And in the past decade or so, it’s become gayer than ever. Indeed, the queer side of Serbian pop culture is pretty hard to miss when music videos, performances and concerts spill over with oiled-up orange muscle men, fierce divas, flamboyant drag performances and even rainbow flags, all to a soundtrack of sick synths and thundering club beats. Belgrade’s most prolific and successful music video director, Dejan Milićević, whose work over the past 15 years shaped the genre’s entire look, is openly gay; it’s not just in the West that gay men, historically shut out of other spaces, find a natural home for themselves in the entertainment industry. [...]
While western music videos bombard us with images of semi-dressed nubile young women on a daily basis, their Serbian counterparts feature just as many scantily clad men as women, if not more. Contemporary Serbian pop-folk is a veritable homoerotic fantasy land, pioneered in full mainstream view by gay male directors and creatives, where divas call the shots, male objectification is endemic and queerness is often more a text than a subtext. Many of the genre’s biggest female stars since the millennium — from Jelena Karleuša to Goga Sekulić, Nikolija to Ana Nikolić — are simultaneously hyperfeminine and hypermasculine: dominant, uncompromising personalities wielding sexual and social power on screen and stage. Their music videos frequently feature them with hosts of scantily clad men at their beck and call, like a Balkan subversion of US hiphop videos where male rappers are surrounded by available female bodies. [...]
The sensual clip for Daniel Djokić’s single Like It Like This, another Milićević production, is entirely focused on selling Daniel’s body as a sexual commodity. It’s near-impossible to imagine any straight-presenting western male pop star releasing a video like this that posits them so unequivocally as a piece of meat. The English lyrics to the chorus feel like a message from Serbia’s gay turbofolk community to the world: “This is the only time we’re ever gonna like it like this. There’s no money in our pocket but we like it like this. We have nothing but the music and we like it like this.”
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