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Home , Balkan Beat Box, Balkan brass, Chalga, Gypsy (soundtrack), Latcho Drom, List of Romani people

“ Music” and Deejays Orientalism, Balkanism, and Romani Musicians Ioana Szeman

Figure 1. Fanfare Cioca˘rlia, Queens and Kings tour , 7 December 2006, , Sala Palatului. (Photo by Sonja Balcells, courtesy of Asphalt Tango Management)

Romanian Romani bands such as Taraf de Haïdouks, Fanfare Cioca˘rlia, and Mahala Raï Banda have become popular in the West in the last decade, playing at prestigious venues in interna- tional festivals and featured in documentaries and Hollywood films. Taraf de Haïdouks, who hail from southern , with their furious playing, flute, , and , count stars like Johnny Depp among their most famous fans. Fanfare, a group from northeastern Romania, play brass and percussion instruments and are known for their irresistible beat. Both Taraf and Fanfare won BBC Radio 3 Awards in 2002 and 2006, respectively.

Ioana Szeman is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Roehampton University, . She is currently completing a book project based on fieldwork carried out over a 10-year period called Stages of Erasure: Performing Romani Culture and Gypsiness in and out of Post-Communist Romania.

TDR: The Drama Review 53:3 (T203) Fall 2009. ©2009 98 University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 The popularity of “Gypsy music”1 performances in the West in the last decade has created not exactly a scene, but what the Guardian has identified as “something in the air, something that is hard to label, let alone define” that spreads from “world music” performances with “authentic” Gypsy musicians to electronic and music (Lynskey 2006:6). A wide range of “Gypsy music” events have flourished across continents, from large international festivals fea- turing Romani bands from the —including the three bands mentioned above—to “Gypsy nights” in clubs where audiences sport Gypsy costumes. Western deejays such as and Gypsy Sound System, and Western bands such as Beirut and , feature or sample music from South East , in what has become a fashionable, “not so underground any longer,” scene (6). Romani musicians from such bands as Taraf de Haïdouks, Fanfare Cioca˘rlia, and Mahala Raï Banda play a role in, but do not control, the export of “Gypsy music” from Romania to the West, while also negotiating the limited options available to them in both locations. After being “discovered” by their Western managers in remote villages in Romania, the Romanian Romani bands Taraf and Fanfare now perform almost exclusively in the West, are entirely Western- managed, and emulate the authentic Balkan Gypsy musician, made famous in ’s filmsTime of the Gypsies (1988), Underground (1995), and Black Cat, White Cat (1997), and in ’s Latcho Drom (Good Journey; 1993). While these groups perform mostly traditional music from Romania, Romani musicians in Romania primarily play (sing. manea), an ex- tremely popular and controversial genre with links to the Ottoman past and associations with and the Middle East. Hence Romani musicians find themselves at the crux of debates about identity, Europe and the “Orient,” modernity and tradition—epitomized in critiques or praise for manele. However, the behind Taraf de Haïdouks has produced a new band, Mahala Raï Banda, that performs manele, often alongside deejays. Shantel, also known as DJ Shantel, of , has mixed for both Taraf and Mahala and won a BBC Radio 3 World in 2006. Mahala invites audience members to come up onstage and dance during their live performances, and Shantel has created a similar atmosphere with his Bucovina Club, initially based in , Ger- many, and now touring to international locations. Bucovina is the name of a Figure 2. DJ Shantel and the Bucovina Club Orchestra, Disko region situated in both Romania and Partizani tour concert, Koko, London, 20 February 2008. (Photo Ukraine where Shantel’s maternal family by Ioana Szeman) originated and with which he has been fascinated since he first visited in the late ’90s. HisDisko Partizani (2007) and tour bring to his audience a new kind of pop focused on the urban music of the Balkans, including the manele, most famous and ubiquitous on the streets of Romania. Shantel’s music has the produc- tive potential for creating a Balkan cosmopolitanism, an alternative version of modernity, in tension with other forms of Western cosmopolitanism—what Donna A. Buchanan credits “Gypsy Music”

1. I follow Carol Silverman’s use of quotation marks for this term, which is used to market a variety of types of music from the Balkans and elsewhere (2007).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 ethnopop for creating (2007:260). Shantel’s songs may offer the same kind of alternatives to diasporic audiences, but at the same time they orientalize the Balkans from within, erasing the Roma. Shantel’s album and tour feature a multinational group of musicians from the Balkans, Turkey, and Western Europe, including a couple of Romani musicians, such as Taraf’s newer member, clarinetist Filip Semionov, from . From Taraf’s and Mahala’s to Shantel’s performances, Gypsies are a vehicle for entering the exotic Balkans. But while the role Gypsy stereotypes play in literature, musical performances, and Balkan films has received significant scholarly attention (see Trumpener 1992; van de Port 1998; Iordanova 2001), less discussed is how Romani musicians fulfill and embody these stereotypes, and their effects on , including musicians (see Lemon 2000; Beissinger 2001, 2007; Silverman 1996, 2003, 2007). Following the trajectory of Romani musicians in these bands, I trace the erasure of the Roma from the “authentic performances” of Taraf and Fanfare through to Mahala and the Disko Partizani tour concert, where the lyrics of one song, “T¸igan- izat¸ia” (Gypsification), literally suggest that by becoming Gypsy (t¸igan) one can reach the “exotic Orient” (here standing for Turkey). In a recent TDR article, Mike Sell argues that forgetting the Roma while mimicking them is an avantgarde gesture dating back to 19th-century bohemians and continuing in contemporary popular theatrical works such as Rent (1996): “By way of mimicking, appropriating, mythologiz- ing, and ultimately erasing the Roma […] the idea of challenging political authority through fashion, sex, drug use, cuisine, creative expression, etc., came into being” (2007:45). All of the stances Sell identifies recur in the recent plethora of “Gypsy music” performances, where musi- cians, managers, and deejays mimic, appropriate, and erase the Roma through their demonstra- tions of Orientalism and Balkanism. The marketing of the “authentic” Gypsies is based on Western managers’ discovery narra- tives that re-enact Balkanism, a specific discourse that historian Maria Todorova identifies as grounded in Western travelers’ discoveries of the exotic yet not so distant part of Europe known as the Balkans, beginning in the 18th century (1997). Todorova’s work on Balkanism provides a critical apparatus, inspired by, but different from, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism ([1978] 2001). Milica Bakic´-Hayden further developed and reconfigured Said’s work in her theory of “nesting orientalisms,” which she identified as the application of Orientalism to nationalities from former Yugoslavia (1995). In the Western performances of “Gypsy music,” “authentic” musicians, music from the Balkans, and even lyrics such as Shantel’s “T¸iganizat¸ia” index the same stereotypes of Gypsies as wild, passionate, and free. Ironically, however, the Roma become forgotten in plain sight, as in most cases they function as projective mechanisms and a way of reaching the wild, passionate, and unpredictable place that the Balkans are supposed to be. Buchanan (2007) notes that ethnopop genres like (the equivalent of manele in Bulgaria) and Yugo-pop were not initially intended for Western consumption. However, the newest trends, such as Shantel’s and Mahala’s albums and concerts, have brought manele to the West. Diasporic and migrant Balkan audiences’ reception of this music, often advertised as “Gypsy music” in the West, and the musicians themselves, reveal that nesting Orientalisms, or the fractal recurrence of the East- West dichotomy, function to further Orientalize Balkan identities via the Gypsies. While the positive attributes of performance stereotypes about Roma present Gypsy musicians as passionate performers, the flipside, pervasive in the media, is that they are beggars and criminals.2 Since 1997, I have been involved in theatre projects and fieldwork with Romani communities from Romania, many of them impoverished, who often suffer the negative effects of these stereotypes (see Szeman-Ureche 2005; Szeman 2005). Because Roma rarely control media or entertainment institutions, non-Roma continue to shape public discourse on Roma, easily resorting to stereotypes both in the media and onstage.

