Manele music and the world latrine-culture

A Romani gypsy vision of the world

Famous Romani gypsy manele singer Adrian ‘Copilul’ Minune (copilul meaning ‘the child’, and minune meaning ‘wonder’), who is also a dwarf, with two pițipoance (‘young, frivolous women’ – i.e., bimbos).

In 1991, a beauty and dance competition called Miss Piranda was launched in Bucharest. Piranda is a gypsy word meaning ‘wife’ or ‘lady’. As the decade wore on, Miss Piranda became an important meeting point for the gypsy community, taking advantage of new liberties after the fall of Communism.

As Miss Piranda was held each year, the music played at the event started to take on an increasing significance. Here, gypsy music that had stewed for decades and centuries in villages and slums was able to reach a large new audience. Newfound access to sound recording and broadcast equipment, as well as new forms of instrumentation, such as synthesisers, meant that after a few years the kind of music that played at Miss Piranda ended up cohering around a common style. This is what we know as manele.

An indicative collection of the noughties style of the genre can be found in this 2004 compilation album, which features some well-known stalwarts of the genre, like Nicolae Guță and Florin Salam.

What’s striking about the music? First of all, it sounds distinctly Oriental. It is very clearly influenced by the musical styles of the Ottoman Empire and Arabia. This is evident in its use of non-Western scales, particularly the Phrygian dominant scale, which gives a distinctly Middle Eastern flavour to the melodies. Its instrumentation further reinforces this, with the use, for example, of accordions and violins (or violin-like synthesisers). The singing, of course, is in a warbling Arabesque style.

Lyrically, this noughties manele is about love, but also with oblique references to ‘struggles’, often against one’s ‘enemies’. Some songs have more of a party vibe. An example of a love song might be Jumatate Tu, Jumatate Eu (‘Half you, half me’) by Adrian Minune; an example of a party song might be Chef de Chef (‘A party of all parties’) from the same singer.

Adrian ‘Copilul’ Minune (born Adrian Simonescu) is incredibly famous, a giant of the genre despite being a literal midget. During an early trip to Romania, I saw him from the balcony of a seaside resort on the Black Sea; he was in a white Lamborghini flanked by a couple of pițipoance (a word which a Romanian dictionary defines as ‘young, frivolous women’).

I would encounter Minune (which means ‘Wonder’; ‘Copilul’ meaning ‘the child’) again a few years later, when he performed at a wedding I went to. At the wedding, some people would pay him hundreds of euros – a substantial sum by Western European standards, let alone Romanian ones – to dedicate songs to their lover, or to a family member.

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As the twenty-first century has worn on, manele has become steadily more hedonistic, materialistic, and gangsterish, as it has begun to absorb the themes rapped about by the American black underclass.

Let’s take a look at what contemporary manele looks like. The song Daca n-ai Bani (‘If you don’t have money’) from Bogdan De La Ploiesti is fairly typical. The song is about how money makes the world go round – and how he, naturally, has lots of it. Another song, chosen at random, by the same artist is called Toti Dusmanii Sunteti Clone (‘All my enemies are clones’); its repetitive lyrics emphasise how sharp-witted the singer is, and how he is able to make money seven days a week – unlike his ‘enemies’.

Basically, the gold standard for manele these days is rhyming bani (money) with dușmani (enemies).

One more example, just in case you haven’t yet got the idea: the song Emirate by popular singer Tzanca Uraganu. Some choice lyrics:

Se vede că nu prea îl iubești

Fraieru tău nu stă bine pe mălai

Decât să plângi la București

Nu mai bine plângi tu la Dubai

[It’s clear that you don’t really love him

Your sucker doesn’t do well with money

Instead of crying in Bucharest

Wouldn’t you rather cry in Dubai?]

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Manele and the world latrine-culture

Note the reference to ‘fraier’ in the last song – a word that is also found in other manele songs. This word is thought to come from the German Freier, the client of a prostitute, possibly via Yiddish. In Romania, it has come to mean ‘sucker’, or ‘mug’. It’s used the same way in modern Israel. The fraier is like that other Yiddish word, the schmuck: the one who does things the proper way and as a result, loses out. The fraier is the person who returns the shopping trolley. The fraier is the one who doesn’t park in the disabled bay.

The conceptual opposite of the fraier is the șmecher, another word that is used frequently in modern-day Romanian and also features in manele. This is also a German-Yiddish word. Schmecken in German means ‘to taste’, and it is thought to have transferred over to Yiddish with the meaning of ‘connoisseurship’. When in turned borrowed into Romanian, it means someone who is ‘cunning’ and ‘streetwise’. It has both positive and negative connotations, depending on whether you are the șmecher in the situation, or have to put up with another șmecher’s manoeuvres.

The șmecher-fraier dualism neatly captures the Orientalising moral sewer, the stagnant puddle of amoral familism and clannishness, where street smarts and easy money is good, and honest work is bad.

