Chalga Unchained

How chalga culture has chained Bulgarian femininity

A Woman in Black Leather Boots; image by Daria Klet; source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-in-black-leather-boots-10292149/

“You wanna put a padlock on me

so I don’t run, hurry put the padlock

put the golden padlock — so you don’t have to worry.”

These are roughly the lyrics of the third most trendy song on the Top 50 Most Popular Bulgarian Songs playlist on Spotify. The rest of the playlist is not much different. Expensive cars, love drama, questionable moral choices, and female submission are the predominant themes in chalga music, which people readily enjoy and pay for. I can’t help but wonder. Why do these singers, their music, and their popularity make me feel so angry, so helpless? Why do they make me feel as if this industry has chained Bulgarian femininity with a heavy golden chain?

Let me clarify something. I don’t mind chalga as music itself. The genre is old and culturally important. It dates back to the 19th century, emerging as a mix of Bulgarian, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Gipsy melodies and flamenco motifs, performed by ethnic musicians called Čalgii. They were pretty much playing entertaining songs about everyday life and social struggles. Gradually, this transforms into folk music popular between the 50s and the 90s throughout the socialist period. Chalga, as we know it today, emerges in the 90s when Bulgarian socialism falls, and capitalism kicks in. The period of change.

The market, unchained from censorship, doctrines, and state regulations, gradually mixes chalga with pop music, connecting it to the world of fashion models and folk-singers who are practically erotic models, with some ability to sing. As Zlatina Dimitrova remarks in her study

“…the market presence of folk singers, most often linked to the nouveau riche (“The Thugs”), provokes an entry of the Bulgarian audiovisual industry in the shady economy. Thus, the massive Balkan underground pleasures and ‘gangsta’ mentality triumph into a happy market media embrace.”

This is what I mind — the mindset and culture that come hand in hand with the music. A culture that glorifies thug life, expensive cars, and submissive women. A culture that people like and readily pay for.

In fact, Chalga music is the most popular music genre in Bulgaria according to a BNR report, and its influence on young men and women has become stronger than ever. An influence that might contribute to harmful discriminatory beliefs.

Singers are powerful drivers of fashion and trends; they are public icons that people want to identify with. They are the driving force of cultural norms and standards. If that is true, what happens to a society whose female icons look all the same, performing with scarce dresses, fake breasts, and pumped-up lips, singing about wanting to be chained, wanting to be “won over,” glorifying cheating and lying? If pop culture is as powerful as we think, then it seems like the message young Bulgarian women receive is exactly this: you are desirable if you look this way and have controversial moral values.

Azis, one of the most famous Bulgarian chalga icons, once told Reuters:

“Pop-folk is sex, let’s speak the truth. We sell sex. My female colleagues … make women dream to look like them, while men dream about such women.”

The visual image is not the only problem. Peter Fischer and Tobias Greitemeyer found out in their study that aggressive song lyrics made listeners much more likely to exhibit aggressive actions towards opposite-sex participants. In addition, research has shown that song lyrics may help drive shifts in social stereotypes towards women, especially if the message comes from male artists. If that’s true, then what can be the impact of the most predominant Bulgarian music genre, glorifying aggression and chaining women? Chalga culture teaches Bulgarian men to treat women as objects, and women to be okay with that.

I’m a huge fan of letting people listen to whatever they want. My critiques towards chalga culture might be completely irrelevant and false, maybe it does, in fact, provide some sort of empowerment to Bulgarian women. Maybe it makes them believe that they can be glorious, desired, and successful?

Is this the way we want to empower women, though?

The thing is that I, as a Bulgarian woman in her 20s, currently don’t see many female public figures standing for education, equity, and dignity on the public scene. In fact, Lena Borislavova, one of the few young female Bulgarian politicians, refused to run in the next elections after years of constant public attacks. Ironically, the famous politician and prominent chalga singer Slavi Trifonov even made a song, mocking her political presence and ambition.

Everyone is free to choose what to consume. We just need to be aware that sometimes our choices chain our understanding of the world…with a shiny golden lock.