world music hypocrisy :: Zehra Bajraktarević and turbofolk melodrama

What's with world music and political correctness? Since I first heard of the term, I was full of hope – finally someone got it: there's tons of great pop music out there all over the world, just waiting to be discovered. Then it dawned on me, popular music and folk music is apparently not the same thing. For some strange reason, music classified as folk music is supposed to be frozen in some time warp when people were officially traditional, whereas pop music (i.e. popular music) is simply what lowbrow people around the world listen to. And it's not worthy of world music compilations...

Which is why the records filed under European "world music" (let alone released on Peter Gabriel's "RealWorld label) are generally very acoustic and traditional. In the sense of being preserved by some national academy, mostly played on statesponsored cultural programs, and – frankly – not very popular.

Accordingly, the truly popular music in countries in "world music land" is hardly ever found on the world music shelves in western record stores. No, you have to search in the grocery shops catering to different immigrant communities or surf the net to find truly popular music.

Blogs are good for the odd rant, thanks for skimming through it. My main point today is to spread the news of ex-Yugoslav turbofolk, through the wonderfully dramatic Zehra Bajraktarević. I first stumbled across her on the BalkanMedia website, which not only sends you great ex-Yugo cds, but chuck in sweets too! They let you listen to sound clips of the cds, so you know what you'll order, and that's how I fell in love with Zehra's song Nevjero ("betrayal", if BabelFish is not mistaken), off the album Samo nebo zna.

I'm pretty sure Zehra is Bosnian, since her first name is common in the Muslim world (it means flower), but apart from that I haven't been able to find any information about her on the internet. So you'll just have to trust my word, follow the links here and download some of her songs to see how wonderfully, quartertonally vibratingly great she is. I have no idea what the lyrics are about, but I'm sure they're pretty melodramatic. And what better place to perform a song (probably) called "betrayal" than in front of a swimming pool somewhere in the Balkans? Enjoy:



The title track of the album Samo nebo zna is not bad either:



Turbofolk rules, pc world music eat your heart out!

Introduction

Welcome to the quarter tone zone! This is the blog that I've been looking for for quite some time, and never could find - so I decided I'd start it. My first encounter with quarter tonal pop music must have been back in the early 1970s, when my parents gave me a Demis Roussos tape after they came back from a holiday in Greece. Today My friend the wind sounds a wee bit cheesy, but it hooked me on synthesizers tuned to an Arab scale. Since then, I haven't looked back.

Over the 30-some years that have passed since my first exposure to "oriental" music, my horizon has expanded quite a bit. My next watershed experience was Spain's Eurovision 1983 entry: Remedios Amaya's ¿Quién maneja mi barca? It may have bombed with zero points, something that made poor Remedios go into musical hibernation for years (see Tim Moore's great book Nul Points for more), but in my opinion, her flamenco lament has just improved with time:



Then in my late teens I "discovered" Arabic pop music - both the Middle Eastern variety and Algerian raï راي, then (because Arabic music was so difficult to get hold of in Oslo back in the early 1990s) I fell for Turkish arabesk. Studying Arabic in Cairo in the mid-1990s made it considerably easier to get hold of Arabic pop, and I still have hundreds of Egyptian tapes stashed away somewhere. This was when I started to be able to differentiate between different Arabic pop music styles. In 1997 I worked in Hebron on the West Bank, and in addition to buying yet more Arabic cds, I ventured into Israeli mizraḥi מזרחי pop. Excursions into more Spanish flamenco pop followed, picking up the odd Iranian cd every now and then, before finally realising that Balkan quarter tones are more than Greek pop and Les mystères des voix bulgares: Narodno music from former Yugoslavia, Bulgarian čalga чалга and the genre with the greatest name in pop music history - turbofolk!

And now the time has finally come to share the happy tidings: Enjoy!