The Banat Scene of Manele and the Polish Papal Complex
My plan at home was to do exhaustive anthropological research and analyse Timișoara’s schizophrenic relationship with the manea. Given that the city on the Bega is one of the birthplaces of the pop manea and the Serbian proximity predetermined its Balkan harmonies, why does it continue to reject the manea so vehemently even today, when the moral panic surrounding this phenomenon has subsided?
Nevertheless, that kind of research sounded too ambitious and focused on far too many factors interacting in a complex cultural equation. I would have had to analyse: 1. the status of Timișoara as the Romanian capital of rock during communism; 2. the strong anti-communist sentiment, originating in the pride of having triggered the Romanian Revolution; 3. the cultural bovarism of a space that preferred self-mirroring in the flattering lie of belonging to the Central European, not the Balkan space that lies in its geographical proximity; 4. the dissolution of Yugoslavia, replaced by Serbia, a ruined state; and, last but not least, 5. the population’s racism intensified by the prosperity of the Roma people, who bought heritage buildings in the city centre.
In the space of a month, I wouldn’t have had time to clarify so many issues that were fundamental for understanding this city. For that reason, I decided to write a history of the Banat school of manele in relation to its public reception (pros and cons) and, taking advantage of the fact that my residence was literary, to carry out my analysis of the fundamental questions as literary speculation.
Conceptual clarification
For the beginning, a conceptual clarification is required: the history of the manea starts, if not during Dimitrie Cantemir’s time, at least during Anton Pann’s. In the seventh and eighth decades of the last century, the manea was in the repertoire of well-known folk singers like Gabi Luncă (Mama mea e florăreasă, Răpirea din serai 1 ) and Romica Puceanu (Șaraiman, Florăresele 2 ). Yet it is not the historical manea played by ‘lăutari’ on acoustic instruments (cimbalom, double bass, violin) that makes the object of my research, but the pop manea, played on electronic instruments (synthesizer, electric guitar, bass guitar). The period I am discussing begins in the 80’s, when the manea became electronic and turned into ethno-pop, and extends up to the present.
The beginnings of the pop manea: (probably) double origin
When it comes to music, when you say Timișoara you say rock – a real school that started with Phoenix – the band that generated formidable emulation on the banks of the Bega – and later expressed itself through top bands such as Pro Musica and Celelalte cuvinte (musicians from Oradea who studied in Timișoara).
Not many people know that, in addition to rock, Timișoara also has a history of the manea. The city created a school whose influence on the genre was as strong as that of Phoenix on the rock scene. Its privileged geographical position on the border with Serbia turned it into one of the entry points of manele in the Romanian cultural circuit.
The origin of the pop manea is disputed. On the one hand, Paul Breazu claims, with valid arguments 3 , that the genre appeared in 1982, with Nicolae Răceanu’s song, Magdalena, recorded in the USA and available in Romania on samizdat tapes. On the other hand, Margaret Beissinger and Speranța Rădulescu 4 claim that the genre originated in Banat. Called either Oriental, or Turkish or Serbian music, the genre would have emerged as the local adaptation of novokompovna narodna muzika (roughly translated as ‘modern folklore’) from the former Yugoslavia. Banned by the communist government as ‘polluted folklore’, the manele were still played by ‘lăutari’ at weddings. In those years, the genre was popularised by both Roma ‘lăutari’ and Serbian folk singers who played both acoustic and electric instruments. For example, Laza Cnejević, a Romanian singer of Serbian origin specialised in Serbian music, performed with both organ and traditional accompaniment.
Be that as it may, it is certain that as early as the ninth decade of the last century, the ‘modernised’ manea could be heard in two regions, Banat and the south of Romania. The south meant the counties on the banks of the Danube (Galați, Brăila) or near the sea (Constanța), where ‘bișnița’ 5 was in full swing, thanks to the sailors who, in addition to jeans and cassette decks, also sold Balkan music, Greek in particular, or preset organ harmonies. In Banat, the trajectory was most likely similar: not only electronic appliances, chewing gum and Vegeta, but also Balkan ethno-pop, in this case, Serbian music, was sold.
