Goran Bregovic and orchestra performing Bella Ciao in Paris
I was lucky enough to have seen two incredible performers last month: Serbian gypsy orchestra leader Goran Bregovic and American rock legend Bruce Springsteen.
While the obvious difference between the two comes down to genre — Bregovic comes from the Balkan big band tradition, while Springsteen is very much of the American rock tradition — there is quite a bit of overlap in the way they each approach music.
The most superficial, but not unimportant, similarity is the size of their bands or “orchestras”.
Big band sounds
There’s a reason why both “bosses” have big bands; Bregovic had an 18-piece ensemble, while Springsteen had 17 in his band (I’m pretty sure) when they both performed in Melbourne last month.
Springsteen and Bregovic both have a big, all-encompassing vision for their music that takes in a range of influences they want to both assimilate and display. The beauty of having a big band (it definitely wouldn’t be the wage bill) is the versatility and scope it gives in drawing on different sounds, combinations and styles.
With Springsteen, it’s being able to give voice to a truly pan-American style which takes in the obvious influences — Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan-style folk, the epic orchestrations of the Beach Boys-Phil Spector, and the soul party band sounds of Springsteen’s 70s contemporaries like Bob Seger — as well as the less obvious — Nuggets-style 60s garage, a dash of country rockabilly twang, and even the heavy stripped back atmospherics of Suicide (Springsteen’s State Trooper, I’m on Fire, his cover of Suicide’s Dream Baby Dream — and here’s the Suicide original).
For Bregovic, the Balkan band tradition he comes from already dictates a clash of empires sound that dates back hundreds of years: the brass oompah rhythms of Bavaria-Austria, the snaking oriental melodies of the Ottomans, and the ancient Indian bedrock of sound at the heart of gypsy music.
This is before we even factor in the myriad other sounds swirling about in the Balkan brass pot of sound: Jewish klezmer, Greek rembetika, and the deep, doleful sounds of Orthodox church chants to name a few.
In true “boss” fashion, these two performers are across the scope of styles they are trying to coerce, each with the conviction and vision to take on a project which could easily end up as a disjointed mess.
Both are charismatic performers, stepping beyond the conductor’s pit to lead the cavalry charge from the front. Springsteen does this in an almost preacher-like manner, cajoling the audience to get up, dance and become part of the rock ‘n’ roll communion.
Bregovic, at least when I saw him, didn’t have to work as hard as Springsteen to engage the audience. This was probably because he knew his audience made up mostly of Serbians and other Balkanites would need little prompting to get up and shimmy down the staid concert hall aisles at Hamer Hall.
In fact, the only thing missing at the Bregovic show was a wedding to go with the band.
Big sound, big politics
Politics plays a pivotal part in the music of these two bosses. In Bregovic’s case, it’s the cut-throat arena of Balkan national identity which frames his music and gives it an especially combustible edge.
Bregovic is mostly identified as Serbian, though his own remarks on the subject show that he is more comfortable with a pan-Slavic form of identity:
My emotional territory is between Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo. I have the three passports: Bosnian, Croatian, Serb. If one day, I stop somewhere, I would like to live in this territory. I feel myself deeply yugo!
Reflecting the common nature of ethnic mix in the Balkans, he was born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to a Croatian father and Serbian mother.
While Springsteen proclaims and makes a virtue of his American workingman politics, Bregovic embraces an apolitical stance that puts the music first.
But by the very nature of the Balkans, and especially anything to do with the contested nature of ethnic and national identity, it is almost impossible for a performer of Bregovic’s popularity and stature not to be dragged into the ideological crossfire.
Yugoslavia is the intersection of so many worlds: Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim,” says Bregović. “With music, I don’t have to represent anyone except myself — because I speak the first language of the world, the one everyone understands: music.
A question of gypsy kings
Part of what has made Bregovic so popular the world over has been his association with the gypsy musical traditions of the Balkans. He might not be an ethnic Romany (gypsy) but he has readily appropriated their sounds and mystique to push his own music forward.
The music of the Balkans is such a stew of styles that a little gypsy spice was almost always going to find its way into his musical goulash, but the cultural cachet of gypsy music in the West has probably made it easier for Bregovic to become a big name on the Western world music scene.
He certainly hasn’t escaped the charges made by some music critics that his appropriation of gypsy songs is much like what happened with the work of black American blues musicians having their rhythm and blues work taken and adapted by white American performers and repackaged as rock ‘n’ roll.
Among the performers Bregovic is said to have ripped off are the likes of Serbian gypsy Saban Bajramovic, known as the ‘king of gypsy singers’, and Esma Redzepova, the Macedonian singer likewise referred to as the ‘queen of gypsy song’.
Bregovic’s story, though transplanted to the Balkans, is not untypical of many rockers in the US or UK: there’s definitely an element of the middle-class kid identifying with the otherness of gypsy culture through music and culture which has parallels to the way white rock ‘n’ rollers felt about ‘race’ music and culture. The Rolling Stones and any number of English rockers from the 60s are great examples of that.
In fact, he readily acknowledges his desire to be a gypsy:
But because everyone wants to be a gypsy. It is like wanting to be a cowboy. I was born in a family very distant from this culture. My father was a colonel. It is surely why my universe is also influenced by the military music.
Right now, we’ve headed into a mess of cross-cultural, psychological and musical signifiers.
Think on this: The ‘white’ man most commonly associated with stealing black music in order to make it his own and be crowned the king of his particular musical heap is Elvis Presley; part of the substratum of Presley mythology is that he too was a gypsy, of Sinti German origin on his mother’s side apparently; that Presley was a gypsy is confirmed for many by Bob Dylan’s song I Went to See the Gypsy, supposedly written by Dylan after he met Presley. (Of course, others insist Dylan’s song is about legendary wrestler Gorgeous George! But that’s a whole other blog post.)
Then there’s the small matter of Bregovic and Presley both having a ‘colonel’ father-figure in their lives.
Even aforementioned gypsy queen Esma Redzepova knew Elvis had Romany blood: “Elvis Presley was a Gypsy. Da. I know these things. He never admitted it but he was a Rom.”
Patriot or class warrior? Can a Boss be both?
Springsteen might not have had to contend with the convoluted minefield that is Balkania which Bregovic has had to negotiate, but he too has had to struggle with identity issues that go beyond music into the murkier realms of American class politics.
This collision of politics and identity was especially evident when Springsteen’s second truly massive album, Born in the USA, was released in 1984. The title song from that album was even used for a brief time by the arch conservative Big Daddy character of American politics, former president Ronald Reagan, during his re-election campaign that same year. Reagan had interpreted Springsteen’s anthemic hit as a patriotic call to arms, a song that celebrated the virtues of the American dream and all its promise.
It was nothing of the sort. But that didn’t stop it being interpreted as such by a large chunk of the population who, like so many people often do with pop songs, managed to fixate on a few key words of a chorus and conflate those words into meaning whatever the hell they wanted the song to mean.
In this case, coming off the back of a depressed late ’70s economy, the various humiliations still lingering from the Carter administration era and the ever-present threat of a Soviet-inspired Red Dawn, Springsteen’s critique of the American dream gone awry from the perspective of a Vietnam War vet seemed to go over the heads of a lot of people:
Got in a little hometown jam,
So they put a rifle in my hand,
Sent me off to a foreign land,
To go and kill the yellow man
Of course Springsteen and his management very quickly moved to make it be known that the Boss was in no way down with the Gipper’s program nor with the use of his song by the Republicans for Reagan’s campaign.
But an interesting point raised by writer Marc Dolan in his book, Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ‘N’ Roll, (an excerpt of which you can read here), is that Springsteen’s widescreen panorama depicted an America which was essentially a land of promise; the exact same message Reagan wanted to tap into in his quest for ‘aspirational’ (this was the birth of the Yuppy Age after all) voters looking to bust out of the cynicism that had encapsulated American society and politics in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era:
In the end, when you compared Springsteen’s fall 1984 tour with Reagan’s, no matter how different their political visions were supposed to be, their rhetoric seemed a lot alike.
Music, identity and political bum notes
Springsteen and Bregovic both started their careers as largely apolitical performers; neither was initially moved to make music as a means to effect political change; and their political awakenings have come very much as a consequence of being thrust into a position of popularity that has forced them to either assert or deny a set of ideals ascribed to their music.
Both have had to contend with nationalist agendas which have tried to enlist their music to a cause: conservative American patriotism for Springsteen; and Serbian nationalism for Bregovic.
Springsteen has well and truly separated himself from any association with conservative politics, while Bregovic has sought to distance himself from any affiliation with Serbian nationalism, opting instead for an almost archaic embrace of pan-Yugo/Balkan solidarity that tries to soothe the pains of the past 20 or so years with songs of sex, celebration, death, and even a little satire.