992, 158). Music was indeed a major marker of identity in Serbian internal struggles during Slobodan Milošević’s era, and this is where I now turn. Leaving the epics for the moment, I want to address turbo–folk.

Turbo-Folk

Turbo-folk is a mutation of the so–called newly–composed folk music (novokomponovana narodna muzika). Newly–composed, as opposed to “original” folk music, was a neo–folk genre that boomed in the 1960s in Yugoslavia and appealed to recently urbanized peasants as well as

those working in Germany and other European countries as guest workers (Gastarbeiter). The lyrics were mostly about family and romantic relationships, and often played on nostalgia for the country-side (see Simić 1976, 1979, and Gordy 1999). From its inception, however, neo–folk was radically opposed to so–called authentic folk music (izvorna narodna muzika). Authentic folk, as Eric Gordy ob-serves, “is a minority music on a level with symphonic music, its performance most often restricted to professional ensembles of trained musicians, while “neo–folk,” like most other commercial forms, is performed principally by self–educated performers” (Gordy 1999, 129).

In the 1970s, neo–folk was the prime target of socialist–style “culture campaigns” aimed at exorcising it as kitsch and garbage (schund), which, of course, never hurt its enormous popularity. As a musical marker of peasant–urbanites and guest workers, neo–folk was denounced and even viscerally despised by two distinct groups: the young urbanites who listened to rock and jazz and by the guardians of authentic (izvorna) folk.

In terms of sound, neo–folk introduced Western pop into a matrix recognizable as folk while turbo–folk introduced Western pop, as well as rock elements far more aggressively than neo–folk before it. “While turbo–folk’s radical extension of the influence of Western commercial pop styles did represent a continuation of a process of change that had been occurring in the neo–folk genre for at least two decades,” Gordy says, “it can hardly be thought of as an ‘organic’ development.” Gordy continues by saying:

The trend would continue as turbo–folk developed, with more folk elements falling out of the mix. Finally, only two musical elements identified with “folk” would remain in the music: the sound of accordions and the tremor in the voice characteristic of some types of traditional duophonic singing, generally described by the derogatory term “zavijanje” (howling). (Gordy 1999, 133–34)

In thematic terms, turbo–folk moved from predicaments of urban migrants and nostalgia for the lost idyll of the countryside to aggres-sively promoted “images of glamour, luxury, and the ‘good life’ as imagined by the peasant urbanites—a world populated by young women in miniskirts who drive luxury automobiles, live in fantastically spacious homes and spend their time in fashionable hotel bars” (Gordy 1999, 133). Furthermore, in contrast with the old neo–folk, turbo–folk was widely seen not as a grassroots phenomenon but as something imposed from the authorities above through the privileged channels of state–run television, radio, and music production companies. Finally, turbo–folk was identified not only as the music of peasant-urbanites, but also of the new criminal class that was becoming indistinguishable from the regime itself.

Turbo–folk was thus a lightning rod attracting wrath and disgust from several directions at once, and this is precisely what makes it such a valuable diagnostic instrument in Serbia’s “culture wars” of the 1990s. It was seen as an abominable mix of things that should not be mixed—namely folk elements with Western music. It was despised as the ultimate kitsch, and resented as a conspiracy of the regime to drive the population into utter idiocy.

One could then perhaps picture a triangle of sorts: “Second Serbia” standing at one point, with its two–pronged distaste for turbo–folk on one end and for quasi–epic rhapsodizing of nationalists on the other. My paper will now turn to the figure of Rambo Amadeus who I would argue is related in a fundamental way to all three points of that triangle. He originated the ironic term turbo–folk, relentlessly parodied it but also, and with particular poignancy since he himself is Montenegrin, parodied the epics.3 As we will see, the intelligentsia did not escape his irony either.

Rambo Amadeus—The Ironic Hero

A music academy graduate who styled himself as an idiot–savant peasant rapper, Rambo carved a unique role for himself in 1990s

Serbia. “Incorporating the madness, paranoia, kitsch, and inauthenitici-ty of the neo–folk ascendancy into his antimusic,” as Gordy observes, “Rambo Amadeus presented a detailed ironic reading of the cultural moment, with the capacity of reaching broad audiences… However, commercial neo–folk performers who lacked Rambo’s irony [emphasis mine] adopted the term [turbo–folk] for themselves, and it came to refer less critically to an amplified and synthesized dance kitsch form, which received tremendous commercial promotion” (Gordy 1999, 114, 119).