2. Following Lemon (2000), I use Rom (noun, singular), Roma (noun, plural), and the adjective Romani to denote individuals or groups. I use “Gypsy” when discussing stereotypes and to translate the local term t¸igan. IoanaSzeman

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Little is known about the suffering of Romani populations in the past, for example in the slavery and concentration camps dur- ing WWII. The perfor- mance paradigms that romanticize the Roma place them in the present through the denial of their past, as they become ves- sels for the majority’s ideals and aspirations. Katie Trumpener argues that: Gypsies continue to appear as stereotypical figures of magic and menace; what is involved here is not only igno- rance, and a failure to Figure 3. Robert Anghel and Costica˘ Boieru on violin, Taraf de Haïdouks, Queen realize that the Gypsies Elizabeth Hall, London, 26 November 2007. (Photo by Ioana Szeman) are a sizable population living as a still threat- ened minority in Europe and North America, but also a refusal to give up a powerful set of cultural myths for their sake. (1992:849) Roma in many countries throughout East Central Europe continue to be the target of dis- crimination and racism, and the majority live in poverty. Many Romani children still suffer the effects of discrimination and are sent to special schools such as those for the handicapped. Romani migration to Western Europe increased remarkably after January 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU, but some Roma are not qualified to work there and are not savvy about how to cope abroad. Their presence is widely mediatized and negative stereotypes about Roma in the West often conflate Romani and Romanian people, languages, and cultures. How- ever, many Roma do succeed abroad, even though their labor and/or success remain invisible, as is the case with the musicians in this article. Balkanism, Orientalism, and Turkish Influences in Music Anthropologist Susan Gal has analyzed the fractal recurring of the East-West dichotomy within Europe and the role Europe plays as an ideological concept whose meaning and location shifts (1991). Whereas in one instance Romania represents the East—the less developed pole in opposition to Europe—within Romania the Gypsies stand for the East, the Orient within, while Romania stands for Europe in contrast to the Gypsies. This opposition also spreads across musical tastes, with the elites looking westward and despising manele, which are hugely popular and associated with Gypsies, kitsch, bad taste, and a dangerously contagious Orient, identified most often with Turkey and the former . Romania’s Balkan position, as a bridge between East and West and equally sensitive to both influences, is thus reenacted in the ideological battle between manele supporters and protesters. Manele detractors see the musicians who play this music as agents of “gypsification,” where “Gypsy Music” Gypsies embody the negative pole of the East-West dichotomy.3 The verbs “to gypsy” (a se

3. Marin Marian-Baˇlas¸a reports about anti-manele websites, and even an anti-manele protest in Romania (2006).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 t¸iga˘ni) and “to gypsify” (a se t¸iganiza)—similar to “to jew”—can be offensive, carrying linguistic traces of racism present in the (see Gilman 1991). Even though not all Roma may take offense, the words “t¸igan” (translated here as “Gypsy”) and “a se t¸iga˘ni/za” are derogatory (see Szeman-Ureche 2005). Music similar to the very popular manele in Romania, bearing influences from an Ottoman form called mana, and which today extends into fusion styles, can be found across the Balkans in other ethnopop incarnations such as turbo folk and chalga. According to Todorova, the Balkans have in common hors de texte the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, of which they have all been a part, and this music is certainly one of its outcomes.4 In the current wave of “Gypsy music’s” success in the West, the Balkans appear both in the names of bands, such as Balkan Beat Box, and in the advertising and marketing of concerts and tours, bringing together musicians from different countries of South East Europe. Beissinger (2007:117) and Marin Marian-Ba˘las¸a (2006:84) both offer a list of manele’s favorite topics, which include money, cars, love, and women—all signs of status for the newly rich. Most manele singers are men, often accompanied by scantily dressed belly dancers. Beissinger provides a history of manele and its Ottoman origins, establishing a link between Ottoman domination of the Romanian territories and the spreading of this music via Romani musicians (2007:101). Buchanan argues that the Orientalist vision evident in ethnopop today, which is also present in manele, with a dominating hypermasculinity and sensuous, accessible femininity, goes back to late-18th- and 19th-century Viennese operas, which had the harem as setting (2007:251). Beissinger notes the distinguishing features of manele, or what she refers to as muzica˘ orientala˘, lie in a series of stylistic effects that relate to rhythm, melody, and instrumentation. Manele are characterized by “syncopated Arab rhythms,” and “elaborately ornamented, virtu- osic, and often improvisational” melodic passages. The most common instruments employed are the , synthesizer or keyboard, drums, , electric guitar, saxophone, and string bass (2007:110–15). Most of the musicians Beissinger interviewed explained the “oriental” specificity of manele in the rhythm. Western music, from rock and pop to rap and hip-hop, has influenced manele and given birth to fusion styles in Romania, and most recently Western deejays have mixed electronic beats with manele. Turkish influence in Balkan extends far beyond manele. “Taraf” itself is a Turkish word, meaning a small orchestra, with instruments such as cimbalom, accordion, violin, string bass, and flute. Robert Garfias notes that tarafs comprised Romanila˘utari (musicians) in the times of Ottoman domination of the Romanian territories, when Roma were slaves (1981:98). The musicians of the group Taraf de Haïdouks descend from generations of la˘utari, sedentarized Romani musicians who have developed a particular kind of music called muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘. According to Garfias, muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘ is a mix of traditional Romanian music, Ottoman Turkish music, and Western European music. As slaves in the courts of nobles, Romani musicians played the latter two styles, which they combined with Romanian , after emancipation in 1856, when they started playing for Romanian villagers (98). Muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘ includes a series of dance pieces, such as and sârba, whose tempo varies and whose many versions depend on location and musician. The muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘ genre also encompasses cântece de pahar (drinking songs), sometimes called cântece de petrecere (songs of pleasure or relaxation), cântece ba˘trânes¸ti (epic ), and cântece de dragoste (“songs of love

