ROSEMARY STATELOVA The Seven Sins of Chalga

Toward an Anthropology of Ethnopop Music

Edited and introduced by Angela Rodel

PROSVETA SOFIA

contents

editors introduction Out of One Throat Many VoicesB / 7 introduction What I Study and Why / 11 Why Anthropology? / 17 chapter I Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria / 21 Images of Todays Bulgaria / 23 The Dominant Culture of the Excluded / 30 chapter II Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past / 38 Different but Together / 48 Etude on the Interpretation of a Word / 58 chapter III Basic Aspects of Ethnopop Music: Scientific Approaches and Ideas / 64 Chalga and Orientalism / 66 Ethnopop Music and Regionalism / 72 Chalga as a Cross-cultural Product: The Mixed / 77 Chalga Eroticism and Vulgarity / 85 Ethnopop Music in Relation to Folklore / 99 Appendix to Chapter III / 112

chapter IV Ethnopop Music as Creativity: Two Roma Cases / 117 Neshko Neshev The Passions of a Music / 118
An Extract From the Story of Neshko Neshev: His Childhood and First Steps in Playing Music / 119 Neshko Today / 122 Biculturality / 124 Evaluative Duality / 126 The Aesthetics of Mixing. Improvising Again / 129 Extracts From Neshkos Story. Pop Music or Chalga / 132 A Debut at the Fair Muhabet in B-minor / 134 An Experts Appraisal / 135 The Big Assumption / 136 Extracts From Penka Neshevas Story. The Ban and its Lifting / 136 Deceptive Cadence / 140 The Real Finale / 140

Anita Christi: I Will Leave Something to the World

Subject, Motives and Goals of the Study / 141 Family Background and Childhood / 143 Bulgarians and Gypsies: Problems of Coexistence / 147 The Professional Life of a Singer. Getting Married. To Berlin and Back / 152 The Mission / 155 Nomads / 157

chapter V Ethnopop Music as a Craft / 163 Peter Dimitrov: We cannot Allow Ourselves to Have a Style of Our Own / 163
The Road to Music / 165 The Fascination of Wedding Music / 169 In Search of Music Which Does Something Useful / 174 From he Gypsies With the Small Trumpets to Chalga Management / 183 First Conversation / 185 Second Conversation / 192

Bibliography / 198 Discographia / 207

e d it o r s intr o du c t i o n : Out of One Throat Many VoicesB

In my work with Bulgarian folk songs, I have often come across the phrase ot edno gurlo dva glasa, which literally means from one throat two voices, used to describe a singer of great skill and power, who when singing solo sounds like a chorus-unto-herself. I was reminded of this phrase as I read Rosemary Statelovas The Seven Sins of Chalga: Toward an Anthropology of Ethnopop Music; out of her throat (or, rather, pen) come not just two voices, but a myriad of voices, woven skillfully into a complex and multifaceted analysis of chalga, a Bulgarian popular music phenomenon that burst into popularity in the 1990s after the fall of the Bulgarian communist regime in 1989. Yet as Statelova herself makes clear, her book is not a musical or textual analysis of chalga itself, but rather an examination of chalga as a social phenomenon. In her analysis, Statelova tries to understand why this music evokes such strong reactions, both positive and negative, in listeners. She also does not limit her focus to the current state of Bulgarian popular music, but also explores the relationship between chalga and popular music genres that have preceded it, such as chalgia (Turkish-influenced urban popular music) and wedding music from the 1970s and 1980s. Her approach entails juxtaposing voices from different walks of life, including the voices of her students, the intelligentsia, conservatorytrained musicians, self-taught Roma musicians, and media personalities. She also engages a number of different literatures, including literary criticism, cultural studies, anthropology, the discourse in the Bulgarian mass media, and ethnomusicological
Out of One Throat Many Voices 7

literature from both inside and outside of Bulgaria. Statelova succeeds in painting a picture of chalga as a complex social phenomenon that is tied not only to the workings of the mass media in a newly-opened-up market economy, but also tied to questions of Bulgarian identity, especially vis--vis Bulgarias Ottoman past. Statelova takes an interesting position with respect to her subject, chalga, which may strike western readers and scholars as somewhat unusual: She openly declares in her introduction that she, in fact, dislikes chalga, as does most of the Bulgarian intelligentsia of which she is a member. This is quite a different attitude from that of many western popular music scholars, who, reacting against Adornian dismissals of the popular, often position themselves as champions out to resuscitate aesthetically-maligned genres (the work of Simon Frith and Robert Walser comes to mind). Yet despite her personal dislike of the music, Statelova approaches the Bulgarian intelligentsias negative (or at best ambivalent) discourse about chalga with a critical eye, looking behind the rhetoric for larger issues of Bulgarian identity during a difficult period of economic and social transition. Statelovas careful attention to her own position as a scholar is apparent not only with respect to the case of chalga, but also in terms of in her discussions of the fields of ethnomusicology and popular music studies as a whole. She revisits the emic-etic debate, but from the intriguing position of an eastern European looking on at the sidelines of the western discussion of globalization and transnationalism (a discussion she subsequently critiques for not always taking into account sufficiently specific local histories). Statelovas work is also important for popular music studies in that it raises questions particularly a propos of Bulgarian or eastern European contexts; for example, the modernist concept of the high-low cultural divide, which in the western post-Warholian cultural landscape has been for the most part abandoned or superseded by postmodern approaches, is still extremely relevant to systems of cultural production in Bulgaria and plays an important part in discussions of culture
8 editors introduction

in the Bulgarian mass media. Statelovas work offers a fresh look at how such concepts can still be important analytical frameworks in popular music studies. Statelova as a scholar, however, is far from an example of the typical Bulgarian academic; in fact, I would argue that she is part of what might be called a new wave in Bulgarian musicology, as part of a group of scholars (including Lozanka Peycheva, Ventsislav Dimov, and Claire Levy, among others) who in post-1989 Bulgaria have abandoned soviet-style structuralism and have begun developing theoretically sophisticated responses to problems of Bulgarian traditional and popular music. In fact, as Statelova herself points out, this wave is not so new, rather its appearance on the academic radar is; having worked for more than twenty years on popular music within the confines of a totalitarian regime that limited the kinds of ideas and discussions scholars could have (a limitation which led to many of her manuscripts being buried in desk drawers for years), Statelova is now enjoying the opportunity to address the questions of race and ethnicity so crucial to the dynamics of Bulgarian popular music that were impossible to fully explore during the communist era. Yet a different kind of limitation now often prevents Bulgarian scholars and many of their eastern European colleagues from taking full part in international scholarly dialogues: the problem of funding. With the fall of communist regimes, many obstacles to research disappeared, but with them also disappeared much of the state funding for academic activities and publications. Thus, while doing fieldwork in Bulgaria, I have often sensed the frustration of my Bulgarian colleagues, who are doing exciting work that deserves to be heard and recognized in the west, yet who face financial limitations that often make such participation impossible (for example, paying for a decent translation of ones work is often prohibitively expensive for a Bulgarian scholar). Thus, scholarly debate continues to be rather one-sided, with those in wealthier nations dominating the discussions. I was therefore extremely happy when Rosemary approached me to participate in this project, as it
Out of One Throat Many Voices 9

gives me an opportunity to help Bulgarian voices be heard in international discussions. Working on the solid foundation provided by the Bulgarian translator, I have tried to render in English Statelovas sophisticated literary style, which in Bulgarian at times sounds reminiscent of Adorno at his most deliciously caustic, while at other times approaches a poetic reflection on the current state of Bulgarian culture. The reader will have to judge to what extent I have been successful in bringing Statelovas voice and the myriad of voices in her text to life out of my English-speaking throat.

10

editors introduction

introduction:

What I Study and Why

The subject of my study is a phenomenon of popular music in Bulgaria that caused the word chalga (popfolk) to reenter our speech in the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. However, the text is not a monographic study of ethnic music in the period mentioned; such a study has already been written and published by Ventsislav Dimov (2001). Etymologically the word chalga means popular entertainment music, once played in Bulgarian towns during the Bulgarian Revival by ethnically mixed instrumental bands, the so-called chalgii (Valchinova-Chendova 2001:14).1 But at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries in Bulgaria chalga has not only acquired a new meaning, but also has a different emotional context. It is this context that interests me, not the very chalga itself. I place the term ethnopop in the subtitle of my study (which should be considered its true title) to refer to a broadly defined notion of a whole array of modern popular music phenomena I will use both chalga and popfolk as contextually equivalent for this notion in which, going against globalization in the sphere of popular music, the local and the ethnic are the dominant factors marking the product. An Anthropology of Chalga would have sounded too daring, even anecdotal, which is something I cannot allow at the very beginning of the exposition.
1

Ed. note: The term entertainment music is used in Bulgaria for some styles that would be called popular music in English. Rather than Anglicizing the Bulgarian by rendering entertainment music as popular music, I have chosen to Bulgarianize the English and retain this phrase. The Bulgarian Revival refers to a period in the 18th and 19th centuries when Bulgarian intellectuals, mainly trained abroad, became active in a Bulgarian nationalist movement to secure independence from the Ottoman Empire. Partial independence was achieved in 1878. 11

What I Study and Why

After a lifetime of studying popular music, I inevitably think of the place this text has among others dedicated to popular music. Saying this, I am once again identifying myself as a popular music researcher. I could have committed myself elsewhere, for example, to the much-needed work of developing and writing a history of Bulgarian entertainment music. I have not done this because of my keen interest in a sphere which as I see now swallowed the twenty years during which I had been working as a researcher in the Institute of Arts Studies/Musicology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences: the daily, the ordinary, the low and its musical manifestations. As is clearly seen, chalga is not a genre of music, but rather a dimension of culture, which, for reasons not quite clear to me, awakens my intuitions. (But not my liking of it.) At the beginning of the 1980s I started a large-scale study called Toward a Theory of the Entertaining, and it was there at that time more from a psychological and a psychoanalytical perspective that I tried to clarify my idea of the phenomenon as one of the ways for us to go back to the primitive and pre-cultural. My theses argued against the educational pathos of socialism, but after its collapse my work was buried in the drawer of my unpublished as works. My first essay on entertainment music lay unpublished as well because of its too-serious scrutiny of Todor Zhivkovs thoughts on the subject.2 Naturally I liked M. Bakhtins work on Medieval and Renaissance carnival culture very much and liberally but only in oral presentations developed theories about bodily openings and their relation to the entertaining. My understanding of the low, however, is different from Bakhtins since he tries in one way or another to connect joyful festive recreations with the world of the high goals of human existence (Bakhtin, 1978:21). My understanding of the person having fun excludes the high and is focused downward on the basement of values looked at from above. And looked at from below upwards? This is an irrelevant question since in human conceptions
2

Ed. note: Todor Zhivkov was the leader of Bulgaria for more than 25 years during the communist period. He was removed from power in 1989 when the communist system was replaced by a multi-party democracy.

