Popular Music and the Subaltern Internationale: the Case of Serbian “Turbo-folk”

Drawing from different academic disciplines this article addresses a mainstream genre of popular music in post-Yugoslav Serbia as a mirrorof the neocolonial processes of “thirdworldization” of small cultures which share a marginal position in the globalized world order. This once despised form of popular entertainment has been acknowledged as a complex cultural phenomenon, deeply connected to the questions of cultural and political legitimacy. I trace its historic roots in socialist Yugoslavia connecting it with the processes of modernization and post-World War II social transformations of the country. I discuss the rise of “turbo-folk” in Serbia in the context of the dissolution ofYugoslavia in the 1990s and the genre’s controversial role both in Serbia and in other former Yugoslav republics. I look at the association of turbo-folk with the global processes of “thirdworldization” and concepts of crypto-colonialism and self-colonization. Finally, I discuss “turbo-folk” as a tool for cultural legitimization of the new political and economic elites of post-socialist Serbia in analogy with similar cultural forms which emerge throughout the global post-socialist “South”.