In a delightful interview for the first channel of Belgrade television, Rambo recounts how he began with this turbo–folk thing (fazon).

When I came to Belgrade, I bought a radio, and found to my delight that there were ten radio stations. But then I saw that on all ten they played nothing but folk (narodnjake). … the texts of the songs were endlessly ridiculous and stupid to me. So I tried to radicalize them, to create even stupider and more ridiculous texts, until the stupidity reached the point of genius (Rokumenti 1994).

In a newspaper interview reported by Gordy, Rambo most succinctly states his project:

I want to isolate that gold Mercedes with diamond wheels and to observe it as a work of art… The same as I want to observe the man who has a gold necktie, who listens to [neo–folk star] Šemsa Suljaković and knows which kafana has good food and how to make easy money. But other than that, he understands nothing and knows nothing… and is happy as a sheep. That man interests me as an artist… I want to break into his con-sciousness and make civic culture of it (Gordy 1999, 118–119).

This is of course an ironic mode asserting superiority over the unre-flecting, unconscious parvenu happily basking in his kitsch. The move is to make a piece of art of this kitsch and thus camp (perhaps the

ultimate in irony). Rambo is after all a music academy graduate. But his irony cuts both ways. It also cuts those who are smug about their cultural superiority over such non-cultured persons. This is beautifully illustrated in Rambo’s recounting of how he shot his first television show in Belgrade in that same television interview quoted above.

When I was shooting my first TV show, I came and asked, who is in charge here?—and there’s this director with Ray Ban glasses, full of himself, you can see how glad he is that he is a director in his life, and I say: hey, please, I have a Seiko watch, (you know, since my media self–presentation was as a manual laborer who came from some village from Bosnia who doesn’t have a clue), I say: yooo, on your mother, see I have Seiko, 2000 DM [Deutsche Marks], can go 100 meters underwater, please show this so my mom can see it on television, and my pals. And he says to me, “no problem, comrade (t’was when it was still “comrade”), comrade, there is no problem at all, please would you go over there… And then I constantly exhib-ited my hand thus (shows) so that the watch be visible, and he was nudging with that crew he had over there and laughing, like look at the fool, you see… and so… I enjoy posing as a fool… but when I think about it a little more, I can see that I am essentially, in fact a fool, that I, eh, in fact, that in fact I behave sincerely all the time. (Rokumenti 1994).

And it does not end there. It is widely held that the term turbo–folk, coined ironically by Rambo, was adopted without irony and in all seriousness by the practitioners and consumers of the new genre. What a magnificent irony! What a huge joke at the Turbo–Folkniak’s expense.4 But could that view be completely sustained? What if turbo–folk was in some sense tongue–in–cheek? Would that not make the intellectual elite who laughed at the simpletons who could not get it, an even greater victim of irony? Those who laugh last, laugh the sweetest, as a Serbian proverb would have it.

It is sometimes hard to judge these things. The further from “home ground” the critic is the more probable errors in judging irony become, a fact demonstrated with mathematical precision by one of Wayne Booth’s students.5 Thus, theoretically, it is the native ethnographer who is in the best position to deal with these matters. I am one, but there is a puzzle that really vexes me. Keba, one of the turbo–folk or neo–folk stars, adapted Mick Jaggers’s rock classic “Paint it Black.” It is obvious that in the Serbia of the last decade, a Rolling Stones hit and the kind of music associated with Keba are clearly seen by most as culturally incompatible. Keba is completely straight–faced throughout the video. The text in Serbian is as cliché–ridden, pathos filled and conventional as is possible in the classical neo–folk genre.6 Even more incongruously, the lyrics scroll down the screen in the quasi–archaic Cyrillic script that has become a diacritic for the glory of Serbian Medieval Culture.7 What kind of person could inhabit such a role? What kind of “idiot” do you have to be to NOT be ironic about such juxtapositions?8

Now, if Keba’s “Paint it Black” (U crno obojeno) is ambiguous, another great turbo–folk hit, “Coca Cola, Marlboro, Suzuki” is unques-tionably rich in self–irony and self–parody. In the video, we see a bunch of young people having a good time in a stereotypical Serbian countryside scene. Everybody is merrily engaged in typical peasant tasks (like milking a cow) while singing praise to the most stereotyped indexes of Westernized urban living, characteristic of the Turbo–Folk-niak lifestyle: “Coca Cola, Marlboro, Suzuki, Discos, guitars, bouzuki… This is life, not a TV commercial, Nobody’s got it better than us…” Peasant tasks are mostly performed in the sped–up slapstick mode, fresh milk is drunk from classical Coke glasses, and the musical folk riff, stylized to the point of self–parody, is inserted in a generic (but highly contagious) pop matrix in order to label the composition as turbo–folk. The very existence of such self–parodies (and “Coca Cola, Malboro Suzuki” is not the only one) could perhaps prompt us to reorient our understanding of the genre itself. If it is now openly self–parodic, perhaps it was like that long before we, the intellectual elite,

noticed it. We might have been the dupes, the victims of irony, for longer than we care to admit.