12

introduction

low does not have a bottom, in the same way in which high has no top. That is why already in the 1990s I created the methodological metaphor of the reversed pyramid (Statelova 1993) of cultural values. One walks on the terrain as in Alice in Wonderland or in the film The Matrix; one hangs upsidedown, staring at the unfolding landscape below. What you can see, you see. The rest is sounds and words that are usually taboo higher up in the pyramid. Meanwhile Bulgaria entered a transition from totalitarianism to democracy. Many barriers fell and a reign of anythinggoes began. Or, in the words of social antropologist Haralan Alexandrov, a time of giving in to primary dissipation. This did not happen step by step, like it did in the West by creating a mass culture for decades, but rather quickly. What happened was that exceptionally many and exceptionally different projects were started as if in a wild uncontrolled zone. As if everything which in some way does or did originate, cross, appear and then hide, everything which is or was brought, thought, tried, encouraged, suppressed or distorted in the culture of this small land got the opportunity to materialize. Or to perish. Or only to smolder until it faded away. It was the end of guarding art in its status as high. Opening the floodgates for mass culture was de facto opening the floodgates for the low to a certain extent this was more than normal, says Violeta Decheva (2002a:8). Thus, the phenomenon that I observe lets call it entertainment was left to the chaos of its internal logic and had the time of its life. I will put it in more concrete terms: If its temporary, historically changeable genre features are erased, the phenomenon in question essentially reproduces a very old and always new interpersonal situation in which one individual, performing music, pleases another individual. This is done in the form of a (preliminarily constituted) aural-kinetic service, which has a particular purpose and symbolic content and which evokes a particular emotional response, ranging from excitement to relief. This is, in my opinion, what the socalled popular music genre is all about: sound-rhythm (songs, music playing) and gesture-movement (dance) have had the power to entertain from the very beginning of the (human)
13

What I Study and Why

world. The entertained and the entertaining (clients and musicians) create the contour of one of the oldest cultural situations, crisscrossed by a multitude of aspects and relations concerned with music, dance, communication, markets, production, and power. Ancient or not, however, this cultural situation is not free of problems. To use the rhetoric of Freud, the principle of pleasure moves across its full range, unstopped by any corrective principles of reality. The client pays, the artist gives, and on it goes ad innitum in the wild uncontrolled zone. The following example, given by anthropologist A. Baliksi at a seminar in visual anthropology at the Institute of Arts Studies in the mid1990s, illustrates this. (I am reconstructing this example from memory.) The scientist reported on a eld study that he had led to study daily cultural life in the village of Yakoruda and other nearby settlements.3 Besides everything else that went on in the village, Baliksis video camera recorded the arrival of a car from Soa every Thursday, whose driver rented videocassettes, including pornographic ones. Asked to evaluate his regular consumption of rented pornographic videos, an elderly Muslim man answered: My soul opens! What is striking in this statement is that it almost literally illustrates the words with which Edgar Morin opens his remarkable book, Spirit of Time, a very important work for understanding the phenomenon of mass culture: But there in the fairground stalls and nickelodeons [motion-picture theatres where admission was very cheap at the beginning of the twentieth century authors note] the second industrialization began the second colonization, penetrating into the big Reserve, what actually the human soul is. The soul is the new Africa, which the film streams started to chart (Morin 1995:27). A century later this Africa is in Yakoruda, and the cinema is replaced by video. What else is interesting about the described case? I would say it is the fact that it is intertwined in the ordinary, in the mean3

Ed. note: Yakoruda is a village in southwest Bulgaria inhabited by so-called Pomaks (usually dened as Bulgarian Christians converted to Islam during the Ottoman period).

14

introduction

ingful structures of the daily life of the people from the periphery of the country. Somewhere there, in Yakoruda or nearby, in the twilight of a Thursday evening a video shop arrives on wheels. And while women finish their shopping in the neighborhood store, men are supplied with yet another portion of soul-openers. In the same way, step by step, in the peripheral cultural spaces of Bulgaria ten years earlier, demo-cassettes of songs by the so-called Hisar Priest began to be distributed illegally, risking government sanctions.4 I heard them for the first time in a bus running between towns, on my way from Razgrad to Shumen, played on the drivers cassette recorder.5 What struck me then was the ordinariness and plainness of the lyrics: some ordinary uncle, with all the characteristics of a not-very-good upbringing, sighed, remembering the cigarette that his girlfriend smoked in the morning. Everything merged in an image: the bus-station I had just left; the stall there selling Schweppes, wafers and newspapers; the women carrying bundles and the men with bags; the old Chavdar bus; the smell of petroleum; the general impression of shabbiness. Local, remote, out of time. The people, this time not in the idealized sense of the word. Sounds and words of daily ordinariness. Balkan country music. So, after the decline of the Golden Orpheus festival and its pathetically sublime pop songs with their poetic lyrics made to fit government standards, another way of making songs appeared in Bulgaria.6 These new songs smacked of the provinces and of olden days in the many meanings of their words
4

Ed. note: During the communist period, the music industry was strictly controlled by the government. In the 1980s, new forms of ethnopop music began to be sold in farmers markets on unlabeled democassettes in deance of government regulations. Ed. note: Razgrad and Shumen are towns in northeast Bulgaria in a region where large numbers of Turks and some very ne Rom musicians live. Displays of Muslim culture were prohibited in Bulgaria from 1984 to 1989, and democassettes were undoubtedly one response to this censorship. Ed. note: The Golden Orpheus festival celebrated the popular music of the communist period, called estradna muzika (stage music) and supported by the government. It was a sort of Europop music, similar to Italian popular songs such as Volare, and far from, for example, Anglo-American rock music, which was not government-approved.

What I Study and Why

15

and of something contrary to the space-time idea of the up-todate in culture. This stealthy, sneaky move was noticed in a timely fashion by two researchers of modern forms of folklore, Lozanka Peycheva and Ventsislav Dimov, as early as 1994 in their publication Demo-cassettes: About One Unstudied Fact of the Sofia Music Market, which reported the phenomenon and began its study from the perspective of a methodology influenced by new research trends in world ethnomusicology (Peycheva and Dimov 1994). Soon after that they were not alone and were even pushed aside by a noisy crowd of journalists, who turned their sights to manifestations of popfolk, moving them in this way from the periphery to the centre of media attention. Ethnic pop music turned into a prosperous industry, the vanguard of mass culture made in Bulgaria. There was more to it it turned into a metaphor for modern Bulgaria, concentrating a huge amount of discontent with [post communist] Bulgaria in the word chalga, dragged out of yesterdays cupboard. But strangely enough, the metaphor revealed itself as ambivalent in terms of values and meanings, even polyvalent, just as todays Bulgaria seems to us at times a place where we can consume freely our melancholy and disgust, and at other times a country that is developing in a certain direction. So, I start a debate with the words of Ivan Stefanov, written in one of the two introductions to the book by V. Dimov The Ethnopop Boom (2001). According to him, if the author had denounced this type of music as low-quality mass culture, as a primitive form of kitsch, as oriental popfolk or low-quality imitation of gypsy music, he would have wallowed in a showy and easily achievable, but one-sided and unproductive negative discourse. Instead of this, in his monograph on popfolk, Dimov analyses the subject as a social fact and investigates the cultural industry that has distributed its products in the large vertical and horizontal public spaces (Stefanov 2001). What do I argue with? Only with one thing: in my opinion, the negative discourse about chalga might be showy, but it is not easily achieved theoretically. Here I turn to the text of an academic discussion on the topic Chalga Pros and Cons, organized by the department History and Theory of Culture at Sofia University and by the New Bulgarian University in 1999.
16 introduction

In the ten talks, comprising the published text, the ambivalence mentioned above is clearly seen it is an ambivalence about the negative discourse on this phenomenon given the tolerance and sympathy felt for it, which garnishes the contempt. This, in my opinion, is not (only) a sign of open-mindedness or perhaps an underestimation the phenomenon, as if to say: nothing serious has happened. The discussion on the topic Chalga Pros and Cons is in fact just a slight echo of a large-scale horizontal and vertical, and synchronic and diachronic, discourse about what is going on in our country today, yesterday, and the day before. Popfolk does not only tease, but it is just like a physical pain; it not only aches, but it also signals a certain syndrome. Liberals in culture (such as the politician Lyuben Dilov, Jr.) sympathize with the syndrome because it is intertwined in the local landscape. Hard-core culturologists, however, firmly claim that the essential cultural phenomenon associated with ethnic pop music is the disgust felt for it. I stand by this latter idea by tradition: in the Reversed Pyramid I declared that I study not so much pop music, but rather the negative paradigm in which it is placed as a subject of study. That is why I accept as a challenge the concluding words of the leader of the discussion Chalga Pros and Cons, Alexander Kyosev, who says: Each culture draws a zone of laughter, a zone of pleasure and with them a zone of revulsion Disgust was born [at chalga R. St.]. This disgust has to be theorized (Chalga Pros and Cons 1999:72). So, let this text be considered an attempt at such theorizing.

why anthropology?
In the spring of 2002, when culturology as a major at Blagoevgrad South-Western University was being accredited, at a meeting with university teachers, a colleague boasted that in the course entitled Methods of Researching
What I Study and Why 17

Public Thought a paper had been written on my topic. I was intrigued, since for a number of years I had suggested that my students join my research with their own mini-studies. (Some of the outcomes of these mini-studies will be introduced in the exposition to follow.) Helpfully they gave me a copy of the paper called The Phenomenon of Popfolk in Bulgarian Popular Culture at the End of the 1990s and the Beginning of the 21st Century. I had hardly started reading it when I realized that it belonged completely to the negative discourse. Before achieving the required scientific form, it started running like a muddy stream with the rage of insulted virtue. Here are the first few lines of the text: The genre of popfolk in Bulgarian music has turned into a cultural phenomenon that changes and develops incessantly, spewing kitsch, pornography and primitivism into the media space. Popfolk stylistics has established itself as a Bulgarian syndrome of stupidity and perversion. However, this characteristic has captivated the mass audiences, who started nimbly to sway and shake their bodies to the rhythm of popfolk a complex eclecticism of oriental sounds, Gypsy rhythms, Greek music, and pop motifs (Stefanova 2002: 12). And further on: The opponents of popfolk gave a negative meaning to the so-called chalga and declared war on its performers, whose lyrics have profuse phrases charged with sexual animism and culinary consumer passion expression which in todays cultural sense is full of elements of pornography and sexism (ibid.). What is clear here is that there is a musical and textual object, aesthetically worthless, but precisely because of its worthlessness quite characteristic of a dynamically developing culture (popular) that is kindling passions which, first, are an expression of certain (low) value dispositions and, second, awaken
18 introduction

among citizens an active dialogue and inter-institutional action (the so-called war between pop music and popfolk). Another thing is clear as well the studied case is an example of the necessity of applying an anthropological approach to musical phenomena. According to the creator of the organon of the anthropology of music, Alan Merriam, this approach means studying a particular kind of music as human behavior, as a fact which is derived from certain peoples notions, as part of a certain cultural environment which produces it and which so that we can conceive of the music can also be analyzed (Merriam 1964:vii-viii). Furthermore, the study of music in its cultural context is already by itself anthropology of music. A third thing is clear as well: the negative discourse about ethnic pop music is theoretically uncontrollable and ideationally insignificant and it says little about the studied phenomenon and a lot about its author. The anthropology of music is necessary as an instrument because being the most egalitarian in comparison with the other musical disciplines (Myers 1992:11), it can express an opinion about a case that has grown from a musical into a moral one. As Nettl states, the anthropological approach encourages ethnomusicologists to study phenomena that certain societies are not inclined to consider as music, even less so as art (Nettl 1983:24). This approach will help the consideration of things belonging to low culture to achieve self-discipline and become analytical and diagnostic rather than moralizing and pathetic. It is curious that even the pioneer researchers V. Dimov and L. Peycheva back in 1994 were not able to fully overcome the negative discourse and when they turn from describing the terrain to describing the subject, they start giving classifications (e.g. banal rhymes) like referees on a sports field. This problem is entirely overcome later as we see in their latest scientific publication The Zourna Tradition in South-western Bulgaria (Peycheva and Dimov 2002). And last the anthropological approach is necessary for the very existence of ethnomusicology in the modern sense of the word. Merriam presents ethnomusicology to us as the sum of two disciplines: (cultural) anthropology and musicology. Thus, in an interdisciplinary way, we should be able to offer, God
19

What I Study and Why

willing, a believable version of the studied manifestation of tastes and life views, typical of a certain culture for example, of Bulgarian culture at the time of transition between two centuries. As far as the title of this book is concerned, it emerged as a joke by the author with her own text or probably the other way round. Once finished, I saw that there were seven features of the studied subject that drew the wrath of the adherents of the negative discourse about ethnopop music: popfolk as a (distorted) image of modern Bulgaria; popfolk as the offspring or heritage of our cursed past under the Turkish yoke; the oriental character of popfolk; its regionalism (instead of nation-o-centrism); the fact that it is not pure music but is a mixture of whatever; that it is eroticized to the point of vulgarity. And last that it competes with folk music in peoples preferences, and even passes for new folk. Number seven amused me just as I am amused by the confusion between cause and effect I see among my students, otherwise so kind and diligent, whenever, for example, I assign the essay Music in My Life. They tell me that there lived a small but brave people who loved its songs so much that it managed to keep them alive during five centuries of Turkish oppression.7 But then came a good-for-nothing song and lured the people into stupidity. The songs, which get blamed for committing these seven sins, reminded me of the story of the portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and then the joking title occurred to me, which I hope will not offend anybody.

Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1389 until 1878, when it achieved liberation.