4. A note should be made here about different ways of framing the same geo-political realities, i.e., nations or countries from the Balkans. Romania, although geographically in Europe, belongs to at least two other geo- political distinctions that supersede “Europe.” During the Cold War and as a post-war legacy, it was part of Eastern Europe, or the Eastern bloc, a term lately replaced with “East Central Europe.” On the other hand, it belongs to the Balkans, the territory of South East Europe that Todorova discusses in her work (1997). IoanaSzeman

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 and longing”), many of them shared with the Romanian repertory. The only “exclusively Gypsy dance piece” Garfias recorded among the la˘utari was the manea (1981:99; 1984:87–88, 91). Marius Manole of Taraf de Haïdouks explains that they can play “muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘, cântece ba˘trânes¸ti and muzica t¸iga˘neasca˘” (Manole 2007). Muzica t¸iga˘neasca˘ (Gypsy/) consists of some of the same dance songs as muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘, but played on a faster tempo; for example, the hora t¸iga˘neasca˘ (Gypsy hora) and cântece de supa˘rare (sorrow songs), which are sung in Romani to a beat Garfias finds typical of songs of other Romani populations, such as . On one of their albums, Dumbala Dumba (1998), Taraf brought in Ursari Romani musicians as guests. Muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘ differs from the music of nomad (or formerly nomad) Roma, such as the Ursari, who use oral bass, for example. However, Garfias argues that “the expressive rhythmic undulating of ” and “the use of permutations of 12 beat patterns in the ” for muzica la˘uta˘reasca˘ are “old Gypsy qualities” heard in the music of the nomadic Roma of Romania and other neighboring countries (1981:102). “Gypsy Music,” Romani Musicians, and Film Kusturica’s films and Goran Bregovic´’s music represent another reason for the “Balkan” asso- ciation with the wave of “Gypsy music.” Kusturica, the Bosnian-born filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or in Cannes twice (1985, 1995), and Bregovic´, the of the music for his films, including , have together made brass bands and the Balkan Gypsy musician trope famous. It might be that because of the war in the former Yugoslavia, a war that, as Todorova shows, has often been called the “Balkan War” of the ’90s (1997), that ex- Yugoslav artists such as Kusturica and Bregovic´ feel more like “Balkan artists” than artists of other nationalities from the region. Anthropologist Mattijs van de Port has argued that films and music involving Romani musicians and protagonists serve as vehicles for their Serbian patrons to get in touch with the opposite of civilization, which the Gypsies are supposed to embody (1998). Film scholar Dina Iordanova shows that Balkan filmmakers’ use of Gypsies functions in a “Balkans to Europe as Gypsies to us” analogy, part of a consensual self-exoticization (2001:216). Non-Romani works featuring Roma, such as Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies and Black Cat, White Cat, have created a whole field of signifiers that continue to be quoted, recycled, and perpetuated, to the extent that Roma use and quote them themselves. Ian Hancock, a prominent Romani scholar, points out that when other nations are portrayed in stereotypes, the school curriculum takes care of distinguishing between fact and fiction (1997). In the case of the Roma, these films are one of the few sources of information about them available to the public at large. Many of the bands and festivals of “Gypsy music” in the West seem to have stepped out of these films. In the past 10 years Taraf de Haïdouks and Fanfare Cioca˘rlia have been marketed as authen- tic Gypsy bands bringing the sounds of rural Romania to the West, fresh from their remote villages. Todorova, in her groundbreaking work on Balkanism, shows that Western travelers to the Balkans have created a discourse similar to, yet distinct from, Orientalism: Balkanism (1997). The region situated at the margins of Europe is experienced as familiar and threatening, exotic, yet close. Narratives about traveling not too far in distance but on a loop in time convey the adventure of going to Clejani, the legendary village of Taraf de Haïdouks. This village is “only” 30 kilometers away from Bucharest, the capital of Romania, yet it takes much longer to travel there, on an extremely bad road that makes many travelers feel like they are caught in a time warp (see Cartwright 2005:186). This sense of being so close to Bucharest, yet so remote, represents a Balkan version of what Said calls the “intimate estrangement” of the Orient from the West. And according to K.E. Fleming, the “alien” nature of the Balkans derives from their

proximity to Western Europe (2000:1229). “Gypsy Music” Taraf and Fanfare’s Western managers described their first visits to Clejani and Zece Pra˘jini (the two villages where the bands originated, one in Southern, the other in Northeastern Roma- nia) as discovery narratives. Henry Ernst, one of two German Fanfare managers, recounts:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Figure 4. Finale of Fanfare Cioca˘rlia and guests, Queens and Kings tour concert, 7 December 2006, Bucharest, Sala Palatului. (Photo by Sonja Balcells, courtesy of Asphalt Tango Management)