While the communist regime in Bulgaria reacted to the ethno-pop manea as its Romanian counterpart, banning and labelling it as ‘polluted folklore’, the liberal socialist regime of Yugoslavia, which allowed the free mix of modernised folklore and Pan-Balkan fusion music, did not enforce folkloric purism; on the contrary, it allowed TV and radio stations to broadcast the new pop mutants from which the turbo-folk, the Serbian equivalent of the manea, emerged. A lorry driver from my native village remembers that he used to bring Serbian music tapes from Novi Sad, and that even singers from Banat went there to record tapes of ‘new folklore’.
Audiotim, the music studio that trafficked Serbian music under communism
Nevertheless, there were also quasi-clandestine recording studios in Banat. In those years, the most important player on the market was the proto-entrepreneur Ghiță Olaru’s studio, Audiotim, which promoted modernised folklore (mostly acoustic instrumentation, but with ‘capitalist’ lyrics such as ‘Money, money rules/Money, money make you rich’), as well as Serbian music of the manea type.
What served as a turning point for the change in the folk music was, in Radu Pavel Gheo’s opinion, the ‘ruga’, a festivity similar to the ‘Sons of the Village’, where people ate ‘mititei’, drank beer and listened to folk music to celebrate the anniversary of the dedication day of their church. Gheo also says that a whole industry proliferated around these ‘rugi’, so that many folk singers subscribed to these celebrations, which were generously funded by the town halls; in Gheo’s words, ‘people knew that between Easter and autumn, that was where big money was made.’
It is clear that the public wanted the modernisation of the traditional repertoire – if not the music, then at least the lyrics, so that they could see their universe and philosophy expressed in words. This led to songs about new characters such as the driver, the smuggler etc., and a philosophy of life that moved sensibly away from the ideological commandments of the age and the folkloric ethos to embrace (proto)-capitalist materialism, meaning money and family prosperity as one’s purpose in life.
However, the new musical productions had to circulate somehow – hence the need for recording studios. Pavel Gheo remembers that besides Audiotim, other such studios of uncertain status (there was one in Reșita too, says Gheo) existed, but the shop where he bought tapes was called Audiotim and was located somewhere near the railway station. ‘At the end of a tape, a voice announced that the album had been recorded in the North Station Studio. The North Station may have been a code name for Audiotim. Audiotim had become a brand; when my friends and I were talking about that place, we always said Audiotim. Who knows how they managed to hide its real purpose, maybe they called it an artisans’ cooperative. I have no idea. I used to buy bootleg Western or Yugoslavian rock music from there, for one leu per recorded minute. For my family, I bought brand new original folklore, especially Vasile Conea’s modernised folk albums’.
An important moment in the history of the genre is Lepa Brena’s concert in 1996. What I have in mind when I say important is the further evolution of things: Serbian music, i.e. the manea, was to separate from the (proto)turbo-folk promoted by the Yugoslav diva. Her concert filled a whole stadium and remained in the city’s memory as one of the hottest musical events in the communist period, close in reverberation to the Phoenix concerts.
Interestingly, although specialized literature includes Lepa Brena in the turbo-folk style (she is considered the godmother, the founder of that style), although manele singer Stana Izbașa imitates her, although Lepa Brena’s songs were played by ‘lăutari’ of manele (see Cik Pogodi), the people of Timișoara continue to perceive Lepa Brena’s music as something else, arguing that it is not turbo-folk and it has nothing to do with manele. Where does this difference in perception come from? Either my ear is not trained enough to distinguish between regional differences, or this is about a bias that – I dare to believe – does not characterise me.
The 90s and the Banat school of manele
As far as the manea is concerned, we have two schools: the southern school and the Banat school. Up until the end of the first decade after the Revolution, the two schools went each their own way. They were never mixed because, after 1989, competed by Anglo-American music, the manea gradually lost its appeal and its mainstream audience. That is why, by the end of the decade, the schools had developed underground, supported financially by their faithful public of limited education. In other words, while in the first years after the Revolution the manele could be heard in the discotheques of the big cities, later they disappeared from the playlists.