20

introduction

chapter I

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

It is ten years after the appearance of the previously unknown phenomenon of the Bulgarian music market, which takes the form of demo cassettes of ethnopop music, offered at the stalls at the Womens Market in Sofia or in the rotunda in front of the Central Railway Station. Today it is easy to hear this music, which has long since left the cultural underground. It is on the air, it can be heard in public and private places: restaurants, open stalls selling music, public transport vehicles, and in the homes of people who can be called consumers of chalga. According to Veronika Azarova, chalga, both as an industry and as a cultural sign of communities consuming media was awarded the status of the most communicatively favored artwith a most specific, unmistakable style of its own (Azarova 1999:13). The next statement which I will quote is negatively charged, but its author, radio music-editor Ana-Maria Tonkova, confirms (in an interview) the clearly identifiable and vividly evident stylistic features of this phenomenon: It takes me thirty seconds to know what it is all aboutI personally do not listen to this kind of music (Atanasova 2001:7). As far as the stylistic parameters of ethnopop are concerned, there exists now in Bulgaria both a possible consensus but also a bipolarity, which is as automatically declared as when people recently declared their political affiliation to the red or to the blue.8 Todays public personalities make their attitude about the problem clear even when they are not asked
8

Ed. note: Red is traditionally the color of the communist and socialist parties in Bulgarian politics, while center-rightist parties are associated with blue.

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

21

about it. Everything but popfolk, answers actress Martina Vachkova to the question as to what her favorite music is in the November 30, 2002 edition of Sega newspaper. Rad Kamenski, a commentator with the Bulgarian National Radio and a former student of mine at the Department of Journalism of Sofia University, declared the following in his essay The Music in My Life, The Musics of Bulgaria (a topic I always assign to get oriented to my students tastes): I even listen to chalga. However, when I do this, I amuse myself with the stupidity which comes from these performances. Interpreting the problem at a slightly deeper level however, is enough to demonstrate that the very mentioning of popfolk touches a very painful chord in most respondents. This is what a student of studio-sound technologies at Technical University Sofia wrote in his essay in 2003: Rebellious songs were sung. They raised the Bulgarian spirit. Thus part of our people, though they knew they were doomed to die, rebelled against the Ottoman Empire and perished, but not in vain. Today these beautiful songs, kindling passions and the human spirit are replaced by popfolk and rap simplified music with vulgar texts intended for ignorant people, leading mediocre lives. The student probably does not know the rebellious songs or is hardly interested in Bulgarian history. Instead of telling about his personal musical preferences (he played the guitar) he started giving a speech similar to the one that it seems that all people who are not tempted by self-reflection give the moment they try to identify themselves as citizens of this country. Immediately, almost automatically, two pains are thematized, two national complexes that have been growing since time immemorial: Bulgarias past and its present. Both of them are personally shared traumas (though not experienced on the level of the personality), and popfolk is their symbol, a symbol of decline and mediocre life. We will deal with the traumas of the past and with the disgust at it in the next chapter. This one is dedicated to the image of todays Bulgaria, which accompanies the mere thought of our native ethnopop.

22

chapter I

images of today's Bulgaria

In my study Popfolk: Toward the Essence of the Phenomenon and Its Definition (Statelova 1999) and in my research paper Experienced in Bulgaria: Rock, Pop, Popfolk 19901994 (Statelova 1995), I included in my scientific bibliography some texts which normally do not appear in bibliographies of research work: materials published in newspapers and popular magazines, texts from radio and TV shows, and privately expressed opinions. I am going to do the same now in view of the topical nature of the studied phenomenon, which belongs to the group of subjects often talked and written about, but in brief and incidental style. This has a methodological justification: if I study anthropologically the negative discourse on ethnopop music in Bulgaria, then the textual spaces of the popular press are also a research terrain. My newspaper terrain in this case is predominantly Kultura (and to a lesser extent Literaturen Vestnik and Sega). I consider Kultura not so much part of mass media, but rather a club of intellectuals in the country, existing in the form of a weekly newspaper. (This characterization is based on the fact that Kultura is both read and written by almost the same circle of people, who communicate through its articles.) What interests me in the space of intelligent newspaper writing, seen as a field of talking about culture as a quality of life in Bulgaria, is more specifically the talking about the transition as something that hit the country, causing a lot of damage. In the mid-1990s the speakers take on the topic was relatively calm: Bulgarian society had fallen into the harness of poverty (Kabakchieva et al. 1995:5). The description uses expressions of degree: increase (in illnesses), decrease (in employment), etc. After only a few more years of transition, however, the

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

23

degrees gradually disappear, replaced by pictures of declining social status, degradation and perishing. This does not happen amid bloody fights and violence as it does during revolutions and wars, but in the following way: according to the sociologist K. Kolev, 65% of all people have not bought shoes or clothes in the past two years. 54% have not traveled between settlements. 20% have not bought even soap (Rajchev 2002:13). But even the dry statistics gradually retreated before the erotic impact of the effective expressiveness of the ethical and aesthetic metaphors of tragedy, destruction, tearing, and decline (D. Kamburov 2002:1011). In 2002 the Open Society Foundation financed the survey The State of Society, conducted by the sociological agency Alpha Research, whose reports were published twice on the pages of Kultura. According to sociologist Zhivko Georgiev, 76% of the people have lost their social status, both objectively and subjectively, which leads to social degradation The peoples vault of values is emptied of meaning as well as is their psychological capacity of correctly responding and dealing with problems (cited in Bodakov 2002b:13). Ivan Krastev draws the grave conclusion that the elite do not need the population, which has fallen into a state of complete exclusion and inertia (ibid.). There is a total economization of mass consciousness because of which the new time has no positive hero and does not produce positive dispositions in society. V. Todorov uses another type of metaphor one of biological and physical disintegration. He resorts to the fact that over 60% of the interviewees [who are 1,975 members of the adult population of the country R. St.] have no children under 18 in their families (ibid.), and a large number of children are abandoned though they have parents who live together. Driving factors of public consciousness are fear of the future and nostalgia about the past. People do have rights but the access to them is exceptionally expensive. If there is some protest, it is not because of a wish for change, but because of the fear that you might be deprived of something. The politicians en bloc are recognized as evil just like the Roma; the trust in institutions is infinitesimal; the very idea of success is considered immoral, and the state of society is not considered settled, but rather as
24 chapter I

something unnatural (Bodakov 2002a; Kamburov 2002). The only constructive thing is the formation of local strategies for survival and the strong regionalism of society. (Both factors are significant for the phenomenon we study, but we will talk about them later.) Let us pause for a moment. The basic category that activates thinking about the object as produced by a cultural matrix (Merriam 1964) is the emotional re-experiencing of reality: living it, reliving it and the further echo of both. Cultures build specific protective mechanisms to cope with the processes that disrupt balance. This is what psychoanalysis teaches us, more specifically the method of modern ethnopsychoanalysis, for example, as developed by Andreas Benz, who treats the problem of enduring/surviving (das berleben) as a basic scientific, practical and strategic issue for people, living in an epoch of vast and multidimensional changes. According to Benz, the mechanism typical of European culture consists of organized forms of concealing, blurring and softening the essence of human reality, human nature and the inclination to aggression and conflicts forms which are placed at all levels of society (Benz 1997:11). Here I would add a formulation by Georgi Kapriev: Western European humanity has no valid language through which to express its extremes. That is why it prefers to taboo them (Kapriev 2001:7). The problem is (through psycho- and ethnopsychoanalysis) for a person to be able to start entering like in an initiation process the hindering reality by discussing it. The cultural matrix in which I see ethnopop music in Bulgaria currently is a matrix of a public conversation, of speeches, mono-, dia-, or polylogical, flowing on different levels, in different forms and under the sign of different ways of thinking, outlooks, and figurative parameters of imagination. All conversations are about one thing: what is happening to people now. Acts of talking go on parallel, very different in style and very similar in forming themes of bewilderment by todays life. In this way, I imagine both Kultura and ethnopop events as modifications of a giant psychoanalytical couch, where the speakers talk, playing the roles of both shrinks and patients. Some of the intellectuals from Kultura speak with

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

25

disgust. We will see how the others, the ordinary people, react. For the time being we are with those with the pens and keyboards, on whom Kultura and other similar newspapers have a catalyzing effect so that they, by means of their rich linguistic culture, express their opinions on todays Bulgaria, her rich and poor, those under and above the law, Bulgarians, Turks and Roma. Today the ordinary Rom, Bulgarian and Turk are in the same frying pan that is heated to red by class conflicts, preaches an enraged Rumen Leonidov in reaction to published anti-Semitic literature. The number of our fellow-citizens thrown out of their social status, out of their way of life and living, fallen to the most despicable level of the social heap, has reached the critical maximum. Their negative energy is also looking for a vent (Leonidov 2002:5). The poet insists on introducing drastic legal repression in order to start everything from the beginning[Because] today most of the healthy and seemingly normal Bulgarians watch indifferently how before their eyes the meaning of their lives is melting meaninglessly (ibid.). Who is to blame? The political mob that led us to this ordinary fascism (ibid.). (Further on, we will see how synchronic the parallel words of the people sound.) One of the most sardonic and original authors of Kultura, architect Pavel Popov, in relation to the defeat of the national soccer team at the World Championship in October 2001, calls our we an immature, lazy, unstable, sly, sentimentally self-pitying crowd which most of all hates talent and success (Popov 2001:1). Artist Andrey Lekarski, who lives in Paris, but also has a studio in Sofia, shares the following anecdote in Kultura: they broke into my studio and stole two and a half tons of sculptures. All this [the result of long years of work R. St.] was melted down in a night in order to be sold by the kilogram as scrap metal (Popova 2002:12). He does not add, and you call those rascals people! so his text cannot be placed together with the remonstrations of the two previously quoted cultured men. However, it serves as an illustration of Zhivko Georgievs above-mentioned conclusion about the emptied vault of values and the total economization of consciousness. Somewhere

26

chapter I

alongside the desperate words coming from Kultura, the voice of Starshel, the satirical newspaper, is heard, which has a leading article entitled The Merry Catastrophe. There are picturesque examples of disgraceful and scandalous behavior by both old and young people, to which, according to the author the only response could be total chalga and belly dancing (K. Krastev 2002:1). Because one of them (life in Bulgaria) is identical with the other (chalga and belly dancing). In this way the popfolk hit becomes a measure of the disgrace of everything and everybody. In a very provocative text a conversation with vanguard thinkers Boris Serginov and Svilen Stefanov it is clearly stated that in Bulgaria life copies chalga, life is so colorless and cynical that the way we talk about it [in an unconventional piece To Kick Culture, whose authors are Serginov and Stefanov R. St.], in spite of the obscene words in the texts, is actually soft and decent. We are decent people who are pissed off by the overall brutalization (Titsin 2002:7). Thus, some concern appears that there is a danger in Bulgaria in these wretched conditions and the brutalization of people, and that the correlation between life and art gives only chalga as a result. Blues songs about beer, for example, maintain the rhythm of the individuals digestive tract, declares Svilen Stefanov. This is some kind of plebeian celebration of the low: the belly, ass and pe But it is exactly this that is encouraged in Bulgaria, I would call it obscenely showy table music9 (ibid.). I cant help thinking how elegantly, on the contrary, Bakhtin puts it in his book about Rabelais when he talks about those parts of the body where it is open to the outside world or it itself juts out into the world: the gaping mouth, child-bearing organ, breasts, phallus, big belly, nose (Bakhtin 1978:4041). Cinema seems to be most exposed to attacks by thug aesthetics. In this respect, the mass of enraged texts by Kulturas edi9

Ed. note: In traditional Bulgarian folk music, the genre table music, consisting of very complex nonmetrical songs, is considered one of the most beautiful parts of the folk repertoire. 27

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

tor of film criticism, Genoveva Dimitrova, is quite indicative. Mastering a supple, figurative language, she is inappeasable when insulting the reality in Bulgaria, which is so disgusting that it leads to madness, emigration or vomiting (Dimitrova 2002a:5). But she seems more furious that the cinema has been staring at this reality and has doubled it: Bulgarian film reality stinks of filth, you can get sick from the stench, deformity, meaninglessness Film makers invention consists in a mere registration. A vulgar narrative (ibid.). Thus, the disgust is two-fold at reality and at art, which has lowered itself too close to the level of life. Another article also talks about our vile reality, about thugs, primates and blondes (Dimitrova 2002b:5) in yet another again till she gets to the definition a thug wave in the Bulgarian cinema (Dimitrova 2002d: 5). In a conversation with dramatist Vladimir Ganev (living in Canada since 1985 R. St.), Dimitrova again rejects the chalga aesthetics into which our cinema has sunk simultaneously with its sinking up to the ears in the sewer of reality. The two reach an agreement that if you have chosen your characters to be thugs, brutal people, who spit out vulgarisms, this still is not enough to make your film a work of art. There is no moral message in such cases, the films are empirical, too external and, in the long run, are in this type of pre-aesthetics (Dimitrova 2002c:5). Theatre has also sunk into a mimetic copying of our formless daily routine (Decheva 2001: 4), but the vulgar, realitydoubling narrative of the 1990s in Bulgaria finds its genuine, i.e. conscious, reincarnation in the mobile phone novels by Hristo Kalchev. (The works in question are the trilogy of novels Nero the Wolf, Caligula the Wild and The Period of Messalina, published in 1995, which were met with great interest by readers.) In them, according to critic Simona Yankova, the reader comes upon the same things that he reads in criminal columns in the tabloids (Yankova 1996:912). The genre mobile phone novel10 is a product of mass literature and as such is not defined via negationis. The author defines
10

The term mobile phone novel was coined by Simona Yankova.