In 1996, I went to Moldavia to visit friends and I heard about some fantastic Gypsy musicians. I went to the Zece Pra˘jini village to listen to them. Before hearing them, all I wanted was entertainment. I had hardly announced my reasons for visiting, when, within five minutes, a group of 25 to 30 musicians came to play for me. I instantly fell in love with this wild music, completely different from everything I had known about music. (2004:2; my translation) In order to create a sense of authenticity onstage, the performers are marketed as hailing from far away: rural Romania, distant in space, but also arrested in time. These narratives are quite prominent in films about the Balkans, as Iordanova shows. Gatlif is a French film director of Algerian and Romani descent, whose work has focused on Roma from East Central Europe, Romania in particular. His filmLatcho Drom is a fake documentary that presents Romani musicians, including Taraf de Haïdouks, at locations throughout the Middle East and Europe. His later filmsGadjo Dilo (Crazy Stranger; 1997) and Transylvania (2006) both feature Westerners traveling to Romania to find a famous musician or lover, and in both films the characters have cathartic dancing sessions to the local music performed by Romani musicians. These Western heroes are not unlike the two bands’ managers in the way they forge connections with Roma. In Gadjo Dilo, Stéphane, a Frenchman who goes to southern Romania to find a singer he learned about from his father, meets with village Roma, who shelter and befriend him, and teach him Romani. In the village bar, Izidor, the Rom who took Stéphane in, shows the Frenchman off to the Romanians drinking at tables. They despise him because for them he is a t¸igan, but Izidor says, beaming with pride: “He is my friend, he is French and he knows Romani. He can’t speak Romanian. He came all the way from France to stay with us.” An incredulous Romanian asks him whether there are many t¸igani in France and Izidor, his smile even broader, tells him that in France the Gypsies are everywhere and doing really well, getting more and more excited at his own fantasy. But the Romanian cuts him short: ”You all should go there, then” (Gatlif 1997). Not unlike this character suggests, the marketing of Taraf and Fan- fare has been mainly focused on the West. At Taraf’s first concert in Romania in 2000, many were appalled that they were hearing a band of Gypsies (see Cartwright 2005:199). Things have changed only slightly since then, and the paradox remains that these musicians are not well known at home. IoanaSzeman

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Nesting Orientalisms Taking its cue from Latcho Drom, the July 2007 Barbican Festival in London, “The 1000 Year Journey: Gypsy Music from around the World,” featured Romani and non-Romani bands from South East Europe, France, Turkey, Cyprus, and the US. Despite one well-attended lecture on Romani musicians in the Balkans, the marketing of “Gypsy music” at the festival and the fram- ing of the performances encouraged broad Balkan vs. non-Balkan divisions. Fanfare Cioca˘rlia took the Barbican stage by storm, with musicians entering from different corners while playing, a routine that cited the image of the mobile traveling Gypsy musician. Cioca˘rlia played tunes such as “Bubamara,” “Erdelezi,” and others made popular by Bregovic´. Ernst describes Fanfare’s music as “a mix between traditional Romanian music and dance, their own compositions with strong Oriental influences, Balkan hits and adaptations” (in Popan 2005). Fanfare (which in French means a ), unlike the Taraf la˘utari musicians, do not belong to generations of professional musicians, but instead played in military brass bands. Their instruments include , , saxophone, percussion, and clarinet. A band member un- apologetically stepped for- ward and greeted everyone in Romanian, and no one translated when he said: “Good evening, every- one from Romania, please say hello.” The audience cheered unanimously, some, like myself, because they were from Romania, and others in excited anticipation. I was in the balcony, near Spanish- speaking audience mem- bers, with some Romanian- Figure 5. Jony Iliev, Miss Ta˘nt¸ica, and Fanfare Cioca˘rlia. Queens and Kings tour speaking ones behind me. concert, 7 December 2006, Bucharest, Sala Palatului. (Photo by Sonja Balcells, Unsurprisingly, the courtesy of Asphalt Tango Management) lyrics of their songs were also not translated. A Romanian artist living in France expressed suspicion to me about bands from Romania singing a bunch of nonsense because nobody understood what they said. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett discusses a similar practice, which she labels “avantgarde,” among the organizers of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival of the Arts, where foreign works completely dis- placed from their context were presented without translation or mediation, with the confidence that they could speak for themselves. In such cases, people become “signs of themselves,” as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett shows, and are viewed from the outside by audiences who are encour- aged to own the meaning of what they see or hear (1998:55). Fanfare Cioca˘rlia, which does not have vocalists of their own, featured special guests from other countries, such as Esma Redžepova, a famous Romani singer from Macedonia; Mitsou from ; Jony Iliev from Bulgaria; and the French Catalan group Kaloome. Redžepova sang the International Romani anthem, “Djelem, djelem,” adopted at the First World Romani “Gypsy Music” Congress, in 1971, with lyrics by Zarko Jovanovic´, a Romani Holocaust survivor. As Ronald Lee, whose translation from Romani I reproduce here, explains, the melody is based on a traditional Serbian-Romani song:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Djelem djelem lungone dromensa Maladilem baxtale Rromensa Ai Rromale, katar tumen aven Le tserensa baxtale dromensa Vi man sas u bari familiya Thai mudardya la E Kali Legiya Ai Romale, Ai Shavale Aven mansa sa lumiyake Rroma Kai putaile le Rromane droma Ake vryamya, ushte Rrom akana Ame xutasa mishto kai kerasa Ai Rromale, Ai Shavale. (Jovanovic´ 1971, in Lee 2005:196) I have traveled over long roads I have met with fortunate Roma Oh Roma, from wherever you come With tents along fortunate roads I too once had a large family But the Black legion murdered them Come with me, Roma of the world To where the Romani roads have opened Now is the time—stand up, Roma! We shall succeed where we make the effort Oh Romani adults, Oh Romani youth. (Lee 2005:197) The Fanfare interpretation of the song lent itself well to dancing. The dancing was relentless for the whole Fanfare concert, where young audience members invaded the aisles and turned the venue into a party, inspired by the exuberant musicians and dancers. Cˇ ocˇek (thus named in the post-Yugoslav space; its Romanian version is the manea), considered a specific form, can be seen on a continuum with belly dancing, where cˇocˇek is a more restrained form of belly dancing (Silverman 2003). The two dancers accompanying Fanfare performed the gamut of movements between these two genres. Redžepova exchanged cˇocˇek moves with an audience member in the front row of the Barbican. Two days later, in front of a sold-out Barbican Hall, Taraf de Haïdouks took the stage. The band includes the following instruments: cimbalom (one or two), accordion, violin (up to four), flute, and string bass. In addition to the three categories band member Manole identified for me, “la˘utareasca˘, ba˘trâneasca˘, and t¸iga˘neasca˘” (2007), Taraf played tunes from their most recent album, Maskarada (2007), classical music performed “Taraf-style.” More subdued in volume than Fanfare, Taraf mesmerized the audience with their speed, skills, and expressiveness. The lyrics, in Romanian and Romani, were again not translated. Below is a song for two voices in Romanian, “, from Roata” (another village where several Taraf members live), which appears on their 1994 album Honourable Brigands, Magic Horses and Evil Eye under the title “Cîntec de Dragoste s¸i joc” (Song of Love and Dance). Taraf also plays a Clejani version, “Dragostea de la Clejani” (Love from Clejani). Both vocalists were violin players, accompanied by accordion, cimbalom, and string bass: VOICE 1: Hai, hai, foaie verde bob na˘ut Fire-al ei mândra iubita˘ La ce vreme m-ai ga˘sit. VOICE 2: M-ai ga˘sit la vreme rea, ma˘i VOICE 1: Mândrut¸a nu mai vrea, ma˘i VOICE 2: Cu parale nu, geaba, ma˘i VOICE 1: Deseara˘ IoanaSzeman

