Grey, anonymous tower-blocks might dominate the country's image, but there's more than one side to life in Romania 's communist housing projects. Dazed takes a look at how the country's first pop generation are creating noises from The Neighbourhoods…
“What the hell's going on?” The man stands in his terry-towel pyjamas looking angrily into the small living room. “Get out, old man. Come on, get out …” Marian gently pushes the man backwards and closes the door behind him. “He's paranoid, that's his problem.” The grey-haired gentleman appears to have every reason to be. From this tenth floor apartment, in amongst the maze of communist tower blocks that house most of Bucharest 's two million inhabitants, his son is running one of Romania 's biggest pirate radio stations.
Marian ‘Mixu' sits back down on the sofa-bed and gazes out of the window at the darkening sky. The streets of Rahova aren't the best place to be after nightfall, being one of the most feared neighbourhoods in the city. Somewhere out there are the regular listeners of the station A-Tentat . “I don't know how many exactly but they're in the hundreds of thousands. Prisoners, soldiers and special weapon units all call in regularly for dedications,” Mixu explains, “though it's the police that are some of our biggest fans.”
There are thousands of illegal stations run by kids like Mixu, most broadcasting to a single neighbourhood or smaller area. Only a handful have the kind of city-wide range boasted by A-Tentat . However, one thing unites these improvised stations that are bringing democracy to the Romanian airwaves. Almost all of them are putting out the same kind of music. “If we get requests from the city centre, then it might be for western stuff. But if someone's calling from the neighbourhoods, then they're always asking for the same thing - Manele ” .
A combination of traditional gypsy music and melodies lifted from Arabic pop, no other music comes close to manele in terms of its sheer popularity. Its dancefloor-friendly rhythms are now inescapable all across Romania , having taken the country by storm in the years following the revolution in ‘89. The first stirrings of the genre began with migrant workers in the Middle-East, who brought the local pop produce back with them as domestic censorship tightened in the late eighties. However, it was the availability of cheap western electronics after the downfall of the Ceausescu dictatorship that allowed for the development of manele, dragging the Roma people's musical history into the pop era.
Despite the music's runaway success, there isn't a single legal manele station in Bucharest . Pirate radio simply fills a gap in the market. “People made fun of him at the start,” Mixu's older sister explains as he digs deeper in the drawer. “Those were his two hobbies – music and electronics.” Mixu starts pulling out improvised microphones and bits of circuit board. “We started out when I was fifteen, using cassette tapes,” the unemployed nineteen-year-old continues, handing over a battered car stereo with the top section cut away. “Back then there were five of us – me, Benny, X-u, Mike and Leo. Our block administrator took a bit to find out, but he called the National Audio-visual Council when he did.” The boys' parents received a $600 fine – then equivalent to around five times the average monthly salary.
“After that we hired out space on the 11 th floor of another block, in amongst the laundry rooms. We started airing adverts for a disco just outside Bucharest , and paid the rent with the money. The problem is that once you start making cash from advertising, that's when the NAC comes after you. They'll hear the advert and turn up demanding bribes.” Their solution was to keep moving.
However, it's not the authorities who've been the cause of Mixu's problems lately. “The others from the station started broadcasting on the same frequency under a different name. Thing is, I've a more powerful transmitter, so I wiped them out. That's when they came round and stole my aerial in revenge . I'm saving up for another, and should be back on air in a few weeks. But from now on, I'm going it alone.”
If music indeed thrives under oppression, then the gypsies have all the right conditions. Contemporary studies suggest that around 80% of gypsies in Bucharest are unemployed, while nationally the figure stands at just under half the Roma population. Less than 10% go to high school, and around 1% make it to university. And it's hard to exaggerate the all-pervasiveness of anti-Roma sentiment, which cuts across all levels of class, age and education.
Paradoxically, manele's audience is as broad as such prejudice, encompassing everyone from celebrities to students; from workers to politicians. It's the music's very ubiquity that makes it so contentious. Educated opinion in the country views manele as a musical travesty. “I don't even consider it Roma music,” Marius explains, a employee at the Roma Centre for Social Intervention and Studies. “It plays on two stereotypes of our people. One is that gypsies know how to party; the other is the flamboyance of gypsy culture and the way it values gold and wealth.”
Both are evident at ‘Miss Piranda 2004' later that evening, playing host to a long line-up of the biggest names in manele. Though door prices alone are enough to put many ordinary Romanians off, the 6,000-seater arena is almost packed to capacity. The bevy of girls competing for the $2000 title might be the event's official highlight, though most people are simply here to party. It's certainly a family affair - from absence of alcohol, to the toddlers and young girls in front of the stage, perfecting their manele dancing. All Hindi hand-movements and snake-hips, it's a visual reminder of the Roma people's origins and long migration from India .
Though most people are parading their best clothes, the Gypsy's fabulous wealth as enshrined in popular mythology is definitely absent. In fact, everyone looks particularly working-class. Like the make-up of the audience, the majority of the girls up on stage aren't even gypsy. Most are simply neighbourhood girls unashamed of making the most of their looks in a big-money competition.
“That's the problem at the moment,” Ombladon nods, lighting another cigarette, “the gypsification of Romanians.” There's something of a debate at the moment as to whether or not Parazitii , Romania 's most popular hip-hop group, harbour anti-Roma prejudices. “That's the way we like it,” smiles DJ Freakadadisk, turning round from the computer, “Keep people guessing.” He picks a KPM library LP from the turntable and flips it over. It's a souvenir from the MTV music awards in Edinburgh , where the three of them were nominated for Best Romanian Group.
If there's an alter-ego to manele – combining outsider status with mass-appeal; extreme poverty with showy ostentation – it's Romanian Hip Hop. The scene began with the roughly photocopied pirate tapes that hit the streets immediately after the revolution. “Vanilla Ice; Public Enemy… this was probably the first hip-hop I ever heard,” explains MC Cheloo. “By '93 they had everything. Whatever you were looking for, you could find it being sold in the central Piata .” Pirate music was booming, helped along by the absence of any applicable copyright law. The real high-point for Romanian hip-hop, however, came in 1998-99. In direct imitation of the East-side/West-side beefs in the US , rivalries developed between Romanian groups such as RACLA and La Familia , each identifying with an opposing seaboard . Rappers could even be seen assuming the hand-signals of their adoptive coasts.
It wasn't just the outward symbols of the States that these hip-hoppers were borrowing. The concept of the ghetto was similarly superimposed onto the Romanian tenement-blocks. It was in this way that the concept of ‘The Neighbourhood' developed, a mythologized space inhabited by ‘Neighbourhood Boys' living life on the fringes of society. It's a stereotype which fails to capture a form of social housing which has little in common with its western high-rise counterpart. Despite disparities between particular neighbourhoods, blocks provide housing for the whole community rather than for an unfortunate minority. “It's an imported idea,” Ombladon reflects. “Pretending to live the street lifestyle, that whole gangster thing. This is the ideal that kids in the neighbourhoods are hoping to follow. To me, it's a gypsy concept.”
If this is a country where Roma stereotypes form part of day-to-day life, then so too do fixed conceptions of the Romanian people. Self-deprecation is a national pastime. The spectre of the lazy, free-loading Romanian looms in the background of almost every conversation about the country's problems. It's this belief in the idea of the Undeserving Poor that shows just how far Romania has embraced the free-market ideal. The ultimate irony is that the communist-built neighbourhoods have proved to be the breeding-ground for such myths.
In the nineteen-eighties the vast swathes of social housing inhabited by the likes of Mixu encroached into the city centre, quickly replacing many of the long boulevards and wrought iron balconies that made Bucharest The Paris of the East . The razing of Romania 's past continued right up until the revolution - the last convulsions of a crisis-stricken regime. Built in a confused spirit of tyranny and unbounded utopianism, this was an unprecedented experiment in social engineering which hoped to resettle the entire rural population into blocks to create a homogenised proletariat. However, these incubation chambers for ‘Socialist Man' have betrayed the intentions of their creators.
Within these concrete and steel paeans to progress, the kids are imitating what they see around them at all levels of Romanian society. Ruthless entrepreneurialism on the post-Soviet model, an a-legal approach to capitalism, is being implemented by everyone from the ex-communist ruling elite to the bedroom-hackers and the girls that work the streets. It's a spirit embraced by both manele and Romanian hip-hop – whether it's bragging about the material rewards that success brings, or glorifying the subterranean routes to respect and recognition open to the disenfranchised. Like the music that's been adopted by the likes of Mixu and Parazitii, the ruling ideology began from scratch and is less than a generation old. Theses are imported ideas being played out in the Romanian way. And for now, the country's own take on hip-hop, and the twenty-first-century's incarnation of the Roma's heritage, appear to be providing the perfect soundtrack.