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chapter I

his novels not as literature, but as chronicles of the time. Hristo Kalchev argues: Somebody had to have the courage to tell [people] what actually goes on in this country I call them vulgar novels. That is, vulgar environment, vulgar language, vulgar action, vulgar predictions. Everything there is vulgar. Whether some day some critic will gather these books together and call them a novel, I dont know (ibid.). Critics, however, after seven years, continue to discard such literature even as mass literature, calling it realism in dirty gray. The writer [now not only Hr. Kalchev, but Alexander Tomov, too R. St.] convinces you, writes Milena Kirova, that in this society, among the people you live, everything is filthy, corrupt and disgusting, that the real color of life is muddy gray The philosophy and aesthetics of the cesspool Reading, you would like to run away from yourself (Kirova 2002b:2). It seems that there is no sphere of art that has been spared the blast of the vulgar low and the disgusting blurring of lines dividing life and art. The soft sadness of Leon Daniel (2001:10) that if watching is ailing, then the theatre is also ailing and the bewilderment of electronic-music composer Vladimir Djambazov (2001:7) at the way feelings become goods expressed by music mutually complement the rage that reaches paroxysm in another composer, Dragomir Yosifov, who is indignant that for Bulgarian intellectuals the limit of the world of sounds seems to be ethnic music of the type Balkan Horses11 while the rest of the country in a coyly vulgar way has interpreted the asymmetrical meter 7/8 as a sign of Bulgarianness (Yosifov 2001:9). Everything gets cheaper, everything is degraded criminals become the main heroes of newspaper stories (Bodakov 2002e:8), television in the best case works to make the public stupid and in the worst case lowers itself down to the very slime (Kamburov 2002:10). Such is, for example, the show All the Kings Men on Bulgarian National Television, which Ave Ivanova attacks
11

Ed. note: Balkan Horses is a jazz-folk fusion group featuring some of the Balkans most prominent folk musicians. 29

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

with the words it is the lowest of the low (Ivanova 2002:5). She summarizes: It gathers and sublimes all frustrations with the culture that reigns in this country. Undisturbed, in slippers and a shabby sweat suit, with the stale reek of last nights drinking and squeezed into a corner, copulating, this fecal culture comes to you like radiation from stages, from small and big screens. It soaks through you, drenches you, wants to possess you (ibid.). The question arises on its own: if high in genre and journalism is such, what other can chalga be in this country?

the dominant culture of the excluded

If we can be allowed to treat the statements of the above-mentioned masters of cultural analysis and their words as a possible psychogram of the trauma caused by what is currently happening to Bulgarian society, we could accept the following theoretical interpretation of the disgust at popfolk: When they declare that life in Bulgaria copies popfolk, the authors, lying on the couch during the hypothetical ethnopsychoanalytical session, make a kind of transfer in the psychoanalytical sense: the subject of the intolerance felt by them (the reality, unbearable to the point of vomiting) is so bad that it looks like the worst the chalga hit in the style of Kondyo or Azis.12 Analyzed, however, the psychogram says the opposite: the ethnopop hit is bad because it shows what is happening oneto-one, without intellectual disgust, but with the sentiment of the losers (Bodakov 2002b:9). We have a typical case of pars pro toto. The thug cinema, if doing a registration of
12

Ed. note: Both Kondyo and Azis are very popular male Roma popfolk singers.

30

chapter I

the nasty reality, does this with an additional portion of disgust splashed across the screen. The infantile gay hit of Azis13, in comparison, is innocent in its shamelessness: it IS the realia causing disgust in intellectuals. But as far as they are both the patient with the trauma and the self-treating doctor all in one, then the transfer does not stop with the aggressive attacks (nasty chalga), but reaches an insight which gives rise to the already-mentioned ambivalent attitude toward popfolk on the part of intellectuals. The only sympathetic character, for example, in an article by Veselin Veselinov called About Tomatoes and Intellectuals (written in response to an article by politologist Evgeniy Daynov [2001], which kindled a discussion on the intellectual stratum of Bulgarian post-modernist deconstructionists and their role in explaining what happens R. St.) is labeled as uncouth, but this label is given with a wink of understanding: the subject is a boor and he listens to popfolk. The tomatoes he produces are not good, but at least he is not a parasite like many intellectuals (Veselinov 2001:7). When Mitko Novkov (2002:4) is compelled to claim in his interpretation of The Kuku Band and Slavi Trifonov (the TV star hosting Bulgarias most-watched television program The Slavi Show) that popfolk turns into a sign of the Bulgarian and even into the most representative Bulgarian music, he actually undertakes a procedure that psychoanalyst A. Benz defines as thematizing the lesser evil with the aim to conceal the worse one. (Benz has in mind the emphasis put on the significance of sexuality in Freuds time in order to conceal the aggression standing behind it as basically inherent in human nature [Benz 1997:15].) After the ambivalence of the vision of popfolk both as shame and dignity, (ibid.) there follows the proposition of its essential role as a sign of the dominant culture in our country (Bodakov 2002c:2). Mitko Novkov states: Today the translation of high national goals into the language of the ordinary person is impossible Among the different passions there is no sense of belonging
13

Ed. note: Azis is unusual in Bulgaria for being an openly homosexual celebrity; he, in fact, even plays up his sexual orientation to regularly scandalize Bulgarian audiences.

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

31

to a community In a way our nation is being scattered, it is crumbling (Novkov 2002:4). If someone manages to speak the language of the ordinary person, this language has to be vulgar, too. Demophilia is an important part of the Bulgarian sense of community (ibid.). Here loom the figures of General Boyko Borisov from the Ministry of Internal affairs and television and pop music star Slavi Trifonov, recognized as substitutes for the dream or God (Borislavov 2002c:4). The means of supporting this vicarage are vulgar, even piratical. One of the biggest companies today in Bulgaria, the mobile phone operator M-Tel, for example, with the impudence of a cult firm, offered a 2003 New Years package with the face of Slavi, made up like the death mask of Ludwig van Beethoven with a laurel wreath around his head. The accompanying CD of songs by the star was called Vox populi Since I started dealing with the subject, I have claimed that understanding the ethnopop boom (Dimov 2001a) will follow from an understanding of the chalga person. This person is not a popfolk celebrity such as Azis or Luna, who are projections of his or her dreams. The popfolk person is not always the popfolk professional. He is the person who simply articulates through popfolk (and other parafolk mediators) his or her views on life and who bears the brunt of this life in contemporary Bulgaria, without comprehending the high national goals and their language. This person, according to M. Bodakov, has no problems with readability and interpretation of messages sent by The Slavi Show, taken here as the sought-after representative of the dominant culture in our country (Bodakov 2002c:2). In his opinion, The Slavi Show turns into retribution for the failures they have experienced. Its outstanding rating voices the will for the life norms and rules which these people share, wishing to be accepted as normal Whereas the rest of the TV shows expressing the interests of the official institutions or the educated circles, or something else are effectively marginalized in comparison with the dominant culture in Bulgaria (ibid.). The reader might ask: How is it that the people who make up BTVs The Slavi Shows large audience come to be labeled
32 chapter I

as failures of society? There are all sorts of people in this audience, including young, well-dressed people, normal in appearance, who do not look as if they forage in dustbins. If an explanation is necessary (and such explanations can never be one-sided), I would say that failure means also falling away from the norms of institutions and educated circles or from the efforts to acquire a civil ability to comprehend and influence the social process in some way (not only to bear and survive it). Or we can conceptualize this falling away as losing trust in institutions. And the fact that now the culture of the educated circles has actually become marginalized does not mean that it has stopped being the Culture. And here exactly is the problem: that which is marginal in value and meaning struggles to take the place of the really marginal, i.e. somebody like Slavi Trifonov dictates life norms and rules to those about whom Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote in his The Revolt of the Masses as early as the 1920s when he signaled alarmingly that they aggressively declare their pretensions and take the best seats in the theatre (Ortega y Gasset 1993). Bodakovs short article on The Slavi Show as a towncrier of the dominant, for the time being, in Bulgarian culture is only an introduction to several articles in which the editor of Kultura wrote or spoke about the dominant social and cultural type in Bulgaria today. In one of these articles M. Bodakov offers an eye-witness account of the national debates about the poll Public Opinion on Crime (October 2002), which was the first Bulgarian (and, in fact, the first Eastern European) version of the Deliberative Poll, a sociological project developed by Professor John Fishkin from Texas University (Bodakov 2002f:5). Of the many-sided information about this event I will select only what sheds light on the social and cultural type in question. The author, as a journalist, was given the task of observing, without interfering in any way, discussions that took place over several days. In them, 281 participants, divided into small groups, had the opportunity, after having been informed by first-hand sources about the problems of crime in Bulgaria and about possible solutions to the problem, to express in a
Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria 33

free dialogue (again with the first-hand people) their views on the topic. Thus, Bodakov had the rare chance to observe what and how the average Bulgarian of both sexes thinks and speaks. He or she, by the way, on the third day abandoned formal business suits in favor of his or her favorite sweat suit.14 This eyewitness account and the detailed conversation with social anthropologist Haralan Alexandrov related to it are an important factual and interpretational source for the topic of my study with respect to the concept of the chalga person. The first interesting aspect that Bodakov reports is the abovementioned projection-identification of ordinary people with the authorities of the day. People always began talking with the words Boiko (Borisov) said that or I, just like Slavi, come from a village The positive statements were most often autobiographical: I do not steal, however others Instead of focusing on essential and topical issues (e.g. the efficiency of persecution of criminals), the people in sweat suits quarreled and told long stories of murders, rapes and robberies, constructed as classical myths. They liked best of all the pleasure of exchanging stories, especially preferring ones where the raped body was torn, put in a sack and buried, while the perpetrator went free (ibid.). Marin Bodakov continues: public opinion did not manage to go beyond examples of daily life, formatted as myths. I observed an infantile refusal to think for ones self. The young people, if they did not take part in this glorification of slyness and mob law, were apathetic, even squeamish about the topic of the discussionThe participants had nothing to ask about nor did they need an answer. In a word, there was a mismatch between mythological and rational speech (ibid.). As we will see later, it is hard to identify the chalga fan by social and demographic features among three forty-year-old accountants, two would be keen ethnopop fans, while the third
14

Ed. note: Urban middle and upper-class Bulgarians generally dress more formally than Americans, thus Anzugi or the ubiquitous sweat suits found across rural and working-class Eastern Europe are considered by members of the urban upper classes to be particularly dclass and a symbol of poor taste.