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 VOICES 1 and 2: ma˘ duc la ea. VOICE 1: Obosit VOICE 2: cum oi putea VOICE 1: Obosit s¸i VOICE 2: plin de apa˘ VOICE 1: C-as¸a-i omu’ VOICE 2: de la sapa˘. VOICES 1 and 2: Ma˘ duc la ea ca˘ mi-e draga˘ Haida, lele, lele, lelis¸oara˘ Ochii ta˘i ma˘ baga˘-n boala˘. Aoleu, aoleu, nu ma˘ vezi cum beau mereu Aoleu, aoleu, s¸i tot beau, beau, beau mereu VOICE 2: Aolica˘, pa˘i ma˘-ntreaba˘ nevasta mea VOICE 1: Ca˘ mai am alta decât ea VOICE 2: Aolica˘, eu îi spun numai pe ea VOICE 1: Ea nu crede nici una VOICE 2: S¸i-mi da˘ crucea ca sa˘ jur VOICE 1: Eu juram, da’ VOICE 2: nu prea-n gura˘ VOICE 1: Ca˘ s¸tiam VOICE 2: Ca˘ este as¸a... VOICE 1: Ca˘ mi-a pla˘cut VOICE 2: dragostea VOICE 1: Cu nevasta VOICE 2: Altuia. (Taraf de Haïdouks 1994) “Gypsy Music”

Figure 6. Taraf de Haïdouks, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 26 November 2007. (Photo by Ioana Szeman)

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 [VOICE 1: Green chickpea leaf, Damned dear beloved, What a time to find me VOICE 2: You found me at a bad time, VOICE 1: My lover doesn’t want me any more VOICE 2: With no money. VOICE 1: Tonight VOICES 1 and 2: I’ll go to see her. VOICE 1: Tired VOICE 2: As I can manage VOICE 1: Tired VOICE 2: And full of sweat VOICE 1: As a man is VOICE 2: After working the land VOICES 1 and 2: I’ll go because I’m fond of her. Woman, woman, little woman, Your eyes make me ill. Alas, alas, can’t you see how I keep drinking Alas, alas, and I keep on drinking, always. VOICE 2: Oh, God, so my wife asks me if VOICE 1: I’ve got someone else. VOICE 2: Oh, God, I tell her I’ve only got her. VOICE 1: Even so, she doesn’t believe me VOICE 2: She makes me swear on the cross VOICE 1: I swore, but VOICE 2: Not too loud, VOICE 1: Because I knew VOICE 2: It was so VOICE 1: Because I’ve always enjoyed VOICE 2: Love with VOICE 1: Someone else’s... VOICE 2: Wife.] (my translation) When Taraf performed pieces involving increasingly faster rhythms (such as horas), and during this song, audience members shouted encouragement in Romanian: “Zicet¸i, haiducilor” (Keep playing, haidouks), or “Zii, ma˘i” (Play it). A similar lack of concern for mediation and translation, as was evident in the festival aesthet- ics, is at work in Kusturica’s films about and with Romani protagonists; his Balkanist vision, emphasizing non-Western aspects of Yugoslavia, is often projected onto his Romani protago- nists. Time of the Gypsies has been credited with more accuracy than Kusturica’s other movie with Romani protagonists, Black Cat, White Cat. Inspired by an article on human trafficking, it was shot near a Gypsy settlement in Šutka, near , Macedonia. Even though Kusturica features Romani protagonists who speak Romani in both films, as he himself confessed, he projected his own vision of what it is to be Gypsy onto them. He perceives and uses Romani, in both Time of the Gypsies and Black Cat, White Cat, as music rather than language: “Language for them is not just regular communication where you exchange necessary information, it’s singing, in a certain way” (in Kaufman 1999). Kusturica’s fascination with the Roma, and his remarks about the , sound like the response of someone attending a concert in an unfamiliar language. For most Western audiences, both Romanian and Romani were exotic, unfamiliar languages at the festival. Kusturica’s and the festival organizers’ focus on sound and function, as opposed to meaning, is also reminiscent of early Western avantgarde artists’ fascination with “exotic” performers. For IoanaSzeman