After 1989, the Banat school based its discursive universe on rural coordinates (probably because the audience itself was mostly rural), while the southern one used mostly urban characters and settings. In addition, the Banat school singers did not specialize in manele, which was usually one of the genres they played besides modernised folklore (acoustic or ethno-pop). The best example here is Carmen Șerban, who switched spectacularly between genres: she burst onto the scene in duet with Adrian Minune between 1996 and 1999, only to disappear from the public’s attention until 2004, when she received a golden record for the album Văd numai oameni necăjiți 6 , with synthesizer rhythms borrowed from (modernised) Romanian folk music. Even today the manele and the Transylvanian Roma folklore videoclips and lyrics sound more rural than those in the South.
The man who promoted the new genre in Banat was the same tireless Ghiță Olaru, with his Audiotim production house. After the Revolution, Ghiță Olaru preserved his brand. Moreover, in addition to managing Audiotim, he became the agent of a huge number of singers of folk music, modernised folk music or manele; unlike Dan Bursuc, whose career as producer and agent remained strictly within the province of manele, Ghiță Olaru’s diversified portfolio includes productions from all ethno, pop or acoustic areas even today.
In the area of manele, the most important singer launched by Olaru in the music circuit is, without a doubt, Nicolae Guță, a name that – according to the world music market – is more important and better rated internationally than Timișoara’s rock emblem Phoenix. His 1996 album, Nicolaé Gutsa - La Grande Voix Tzigane D’aujourd’hui, which had gone unnoticed at the time of its initial release, was rediscovered in 2010, when it was released again by a more important label (Innacor) and included by Le Monde in the top five world music albums of the year.
Although from the town of Petroșani, Guță built his career on the more profitable harmonies of Banat. After ’89, he commuted between Petroșani and Timișoara, where he caught Ghiță Olaru’s attention. Until 1998, although he used a synthesizer and an electric guitar, Guță had not sung manele, but created his own style while testing various harmonies. By the end of the decade, however, when it was obvious that the manea had won the ethno-pop battle, Guță shifted towards the manea harmonies and rhythms until 2003, performing his own compositions.
Just as Copilul de Aur was Dan Bursuc’s golden goose, the singer whom he launched and who made him a lot of money and ensured his fame, Nicolae Guță was the vehicle that launched Ghiță Olaru and his Audiotim on the national level, placing him among the leading players on the Romanian ethno-pop market.
In addition to Guță, Olaru also launched Sorina (who, as Guță’s official mistress, benefitted from his compositions in the first and most successful part of her career), Stana Izbașa, Adriana Antoni and especially Dorin Covaci, one of the most underrated Romanian ‘lăutari’, partially forgotten today. In the Banat school, he comes right after King Guță.
Towards 2000: beyond Audiotim, but inside the Banat school
The most important name of the Banat school, though not promoted by Olaru, is Carmen Șerban from Timișoara, who had her albums released by the rival of Audiotim, Studio Recordings – also from Timișoara. Carmen Șerban burst onto the national scene due to her performance with Adrian Minune between 1996 and 1999.
Adrian Minune belonged to the first wave of ‘lăutari’ who debuted after 1989, like Dan Armeanca, Dan Bursuc, Vali Vijelie, and Jean de la Craiova. By the end of the decade, he had become famous mostly in Bucharest, but once he started his collaboration with Carmen Șerban he achieved celebrity in Transylvania as well.
The credit goes to Carmen Șerban, who became the mistress of a businessman from Strehaia, Mehedinți County, called Ion Mihai Stelică and known as Leo de la Strehaia, who sponsored the albums of the two singers. It was no surprise that by the end of the 90s, the eccentric businessman’s yard had become the national centre of the manea. On the released albums, important names from the south, such as the clarinettist Dan Bursuc and Doru Calotă (aka Doru from Târgoviște) were featured as guests.
