“The Balkans Tattooed on the Skin”

The new millennium has ushered in a new era of popular music in which the Balkans and Balkanism have moved to the center of musical narratives. Although often vague and internally contradictory, the image of the Balkans as a place of poverty, passion, violence, nightlife, crime, and love has proven compatible with the rise of trap music, which emerged from the “Dirty South” of the United States and came to dominate the global music scene. Over the past decade, this convergence has produced a glocalized and (self-)exoticizing phenomenon—Balkan trap/trap-folk—which combines trap techniques, technologies, and musical patterns with Balkan music in its broadest sense. Today, Balkan trap/trap-folk is among the most dominant formats of the local mainstream, especially among younger audiences. Its visibility has also turned it into a focal point of moral panic and a symbol of the alleged cultural decline of new generations. Against this backdrop, the paper examines the reception of this genre in migratory contexts, focusing on the second generation of the Serbian diaspora in the Vicenza region. The analytical framework is grounded in the concept of musical habitus and thematic-narrative analysis. Fieldwork is based on participant observation and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with fifteen interlocutors aged sixteen to twenty-two. The study explores (a) how the audiovisual content of this genre is perceived, interpreted, and consumed, and (b) how Balkan trap/trap-folk operates within cultural arenas and identity practices among young people of Balkan origin in the Vicenza area

Diaspora · Habitus · Identity (music) · Musical · Popular music · Serbian · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Music History and Culture · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior