Lepa Brena is unarguably the biggest showbiz star from former Yugoslavia (btw, I heard on twitter that the phrase `former Yugoslavia` is a pleonasm, but I can`t keep from using it). Biggest star in a Balkan country by default means that the star`s area of expertise is folk music. What`s interesting about Lepa Brena is that she was a pan-Yugoslavian folk star, never sticking to one position or the other, even after the war broke out and subsequently it ended.
This old figure of hers is a good example of what I`m saying.
Since Serbia was the biggest meca for folk music at the time, it was simply ordered that she chose to come in Belgrade, and after the war start her own folk music production empire.
Brena came into public focus only recently when she announced a couple of months ago that she would be doing a `world tour` which also included Sarajevo and Zagreb. That caused a lot of fuss in Bosnia and Croatia, because apparently, Brena is seen over there as a Serb nationalist because of this video where she`s dressed in a military uniform.
Now, we could discuss the type of the video (and the music, for that matter) but when her overall image and attitude is concerned, of all the folk stars throughout the former Yugoslavia, Brena always struck me as the least nationalistic and the most Yugonostalgic one. But it just goes to show that there`s still a lot of bad blood between the nationalists in all former Yu-republics, and that it takes only a tiny push to build an avalanche of hate, as shown by endless youtube, blogs and forums comment discussions that are impossible to translate because of the richness of SerboCroatian language when it comes to curses.
On the other hand, Brena`s succesfull concert in Sarajevo and the sold-out forthcoming gig in Zagreb show that there are lots of people that don`t like all that much about the nationality, which is always a good thing.
Now that I think about it, there are simply a handfull of performers who actually are cosnidered persona-non-grata in other republics, with good reasons: Marko Perkovic Thompson in Serbia, or Svetlana Ceca Raznatovic in Croatia, for example.