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 example, in expressing his captivation with Balinese dancers, Antonin Artaud never attempted a contextualized understanding of their art and claimed direct access to the work even though his only experience of Balinese dance was at the Paris Colonial Exposition. The festival encouraged broad distinctions and divisions between Roma and non-Roma, mostly falling along Romani/Balkan and non-Romani/Western lines. This version of Balkanism placed all the “native” artists from the Balkans within the same category, disregarding not only the different nationalities in the Balkans, but also the difference among Roma from different coun- tries, and even from the same country. It encouraged the notion of a Gypsy language, “music Romani” if you will, that in fact was often not even Romani, but Romanian or Macedonian. However, for many Romanians at the London festival, the fact that the musicians were themselves Roma may have been tangential to the experience of hearing this music from Romania live at a major London venue. Besides featuring a diverse range of Romani performers, the “Gypsy music” festival included many performers who had nothing to do with the advertised “Gypsy music” theme except that they were from the Balkans. For example, Amira is a non- Romani sevdah singer from Bosnia. While the Gypsy stereotypes continue to be successful marketing strategies for selling the Balkans, among the Balkan ex-pats, the festival format encouraged “nesting orientalisms.” After Amira’s concert, on the same bill with Taraf de Haïdouks, a Serbian spectator told me, upon finding out that I was Romanian, that he had yet to meet a Romanian who did not have some Gypsy in him or her. On a message board about Amira, many fans expressed that they were offended because they did not want to see her sing next to Gypsies, or Romanians, who are held in contempt and considered inferior. In this case, nesting Orientalisms work to place the Roma outside of the former Yugoslavia and within Romania in what Gal calls the fractal recurring of the West-East dichotomy. Such reactions reveal the anti-Gypsy sentiments that are the norm in the Balkans, and confirm that the passionate and nasty Gypsy stereotypes are two sides of the same coin. While, coincidentally, the members of Taraf are Roma and Romanian citizens, often the two are collapsed, even in the media where Roma are often presented as belonging to Romania. Such are the negative connotations of these two overlapping terms, that “Romania” itself has become a stigma. Brubaker et al. show how some Romanians resent the Roma for spoiling Romania’s image abroad (2006). When I would tell my non-Romani Romanian friends that I studied and worked with Romani people, some were deeply annoyed and some implored, “Please, don’t make us all look like Gypsies.” However, the perception of the country’s spoiled reputation abroad extends to the Roma as well. I met Romanian Roma in the UK who preferred to say they were from a different country, such as Bulgaria. Romani Musicians in Romania: Freedom or Necessity? In all recent “Gypsy music” performances, Balkan Gypsy musicians seem to share an apparent mobility, a perpetual desire to play music, and a complete freedom to cross genres and musical styles. Here is what Kusturica has to say about Gypsy musicians: “The music is so incredible. It operates with a very unique rhythm, but at the same time, its melodies are very eclectic. [...] And moving from place to place, listening, integrating different pieces from others songs freely— they don’t have a feeling of stealing” (in Kaufman 1999). Despite this expression of apparently “positive” Gypsy stereotypes, linking freedom in life and art, in many contexts the “stealing” attributed to the Roma has been used to indicate that they in fact have no music of their own. Kusturica’s description may apply to what he, Bregovic´, and Shantel do more than to the work of Romani musicians. Shantel’s spin on the “stealing” practiced by Gypsy musicians: they started the art of sampling (Shantel 2006). Romani musicians have been wiped off the musical maps of their countries. They have long “Gypsy Music” gone unrecognized, at best qualified as virtuosos lacking music of their own and merely express- ing the national souls of Romanians, , Russians, etc. Romani musicians have played at

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 weddings, funerals, and other occasions for the Gadjos (non-Roma) for centuries. In the process of national identity building in South East Europe, the Gypsies represented the inner other against or through whom the new nations could define themselves, often constructed as “carriers” of national folklores that were not theirs (Gheorghe and Acton 2001). Scholarly debates—in the region and beyond— concerning the very existence of Romani music Figure 7. Vesna Petkovic´, DJ Shantel, and the Bucovina Club Orchestra, Disko have included arguments Partizani tour, Koko, London, 20 Feb. 2008. (Photo by Ioana Szeman) that there is no Romani or Gypsy music and that Gypsies merely perform the music of the majority population where they live (Bartók 1947), that Gypsy music is a “style” that weds improvisation and virtuosity to empha- size the emotion expressed by the music (Malvinni 2004), and finally that there is a distinction between in-group Gypsy music—the real Gypsy music—and the music they play for outsiders (Ra˘dulescu 2004). But the example of an artist like Bregovic´, who has borrowed and used tradi- tional Romani songs, clearly shows that the borrowing goes in both directions. I find Silverman’s perspective useful in shifting the terms of these inevitably politicized debates. She argues for “a more complex web of musical associations embedded in the realm of commercially available popular and folk music with which both Rom and non-Roma interact” (1996:236). While there are many debates around the origin and ownership of traditional music, there is less controversy, in Romania at least, about who manele belong to—the Gypsies. While most man- ele singers are Roma, manele are popular with a large range of audiences in Romania, both rural and urban, from working class to the newly rich. Anti-manelists are often either the highly edu- cated or heavy-metal and fans. Marian-Ba˘las¸a describes in detail the ideological bat- tle between manelis¸ti (manele supporters) on the one hand and rockeri (rockers) and other manele opponents, on the other. The anti-manele strategies range from website battles, with fake manele- making programs and racist comments, to actual street protests against manele concerts. Not all Romani musicians play manele, but in Romania they are seen as the main agents for the proliferation of this music. Some of the Romani musicians successful in the West expressed dislike for manele. When I asked Marius Manole of Taraf de Haïdouks about playing manele in the West, he exclaimed: Nooo, the majority of foreigners, in these countries where we go, do not want manele. Traditional folklore. If we start with manele (wags his index) oh, no, no, no. “Pas de ça, parce que je suis saturé.5 Ça c’est un rythme Turkish.” [Not this, because I am fed up. This is a Turkish rhythm.] (Manole 2007) It would seem that, ironically, Western and Romanian “elite” tastes coincide, as neither group likes manele’s “Turkish rhythms.” However, Manole does play manele on request, especially

