Чалга (chalga)

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Woods
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Чалга (chalga)

Postby Woods » 2016-03-31, 21:01

I decided to take this out of the "Bulgarian Music" topic and post it as a separate tread, because it focuses on a specific issue and is not on the topic of suggesting songs and bands...

linguoboy wrote:
kalata23 wrote:Oh, and Azis is a fagot that is playing like woman, because of image. He cries like woman and where is the music in that?

Has it ever occurred to you that another reason why chalga appeals to "foreigners" is that we don't carry around the same reactionary prejudices against "faggots" and women that you do?

Linguo, this chalga “music” is really bad stuff – if you grew up in Bulgaria, you would know.

I can agree with Kalata, even though I think he wasn’t able to defend his position at all. I know what he means when he says it’s not music – it’s because music is an art, and any type of art is something artistic, and also something that carries culture. However, there’s nothing cultural in chalga. And if it’s not anything cultural, then it cannot be music. That’s the logic behind our stance, indeed.

The way I understand the word chalga is – lower class, cheap-made sort of thing with very simplistic, basic and sometimes even ugly and disgusting lyrics. Add to that fake faces – women who made themselves as ugly as it could get with plastic surgery; the decadence of the places where it’s played and the crappiness of the people who listen to that (I’m sorry, I don’t mean to offend anybody, but chalga listeners are really not that nice to talk to, and are often the lowest-of-the-low class of people who will go to a discotheque just to get in a fight, dress without taste, drink until they become disgusting and so on – and of course, there are exceptions in the face of some mistaken people looking for company at the wrong places.)

If what you’re listening to is better than what I just described, then it probably wouldn't be called chalga. If it’s at least a little bit decent, it may be called pop folk (an example would be Slavi Trifonov – he doesn’t sing about touching penises and letting them play in his hands, he doesn’t brag about his penis enlargement surgery and there are actually elements of folklore in the whole thing – and yes, the lyrics will of course still be about women most of the time, because that’s what we’re all interested in – and that goes for all the genres from opera to melodic death metal. Every person on earth listens to music about love, attraction, flirts, seduction and so on. The differences are not in the topic, but in the way it’s been touched.

And if we’re talking about music of quality, it wouldn’t be pop folk either – I don’t think anything pop might be of quality – because people tend to listen to bad stuff, maybe because they haven’t had the time to discover something better and understand it.

So if there’s a brilliant song in a неравноделен размер (somebody can translate that – metre 7/8?), we may call it ethno, modern folk or folk rock! Chalga stands for the crap. However, I hope I won’t provoke people going around with chalga songs and telling they’re ethno now! So foreigners please - try to get deeper in these songs before you start telling how good they are – it may make you look pretty badly in the eyes of educated Bulgarians!

Linguo, I’m sorry to inform you of that, but you’ll find virtually no decent person in Bulgaria who will praise you for listening to Azis. But, as far as I know, you know no Bulgarian, and as a foreigner you have all your rights to find elements in this “music” that you like. If you get deeper in our culture though, I’m more than certain that you’ll appreciate other bands more.

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