Balkan Pop-Folk

Balkan Pop-Folk is the umbrella term for the commercial folk-pop hybrids that dominate popular music across the whole post-Ottoman Balkans: Serbian turbo-folk, Bulgarian chalga, Romanian manele, Albanian tallava and their Greek and Bosnian counterparts. Synthesiser and drum-machine arrangements carry folk and Romani melodies, oriental scales and accordion or clarinet hooks beneath diva-fronted singing about love, money and betrayal. Vilified by cultural elites and embraced by mass audiences across every generation, it is today the region's defining and best-selling popular sound of the entire post-socialist era.