Lepa Brena is undisputedly the biggest showbiz star from former Yugoslavia (btw, I heard on twitter that the phrase ‘former Yugoslavia’ is a pleonasm, but I can’t restrain from using it). Biggest star in a Balkan country by default means that the star’s area of expertise is folk music. What’s interesting about Lepa Brena is that she was a pan-Yugoslavian folk star, never sticking to one side or the other, even after the war broke out and after it ended. This old video of hers is a good example of what I’m saying.
Since Serbia was the biggest meca for folk music at the time, it was only logical that she chose to settle in Belgrade, and after the war start her own folk music production empire.
Brena came into public focus only recently when she announced a couple of months ago that she would be doing a ‘world tour’ which also included Sarajevo and Zagreb. That caused a lot of fuss in Bosnia and Croatia, because apparently, Brena is seen over there as a Serb nationalist because of this video where she’s dressed in a military uniform.
Now, we could discuss the quality of the video (and the music, for that matter) but when her overall image and attitude is concerned, of all the folk stars throughout the former Yugoslavia, Brena always struck me as the least nationalistic and the most Yugonostalgic one. But it just goes to show that there’s still a lot of bad blood between the nationalists in all former Yu-republics, and that it takes only a tiny push to create an avalanche of hate, as shown by endless youtube, blogs and forums comment discussions that are impossible to translate because of the richness of SerboCroatian language when it comes to curses.
On the other hand, Brena’s succesfull concert in Sarajevo and the sold-out forthcoming gig in Zagreb show that there are lots of people that don’t care all that much about the nationality, which is always a good thing.
Now that I think about it, there are only a handfull of performers who truly are cosnidered persona-non-grata in other republics, with good reasons: Marko Perkovic Thompson in Serbia, or Svetlana Ceca Raznatovic in Croatia, for example.
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This thing with the uniform was old news in 1994 when Vecernji list or Arena did a splash on it then….
I think that in big part Brena is considered politics-neutral by most of us quite simply because she didn’t appear in media much during the last 15 years or so… Still, since she is a leader in turbo-folk turbo-production, makes her a bad guy in my view…
Still, this strikes me as odd: last time I was in Slovenia in a hotel, they had a bunch of pictures of VIP guests in the lobby… A nice hotel with nice patrons.. Rupel, Janša, some ambassadors to Ljubljana and stuff like that, but above them all: Ceca!
If it goes that quantity of appearance is more important than quality of appearance for products, then it goes for folk singers too…
Dejan, I could be wrong, but just based on anecdotal evidence, I never got the impression that Ceca carried the same negative baggage in Slovenia as she does in Croatia and Bosnia. Perhaps because (IIRC) Mr. Ceca and his lads were not active there during the war(s).
Shaina, that was exactly my point. I mean, her moral qualities weight the same anywhere on the planet, right? But in Slovenia, she’s just a turbo-folk singer, while in countries where her political standings were more exposed, she’s Arkan’s widow.
She’s been Arkanova udovica in Slovenia too – at least, when she did her first concert in Ljubljana in ‘05 there was an open letter of protest from the Slovenian musicians’ union (much the same kind of hoo-hah Brena’s getting in ZG right now, really).
One might say that was domestic musicians worried about the competition, I couldn’t possibly comment