The Tar Pit

Motto:
Yeah-yeah-yeah!
Steel is my entire life!

This article is the result of multiple disconnected discussions that were had over the course of many weeks, if not years, which led to the birth of a few ideas which became crystal clear to me in the last few days.

Delia Matache, the daughter of one Gina Matache, a "Romanian folklore singer"¹, is herself a very talented, educated and quite clever manele singer. In fact I like her so much that one of her lyrics is now in my tagline!

I'm well aware that Delia Matache began her career by singing some boring pop songs along with some dude who meanwhile fell into forgetfulness -- or rather, she sang while he pretended to rap. In this day and age nobody cares anymore, meanwhile Delia has evolved her own artistic style, which yes indeed, culminated with "her" manele -- in all fairness, not really hers, and not in the slightest because it's someone else's, but rather because manele singers never made much case about the whole "intellectual property" mumbo-jumbo. Fucking fortunately! In any case, make no mistake, she is a manele singer first and foremost, and there's really no shame in that.

Delia Matache is well educated because she correctly recognized the roots of the song she sang -- I'm serious, look up the interview where she heard it first, she did the whole job for you: that's a so-and-so Balkan rhythm with a Greek modality, where by "Greek" we mean neo-Greek, which is to say, I suppose, Turkish. That means she knows what she's doing, which is definitely on par with manele standards and miles above the average Romanian "pop artist".

Last but not least, she is smart, even clever, since even as we cut deep and leave aside the entire aesthetical marketing thing she's doing with "Rockadelia", we find that her modern rock-manele blend is reflected in the very lyrics she stole -- "Steel", that is "metal", is her entire life, didja even get that? But make no mistake, the song remains a true manea, no "rock", no bullshit whatsoever.

I bet right now you're wondering what the fuck's wrong with me, and where did the previous four paragraphs come from all of a sudden? And what's Delia got to do with the title?

Let's take a trip down memory lane (for some at least), tracking back in the 1990s, or even late 1980s, when some Romanian singers took whatever instruments they had on hand and started translating Romanian and Gypsy folklore into what we first called "muzică țigănească" and then we started calling "manele". First we heard Azur and Generic², then Minune, Guță et alia started gaining traction and then... a whole fucking wave of singers, led by the Salam doing mostly the Bulgarian Tallava, simply hit the speakers of each and every bairam³ in the hood.

But this is not even the impressive bit. What's impressive is that the genre called manele grew despite its (and thusly, perhaps with the help of) brutal repression in mainstream media. You'd only rarely hear any manea on mainstream TV in the 2000s, while mainstream radio never promoted it⁴. And yes I'm aware it was their loss, since then YouTube came and at that point mainstream "stars" began struggling to keep up with the trend. And get this, it was abso-fucking-lutely organic, these guys managed to own the platform, do you get me?

And thus it's no wonder that Delia is now a manele singer, since she knows that TV will now have no choice but to air her interpretation and... well, that's about it, manele has thusly eaten Romanian music. Scratch that, it's eaten Balkan music and I'm pretty sure it's only growing in size and scope.

This is not a new phenomenon either. Going back further to the 1920s and running through them up until at least as far as the 1960s (but really, until this very day); and focusing our lens this time over the Atlantic, whether in the southern delta of Mississippi or in New Orleans, Chicago, or even in Memphis and New York, there grew a style of music sung by the folks of African descent, although they were as American as one can be an American. Jazz was through those decades as much a musical genre as much as it was jizz, and it was so powerful a music that it coopted "classical" music, so much that entire orchestras would gather to play Gillespie instead of Strauss.

Only through sheer coincidence we may agree with the pantsuits here: whether you like jazz or not, that's entirely a matter of taste. Otherwise there's really nothing placing it below the so-called "classical white"⁵ genre, it's not like Miles Davis' free modals are in any objective manner of speaking "below" Beethoven's sonatas. That's nonsense, which makes the pantsuits' derpage about supposed "white elitist patriarchy" all the more ridiculous. Anyway, all the whites did was try to coopt blues -- since, with the exception of maybe Brubeck and a few others, they didn't really understand jazz -- which resulted in that obscure country genre⁶ and which at most gave birth to a sub-genre, that meanwhile utterly dead "rock music".

So you see, history is just repeating itself over here in our little Balkans. Soon enough Cheloo is going to start singing manele along with his workmate, 'cause really, there. was. nothing. else. The world has changed, indeed, and there's simply no point in resisting it. Sure, you may call it a "cultural war" if you will, since it's definitely way more "cultural" than the one in software.

I'll call it the sweeping, unstoppable wave that's coming to get you.

Filed under: olds.
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