”While the genre is broad enough to accommodate a plethora of motifs (joy, sorrow, migration, family, politics, women, home appliances, heroin addiction etc), it is usually a highly-relatable sentiment that is being transmitted through the lyrics. Migration, for example, is nearly universally relatable in Romania, a country that has around 4 million citizens living in Western Europe. [...] It stands to reasons that these lyrics are going to resonate with a large segment of the population, serving as a smallest common denominator of sorts, and that denying the right to listen to the preferred music in an attempt to make dominant a middle-class culture is incredibly aggressive and tantamount to symbolic violence. This becomes even more evident in the virulent defence of more traditional Roma music, particularly from the inter-bellum period, which is held in high regard as “true gypsy music”, being neat and tidy enough for non-Roma, middle class audiences to enjoy, despite it being as vilified in the epoch as manele are now, or in the case of those who, while hating manele, thoroughly enjoy listening to non-Romanian Roma music, like Goran Bregovic, Gogol Bordello or Gypsy Kings, to say nothing of all the other “world music”, which is treated completely different, due to it being imported and thus, exotic.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 17:06:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015