Slovenian Folk-Pop as Politics: Perceptions, Receptions and Identities

General information

Code: J6-2582
Period: 1.9.2020 - 31.8.2024
Project leader at FDV: prof.dr. Peter Stanković
Research activity: Humanities

Abstract

A wedding, a funeral, a sports victory or simply a party in Slovenia hardly goes by without the tunes of folk-pop (narodno-zabavna glasba) – the most ubiquitous, all-pervasive, mainstream, proverbially “Slovenian” musical genre. Surprisingly, this very genre, which continues to exhibit profound influence on Slovenian “national aesthetics” (Mlekuž 2015, Močnik 2009, Stanković 2015), the nation's symbolic imaginary, its party and celebration playlists, as well as other musical genres, has managed to escape the attention of researchers. Slovenian popular music has thus far predominantly been studied as a tool of alternative identity formation and articulation; in terms of its politics, its productively disruptive capacities in particular have been emphasized (Hofman 2015; Velikonja 2003; Velikonja 2013).The value of such studies, which, understandably, focus on alternative genres and practices, cannot be overstated. They point to the vibrant complexity of the Slovenian cultural landscape, both demonstrating the formative role of music in place- and identity-articulation, and effectively contextualizing the Slovenian landscape of musical production and consumption practices from regional and transnational musical, cultural, and theoretical perspectives. This project wishes to take these studies further by scrutinizing folk-pop, a prominent and arguably the most underresearched aspect of the Slovenian contemporary musicscape. The project builds on the PI Prof. Dr. Peter Stanković’s extensive previous research on Slovenian popular music (Stanković 2002, 2006, 2014, 2015) and addresses the research gaps and challenges identified in the last major study on Slovenian mainstream popular music (2010-2013). This study, headed by Stanković, was part of a HERA-funded project on popular music heritage, cultural memory and identity. Among other findings, the results of this project demonstrated the perseverance of strong links between folk-pop and national identity in political and educational discourse (Zevnik 2014) and in audience research (Majsova 2016), and, at the same time, the absence of this genre in heritage discourse (Stanković 2014) and in scholarly literature (Stanković 2015). Taking these findings as its point of departure, this project aims to determine the contemporary cultural impact of folk-pop and its involvement in governance in Slovenia by investigating it from the perspectives of a) policies and production; b) media exposure; c) reception and d) texts, aiming to analyze it in terms of representation and mediatized performance. We intend to provide a multifaceted mapping of contemporary folk-pop in terms of 1) its presence in music production, print and audiovisual media; 2) its visibility in legislation, cultural policies, political and commercial discourse; 3) its perceived entanglements with local, regional and national history, cultural memory and identification, and 4) its expressed aesthetics (text, performance and imagery, with special attention to its navigation of gender roles and its aesthetics of the rural and the urban, as well as the traditional and the modern). In doing so, the project will enrich Slovenian popular music studies by providing a valuable contextualization of the contemporary popular-musicscape, and thereby complementing studies on other genres. The project will also provide a much-needed assessment of the contemporary transformations of the genre’s place in the national economy, and of its status as a “national” genre. It will be the first study to date to interrogate folk-pop’s traditionalist, conservative and nationalist aesthetic by analyzing its contemporary impetus to respond to and incorporate developments from other genres, and also its impact on other genres (such as pop-rock).

The phases of the project and their realization

1. Team consolidation and development of research and methodological foundations
2. Data collection (quantitative approaches (M8 to M12) and qualitative approaches (M10 to M30))
3. Data analysis (from M13 to M36)
4. Dissemination and communication of results (M15 to M48)

Research Organisation

https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/18345

Researchers

https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/18345

Citations for bibliographic records

https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/18345

Results / Key findings

This project offers a much needed, and hitherto inexistent mapping of the significance, prominence and connotations of Slovenia’s most widespread and allegedly preferred popular music genre. It is the first ever study to evaluate the contemporary transformations of folk-pop, and to do so in the broader contexts of political factors, the media ecology, networks, text and performance analysis and reception, tracing the temporal changes in various relevant structural relations. Moreover, the research conducted within this project shed light on the entanglements between the popular music industry and current important political and socio-cultural transformations (new forms of market economy in the context of digitization and the appearance of new platforms; a transformation of relations between progress and tradition, the city and the countryside, the nation and the world) in the Slovenian cultural context. This project provides a model for future studies on Slovenian popular music, and will serve as a springboard for further investigations into music genres. One such further study could investigate the migration of genres and related practices across borders and appropriations and (re-)uses of genres by national diasporas abroad. This project and its experimental multidisciplinary design has enriched the fields of media studies, popular music studies, popular culture, stardom and fandom studies, and history and sociology of culture; it is of particular significance for gender studies and nostalgia studies. The project provides insight into hitherto unexplored recent developments in the fields of popular-music-related professions, networks and their political implications, and used digital data visualization methods to illustrate and highlight the connections between these aspects. This broadly conceived framework allowed the project to conduct an extremely nuanced analysis of representations (particularly placemaking, identity-formation, temporalities and gender) within the genre of folk-pop, making a contribution to studies of the transformations of the Slovenian cultural and symbolic imaginary. The project has provided new theoretical insights in the fields of gender, memory, and media studies, advancing studies on temporality and gender, memory and media, and media and history.

Key words

aesthetics, audiences, audiovisual media, cultural policy, gender, identities, popular music

Sustainable Development Goals

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