Irena Šentevska: Raspevani Beograd. Urbani identiteti i muzički video

In her book Raspevani Beograd: Urbani identitet i muzički video (Singing Belgrade: Urban Identity and Music Videos), Irena Šentevska sets herself several goals. The thread running through her research is the representation of the city of Belgrade in music videos, that is, the depiction of the “real social transformations of Belgrade (including its urban and architectural infrastructure) and their media representation in different music genres” (14). In contrast to current Serbian academic discourses that treat the urban environment as an undeniable given, Šentevska argues that such an urban space is articulated through and in the media, making it a reflection of various social, political and economic processes at the same time. The basic premise of her book is that “the representative conventions in popular cultural media texts reproduce ideological presuppositions about the identity structure of a society through discourses/narratives of inclusion and exclusion” (15). Therefore, Šentevska argues, the visual language of popular music videos can be understood as texts to be analysed to reveal the ideological workings of various identity-related social processes – urban, rural, gender, sexual, national, racial, among others – and the ways in which these are used in the media.

The book is divided into three parts, each comprehensively dealing with a specific genre. It also contains a preface in which Šentevska argues for academic analysis of music videos, and an introductory chapter, in which she provides a historical overview of the music video genre in the West as well as in Serbia. To conclude, she retraces her analytical steps and provides a chronological summary of her analysis. The first part of the book is entitled “The Pink Chapter: Belgrade as a Melting Pot of Cultural Models”. Firstly, it offers theoretical considerations about musical taste, going on to take a historical look at both the cultural policies of socialist Yugoslavia and the latter’s treatment of folk music. The chapter also discusses so-called “turbo folk” and the academic issues the study of this genre raises. More specifically, it describes various mostly value-based approaches – both within and outside academia – to turbo folk and the culture surrounding it, which is often deemed inferior and lowly (and usually non-urban or rural). Šentevska, commendably, takes a value-neutral approach to turbo folk and, instead of condemning the genre and the people who listen to it, she casts an analytical eye on turbo folk music videos and the ways in which the urban environment is presented in them. Belgrade, being the capital of turbo folk (and turbo folk being Serbia’s only truly unique regional product), is the subject of several subsections in which Šentevska shows various ways in which a variety of urban markers have been used in turbo folk music videos. She also demonstrates that the construction of different identities, especially urban ones, has shifted over the years of (turbo) folk music’s existence. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, listening to turbo folk music had been resignified not only as urban, but in some cases even as an underground practice, a cultural practice that denoted a form of resistance to the dominant cultural model.

The second part of the book, “The Painted Black Chapter: Belgrade as an ‘Unconquered’ City”, deals with rock music and rock music videos. As in the first part, Šentevska devotes considerable space to discussing the beginnings of rock music in Belgrade, and its role in the Cold War. Interweaving historical, political and cultural threads, Šentevska depicts the rock and roll scene in Yugoslavia and Belgrade up to the dissolution of the country, and beyond. Or, to be more precise, she looks at how various social distinctions were created on the basis of musical taste, especially in the relationship between rock music and turbo folk.

The third part of the book is entitled “La haine et les autres crimes, or the Grey Chapter: Belgrade as a Ghetto” and, as one might guess, it deals with rap and hip-hop. Again, the reader is given a detailed description of the historical and cultural context in which rap culture emerged in Belgrade, in particular in the socialist-era suburban district of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade), which happened to be the rap hotspot, with its subcultural identities constructed around belonging to particular apartment blocks. Today, Novi Beograd, a product of socialist Yugoslav modernity, is often described as a grey concrete jungle because of its brutalist architecture, and thus also becomes a convenient backdrop for rap music videos and rap music’s disenfranchised performers and listeners.

One of the book’s advantages is also its disadvantage, and vice versa. Namely, the book is almost encyclopaedic in scope in terms of the references it contains and the theoretical platforms it employs. In addition to this is the broad historical scope and complexity of the socioeconomic contextualisation of the three different musical genres and their video production. The sheer volume of information contained within the book’s six hundred pages (over 4,500 music videos analysed) at times demands a great deal of patience from the reader. It could easily have been three books instead of one. But while the scope and density may seem daunting at first, Šentevska deftly navigates the terrain of her research, and the result is a book that will serve as a key reference for the study of popular culture, of Yugoslav and especially Serbian turbo folk, rock and rap music, all of which, as the author herself notes, remain woefully understudied. Having said all this, Raspevani Beograd should be treated as a textbook example of cultural studies on postsocialism and beyond, not only because of its wealth of information, but also because Irena Šentevska skilfully shows how it should be done: theoretically grounded, thoroughly researched, methodologically sound, and, perhaps most importantly, approached playfully and with a lot of humour.