Rambo Parodies Epics

Just as he parodied neo and turbo–folk, Rambo also parodied gusle and epics. That he is Montenegrin made his parody even more powerful since epics are so strongly associated with Montenegrins. Gusle appear in his videos. You can hear them in his musical riffs or when he com-bines the metre and style of heroic epic poetry with some sort of rap deliverance and mock–epic context. But Rambo is also an author of what could perhaps be seen as a true epic song in the old style: “The Death of Priest Milo Jovović” (Smrt Popa Mila Jovovića). He still appears as a rapper in the video, as expressed by his outrageous outfit (the combination of a sailor’s T–shirt and a glittering fur coat). Clips from an old movie about medieval battles between ridiculously ar-mored knights suggest parody, yet, it is possible that beyond the first and quite penetrable ironic level there is another where the epic is actually intended seriously. It is this position that I want to focus on and this is how I will conclude this paper.

Epic poetry has been parodied since it began (e.g. Aristophanes’ parody of Homer, Battle of Frog and Mice). When I was growing up in Belgrade, mock epics, often with sexual content, were a part of children’s folklore. To mock a teacher, little bards would even compose decasyllabic poems on the spot. Having decasyllabics drilled into our ears, we were all in principle able to improvise verses with greater or lesser fluidity. That is, it was no big deal, and mocking the epic genre was just a childish game. It is only when the epic style became a very serious matter (as in Yugoslavia’s wars) that the parody of epics ac-quired its biting edge. It was the deadly literalism of Radovan Karadžić’s performance in Vuk’s house that made Rambo’s parody so poignant.

Yet there is a difference between Rambo’s mocking and the opposi-tional intelligentsia’s open denunciations of epic rhapsodizing. It is true

that Rambo’s ironic treatment of gusle had the effect of creating a community of those who “got the joke” and could thus feel superior to the blinded, unsophisticated, deadly literal epic rhapsodizers—the implied victims of Rambo’s irony. Yet, just as in the case of turbo–folk, Rambo’s irony cut both ways: against the supposedly deadly serious turbo–folkers on the one hand and the deadly serious intellectuals who were denouncing them on the other. I would argue that Rambo’s irony was what Burke called the true or humble irony, one “based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with the enemy, as one needs him, is indebted, is not merely outside him as an observer but contains him within, being consubstantial with him” (Burke 1969, 514).

There is a level at which Rambo embraces Keba and turbo–folk as something that is living, something that will in the end produce quality. Beneath his mockery of gusle and epics too, there is a respect for the epics. Only his respect has been cleansed by his irony; it can no longer be mistaken for the nefarious use of gusle and epics found in political communication. Ultimately, for Rambo gusle are something you hook up to a synthesizer and use to make new art. Those who object to such TURBO–EPICS or even RAP–EPICS perhaps deserve to be mocked as foolish purists and literalists. But if it they are only foolish and stupid, and not shelling Sarajevo, then Rambo’s humble irony will embrace them not as real enemies but as part of that flawed community we ruefully recognize ourselves to be.

On the other hand, Pawlikowski’s Serbian Epics is brimming with irony, or perhaps more accurately, with sarcasm at Karadžić’s expense. The repugnance he conveys is certainly justified by the context of Karadžić’s shelling of Sarajevo and declaiming poetry at the same time. However, his is a look from the outside, a look that is not just accusato-ry (however justifiably), but also condescending. Under Pawlikowski’s gaze, there is no possibility that Serbian epics could ever be rescued and redeemed from Radovan and his ilk. In this sense, I would argue that Pawlikowski’s documentary joins a whole genre of wartime analysis (cf. Meštrović 1993; Anzulović 1999; Lauer 1993, 1995) that blames the war on the bloodthirsty and destructive Serbian highlander character, and blames that character mainly on Serbian epic poetry. I

have discussed this elsewhere (Živković 1997, 1998, 2001). Here I only wish to point out the difference between Pawlikowski’s and Rambo’s irony.

