Clear as folk?

In an interview in this week's Vreme, the writer David Albahari criticizes the massive amount of academic attention given to turbo-folk as opposed to the very fine rokenrol that the Balkans produced, especially during the eighties and nineties. He says:

Ovde postoji apsurd da je turbo-folk, koji je bio neki najniži oblik masovne kulture, dobio najviše akademskog prostora. Mislim da je to bilo zato što je bio povezan sa određenim političkim trenutkom. Politički trenutak je dobio tu pažnju, odnosno politički trenutak prelomljen kroz turbo-folk. A imate "novi talas" koji gotovo da i nije bio obrađen, jer nije na taj način bio političan. On je više govorio o pojedincu i njegovom odnosu prema društvu. To je bio pojedinac izgubljen u sistemu koji ga okružuje.

On the one hand, Albahari is certainly right in saying that the growth of interest in turbo-folk was a product of the political moment out of which turbo-folk grew, and which turbo-folk seemed to illustrate so obscenely faithfully. On the other hand, the research on "Yu-rock" is not so thin, even if the level of journalistic fascination is a bit lower. Albahari knows this, since he was a coeditor (with Petar Janjatović and Dragan Kremer) of the classic Drugom stranom - Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ (1983).

A few more recent works I would draw attention to would be Ines Prica, Omladinska potkultura u Beogradu: Simbolička praksa (1991), Benjamin Perasović, Urbana plemena: Sociologija subkultura u Hrvatskoj (2001), and Gregor Tomc, Petar Stankovič and Mitja Velikonja, Urbana plemena -Mladinske subkulture v Sloveniji v devetdesetih (2000). Then, of course, there are also a few works in English.