Good morning! Last night in Zeta, for the great Christian holiday, a singer sang a song that is a symbol of everything un-Christian and ugly that characterized our part of the world in the 1990s. The DF and their mother party, the SNS, are trying to turn Serbia into a peasant political ideology, and there are very logical reasons for that.
Don’t forget to join our Viber community where we share information in real time and answer your questions directly. Look for us on this app.
Karleusization of Serbian politics in Montenegro
What Rambo said about Turbo-Folk should be repeated from time to time. Paraphrasing: The turbine is a mechanism that increases the power and efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Turbo-folk is a people-burning mechanism. Turbo-folk is also a means of dumbing down, I would add. This does not exclude one from the other. Dumbing down comes as refining before combustion in the whole process. And the process aims to strike at the most basic urges and turns people into a pliable mass, easy to mold to any aspiring dictators in the attempt.
Karleusa is just another iteration of primitivizing Serbianism in politics. Because the concert in Zeta is a political message. Reward for Karleusa’s humiliation of Montenegrins. In the liberated Zeta.
Karleusa is a perfect product of the time when technology meets primitivism. It will sound populist, but the peasants here were neither guilty nor ugly, so rural became a synonym for ugly and primitive. The rapid migrations from the countryside to the city in socialist Yugoslavia created a new class of people who first found newly-composed, then turbo-folk music, excellent as a musical expression of the subculture they belonged to. Halfway between village and city. This subculture very quickly became mainstream, just like Greater Serbian nationalism as its political expression became mainstream in Balkan politics.
Let me underline. The fact that someone listens to Karleusa is not the point of this text, but the fact that they may start equating themselves with her in terms of identity and politics.
This Serbian turbo-folk political expression is our autochthonous Montenegrin expression. We import it from Belgrade and give it our brutal touch. Whether we want to admit it or not, 20% of our capital voted for this policy. Citron yellow politics. Citron yellow like Karleusa’s leotards.
If Milan Knezevic were a colour, then it would be that screaming colour of Karleusa’s hair and stage costumes. That’s probably why they see themselves as matching souls. Milan is Karleusa’s spirit animal. And vice versa.
What neither the Serbs in Montenegro as a community, nor the rest of us, should allow is that Milan Knezevic and Aleksandar Vucic push us into this Karleusa pattern. Because that is what Vucic wants. And that is what Mandic wants. Because primitives are easier to manage. Primitivism is Milan and Andrija’s politics, but it is not Serbian politics. A Serb and a primitive are not and must not become the same, no matter how hard Kovacevic, Mandic and Knezevic try to equalize it. If we leave the Serbs and Serbianness to them without a helping hand, and if we begin to equalize it ourselves, then we are complicit in the disaster. A fire from a neighbour’s house can easily spread to our house.
Why is this important? If you remember, during the 2023 parliamentary elections and after them, Vucic made a fuss about the fact that Serbs are not in the Montenegrin government, equating the Serbs with the DF. And he didn’t do it without some intention. He will not rest until he squeezes all Serbs into a political entity that he can control. And those who do not agree to that will be declared non-Serbs. Pressure is exerted through the media, through the church, through organized crime. Until they all give in.
In this way, Vucic appoints himself as the arbiter of Serbia, and his accomplices in the jury are circus artists Zeljko Mitrovic, Dragan Vucicevic, Maric, Karleusa and Jovana Jeremic. This settlement gained so much momentum in Serbia and Serbian politics that even Emir Kusturica had to react, who started to be bothered by that.
And it is Emir who is one of the conscious culprits and architects of that system, because he actively and consciously participated in the construction of the Serbian identity in the 1990s, which was supposed to create attraction with his “charming insolence and primitivism”.
Serbia and Serbianism is not only that. And it’s far from just that. Stocks of good examples from Serbian culture and history are waiting to be rediscovered and placed at the center of contemporary Serbian cultural and political identity. Because each of us is the creator of our own identity. We do this by emphasizing and highlighting certain segments of our experience through it. Then this identity of ours becomes a framework for understanding and communicating with the world around us.
A Serbian identity that would push Karleusa and political Karleusas to the periphery of their social reality would be much more meaningful and fulfilling, and would enable easier coexistence with other identities, not only in Montenegro, but also in the region.
That’s it for today. We wish you a pleasant rest of the day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the columnist are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