5. The French here is a calque on the Romanian. IoanaSzeman

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 at weddings in Romania. This Romani musician, working abroad in highly visible venues, re- turns to more modest venues at home, where he has to accommodate audience tastes. But after having played for 17 years in France, both with and without Taraf, he is less-versed in the local repertory in Romania: “You have to do it, you can’t say no. A woman or a man comes and asks, ‘Play a manea for me, play this for me.’ I say, ‘Which manea is this? Because I don’t know. Go first, please, and then I’ll repeat after you’” (Manole 2007). As true professionals, musicians like Manole play what is required of them, be it traditional music, manele, or most recently, classical music. As mentioned above, the same label that pro- duced Taraf has developed Mahala Raï Banda, which does play manele. The group hails from an urban location, Bucharest—more precisely its slums. Mahala means “slum” in Roma- nian: “It’s from the slums [the music]. That’s where we live, by the way, in the slums of Rahova, Pan- telimon, Ferentari, Mili- tari. ‘Raï,’ in Romani, means ‘noble.’ Among Gypsies, the la˘utari are seen as noble. Hence our name” (Popan 2005; my translation). This Figure 8. Taraf de Haïdouks, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 26 November 2007. “banda”—“gang” in (Photo by Ioana Szeman) Romanian—brings together the Romani and the Romanian in their name. Taraf de Haïdouks’s name, just like their concept, was imposed on them from above. One band member confesses his bafflement when he first heard the name—ahaïdouk (in French), spelled “haiduc” in Romanian, is a rebel peasant who fought against the nobles in the 17th and 18th centuries: “We were also surprised in the beginning: ‘Why are we called Haïdouks?’ But then we saw that the name stuck with us and was successful” (Blaga 2007; my translation).6 For all of the three bands famous in the West—Taraf, Fanfare, and Mahala—the difference between their reception abroad vs. in Romania is staggering. One of the musicians from Mahala, Aurel Ionit¸a˘, explained: “‘I’m sorry to hear my neighbor say: ‘Bro, why did I not see you on so- and-so’s show, where they had first class la˘utari?’ I have to answer him: ‘Dear Neighbor, I’m not good enough for Romania’” (Popan 2005). The sarcasm in the reply is obvious, as the musician further explained that in Romania only money (meaning bribes) and looks get you a place on TV. “Here, in Romania, you get ahead with a super sexy girl; it doesn’t matter if she knows how to sing, you back her up with a guitar and two dancers, like that, well built, all muscles, and you’re in business. The girl is tight with the manager and things are on a roll. Outside this doesn’t work. Look at how fat I am” (Popan 2005). Ionit¸a˘ seems to imply that manele are all about hypermasculine men and sexualized women, which is true of most videos featuring manele. However, some of the most famous manele “Gypsy Music”

6. The names of these bands bear the stamp of their Western managers and often contain Romani and Romanian words spelled in other languages, such as French for Mahala Raï Banda and Taraf de Haïdouks (their managers are Belgian). Fanfare Cioca˘rlia’s name uses an incorrect diacritical for the Romanian word “ciocârlie/a,” meaning lark.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 players in Romania, such as Adrian Copilul Minune, Nicolae Gut¸a˘, and Vali Vijelie, are cele- brated for their voices and not their looks. For Ionit¸a˘, his “fatness” is proof of his talent, which is recognized in the West but ignored by the image-obsessed Romanians. Ionit¸a˘ refuses to see that in the West the band’s acclaimed authenticity is itself a marketing strategy. Just like Taraf who, as Silverman reports, used to appear in tattered clothes to show they had just arrived from the forgotten corners of Romania (2007:346), the Mahala musicians claim the slums as their territory to give them an air of authenticity. “T¸iganizat¸ia”: Deejays with(out) Romani Musicians In Mahala Raï Banda’s concert at the Barbican, non-Romani Belgian DJ Gaetano Fabri digitally enhanced the group’s blasting brass sounds with electronic beats from a corner backstage, tucked behind his keyboards, wearing a Superman T-shirt and a whistle hanging from a string around his neck. The presence of a Western deejay and Romani musicians on the same stage can lend legitimacy to both parties: to Mahala for being a band hip to urban youth, and to Fabri for play- ing “Gypsy music.” At the start of the Barbican concert, the band members invaded the stage from all four directions, even hopping onto the stage from the audience. The audience greeted them with enthusiasm, and some stood up and instantly started dancing. Arms in the air and jumping in place, Fabri set the tone for the dancing, responding to the audience’s frenzy. The electronic beats he contributed to the music encouraged the jumping, arm-waving audience members. The inclusion of genres like manele and traditional music from the Balkans in the Western club scene has blurred clear-cut distinctions between Western and local audiences. There are a growing number of non-Romani musicians playing music from South East Europe, and deejays mixing it sometimes with but primarily without Romani musicians. Shantel, steeped in German music, explains his style as combining “ and acoustic instruments like accordion, percussion and violin” and “electronic playback, which I created” (Shantel 2007). His remix of Mahala Raï Banda’s famous song “Mahalageasca˘” adds an electronic dance rhythm to this already very danceable tune and was included on the (2006) . “Gypsy music does not exist,” Shantel exclaims. “You can only talk about traditional music from different regions of south-eastern Europe,” he continued (in Lynskey 2006:6). Shantel has a point, as I have Figure 9. Finale, Disko Partizani tour concert, Koko, London, 20 been employing “Gypsy music” in this February 2008. (Photo by Ioana Szeman) article. The problem, as I have shown earlier, is that such statements have been taken to mean that Roma have no culture of their own. The term “Gypsy music,” on the other hand, has been used to mean any kind of music from the Balkans. At Shantel’s gig at Koko, a club in London, there were no “authentic” Romani musicians, but there were certainly Romani songs and plenty of mentions of Gypsies. Shantel played with the Bucovina Club Orkestar and the lead singer, Vesna Petkovic´, sang many songs in Serbian about Gypsies (Cigani in Serbian), including “T¸iganizat¸ia,” in English and Romanian. On the Disko Partizani cover, the atmosphere of the Bucovina Club is described: “People who have never set eyes on one another before end up dancing together, when they crash the stage to dance the cˇocˇek alongside the musicians or to get a shot of Vodka from the DJ” (Disko Partizani 2007). At Koko, Shantel spoke of Europe IoanaSzeman