I believe Rambo also offers a lesson to anthropologists and all those who claim some sort of privileged knowledge, who claim to know what the natives are up to better than the natives themselves. To attribute some sort of unconsciousness to those we study is to claim the superiority of an ironist. We get it, they do not. We are sophisticated, they are literal–minded. Anthropologists have been pondering the ethical, political and other pragmatic consequences of such positioning and have come up with, if not ways of dealing with it, at least ways of understanding it (for instance, Briggs 1996). The intellectual elite of Second Serbia also engaged in condescension when they criticized either turbo–folk or gusle and epics. I hope to have to shown how Rambo exposed some of that condescension by trapping the ironists in his own irony. Now I have been guilty here of exhibiting a certain ironic, and thus superior and condescending stance toward the intelli-gentsia crusading against kitsch and nationalistic folklore. I, who by rights belong to these circles, have claimed a superior view from outside and found them too literal-minded. They cannot stand it, they have a gut revulsion against it, but I find it campy and fun. They might have even been so unsophisticated as to take seriously what was in fact intended ironically in turbo–folk, snickering at the ostentation of Rambo’s 2000 DM Seiko watch without realizing that the joke was on them.

What can I say? My last word on this is that we should be recalling the humble irony Burke identified, ultimately realizing that we are all probably dupes at some point in this messy life (Burke 1969, 154). When all is said and done, for all my ironic sophistication, I must admit that I also have to, at quite a non–ironic level, endorse the pathos and gut level response of those in Serbia who opposed war folklorism and the nefarious uses to which gusle and epics were put. This, after all, was no laughing matter.

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1 Čolović gives examples for Croats that extend from Ante Pavelić to the celebrity guslar Mile Krajina in the early 1990s. He even cites a case in which an article on a Bosniak website gives thanks to Lord and Parry for helping preserve and make world–famous the Bosnian epics. So their favorite bard, Avdo Medjedović, Čolović points out, a Muslim of Albanian ancestry living in the Montenegrin town of Bijelo Polje becomes a “Bosniak” (Čolović 2003).2 Pawlikowski is by no means an isolated case. In his 1994 New York Times article on the war in Bosnia, John Kifner (Kifner 1994) draws our attention to “the rocky spine of the Dinaric Alps, for it is these mountains that have nurtured and shaped the most extreme, combative elements of each community: the Western Herzegovinian Croats, the Sandžak Muslims, and, above all, the secessionist Serbs. Like mountaineer communities around the world,” Kifner goes on, “these were wild, warlike, frequently lawless societies whose feuds and folklore, have been passed on to the present day like the potent home–brewed plum brandy that the mountain men begin knocking back in the morning.”3 In Serbia and Montenegro, curious permutations and ironic twists occur with gusle as a political emblem. Considered by Serbs as more Montenegrin, it is the pro–Serbian Montenegrins who embrace it most openly, as opposed to the pro–independence Montenegrins who tend to leave it to the Serbs.4 I have to thank Victor Friedman for his inspired translation of Serbian “narodnjak” as “folkniak.”5 “My graduate student Gertrude Impersney” says Booth, “has studied 273 famous cases of failure in comprehension, plotting degrees of error and the period of duration of incomprehension against the distance of the cultural mileu of the ironist from the victim’s cultural mileu. We were both gratified when her results yielded the ‘straight line curves’” (Booth 1974, 223).6 In English the lyrics run something like: “Painted black everything now is in me. How will I face tomorrow alone without her. God gave me everything, gave and took back. I never loved anyone like I loved you (U crno obojeno u meni je sve. Kako ću sutra sam kad nema više nje. Bog mi je dao sve, dao i uzeo. Kao tebe nikoga nisam voleo …).7 Belgrade writer, critic and professor at the Fine Art Academy, Mileta Prodanović offers a thorough analysis of the widespread uses of this script in his Stari i lepši Beograd (Prodanović 2002, 116–118). This script, marking often in most incongruous ways the urban landscape, is popularly associated with the handwritten style of the beautiful illuminated manuscript from the twelveth century known as “Miroslavljevo jevandjelje.” For the resurgence of neo–Byzantinism in the Serbia of the 1990s see Živković 2007.8 When Rambo formally does the same (for instance singing “Hey Joe” in an exaggerated neo–folk style accompanied by the icon of trash neo–folk Mica Trofrtaljka) irony is staring you in the face. But what to make of Keba? And then what to make of a number of other turbo–folk hits? What about Rambo himself, appearing in a video clip by one of the acknowledged queens of the genre, Vesna Zmijanac?

Notes