Adrian Minune is, first of all, a performer, and only then a composer. On the albums he released with Carmen Șerban, the latter, who wrote the songs, is more visible than Adrian Minune. Things must be seen in relation to their position in Leo’s yard. As the sponsor’s mistress, Carmen Şerban was in a position of power. The five albums released with Adrian Minune told the phantasmagorical biography of Leo and his relationship with Şerban. Consequently, in most of the songs, Adrian plays Leo, and Carmen Șerban plays herself. The albums strongly promoted customised songs; as far as I know, they are the first albums to build a complete biography of a sponsor, whose name and biography are embedded in the tracks. Not that Leo invented this genre, whose tradition is lost in the history of the ‘lăutari’, but he practiced it systematically and there are entire albums about the anointed Prince Leo.
The albums were a mixture of the two schools and enjoyed success both in the south of the country and Transylvania. Carmen Șerban and Adrian Minune became the most famous names of the manele scene, and in 1999 the latter was the true of this genre, crowned as such at ‘Miss Piranda’, the Bucharest Miss Roma festival, which also gathered the cream of all the ‘lăutari’ in a concert.
1999-2003: The two schools merged
After 1999, through the album of Costi Ioniță and Adrian Minune, Fără concurență 7 , the manea burst onto the mainstream scene. For a few years, just like at the end of communism, the manele went beyond the boundaries of their loyal, poorly educated public, regaining their general audience. By 2002, the discos in student campuses had been playing manele ad nauseam.
In that period, the Banat school stood out due to the fusion with the southern one, so much so that from a certain point the Timișoara-type manea lost its specificity. All the important singers of the Banat school did duets with their southern counterparts: Stana Izbașa with Adrian Minune; Adriana Antoni with Salam, Sorina with Copilul de Aur, Guță with countless others etc.
2003-2012: The moral panic and the dissolution of the Banat school of manele
After the period in which it revived its old singers by having them do duets with their southern counterparts, the Banat school no longer launched important names on the national circuit. The local manele scene seemed to have lost its compass and dissolved itself either in modernised Romanian folk music (Carmen Șerban, Adriana Antoni) and Roma compositions like those of Sandu Ciorbă (Sorina), or simply dissolved in the Bucharest school (Nicolae Guță); in other words, it was like a dead organism which the neighbours tore apart piece by piece. In this regard, the fate of the One Million club seems paradigmatic to me. It was opened in Timișoara in 2008-2009, by Dan Bursuc and a ‘lăutar’ from the south, Florin Salam, gave two of his live masterpiece performances, Cap și pajură and Soldații 8 (unfortunately deleted from youtube) there. Unfortunately, the club went bankrupt, a sign that the local market could not support a di granda manele club.
In addition, Timișoara joined quite quickly the loud voices that demanded the prohibition of manele, allowing for regrettable exaggerations. In 2006, SRADSCD 9 Timișoara Branch proposed the action-manifesto ‘Romanians, let’s play Mozart to the whole neighbourhood’ 10 , as a civilising countermeasure and a polemical protest against the manele fans, who played their music loudly everywhere.
2012-present: almost nothing
The only name from Banat who managed to make some noise in the world of manele is Dani Prințul Banatului (Dani, the Prince of Banat), but it is not clear how much of his celebrity is due to him and how much to the charismatic Dani Mocanu, with whom he sang most of his songs and who, according to my information, was mostly responsible for their naughty lyrics. The Prince of Banat’s voice is not impressive in any way; he imitates Guță and doesn’t bring anything new. Dani Mocanu’s voice sounds even worse, but he (like Romeo Fantastick in the previous decade) owes his success to the fact that he managed to invent himself as a character – half thug, half pimp – and compose transgressive songs consistent with that character. The Prince of Banat couldn’t get past the one-hit wonder stage (let’s say two-hit wonder – Sunt în închisoare și Să mă feresc de gardă [11] , both duets with Dani Mocanu).
To this day, Timișoara has stubbornly maintained its anti-manele attitude. Vlad Tollea from Timișoara accounts for it in an article for Vice [12] . To this I must add the disdain with which Ghiță Olaru, the financier and the creator of the Banat school of manele, is treated. Instead of being worshipped and having a statue raised for him, like the bard Nicu Covaci, his reputation is constantly trashed [13] .
