Turbo-Culture
The future of 21st-century culture happened during the Yugoslav Wars
Most people reading this have probably never heard of turbo-folk. It’s a Serbian genre of music defined by addictive beats and eastern-sounding harmonies with lyrics of romantic/sexual longing, vice, sacrifice, and materialism. Turbo-folk is culture cranked up to eleven, maximalist and made for TV: “music for looking, not for listening.”1
This was the emotional tempo of the 1990s war in Yugoslavia, especially for Serbia. The country became an international pariah in those years. Its people were impoverished and isolated, and the economy was looted by criminal gangs who also ran the airwaves. Turbo-folk was shown as a new way to live. In 1995, its superstar Ceca married the warlord Arkan in an unprecedented media spectacle. It was promoted like a Disney fairytale on channels like Pink (“Serbian MTV”) and widely sold on VHS. Polls at the time said that teenage boys in Serbia most wanted to be like Arkan, and the girls like Ceca.2
I’ve always been fascinated by how this genre took over like a delirium. The music was often crude and kitsch, but intoxicating as if it were some forbidden fruit. In ethnically cleansed Sarajevo in Bosnia, it’s said that the only Serbian product desired by youths after the war was turbo-folk.3 Even today, the genre dominates the music charts in Croatia despite the past war against Serbs. Croatian nationalists have even tried to ban its performers so they stop “corrupting the public” with little success.4
Turbo-folk and its origins are a rabbit hole you could spend forever researching with its lore, personalities, and obscure cassettes. I may get some hate for admitting some of it is worth listening to, at least the pre-war songs that preceded its peak. But more generally, to say folk music went “turbo” is to talk about a specific cultural process. Although today’s media environment is nowhere near as gaudy or openly criminal, the basic ingredients needed for culture to go turbo are here with us.
What Makes Culture “Turbo”
The origins of turbo-folk are something of a joke. Musician and self-styled “media manipulator” Rambo Amadeus coined the term in 1988 to describe his debut album. He put out a track list with electronic rhythms that exaggerated Balkan melodies and vocal trills, sung with folksy lyrics about lowly passions. It was intended to mock the way culture was headed. But somehow the genre was taken up by the music industry in Serbia, as if they were long looking for the name.
Rambo considers turbo-folk to be less like a genre and more like a social phenomenon. In a 2024 interview, he explains how traditional folk went turbo because certain conditions were met.
The first (and most important) condition of turbo is technology outpacing culture and human competency. In the 1980s, drum machines, synthesizers, and sequencers were being adopted by rural Yugoslav musicians who were moving to cities. Mass media like TV and radio multiplied quickly due to liberalization, and the nouveau riche saw potential in this music as profiteers. They were also not exactly people of taste. They later formed a pact with the Serbian state during wartime to sync public emotion on the airwaves and promote their flashy criminal lifestyles.5 In many cases, the sound engineers were very skilled, but they produced music with little regard for aesthetic judgment whatsoever.
The second condition is horror vacui or fear of empty space. Turbo-anything has to fill every crevice and consume all your attention in its sound design and promotion. The war meant that empty space was aplenty, open for maximum exploitation. There’s never been a collapse as wildly loud as this, and anything competing with turbo-folk suffered. The genre was pushed “almost to the exclusion of all other music” during its wartime peak.6 This caused invisible damage to other forms of art. Serbia’s beloved underground badly declined, and many of its artists were left impoverished. The legendary band Ekatarina Velika fell into heroin addiction, and two members died due to AIDS-related complications from use.
Third is the content. It mostly proliferates kitschy trash that provokes strong emotion (šund in Serbo-Croatian).7 This could be likened to slop in today's speak. Original Balkan folk-pop sang about higher themes of fate, love, tragedy, home, and loss. These performers would often play in small village cafes, where listeners come to indulge in their pain or be joyfully moved. In contrast, turbo-folk has little actual “folk” in substance besides resembling its form. The šund fills in the gaps. Some turbo-folk stations went to trashy extremes, like TV Palma, which was the first channel in the country to show hardcore pornography after dark, along with ads promoting guns, luxury cars, and sex enhancers.8
Lastly, turbo-anything relies on ease of creation and rapid spread. The Yugoslav Wars are unique, not necessarily because of ethnic nationalism, but because of how well-documented it was by many little creators. Small military brigades made their own anthems, and local singers came to the front to record nationalist songs. Bootleg cassettes were everywhere. This gave the atmosphere an elevated, frantic feel that accelerated every emotion to the point of anomie. Many of its videos have been picked up by online culture since they’re inherently very meme-like and referential. It was, as writer Lily Lynch put it, “the first internet war.”9 Turbo-folk was popularized at the dawn of this new communication technology.