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chapter I

would not even scribble some words of disgust in my questionnaire. The popfolk hit itself, seen as a manifestation of the practice of exchanging mythological accounts of that which has occurred, does not rely on an audience that is definable in terms of age and education. It turns to an audience which Haralan Alexandrov defines as a product of popfolk culture with its false and cynical suggestions that if you have dough, everyone loves you (Bodakov 2002d:10). Bodakovs long conversation with him is directly relevant to our theme, since the anthropologist has specially studied the culture of thugs and thuggettes, and apparently the modern dispositions of society are the terrain on which he works. When I conducted my first series of field observations of popfolk during its previous period, in which the songs authors worked in the mode of simplicity and ordinariness in production (the lyrics had a certain dose of clumsiness, deliberately sustained, the arrangements still did not have the style of dancefloor music, female singers had not undergone plastic surgery, and the videos in the manner of amateur videos were shot with one camera, outside in the country, or in somebodys yard), I was struck exactly by this spontaneous way in which relationships in popfolk occurred, which Alexandrov also discusses. The anthropologist argues: People [in popfolk plots R. St.] meet, fall in love and then out of love and leave one another. Or they meet and have a fightWe have a direct naming of the reality, but not an authors creative construction of the situation. Stories in popfolk are related to things one does with his or her body. The sensuous world rushes in from outside, invading you like a disaster. There is absolutely no hint that we live in the world made by our constant construction of it. All we can do is respond tactilely (ibid.). he anthropologist vigorously and agilely points out details supporting his claim and reasonably applies schematic reduction of cultural types in his typology. He does not deal, as do Daynov or Veselinov, with the nuances within the category of the educated type, whose role today more than ever is to discern the boundaries between good and evil, acceptable and unacceptable, civilized and primitive (ibid.). In the aboveEthnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria 35

mentioned conversation, Alexandrov keeps his eyes fixed on the other type, representing the people who do not see the above-mentioned boundaries, but rather develop a traumatic conspiratorial version of the world, petrified in their dependence and learned helplessness, leaving themselves to the mercy of fate. So, this is the true evil that happened to and in Bulgaria during the time of transition, more dangerous than the catastrophic impoverishment and the failure of many to make it in the market economy (those who no longer buy shoes or soap, for example). It is curious that the etic view, acquired by living abroad, outlines more clearly the psychological and social disaster being helpless, unable to construct the world in which we live as a changing world. It is interesting to note in the conversation cited above between film critic G. Dimitrova and dramatist V. Ganev the change in attitude of non-Bulgarians (in this case Canadians) to the disastrous state in which most Bulgarians found themselves. V. Ganev reports: Friends of mine [Canadians R. St.] were troubled and distressed, worried about the misery here. But for more than ten years the information that was coming from Bulgaria was the same. Suddenly, last year, I felt that my friends were sick and tired of this black blackness, of all this madness, of the people rummaging around in the dustbins. They stopped taking us seriously The tragedy of the Bulgarian transition, our complaining to the world for thirteen years, does not touch anybody now they take us as some jerks who are unable to pull up their trousers after you know what (Dimitrova 2002c:5). So, lets go back to what Alexandrov says: it is possible that the Bulgarian population should disappear following the typical Darwinian logic. And this obedient disappearing of Bulgarians is somehow outrageous. We should bear in mind that these words are speculative extrapolation the population is still here, in order to live out its miserable life. And in order to talk about it together with the media in the same disgusting and self-humiliating manner. That is why ethnopop music such as it established itself in the 1990s had such a great reverberation. Between its primitive stories of what is happening and its
36 chapter I

caricatures of the people, who are in a state of learned helplessness and recycling of exhausted meanings, some kind of isomorphism was created and maintained. People who graduated from secondary schools talk about reality as if they have never graduated, as if they were socialized by the street gangs, by the media that celebrate them, and by popfolk. As Haralan Alexandrov argues: Chalga is not just anti-culture for the time being it is the only valid and shared version of reality, as false as it might be. False because it never questions itself; it has no idea of self-study; it has no idea that the suppositions on which brains are fed may not be valid (Bodakov 2002d: 1011). In this sense, the anthropologist calls ethnopop music a folk and half-folk genre. It is the recognized product of the low, writes Emilia Dvoryanova. It is capable of taking the necessary dose of disgust for relaxation (Dvoryanova 2002:9). A genre, which, I would add, uses folklore, given to it as a gift by reality, in order to condescendingly give people the right to live primitively.

Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria

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chapter II

Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past

excerpts from university students' questionnaires
Georgi V.: We cant help but give credit to so-called popfolk for sweeping Serbian and Greek songs away from the Bulgarians table. Previously his Balkan soul compelled him to shower his table with the sounds of the folk music of all our neighbors. They had already mixed pop and folk music a long time ago. Ivan D., engineer: This is gypsy music with a pornographic Bulgarian text, but, on the whole, I am reconciled to it. A middle-aged man: Gypsy music, translated into Bulgarian. Rumyana M., 21, a student of agrarian economics: Popfolk is related to oriental music. I like only some songs that have Bulgarian folk rhythms. Responses to the question where is the word chalga (popfolk) derived from?: Todor N., 20: This word comes from neighboring Turkey and it means making noise, chaos. Yordanka S., retiree: It sounds a little like folk music and a little like belly dancing, so it must have come from Turkey. Kremena I., student: The basis of popfolk is belly dancing, and it is a Turkish national dance. The bad thing is that in this way our national folklore gets trampled. As far as Greek influence is concerned, I cant say it is from the national folklore of Greece because it is exactly what we use that is popfolk for the Greek, too. Lyubomir M.: Its not very clear to me what exactly I dislike

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in popfolk. Yet I think it is the elements of gypsy music. I dont like gypsy music. Responses to the question What kind of reaction does this music cause in you?: Mitka V., 74, a cook from the village of Svetlen in the Popovsko region: None. I like the Bulgarian folk song because it tells of times past, during the [Turkish] yoke, about rebels, rebel leaders, about how hard-working the Bulgarian people are, about the way Bulgarians had fun and how shyly the young made love. Not like now, all their songs are about sex, for example, if only you would let me have sex with you, if only you would let me have sex with you! You call that a song? Their plays on words are perverted, always something about sex and so on. I do not like anything that is now. (The questionnaire was filled in by the interviewee in her own handwriting.) I was at an advanced stage of my work on this topic when suddenly I saw my subject in a completely different light compared to the one I had seen it in before. When I tried to explain it to some colleagues, a comparison sprang to my mind, which I still find successful: you are looking at a freshly plastered wall in a room and all of a sudden you see the wet stain of a former leak reappearing. Or through the light paint there emerges the color of some old dark paint. The present ethnic pop music is a signal about a past, which I had not thought of before because it did not interest me. Our Ottoman past. In fact, it did not even occur to me then to call it Ottoman to such an extent my attitude to the epoch of the Bulgarian Revival (and to what we define as Turkish yoke) had been formed by one of the two basic understandings of the Ottoman heritage according to which it was a religiously, socially, institutionally, and even racially alien imposition on autochthonous Christian medieval societies (Todorova 1997:162) whose remains can be traced, but they are assumed as mechanistic, inorganic alluvia over the authentic organic essence of these societies (Todorova 1999:431). When I tried to find in my memory at least some images of this past, I always saw scenes with brutal Turks, like the

Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past

39

ones in writer Nikolaj Haitovs story The Goats Horn.15 However, ethnic pop music talked about a totally different life experience, not about the three chains of slaves so often described in traditional Bulgarian folk songs. A life experience where Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks and others socialize and share something. Why could I not find this image of shared living in literary works? Why has the constituent myth of the Bulgarian nation (Iliev 2002:6) been built so selectively in our heads? What if a song, circulating in the Bulgarian space today, contains elements of the music of our neighbors? What exactly is wrong with that? What can of worms does the ethnopop music of the 1990s open up? What demons does it awaken that cause it to be vilified as a mixture and to be blamed for being paranational, not national? Isnt this very quality a compliment and a reason for Bulgarian literary critic Tsvetan Todorov to be awarded the prestigious Italian prize Spiritual Teacher of Our Time after Claude Levi-Strauss, Norbert Elias and Peter Brook, to mention but a few of the laureates, because they have transcended their national frameworks and have conceived art as a product of cultural mixing (S. Atanasov 2002:8)? Why is this mixing acclaimed in some spheres of art while in other spheres it is not? Just like in the previous chapter, I turned again to the field of public discourse on this topic, seen as a field of discussion about topics that transcend narrow specificity. Again chalga, most often an aesthetically insignificant fact, has revealed itself as a phenomenon acquiring cultural significance through its involvement in issues which are an eternally-open discussion for our nation, a trauma shared by all, a bleeding wound and historical shame. The shame of the Ottoman heritage. Nothing should remind us of it. But yet a song appears and is
15

Ed. note: This story, which was also turned into an extremely popular lm, tells of a Bulgarian man who, after his wife is raped and murdered by Turks, raises their daughter as a boy, teaching her to ride horses and ght, so that she can take revenge on her mothers killers. The story ends tragically, however, since the girl falls in love with a Turkish man and abandons her male identity, at which point her enraged father kills her lover, which causes the daughter in turn to take her own life.

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multiplied in thousands of versions and other versions, which bring to life images of Turks, Greeks and other disliked neighbors, presenting them if not as loved, at least as close to us. However, for Bulgarian history, the Greeks and later on, the Turks, have always been the hated Other (Bodakov 2002a:4). Chavdar Marinov (2002:8) argues: In Bulgaria, for a long time, there has not been a living witness to Turkish massacres, but they are part of our memory. Whose is this memory of the Bulgarian people, of the Bulgarian nation of its historians and writers or of all its citizens? Do, for example, Bulgarian Muslims share the same attitude to these so-called traumas of national memory? When in the high historical narrative some scientists tried to suggest the term Turkish presence instead of Turkish yoke (as well as the more concrete term Ottoman instead of Turkish), there was a strong reaction against such a change in rhetoric. The motive is easy to explain: leave us the hatred at least. Let us believe in violence. We were never together with them, we were always against them. Of course, we were against them when it was a question of, for example, the well developed mechanism of complementing the Turkish nationality with Islamized captive slaves, who after their liberation took their place in the social and economic hierarchy of Ottoman society (Zhelyazkova 1997:2930).16 But this was not the whole scope of life during the Ottoman period. Besides this, it was a period of interethnic cultural coexistence. Could the new generations not live free from prejudices and hatred on the basis of that human experience in the Balkans when the different ethnic, cultural and religious communities have succeeded, in spite of the vicissitudes of fate, in building a natural system of interethnic and multicultural contacts (Zhelyazkova 1997:5354)? For the time being this seems hardly achievable the high historical narrative has penetrated
16

Ed. note: This quotation refers to the Ottoman devsirme system, begun in the late 14th century, in which male children were taken away from Christian subjects in the Balkans, forced to convert to Islam and to undergo strict military training to become members of the elite Janissary military corps serving the Ottoman sultan. 41

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deeply into peoples thinking and in the spontaneous literariness of the Bulgarian people to reproduce time and again in a romanticized way the drama of our national survival (Kirova 1998:2). Recently I read that when the legendary Bulgarian wrestler Dan Kolov (Dancho Kolev) returned from the USA in 1935 to settle in his native village, Sennik, he often asked people to tell him about the strength and bravery of Rada Barashka [a distant ancestor of his R. St.]. He admired that she had had the courage to jump on a horse at night and race through the Balkan Mountains in order to take revenge on the Turks [my italics R. St.] (Milcheva 2002:43). I mention this, by the way, as one of the innumerable examples of that explainably inexplicable and painful fact that not only the spontaneous literariness of the Bulgarian people [e.g. the mini-story about the great grandmother of Dan Kolov or what the 74-year-old Mitka V. from the village of Svetlen said, which I reported at the beginning of this chapter R. St.], but also history, cultural studies, sociology and psychology have always been in the power of the neurotic fear of interpreting Muslim Turkish influences, which, by all laws of logic, must have penetrated the history of our own native culture (Kirova 1998:2). This fear of the Turkish-in-us makes us very often forget that Bulgaria was the European territory of the Ottoman Empire in which the process of Muslim colonization was at its highest, it was a process of assimilation and migration of colonists, as the historian Ivan Ilchev argues in a conversation initiated by the newspaper Kultura on March 6, 1998, adding that at the time of the April Uprising17 the Turkish population was about 30% of the entire Bulgarian population. Therefore, east of the line Veliko Turnovo Ahtopol the territory was predominantly Muslim, rather than Christian (Dimitrov and Ilchev 1998: 1011). But when the Bulgarian national idea succeeded, with
17

Ed. note: The April Uprising refers to a failed Bulgarian insurrection against Ottoman rule in 1876. The Ottomans brutal response to this insurrection garnered Western European support for the cause of Bulgarian liberation and was a contributing factor in the Russo-Turkish War of 18771878, which ultimately secured independence for part of Bulgaria. chapter II

