When the pop-musical genre called Turbo-folk emerged in Serbia in the 1990s, it provoked a number of controversies and affective antipathies and sympathies. Even though Cultural theoreticians and public intellectuals have mostly dismissed it as the tune that accompanies the war‑mongering Serbian politics, turbo‑folk has also been singled out as the cultural symptom of the ideology of post-socialist transition.
However, the persistence and constant transformations of the genre have invited a variety of interpretations. These have raised and explored many gender-related and class issues, leading to a variety of conclusions that located certain subversive, even emancipatory potentials of this musical hybrid. There is an emerging body of academic and critical writing on the subject today, at a time when the popularity of "Balkan beat" has been boosted by the recent upsurge of "trap-folk" and other styles mixing the 1990s Turbo-folk with other globally emerging trends. So:
- What is Turbo-folk?
- Why and how has it emerged?
- Is it a global or local phenomenon?
- Did it come from grassroots or was it a highly orchestrated and sponsored national project?
- Is it about the desire for emancipation or the desire for repression?
- How to (schizo-)analyse this phenomenon beyond the high-modernist dismissal of popular culture and the postmodern relativism of "cultural studies"?
- And, in general, shall we study the Serbian culture and politics of the 1990s as the vanguard of the world as we know it today?