In the 21st Century
There’s a misconception that turbo-folk is wedded to ethnic nationalism. This lets people draw mental boundaries, and dismiss any meaning from it beyond the Balkans. Rambo calls this “complete bullshit.” Most commercial turbo-folk music does not even sing about these themes. It’s instead a social phenomenon primarily rooted in runaway technology that profits by exploiting a nation’s wounded emotional state. A new class of wealth is created by these emerging technologies, which now has an interest in perpetuating itself regardless of social cost, and the whole culture is held captive as a result.
So when thinking of today, I am reminded of the conditions that made turbo-folk possible. Technology is also accelerating faster than we can keep up, and otherwise skilled engineers use their talents to AI-generate šund (slop). Other creative endeavors are crowded out and easily banished to obscurity. Internet platforms where šund proliferates are also designed with horror vacui in mind because no attention can be surrendered to empty space.
The heyday of the underground is sadly gone, and art now often has to plead to new money in the tech sector who think taste can be purchased. This same class creates technological products that openly poach our most vulnerable emotional needs. They mimic human form and closeness but without substance, even in their promotional material, leading to many documented cases of psychosis.10 While there’s peacetime in the West and no flashy criminal underworld, the trends point toward a general turbo-ing of culture, and you can sense it will only get louder.
When the alcohol comes out in any ex-Yugoslav country, turbo-folk is commonly put on as a guilty pleasure. It has perfected what it does. But imagine it playing endlessly 24-7 as your emotional anchor while your real world decays, and then you’ll truly understand what the “turbo” part means.
Listen to a few of Ceca’s 1990s hits:
Neodoljiv, neumoljiv (“Irresistable, relentless”), 1996
Vreteno (“Spindle”), 1997
Ja još spavam u tvojoj majici (“I still sleep in your shirt”), 1994
In Croatia, turbo-folk is perjoratively called cajka. In 2024, one of its Serbian stars Aleksandra Prijović sold out a record five consecutive arena concerts in Zagreb.
Both Pink and TV Palma had close associations with wartime president Slobodan Milošević and his Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). The allied Yugoslav United Left (JUL) party was run by his wife, Mira Marković, who was a close friend of Pink owner Željko Mitrović.
Markéta Slavková. “Echoing the Beats of Turbo-folk: Popular Music and Nationalism in Ex-Yugoslavia.” Urban People / Lidé Města 12, no. 2, (2010), pg. 424.
Media theorist Alexi Monroe likened turbo-folk to a form of “porno-nationalism” in his 2000 essay. He writes:
The combination of "porno-nationalism," media overload and constant propaganda across music, television and print could be characterised as a type of "kineto-catastrophism" using speed, immersion and overload as terrorising, mobilizatory forces, bringing to mind Ulrike Meinhof's critique of what she termed konsumteror: the deliberate and violent instillment of a compulsion to consume.
O. T., B. “Nova TV stanica u Beogradu – ‘Palma’ na Tašmajdanu [New TV Station in Belgrade – Palma at Tašmajdan]” (19 March 1993)
Are all AI chatbots being marketed as human-like now, as though they were “friends” or “therapists”? One ad I saw recently reads: “Say the one thing you’ve been holding in. Finally.” No wonder psychosis is on the rise.
great piece about a subject that needs more attention. while I agree that most commercial turbo-folk music does not sing about themes of ethnic nationalism, the genre does overindex on themes of violence towards women, glorification of crime, and nationalism. at least historically. the stuff being released today, not so much.
I play in a bball team in Austria which is 80% Yugo, and the lads have this shit blasting at all times haha.