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innumerable complications and vicissitudes, in growing into a national state, people in terms of values broke away from the immediate tradition which was Ottoman daily living, ways of speaking, bodily behavior and so on, says Ivailo Dichev, further noting that: There emerged an enormous sense of shame over everything that was related to Ottoman life, causing Bulgarians to start speculatively and again in a romanticized way a going back to the Proto-Bulgarians. What, however, in our culture is derived from the Proto-Bulgarian? Our real tradition in an anthropological sense comes namely from the Ottoman Empire, from the Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Christianity (Kultura 2002 [19/20]:xii). M. Todorova, whose study Imagining the Balkans/Balkans and Balkanism is not anthropological, but rather historicalpolitical, calls the immediate (in an anthropological sense) culture with which the Bulgarian and other Balkan peoples try to break abruptly alien culture. However, alien or not this does not simplify the issue due to the circumstance that as the author says at the factual level it is difcult or even impossible to differentiate between Ottoman and traditional local cultures in the Balkans. This, in its turn, leads to a methodological solution to use de-Ottomanization, de-Orientalization, debalkanization and depatriarchalization as synonyms (Todorova 1997:180181). The most successful period of deottomanization, or deorientalization, etc., in the history of modern Bulgaria may be considered the forty-five years of modernization during the socialist period, when in Bulgaria what was suppressed was not the western, but the oriental (Iv. Krastev 2002:2). NonBalkan self-identification in the time between the two world wars Bulgarianism, Slavism, European centrism (Dimitrova 1996:4891) also continued, though in another direction. Many views and traditions changed. But because of the fact as Bogdan Bogdanov claims that in Bulgaria and in the Balkans we have one life with two cultures one public, official and another private, rich and versatile, which are not connected even in terms of mood (Kultura 2002 [19/20]:vii), it so happens that the Balkan part of the Ottoman legacy still
Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past 43

remains in the sphere of mentalit (popular beliefs, customs, attitudes, value system), in which sphere de-Ottomanization proved much more strenuous (Todorova 1997:180). When at the beginning of the 1990s Bulgaria was again in transition to something new, this transition awoke the whole heterogeneity and heterotemporality (ibid.) embedded in the Balkans traces of the Ottoman past came up, still lively on the level of popular culture. Post-communist towns again saw Balkan street trade, saw the oriental bazaar in the open as a distinctive feature of the Balkan Ottoman town (Gavrilova 2002:14). What made the popular media really mass media? It was the slang expressions and Turkish words, which came in profusion on the pages of newspapers, and also in everyday speech. Why do we still like the Turkish words for pleasure (kef) and desire (merak), which lower the objects they describe yet give them the nuance of intimacy? Why do we tell jokes in Serbian and Macedonian? Arent these traces of the old bi- and multilingualism of the Balkans, of that common Balkan slang, of the mixture of Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Latin words, traveling through the Balkan languages, which are unburdened with established linguistic norms, something which is recorded for posterity in the Hilendar Chronicle (S. Ivanova 1998:7)?18 In his speech at New Bulgarian University, celebrating the Day of the Leaders of the Bulgarian National Revival, writer Atanas Slavov used as the image-and-symbol basis of his message the multi-lingual family library of his predecessors in Kotel. The educated people of the Revival had known Bulgarian from home, Turkish from town, Greek from school, Romanian from the export of wool, Italian, Arabic and English from their studies abroad (A. Slavov 2002:9). Naturally, the mutual intermingling of different cultures, especially the Christian and the Muslim, refers mainly to the town life and more specifically to the cosmopolitan Balkan town (Botusharov 1995:260). I am not a specialist in history, even
18

Ed. note: The Hilendar Chronicle is a Bulgarian historical manuscript written in the 1760s by Father Pajsii Hilendarski.

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less so in the Bulgarian Revival, that is why the following historicization of the discussed subject should be considered as a reference ad libitum by the reader. The books, dedicated to the Balkan cosmopolitan town of the 19th century, which I managed to study still only referentially and ad libitum exhibit mainly (if not wholly) the logic of nationalism. And it, as it is well known, is a logic of imposing cultural homogeneity, of concealment of the differences, and of opposing otherness. For example, Nikolai Genchevs work Plovdiv in the Bulgarian Revival is, with all its rich reference to facts and intense ideological purposefulness, a passionate eulogy on the rise of the Bulgarian element, of overcoming the lure of Greek traits and eventually of the triumph of the Bulgarian national spirit. Naturally, the national idea in Bulgaria and everywhere in the modernizing world was productive and culture-building at that time. I do not have even the slightest intent to oppose it in hindsight in any way. The problem is different. It is the problem of giving the opposite a chance to take shape, the historically unproductive tendency of common life, of togetherness. Information about this tendency exists, although finding it often means turning to negatively evaluated signs as historical indicators. Because despite whatever words we use today to characterize the Greek influence during the Ottoman period, at that time it meant high culture, in any case higher in terms of its educational system than the Bulgarian culture. Its importance for the breakthrough of the Bulgarian national spirit cannot be underestimated. Thus as Genchev himself says the revival movement among Bulgarians (we have in mind those with an already-formed Bulgarian consciousness) first passed through the phase of the ambition for good education (which until the middle of the 19th century meant Hellenic education) and only after that through the phase of the ambition for Bulgarian education. Therefore, the first stage of the national church and education movement was a stage of cooperation with Greekness (Genchev 1981:145). For example, who is Grigor Parlichev? He was born in Ohrid19,
19

Ed. note: Ohrid is located in what is now the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. 45

Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past

but in the Athenian period of his life he became Grigoros Stavridis Makedon, yet he identified himself as Bulgarian. As Albena Hranova writes in connection with a book by Raymond Detrez about Parlichev, the man from Ohrid is an example of that forgotten old state of the ethnonyms Bulgarians, Greeks and Macedonians, when they could name not only national identities that had already occurred, but also different social aspects of ethnic, territorial, religious and cultural belonging and the daily human lives and activities related to such belonging (Hranova 2001:5). Let us mention here some other distinguished Bulgarian Hellenists such as Dr. Ivan Seliminski, Konstantin Fotinov and the grandson of Sofroniy Vrachanski, Stefan Bogoridi. Journalist Galina Mincheva notes, Stefanaki Bey (a count of the island of Samos), who was a Bulgarian from Kotel, but educated in the Hellenic system, served the Sultan for three decades and played a decisive role in the political life of the empire (Mincheva 2002: 43). Under the influence of Greek culture in Plovdiv, an interesting bicultural phenomenon occurred, creating a population which was on the border between two ethnic communities Bulgarians who followed Greek fashions, called gudili or langeri. It was marginal and accepted with reserve by both sides because practically its behavior destroyed all differences between themThese people became bilingual (their dialect was very interesting, it mixed in a common syntax Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish language structures) and they had or were the children of mixed marriages (Babakova 1995:157). Of course, Genchev has a very negative attitude toward these gudili/langeri. The men of the Bulgarian Revival such as Lyuben Karavelov (Karavelov 1930: 112113) had a similarly negative attitude towards them. I, however, am interested in the facts of multi-ethnicity and contacts among Balkan cultures in the period of their mutual existence in the Ottoman Empire, not in their evaluation by ideologists of Bulgarian nationalism and neo-nationalism. In this respect, in the work of Genchev there is a chapter about the womens enlightenment movement until the Liberation of Plovdiv, which is especially interesting and indicative in that it gives evidence about daily human lives at

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that time. When the time came to think about a girls Bulgarian school in the town, it was hard to find a female teacher. The important men of the town, working for the development of Bulgarian culture and education, at last found the niece of the much respected Naiden Gerov, Rada Gugova. She arrived in Plovdiv from Kiev in December 1866. When she got acquainted with the school, Gugova complained that the girls got tired very quickly. Except for four or five of them, who were older, all the others had difficulty understanding Bulgarian and they had to be taught the lessons in Greek in order to understand them (Genchev 1981:305). Things did not change after Gugovas seven years of teaching. In 1873 (five years before the Liberation!) Gugova declares: children do not know their mother tongue well, which is the language of instruction at the school. They speak Greek at home, only at school do they speak Bulgarian Besides, they have nothing to read in Bulgarian at home and the school has not bothered to establish a proper library (Genchev 1981:310). Let me remind you, here we are not talking about the children of those Bulgarians who followed Greek fashions, rather we are talking about the children of those who fought for Bulgarian independence. What could this information mean to us? Only one thing: the lively contacts in towns between the coexisting ethnic groups not only happened, but were a kind of cooperation, which we know from the sphere of crafts: Turks were engaged in one craft, Greeks with another, Bulgarians with a third and so on. Thus, with the change of focus from the level of struggle to the level of everyday culture we see what Svetla Babakova insists on, summarizing it in her article about Plovdiv: invaders and invaded [also Greeks and Bulgarians R. St.] had been opposed for a millennium; however, it was not a clash, but rather a complex coexistence (Babakova 1995:154). It is this coexistence that had supplied the metabolism of Plovdiv through the centuries. Later the coexistence turned into a severe conflict (Genchev notes, men left their wives, women left their husbands), which ended up with separation and mutual animosity among Balkan nations. But the second, as a stage, should not undervalue the first the period when even the

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public-spirited Bulgarians, to use this clich of nationalism, did not identify themselves as heirs of a glorious past and as Bulgarians, but rather as locals. Comparing the Greek and Bulgarian schoolchildren, the French Consul in Plovdiv wrote the following: On the one hand, [the Greeks are] almost civilized young people, maybe, too civilized, they contemplate their past with pleasure, claiming titles of authentic nobility On the other hand, [the Bulgarians are] badly-dressed children, but too open, if I am allowed to call them so, full of serious and cold diligence, who hate their opponents with a deep and silent antipathy, looking to work for a means to succeed, without paying attention to their past, they even pretend to feel contempt for what once was (Genchev 1981:319320). This is how far the historical-anthropological probe goes as far as the young people who had started to study and as a result started to feel nationalistic hatred. But if the probe could go deeper in the social layers of that time, for example, to those peasants about whom Naiden Gerov says that they do not know what their religion is, they cannot even cross themselves, what would their thinking reveal about the matter?

different but together Perhaps it is necessary to remind readers that the Ottoman Empire itself like any empire was actually a non-ethnic state, tolerating different religions. This was a big and sufficiently tolerant community in which different languages and religions communicate, work, trade, exchange food and clothes. [Only later did] modern nations appear and still later destroy it (Bilyarski 1997:9). Furthermore, Orthodox Christianity in its heavily dogmatic and historical basis is radically incompatible with the ideology of nationalism (Kapriev 1997:9), and on this dogmatic basis churches are established
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according to a strictly territorial criterion, never according to ethnicity. It is inadmissible, it should be noted, for every thought about Ottoman heritage to call to mind the image of three chains of slaves and fantasies of taking revenge on the Turks, when it is known for certain, though somehow frequently forgotten, that the capital of the empire was at the time of the Bulgarian National Revival the centre of the Bulgarian intellectuals and traders, the nest of a prosperous craftsmanship (Yaramov 2001:23). As Halil Okan, who grew up and got his education in Bulgaria, writes in a somewhat propagandistic way: The Bulgarian Revival began at the Monastery of Aton with the work of Father Pajsii and in Constantinople, where enthusiastic Bulgarian young people were educated and their eyes were opened to freedom and trade. Here, in Constantinople, until the Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878, twentytwo Bulgarian newspapers were published, and Bulgarian traders published Tsarigradski Vestnik [the Bulgarian-language Istanbul Newspapered.] from 1848 to 1862 The first book published in Bulgarian in Constantinople was the Bible. It was translated by Petko R. Slaveikov in the Turnovo dialect and in this way the Bulgarian language became standardized for the whole country The first secular book was published in 1843, and until 1878, 600 books came out. The printing society Promishlenie [Ponderance translators note] was established on May 3, 1870 In 1872 the society opened a Bulgarian bookshop where the works of Lyuben Karavelov and Hristo Botev were available In the vicinity of Constantinople there were about thirty-one Bulgarian villages After the Russo-Turkish war in 1828, the number of Bulgarian emigrants soared... After the Crimean War the colony of Bulgarians reached 80,000 people. Nowhere in Bulgaria were there so many people living in one place (Okan 1992:3941).
Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past 49

What is my point in reminding readers of these facts? Only one thing: My point is to suggest that nationalism, when it turned to separation, destroyed exceptionally many undertakings useful for Bulgarians, which were built in the vast and sufciently tolerant community. This is true not only for Bulgarians, as Maria Todorova notes: Because of the dominant idea of a complete severing from a foreign cultural state, the Balkan states give up any pretensions for the Ottoman past and Turkey was left as its only heir (Todorova 1999:468). (It is known, however, that Turkey under Kemal Ataturk at least at the beginning was also hostile to the Ottoman heritage exactly because of the lack of [Turkish] nationalism in it [OConnell 2000:117142].) As Todorova further points out, for Balkan peoples including Bulgarians the Ottoman heritage is not a matter of memory or registering a sum of objectively existing institutions and traditions, but a matter of a (painful) subjective perception. And when in light of this perception, the Ottoman heritage is unwanted (Greek nationalists, for example, reject the institution of Phanariots20 due to its integration in the empire), then there arises the necessity of a new creation of the past (Todorova 1999:476), which has been done by generations of historians, poets, writers, journalists, and other intellectuals, as well as politicians (Todorova 1997:181). Their idea of the newly-created past is subsequently conveyed and distributed in broader strata of population. The rst phenomenon, history itself, is available and is a subject of much research, while on the contrary, the second phenomenon, the pervasion of the views of intellectuals in large masses of people, is according to M. Todorova not the subject of systematic studies. These studies will be necessary in order to nd counterperceptions or alternative perceptions (ibid.:182). I cite here these passages from Todorovas book in order to underscore the fact
20

Ed. note: During Ottoman rule, the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church took up residence in the Phanar or lighthouse district of Constantinople, which became the center of Orthodox Greek culture during the Ottoman period. Upper-class Greeks from this area of Constantinople became known as Phanariots. In the 18th century, such Greeks were often chosen by the Sultans to rule Ottoman provinces in Romania and the Crimea, earning them the hatred of local populations.