The name of the genre itself, manele, is first attested to in 1820, and referred to love songs in an Oriental style performed at aristocratic courts (from Ottoman Turkish مانی‎ (mani), a form of romantic folk tunes and couplets). The presence of Romani gypsies in Romania is first attested to in 1385, when it was recorded that Wallachian prince Dan I had assigned 40 sălaşe (hamlets or dwellings) of aţigani (gypsies) to Tismana Monastery. It seems highly likely that most gypsies first came to Romania as slaves – slavery was only abolished in Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859 – and that they were probably bought from the Mongols and other nomadic peoples. The way that gypsies fit into pre-modern societies was that their own caste system from India was integrated into whatever national context they landed in. Some worked the fields; others worked metal. Some professions came to be seen as particularly gypsy professions. The florist trade in Romania, for example, is dominated by gypsies; the same was even more true of bear-keeping.

One of the highest and most prestigious of these gypsy occupations was the lăutar — minstrels. The lăutari would be retained to perform at the courts of nobility. They would also be (and still are) hired to perform at weddings for ordinary people. They would play the kind of music their audience was interested in. Very often, the aristocracy would request an Oriental style of music popular in Istanbul, but it could just as easily be folk music. See this video for example: the lead violinist was born into a lăutar family, but what he and his band are playing is Moldovan folk music.

Some of these successful lăutar families married in with the Romanian population over several generations, to the point where you have some ‘gypsy’ singers like Ștefan Bănică Jr. who don’t look gypsy at all, and nor do they perform Oriental-sounding music (see this ‘duet’ with his late father, a famous actor and singer). This attests to the relatively high status of the lăutar, as intermarriage between Romanians and Romani gypsies was (and still is) otherwise very rare.

This is where it gets tricky. It’s fair to say that manele is gypsy music. But not all gypsy music is manele. And lots of Romanians enjoy manele. And some — well, some — gypsies don’t like manele.

Similarly, the manele phenomenon is by no means exclusive to Romania. Indeed, very similar-sounding Oriental-style music can be found all around the region – examples include turbo-folk in Serbia, chalga in Bulgaria, and skiladiko in Greece. As far as I understand, these all have a similar cultural cachet, although I’m not sure these are seen as emphatically ‘gypsy’ music in the same way that manele is.

Where does Romanian folk music end and gypsy music begin? Even if some Romanian folk music has non-Western scales, a bit of warbly singing, and a distinct and animated style of playing, I think that listening to, say, something from folk musician Ion Paladi reveals it to be very different. And musical differences aside, Romanian folk music, thematically, deals with traditional life in the village. Even traditional gypsy taraf music is more about urban life; it also uses more woodwinds and accordions.

From the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, Romania was a modernising and Westernising country, where popular musical styles combined Romanian folk music with French chansons and operetta (see Maria Tănase). When the Communists took over, not too much changed in this respect. The music of Gică Petrescu is fairly indicative: folksy and influenced by western ‘light music’ of the postwar period, it represented a genre often known as muzica de petrecere (‘party music’).

Much in the way that blacks in America served as light musical amusement before being propelled into positions of cultural prominence, so did gypsies rise. Any casual listener of the manele shared earlier will see parallels. The older singers are more like R&B performers, and the younger ones more adjacent to rap music.

Manele is now, it must be said, more popular than ever. It is widely listened to by young people. The New Year’s variety programmes across the major TV channels all, without exception, now feature the genre as part of their shows – something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

I view the genre as one which is gaining ground in the context of emigration of the more capable, of dysgenic fertility patterns, and of exposure to the more general world latrine-culture. At best, it is unthinking party music which accompanies lots of alcohol.

Of course, in this sense there are similar genres in America, in Britain, in Germany, in France – and yes, rap music is very popular in Russia too. In a sense, modern manele is part of a meta-genre which grafts itself onto whatever subaltern category is relevant: blacks in America and France, Moroccans in the Netherlands, Turks and Kurds in Germany, and so on. Manele is interesting because it is distinctly Oriental and draws on a subaltern group that has deeper roots in the area.

Here’s something I find quite fitting. North of the Black Sea port city of Constanța and at the foot of the wild marshes of the Danube delta lies a town called Babadag. It’s a strange town with a strange name. Some fifty kilometres south of the Ukrainian border, it hosts an important NATO base.

Babadag is in Dobruja, a region of Romania which – unlike the rest of the country – was administered directly by the Ottomans, and thus saw substantial Turkish settlement. Most of the Turks have since left Babadag, but the town nonetheless still hosts a large Muslim population of Romani gypsies. Amidst the simple Communist-era housing, the local mosque, and the tomb of a Sufi saint, stand several examples of palatial residential gypsy architecture, with storeys and balconies flowing over one another, much like the temples of their distant cousins in India.

This is all very apt. While most gypsies in Romania are Christian (despite many holding on to various superstitions), the actual cultural role of gypsies is that of guardians of a degenerated form of pre-modern culture that stubbornly resists the tide of Europeanisation, of progress, and does all that it can to roll it back. This is how I basically view manele: an Asiatic holdout, nurtured by gypsydom, but not entirely reducible to it.