An analysis – the bad luck of having a progressive pope
What bothers me about the manele in Timișoara is precisely the opinion that the manele are ok, they are Serbian music when they are sung by authentic Serbs, not by the Roma. To put it differently, Timișoara does not have a problem with the Balkan heritage, with what comes from the Serbs, but with the Roma and the lumpen.
Two factors enter into this equation, subsumable to the Polish messianic complex, as I call it. What is the Polish complex? The answer is easy: the fact that sometimes progressive things have very conservative consequences. In the Polish case, the bad luck was that, during communism, Poland produced a pope loved by the whole world, which perceived him as progressive. Based on this fact, a counterfactual inference can be made as to what would have happened if Poland had not produced a pope. Would Catholicism have coagulated with the same frenzy? Would PIS, the Polish reactionary conservative party, still have won two mandates?
Based on this counterfactual interrogation, one can speculate that during communism, having produced a pope helped coagulating Poland’s anti-communist energies and subsequently became a sign of patriotic pride in the public consciousness. ‘We Poles are special. We produced the smartest pope ever’.
In the case of Timișoara, the papal-type bad luck is twofold: 1. the city produced the most important Romanian rock band, Phoenix, which also had an aura of anti-communist dissidence (masterfully debunked by Emanuel Copilaș [14] ), and 2. the city started the Revolution of ’89.
As far as Phoenix is concerned, the most vehement anti-manele musical subculture was probably the rock one (especially heavy metal). Starting with Phoenix, Timișoara gained its prestige as the dissident capital of rock, and after ’89 it preserved this prestige on the social imagery level, meaning in a symbolic context.
As regards the Revolution, the fact of having started it gave the people of Timișoara a messianic complex, the feeling that they were a kind of vanguard of anti-communism and westernisation. The manele were not considered communist, but they entered a complex equation in which they were seen as a backward step, preventing the building of the New Capitalist Society as it was abroad (i.e., without corruption and louts), of which Timișoara imagined itself to be a part; in that period characterised by a terrible national inferiority complex that preceded the adherence to the UE, Timișoara symbolically deceived itself that it was not part of the Balkans, but of Central Europe.
My argumentation could be reproached with ignoring the Serbian, i.e. the Balkan factor, for which the Banat has always had a fraternal affinity. In the first phase, before the war in Yugoslavia, the people of Timișoara perceived this country, due to its liberal socialism that allowed free travel and a small consumer society, as a highly emancipated, almost Western state (this perception is accurately illustrated in Radu Pavel Gheo’s autofictional novel Disco Titanic). In this logical context, with all its ethno features, Lepa Brena’s music was seen as a product of the consumer society.
I don’t have enough testimonies to understand when exactly the perception of Serbia shifted from admiration to compassion after ’90, when both states fell into the third world. I only know that at some point, the things I heard from Timișoara were not about the Serbs, but about Central Europe. The Serbs disappeared as a civilisational model, but remained an ethical model (‘unlike the Romanians, the Serbs are not bastards, they don’t sell their friends and relatives’). I have rediscovered them now, on the occasion of my residence in the European Capital of Culture. They are still like our older brothers whose fate was marked by historical misfortune – the war that made them miserable and hindered their progress, ‘because if it hadn’t been for that war, they would be doing far better than us, they would have been integrated in the UE since 2004’, as an interlocutor from Timișoara said.
The present: the manele in hype orbit
The great surprise of this residence was to discover a manele scene livelier than the one in Cluj. This is not due to the authorities or the city’s mature residents, but, most likely, to Banat’s preference for Balkan harmonies and the latest generation’s more relaxed attitude towards the cultural products passing through the ‘dirty’ hands of the Roma.
I have discovered three manele clubs, two (actually one and a half) in the student campus and one, the most authentic, on Mureș Street.