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 without nationalities and without visas, and of the Berlin Wall falling down, just as the division between audience and performers needed to break down. He served vodka shots to the audience but did not allow them onstage. The concert started with a voice summoning Shantel in Romanian to appear onstage: “Bade Shantel” (Uncle Shantel). He sported a fur hat, similar to those worn by shepherds in Romania, and even counted to five a few times in Romanian. Many audience members from the former Yugoslavia understood the Serbian lyrics of Vesna Petkovic´’s songs, just like Romanians under- stood the Romanian, and some understood the Romani, of which in fact there was very little. My Croatian friend sang along with Petkovic´; there was no translation for those who did not understand. Shantel attempted to translate only one of his songs, sung mostly in Romanian. He summarized the song as: “Let’s burn this fucking night.” They also played songs Kusturica’s films had made famous, such as “Duj Sandale” and “Buba Mara.” Van de Port has identified the projection mechanisms that function in the remote bars of Novi Sad, in , where Romani musicians allow the Serbian audiences to be like the Gypsies, encouraging them to enact the collective fantasies of wildness, freedom, and sexuality. At Koko, Petkovic´ sang some of these songs about imaginary Gypsies. In this concert, the Balkan Gypsy trope continues to be at work without “authentic” Romani musicians, replaced by Shantel and the other artists. Despite the band’s multinational makeup, the abundance of songs replete with Gypsy stereotypes remains problematic. Shantel’s politics are more interesting than some other Western musicians from the dance scene who use the “Gypsy” brand. He discusses the multicultural past of a region like Bucovina and the destruction the Nazis brought to it, even though he does not mention the Roma. Other Western musicians feel entitled to dip at leisure into the repertory of traditional music without the faintest understanding of the history and politics behind it. One member of the American band Beirut unapologetically confessed that he had no idea about the history of “Gypsy music,” or about Transylvania, for that matter, which is the title of one of their albums (in Lynskey 2006:6). The bohemian appropriation and projective identification with the Gypsies continues in these instances through erasure. It is no surprise, then, that Romani musicians from Fanfare Cioca˘rlia dismissed Shantel’s mixing as “dogshit” (6). As Beissinger shows, musicians and la˘utari make a living in an extremely competitive environment and Beirut and Shantel may be Cioca˘rlia’s competition on the international market (2001). The Gypsy motif and Gypsy stereotypes of the Serbian songs sung by Petkovic´, and Shantel’s own song and video “T¸iganizat¸ia,” play a role in perpetuating discourses of Balkanism and Orien- talism. Like the Gypsies in the Serbian songs van de Port discusses, Shantel’s “Gypsification” has less to do with the Roma and more with the Orientalist perspective in Romania toward Gypsies and manele. The video takes place in , the music is from the Balkans, and Gypsification represents the link between the two. In the video, Shantel, with his trademark fur hat, sings in Romanian and English and travels on a magic carpet to the streets of Istanbul. Here he moves from a hotel room to a , where five scantily dressed young women are belly dancing onstage; he interacts with local men on the streets and is backed by male singers, who do a rap routine in Romanian and seem cut from one of the current local videos. The sound includes manele-style singing and brass instruments, added to electronic beats. Shantel sports a playful Chaplin-like persona, awkward and dreaming of being a music star, following a self-propelled mic in the street and a girl who rejects him in the end and takes his mic as well. Shantel’s tongue-in-cheek attitude in the video and his own “foreignness” make the places and people he encounters seem exotic and “cool”—or “uncool” as he would say. He is a bit of a crazy stranger, Gadjo Dilo, like the protagonist in Gatlif’s film. Shantel, a Westerner, is attracted to precisely what some Romanians revile: manele “Gypsy Music” and local fusion styles. He celebrates the threat that these Romanians fear: “a se t¸iganiza,” to become like a Gypsy, kitsch, uncool. Shantel appropriates both Romania and the Roma from

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 within, his traveler’s gaze exoticizing the places, people, and music that for local anti-manelists represent dangerous signs of the Orient’s proximity. Manele in their multiple , pop, and rap incarnations, represent a genre that, as Bu- chanan points out in the case of chalga (2007), was not intended for Western audiences. There- fore, Shantel’s performance breaks down this barrier of what is/what is not for the West, offer- ing the Balkans as a whole and Balkan/Romanian Orientalist fantasies as exotic destinations. Buchanan identifies ethnopop genres as “illustrations of an emergent Balkan cosmopolitanism, where the Ottoman Empire’s musical legacy has become part and parcel of the local grassroots creative lexicon” that “must be interpreted in tension with both older layers of cosmopolitan- ism resulting from European socialism, and competing visions of modernity” (2007:260). While Shantel may be delivering for diasporic and migrant audiences a sense of Balkan cosmopolitan- ism, what is troubling is what “gypsification” has come to mean in this song specifically, and in the branding of “Gypsy music” more generally. Musically, it functions as another apology for mixing and sampling, and in fact works to erase the Roma. Shantel accesses the “authentic” music local people listen to and makes it available for Western consumption, but at the same time he reiterates some of the problematic stereotypes about manele and Romani musicians. Romani musicians in bands like Taraf de Haïdouks and Fanfare Cioca˘rlia perform the Balkan “Gypsy musician” stereotype expected of them, while “Gypsy music” festivals encourage a wholesale identification of the Balkans and Gypsies. In the dance scene, sampling—typical of both deejays and Romani musicians—would seem to erase borders and encourage genre crossing. This practice, however, maintains Gypsy stereotypes and erases Romani musicians’ contribution, adding yet another step in the process of appropriation, projection, and erasure of the Roma in “Gypsy music” performances. As long as the “Gypsy” stamp remains a way to exoticize any music from the Balkans, concerts and videos like those described here will continue to perpetuate the romantic Gypsy stereotypes, ultimately failing to bring either the Roma or the Balkans—in their diversity and complexity—closer.

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