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that my work is to a certain extent an attempt at such research and such study of the views of the large masses in relation to the Ottoman past and heritage. Something else emerges besides the collective rejection of the Ottoman heritage by the Balkan ethnic groups and their spiritual shepherds. To a certain degree there emerges a rejection of the other peoples and their historical fates by each Balkan community separately and by its historiographers: the togetherness that existed not so long ago turns into the hostility of all against all! In this effort, states Todorova, the mutual enmity of Balkan historiographies developed into a passionate polemical tradition, [which] overshadowed even the hostility against the Ottoman Empire and Turkey (ibid.:183). What is this hostility due to? Probably, first of all to problems of unconsolidated nation-states and social identities in crisis. The borders of ethnic groups and those of the new state formations do not coincide, thus giving rise to the unique preoccupations with ethnogenesis in the Balkans (ibid.:183). In the cultural sphere, the most visible and immediate break occurred in what is known as high/elite culture (Todorova 1997:178). This happens today, too, and the results are quite intensely revealed in the sphere of arts, for example. (And also in the economic sphere, too; today the Balkans hardly maintain trade relations.) The sporadic interruptions of this practice make the feeling of a lack of dialogue more intense. For the time I have been in Bulgaria, I have realized how little our countries actually know each other. How little even about what connects them, what is common, says a Serbian director, shooting a film in Bulgaria. Since the establishment of the modern states of Bulgaria and Serbia [after the Turkish rule] our knowledge about each other is mainly about an enemy (Pakovich 2001:7). A drama specialist adds in relation to a joint Balkan production: We know much more about German theater, about theater in France, England, Russia than about theater in the countries closest to us It seems we are not aware that we are depriving ourselves by this fact (Vandov 2001:7). In connection with a congress in Thessaloniki, dedicated to the cultural development of countries in the Balkan
Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past 51

region, a musicologist literally makes the same claim: We know much more about music in France, Germany and many more distant countries and almost nothing about the professional music of our neighbors (Kracheva 2001:4). And here is a cry of isolation from the cinema, regarding a Balkan film forum in Sofia that came as an uninvited guest: How many of us have been to Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia or Slovenia? What do we know about our neighbors and what do they know about us? Myths, prejudices, suspicions, satanization (Leonidov 2001:5). But while in music, theatre and cinema only mutual disrespect reigns, in the sphere of the word open fights reign as echoes of past clashes, interpreted by people of letters, ethnocentrically in most cases, in favor of justification and glorification of ones own culture at the expense of the neighboring ones. When we start talking about the cultural integration of the Balkans, writes Alek Popov in relation to the above-mentioned culturological congress in Thessaloniki, at which Turkish literary critics never arrived, and the Macedonian critic left after an argument, no other zone hides more underwater rocks than literature (A. Popov 2001:3). Really, paradoxes of sameness! Again ethnopsychoanalytically, it could be interpreted that each one of these individuals sees in the other exaggeratedly their own Balkanness and their own oriental stigmatizing by the West. It is like the already complex-ridden you recognizing yourself in the awkwardness of another person, who is also you. Behind the Albanian otherness there was something that was truly ours, very close to us, native, writes Simeon Mitropolitski, one of the Bulgarians who visited Albania in 1997 as an observer of the parliamentary elections held there in June of the same year (Kultura 1997 (30):1011). Nikolaj Mladenov makes the same observation: It is difficult to write about a country which one feels close to, familiar with and at the same time distant from (ibid.). Nuances are indicative: a feeling of great closeness, a feeling for the specificity of the synthesis between good and not good, between boldness and uncouthness, amiability and backwardness. Details are also important details precisely from everyday culture, from
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that state of undress where you recognize yourself. For a Bulgarian, it is not difficult at all to fit in in Albania, writes Deutsche Welle journalist Alexandar Andreev. You lower your eyes towards the ground in the frowning Balkan way, light a crumpled cigarette or take a handful of sunflower seeds out of your pocket, while your free hand is swinging the inevitable, full plastic bag... Most of the time I did not feel like a foreigner because almost everything, though changed in details and scope, I had seen, experienced and lived in Bulgaria (A. Andreev 2002:6). Recognizing your own life, lived by another arent the Balkans surrealistic, too? Inventive comparisons are innumerable. We are a very specific region, with a very specific lifestyle, claims Miglena Nikolchina, adding, meaningless soul-sweetening bustle, enthusiastic and exhausting fooling around (Nikolchina 2001:9). Echoing our usual negative exclamation typical Bulgarian story! Serbian film director Radivoe Andrich opens his movie with the disclaimer: A typical Serbian story, what can you do! Similar to Bulgaria or Albania or Romania, Serbia is a miserable country, abnormal, where everybody wants to steal (Andrich 2002:12). But all this is said with a smile, apologetically, as if about the mischief of a child. Again we find the same ambivalence in attitude, which we found about ethnopop music: our localism is used as an excuse for the horror The specificity of the Balkan mentality and most of all its suspected tendency to give in to the low crystallizes in the image-signs used in artistic events. Such events present the Balkan person as a primitive dark guy, a brawler and chalga listener, (Mihailova 2001:2) and the Balkan zone as a place, symbolizing only the low and ignorant backwardness (Decheva 2002b:2). I guess the reader has already noticed how conciliatory as in a picture puzzle the statements of my (involuntary) informants, who are the authors of materials on culture/cultures of the Balkans today, written in the last few years, are. Often their texts seem to belong to a larger text, a big discussion, held indirectly and in patches, but the-

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matically focused. Here, it is time to go back to our subject, chalga, which has something to contribute to the imaginary discussion not only as a proverbial stain on the wall (causing disgust at the unwanted past), but also as a practice that shows that besides myths, suspicions, satanization (R. Leonidov 2001:5), a smooth dialogue is also possible in the Balkans, a dialogue among close people, if only we could let our hair down Lets recapitulate using Bogdan Bogdanovs thoughts from one of the above-mentioned discussions. On the one hand, Balkan peoples, Balkan states do not think about their joint presence there [in Europe R. St.], they do not work on a subject called the Balkans in the different countries in one way or another the very viewpoint of the Balkans is undermined. In spite of that, however, the Balkans indisputably, in some way, exist as a mentality as a common culture as some common way of life. And it is necessary for the Balkans to exist in the future (Kultura 2002 (19/20):vi). It is important to suppose that this projection of the future for the Balkans to exist does not have (only) nationalisms as its past. Its past is the common Ottoman past, which, apart from being a negative perception, exists as a tradition, too. The author of Imagining of the Balkans/Balkans and Balkanism is unequivocal that this tradition exists, claiming on the level of popular culture and everyday life, the Ottoman legacy proved much more persistent (Todorova 1997:180). Todorova then repeats herself (something which she does not do often in this text): When it came to such phenomena as food and diet, as well as music, the Ottoman legacy seemed to be much more tenacious. As regards food, there is an interesting observation the general cuisine of Bulgaria (Christian and Muslim) became increasingly Ottomanized, as it were, after the end of Ottoman rule (Todorova, 1997:180). (Figuratively speaking, the reason for that is that gradually the poor stop eating only bread and onions R. St.) This is true; the infidel Ottoman accustomed us to a lot of delicacies, for example, watermelons. Their widespread distribution is due to the Turks, who were their passionate
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admirers, writes a specialist in the etiquette of eating. In the last century [19th century R. St.] the watermelon was already a stable component of the summer daily life of Bulgarians (Borislavov 2000:47). In 1870 Petko R. Slaveikov published the first Bulgarian Cook Book or Instructions for All Kinds of Dishes the Way They Make Them in Constantinople. The prevailing cuisine in this book is oriental, but hardly always Turkish in origin (Borislavov 2002a:47). In this sphere of life changes occur quite slowly, so, many of the dishes which are considered traditionally Turkish such as moussaka, stuffed cabbage or grape leaves, stuffed peppers and other vegetables with filling were [probably R. St.] inherited from Byzantium (Borislavov 2002b:47). And when we now have to make a transition from cuisine to music, something interesting occurs: a parallel, helpful for our understanding. We see in Todorovas quoted text that the author pronounces the word music and withdraws from it. The topic is a hot potato: is there Ottoman heritage in our music? However, music as a cultural fact has never been isolated, whether aesthetically, ideologically, or functionally. L. Botusharov makes this claim, though about an earlier historical period: Turks and Bulgarians, despite some well-know yet insignificant incorporation of the customs of the other intonationally were left isolated as far as ritual music is concerned. There was mutual intermingling of different types of music in the cosmopolitan Balkan town (Botusharov 1995:260). Before him Raina Katsarova studied Balkan Versions of Two Turkish Songs as an example of the musical life of Bulgarian towns in the 19th century, where one could observe the integration of Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Serbian, Russian, Croatian and Romanian songs. Foreign melodies were adapted to entirely new Bulgarian texts (Katsarova 1973:116). Earlier, Dobri Hristov pointed out common metrorhythmical phenomena in Bulgarian, Turkish and Greek folk music (Hristov 1967:109110). This is hardly what M. Todorova has in mind when she barely pronounces the word music as one of the spheres of popular culture where deottomanization goes on languidly. The author of Balkans and Balkanism most
Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past 55

probably has in mind 19th century ethnopop music, chalgia, the glue of the Balkan peoples, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Dubravka Ugreshichs phrase from her essay Chalga, in which the glue refers to Yugoslavian peoples (Ugreshich 1999:166). This phenomenon was so familiar to us in the middle of the 19th century that we see it serving as a basic component in the opposition old new, in which the Tsarigradski Vestnik [the Bulgarian-language Istanbul Newspapered.] inserts the newly-minted (today called old) hit from Europe. The author thinks the new songs may sound to some people like something ugly and indecent because the ear has been accustomed to other songs but we assure them in a brotherly way that the loathsome gypsy songs can never be better or sweeter than the educated European songs (Panova 2002). So now for the parallel. As far as I, following Maria Todorova, also study ethnopop music not as a structure, but from the point of view of its perception on the basis of a certain value system, in the parallel cuisine music I can clearly discern how each of the two spheres of pleasure has one principal exponent of Ottoman Balkanism: tripe soup in the former, and chalga in the latter. The nuances in the texts of people of letters give rise to such an interpretation. When the Bulgarian literati were late for the afore-mentioned pan-Balkan conference in Thessaloniki, whose aim was to introduce Balkan artists to one another and draw the high Balkan cultures closer together, they met the Bulgarian drama specialists, who had arrived earlier. They exchanged two kinds of information: first, how the high meeting was going (it was going badly, as we already learned) and, second, where the tripe-shop was, this being an invariable symbol of Balkan identity (A. Popov 2001:3). Here the text of Alek Popov, like the text of any other Bulgarian intellectual, setting aside the tone of strict, patriotic post-Revival pathos, starts sounding like a text in the travel notes of Lyuben Karavelov and Aleko Konstantinov. In them Turks, Greeks and Bulgarians talk and act as living people, not as museum exhibits embodying executioners and victims. The tone is invariably one of some ironic realism:
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tripe soup and chalga, coffee shops full of men the whole day through, Shopska salad and tarator,21 stalls with candies and plastic articles, rakia vapours, (A. Andreev 2002:6) lyrics of songs like He left, without tasting the stuffed grape leaves (Ugreshich 1999:167). So, the popular Balkan cultures, the cultures of everyday lives (A. Hranova 2001:5), the cultures of the low achieve effortlessly what high cultures have not been able to achieve for more than a century and a half: they create for the region and nurture in dialogue a common subject. In the media We are not the same musically in the Balkans, this statement was heard on February 16, 2002 on the program Breakfast on the Grass, a Saturday morning cultural program on the station Horizont, which airs on Bulgarian National Radio (BNR). But when people see one another they pat each other on the shoulder, laugh, eat, drink, and sing. In this sense we have a common music it is always with the people and transfers the Balkans from one place to another. A transborder agreement among the (former) Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Bulgaria was sealed during dinner, accompanied by ethnopop music and dancing. A reporter observes: The mayors of Sofia, Skopje and Nish joined a lively horo (a popular folk dance in the Balkans) in the army pub of the second largest Serbian town All night the orchestra played Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian pieces in turn. There are no borders for us. We have a problem only with the Bulgarian repertoire because it is hard to find your music in Yugoslavia, said bandleader Boyan Yankovski-Boka (Kiryakov 2002:56).
21

Ed. note: Shopska salata is a traditional Bulgarian salad made of cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and feta cheese; tarator is a cold yoghurt soup made with dill and cucumbers. Rakia is the ubiquitous brandy found all over the Balkans.