The club on Mureș Street is decorated in a rustic Romanian style that seems to be establishing itself as standard decoration for manele clubs, after the success of Hanul Drumețului (The Traveller’s Inn) in Bucharest. Just like in the capital, the public gathers late, after 3 a.m., when the boys are bored of electro or dance clubs and need to get drunk in a familiar décor. The audience is a mixture of white trash, bums and Roma, but no middle-class people or students. The wine is sweet, semi-dry at best, and the whisky brands are unexpectedly affordable and taste like surgical spirit. What differs is the scale, in the sense that this club is much smaller than those in Bucharest, and the playlist, which mixes southern raggaeton manele (reminiscent of Salam’s classical piece The Soldiers, performed at One Million club in Timisoara) with rhythms of Transylvanian Roma ethno-pop in the manner of Sandu Ciorbă (whose style is not from Banat, i.e. Serbian, but rather influenced by Hungarian rhythms).
The club in the student campus also has an exclusive manele profile and ‘lăutari’, but it doesn’t seem very prosperous, despite being private, having an intercom – which is broken, so it’s free entry – and allowing customers to smoke; when I arrived there, it was deserted, a computer was running a playlist of manele and pop music (I must admit I arrived too early, around 1 a.m.). The place was set up like a lounge, with small leather sofas, but an element of authenticity: two bored entertainers in everyday clothes, who scrolled through their phones and walked barefoot around the place. Slightly depressing, so to say.
The third place is a disco that plays manele on Fridays, and hip-hop and pop on Saturdays. The good news is that this place fills to capacity on Fridays, although the computer runs the manele playlist. Naturally, the audience consists of students, and there is, if not face profiling, at least outfit profiling at the entrance: a young man was not accepted in the club because he was wearing a European lumpen outfit, i.e. a brand tracksuit.
As I entered, I had a sense of déjà vu. I felt like in Bucharest in 2016-2017, when the manele decidedly entered the DJ-ing hipster orbit. The difference from Bucharest was the average age, which was lower in Timișoara, but higher and mixed with old boys in Bucharest, and the absence of the political dimension, of commitment.
What does this tell us? Grosso modo, after the pandemic, the success of ‘trapanele’ (a post- pandemic combination of manele and trap or dance) made the manea cool, more to the liking of the latest generation. It seems that unlike older generations, the newest one is free of both elitism and anti-communist demons.
The problem is that the students in Timișoara, like their counterparts in Bucharest, love these new manele played by a computer, not in the original context of performance, i.e. by ‘lăutari’. In a sense, the same thing happened in the United States during late capitalism, when hip-hop began to catch on in white circles: young people liked the music, but only when isolated from its context of origin, as an experience lived by delegation: for one night, the white kid, in the safe context of a bourgeois club, took the liberty of imagining himself a bad boy like the African- American in the ghettos. The same thing happens with the manea, which has recently entered the ‘cool’ orbit: for one night, the student from Timișoara feels like a bad boy from the Roma ghettos.
Is this good? Is this bad? The anti-communism of the 90s vaccinated me for life against ethical purism and activism with a prosecutorial, judicial touch. Therefore, I am glad that this is happening, that even though it was only after destroying its splendid manele school that Timişoara came to its senses, the new generation seems to have overcome the papal provincial complex of being a rock citadel and the starting point of the anti-communist revolution.
Because, that’s it, if there is anything I didn’t like in Timișoara, it’s this brand of selective multiculturalism: which neighbours we like (Saxons, Serbs, Hungarians) and which we don’t – the poor or the underworld of the Roma ghettos. In other words, this new brand of multiculturalism is just as imaginary as old Mitteleuropa: we are multicultural, multicultural to the core, but when it comes to the Roma we let it go, let’s talk about the Serbs and Lepa Brena better.
Otherwise, as a fan of manele, I was somewhat amazed to discover that Timișoara, although lying on a completely unexplored treasure – a whole school of manele opened at the very beginning of the phenomenon – prefers to put forward, as a local subcultural pedigree, the anti- communist relics of Saint Nicolae Covaci, which even the left-wing factions of the rocker sect dispute as genuinely anti-communist (see the ongoing debate around Emanuel Copilaș’s book, Formația Phoenix: muzica, politica, filozofia [15] ).
In a long lineage of commentators, Emanuel Copilaș has exhausted the subject, playing the part of a contestant. It is time Timișoara moved on to more serious topics, namely the manele.