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I will summarize in the same report-like way with the words of host Georgi Lyubenov from the above-mentioned radio program on BNR. What differentiates the Balkans? he asks rhetorically and continues. When you travel to the Balkans from outside of them, you feel an abrupt boundary misery, filth, destruction. THE BALKANS SHOULD NOT BE SEEN, THEY SHOULD BE LISTENED TO

etude on the interpretation of a word

Well, why chalga, we could ask, when in Turkey, Greece, Serbia and Macedonia the modern kinds of ethnopop music bear other names? Being arbitrary, as all names for popular music phenomena are, these names gradually acquire the position of genre terms and lose their past pejorative meanings. Chalga is a word very rich in meanings in the Bulgarian context. Like a sponge it has soaked up the multi-layered attitude to the local built up over centuries; chalga is Balkan town music performed for dissipation or on traditional holidays with Gypsy participation. One could buy this music by the piece and it could be adapted to the wishes of the client. Chalga is clientele music. As the main informant in one of the case studies in my research said, chalga is a craft. A very difficult craft, namely due to its service character, its essence as a service with one clearly-marked market and economic aspect: it is done only for pay. The very payment stimulates the performance and the quality of the service. (Neshko Neshev, a highly successful accordion player, quotes the following pearl of wisdom he learned from his father, who was also a chalga58 chapter II

player: If you play popular music, you will drink cheap lemonade. If you play chalgia, you will drink good rakia) Paid music or music as the customer wants it, such a connotation in the aesthetic sphere cannot but be a source of ambivalent attitude like the pairs love hate, preference contempt, and a sense of closeness a sense of shame at this closeness. In his Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust draws an expressive comparison between the light woman and light music. Each musical motif, as unique as a woman, does not keep the sensual secret as she would only for some privileged but offered it to me, giving me a stealthy glance, stepping in a capricious or impertinent way, stopped me, caressed me, as if suddenly I had become more seductive, mightier, richer (cited in Tschernokosheva 1987:44) The performance of any music, when it is not amateur, has economic aspects. But only here, when playing chalga, musicians have bank notes stuck with saliva onto their foreheads, advertisements that scream They like me! or I sell well!. If we add the oriental intonational and rhythmic coloring, the lyrics, whose poetics are on the level of teenagers talking about love, it will be clear that for the westernizing citizen of the European Southeast this musical practice must have been and still is something which belongs, on the one hand, to tradition, but, on the other hand, it is something that has to be given up as soon as possible as a loathsome gypsy song, as it was dismissed in the Tsarigradski Vestnik in 1860 (Panova 2002). Later the word disappeared because the musical practice it denoted sank somewhere into the space of the incorrect, of low culture. Chalga was left to be sporadically used in private contexts as a synonym of something base, pub-like and boorish, as an echo of the devaluation of pub space (Pavlov 1997:19). Why and how did it befall us again? It did not happen immediately with the new appearance of mass ethnopop at the beginning of the 1990s. At that time, in the article cited at the beginning of the book by Peycheva and Dimov about demo-cassettes, the new popfolk was called by the strange term authors song, which was a contrac-

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tion of the longer name authors song on a folk or national basis. (This expression is comparable to the Serbian newlycomposed folk song.) Later, again, authors acquired the specific meaning of a term denoting the newly-composed songs for the festivals Pirin Fest and Pirin Folk. However, the phenomenon grew, especially due to the successful (and commercially driven) reversion of pop singers to traditional folk songs that had seemed to us covered in dust, for example, Lilyano, mome hubava (Lilyana, you beautiful girl translators note), performed by Katya Bliznakova. Seeing how well the authors songs sold, pop musicians plundered local music, which they had hitherto ignored, and this whole movement was spontaneously given the name of folk. So far, so good, but folk already meant something in our country, actually two things Folk in Bulgaria (in the 1970s) originated as a word about something connected not so much with folklore, but with the Anglo-Saxon folk a contraction for the phenomenon folk revival, which means the revival of (performance and listeners interest in) English and American folk or popular song, and its inclusion as a rhythmic and intonational resource for pop and rock music that was still new in Bulgaria and particularly! its inclusion in the context of the movement for civil and political songs Alen Mak (or Scarlet Poppyed.) which began in the mid-1970s. There was also an enthusiasm for Latin American folk in Bulgaria, but in one way or another, this manner of creating songs on the basis of texts with clear poetic qualities (song-poetry) and socially committed topics with the use of the musically expressive means of the two spheres mentioned above (Anglo-American and Latin American popular music) was spread as a practice prevalently among educated young people (high school and university students, actors) and people from intellectual circles. These songs had nothing in common with the pub context, with Balkan manners, still less so with the oriental manners or loathsome gypsy songs. Celtic pentatonic sounded instead of makam hidzhas, and the cult idol was Bob Dylan, not the Serbian singer Lepa Brena. The other non-chalga understanding of folk was the custom60 chapter II

ary speech contraction of the word folklore, meaning the traditional old village music, obligatorily authentic. It is clear that these folk meanings referred to phenomena belonging to high values, to respected and praised culture. But in Bulgaria and this is a compliment popular culture has never been a unitary phenomenon, but rather a dual one, divided into the popular culture of the educated and that of the ordinary people. (Sometimes the two cultures meet, full of respect simultaneously but not in the same way! for singers and artists, for example in the case of the pop star Lily Ivanova.) And in the popular cultured spheres that interpret music predominantly in the context of pub celebrations, the ethnopop boom (Dimov 2001a) was spontaneously called folk by its customer (Statelova 1999:61108). The pinch of chic is visible: when added to Lilyano mome, yesterdays dust-covered retro cast-offs suddenly acquired a new hipness. The parties for the working class people began to be ordered and paid by maa bosses with their brand new mobile phones rather than by trade unions, as in the past (Statelova 1995:110). Cultured circles are usually jealously protective of their symbols and slogans, especially when the borrowing of some catch phrase happens at a moment when the mother-word means something topical and important in the cultured circle. We remember our surprise when pop star Georgi Hristov, with his Italian-like, sympathetic and at the same time refined canzonet singing, unexpectedly sang the well-known traditional folksong Lale li si, zyumbyul li si (Are you a tulip or a hyacinth translators note). The same song has been sung even by Tsvetelin Atanasov, the imitator of the King of rock-androll in Memphis itself, at the celebrations for Elvis Presley. Ivelina Balcheva brought tears to the eyes of the audience with another folk gem Zableyalo e agantse (A lamb bleated translators note), Diana Dafova opened her maxi-single Sounds of the Earth with the folk hymn Rufinka, Lily Ivanova sang the popular Kanyat me, mamo, na tezhka svatba (I am invited to a grand wedding translators note), while Stanislav Stanley Slanev also started writing songs in the national spirit, and even the desperate rock musician
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Ventsi Drenikov quit Subdibula band and took to recording singers of traditional folk songs in his sound-recording studio. High popular culture/music sensed in itself a desire to sing folklore, i.e. folk in the same way in which a century earlier our artists learning modernism created in a compensatory way? the concept of native art. It was all about preserving the tradition, not about some stupid pub fun So, let us imagine Georgi Hristovs shock. He is traveling round Varna, where he has just had his most recent concert and is enjoying his success, giving an interview to a local journalist. The journalist, thinking of the ethnopop boom, called folk as well, asks: What would you say about folk? Georgi Hristov: Folk? What folk? The champion of the high in popular music should clearly and firmly distance himself from the ambitions of pub musicians to usurp the loan translation from folklore for their own miserable music, stimulating the digestive tract and erotic desires. But how to express this distance? Only by using a word that brings to mind a baseness in sound, which we keep in our collective memory from the time of forced primitivism: chalga! So, Georgi Hristov replies: What folk? There is chalga. Let us not mix Bulgarian folklore with chalga (Todorova 1997:3). (One should understand it as a base, dirty, shameful thing.) And the Bulgarian ethnopop War of the Roses started there were fierce debates between the pop star Vasil Naydenov, for example, and the chalga star Sashka Vaseva. This is how as a verdict the word loomed in our public space. But why has it not disappeared again as does everything said? Times change, and people change with them, too. The practices of post-modernism came to Bulgaria, which taught the cultured public how to play with, parody or mock at idols, how to be suspicious of inherited values and anti-values (Kirova 2002a:2). The public enjoyed entertainment created by mixing the previously unmixable and the charm of eclecticism. Some young people maintained their reflexive shame of the past. When you ask them about the musics of Bulgaria, they talk about traditional songs, slavery and struggle against the Turks, about the stupidity of those who listen to chalga. But these
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people are no longer a majority among the young. A generation is growing up for which the world of values is created in the space between rap and computer games. It grows up without Under the Yoke (a famous late-19th century novel by Ivan Vazov about resistance to Ottoman rule) and the classics of Bulgarian literature, read only at school. Dialogue with these young people is bewildering to the point of leading to a feeling of catastrophe. The way things are going, predicts university lecturer Marko Semov after an unfortunate admission exam for students in the Department of Journalism at Sofia University on the topic of national values, candidates will convince us in the future that we were allies with the Turks during the April Uprising (Semov 2001:17). Exactly this type of young people, actually adolescents, who do not care about what was yesterday and before yesterday and who, in addition, are at the age of mocking everything as a means of self-assertion, it was they who heard the word chalga and mockingly deemed it super and cool. They like the word as a sound because it, as a word, is really likable: short, vibrant, attacking sensitivity. And it is unusual, obviously disturbing the sympathetic words on the subject of Bulgaria, very different from the parent-word alg (which, according to the Dictionary for Foreign Words in Bulgarian, comes from Turkish and means playing a tune or a musical instrument), which was unknown to them. And it became unstoppable chalga flew on new wings. Not that it became elevated in meaning, it became modernized. Compared with it, the Macedonian expression chalgia sounds retro, old-fashioned. Thus post-modernism out-topped modernism: the turn to the native art was abused, mocked, and was in essence carried out in a gypsy fashion. Indeed, the revolt of the masses in Bulgaria in the 1990s was combined with the gypsy manner of doing things, which had been waiting for and got its chance. But more about this later.

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Chapter III chapter III

Basic Aspects of Ethnopop Music: Scientific Approaches and Ideas

A multitude of views on the ethnopop music in Bulgaria today and other similar phenomena expressed and developed in some form by other researchers are involved in my understanding of it. Here I would like to dwell on them since only in this way in constant reference to and discussion with other voices in ethnopop musicology and humanitarian studies is it possible to move to the essence, meanings and functioning of musical phenomena, treated anthropologically in the context of a culture that is in a state of transition and change. I am especially interested in: a) outcomes from studies of forms of Bulgarian culture in this case ethnopop music, which are done by ethnomusicologists and/or humanists for whom it is another culture and, b) outcomes from research work on manifestations of other cultures that are phenomenologically similar to ethnopop music in Bulgaria. For me the most interesting aspect is not the very phenomenon itself, but its diverse treatment, which includes the problem of the researcher as a factor, who according to his/her background sees one thing and overlooks another (or, conversely, sees a nuance that another cannot see). Here we reach etic/emic issues, which are still dichotomously presented by Nettl: the researcher, who is external (to a certain culture), i.e. the outsider, is not sufficiently familiar with the values, meanings and hidden moments of the practice of phenomena they are studying. Because of this very outsiderness for example, when notating music such researchers write down everything in detail, since they might miss something important. While researchers who study their
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