Museum of popular
& subcultures
Forget European time, the night lasts there for days!
When she presented her first record with the singles Mustafa and On the Planet of Sighs in a radio interview with Nikola Nešković for PGP-RTV in 1982, Dragana Šarić, known as Baby Doll, was asked if she planned to pursue serious singing in the future through her studies at the Music Academy. , she replied:
"I do not intend to take serious singing, but I intend to take it seriously (singing)."
Noting that she loves historical novels, Hungarian songs, Egypt, gold and elephants and does not like to comb her hair and wait, Dragana Šarić stepped on the domestic music scene with a melodic and gentle alias of Hollywood tone - Baby Doll. Already through a conversation about her stage name alluding to the babydol sleeping piece that was the pinnacle of desire in her childhood, Baby Doll toyed with the idea of overthrowing seriousness from the throne (Adkins Richardson 1966). The same idea permeates what is known to us today as camp culture. In her seminal work, Camp Notes, Susan Sontag interprets seriousness as the core of a naive / pure camp (taken seriously and unconsciously / unintentionally), but it is a seriousness that has failed in its essence (Sontag 1964). Susan Zontag's understanding of the seriousness of writing about the camp is in line with the basic postulates of the author, who sees the camp as a 'outside' phenomenon (on the off side of the on / off opposition). Thus, the seriousness of the camp failed according to the standards of mainstream cultures that determine the boundaries of the serious (Sontag 1964). Contrary to Sontag, Catherine Horn sees camping as a subversive strategy in popular culture rather than as a sensibility that signifies what is good precisely because it is terribly bad
Baby Doll's early records and singles perhaps exude the most obscure meanings and intriguing messages that the audience needs to decode, and which consequently, in most of Baby Dolls, has marked her as an artist 'ahead of her time.' Perhaps the initial drive to experiment and combine different forms and musical genres with the often contrasting images in Baby Doll's music videos stems from her naive belief that she can create under the Baby Doll alias without caring about the person behind it. Names.
In an interview with Danilo Štrbac (RTV magazine, June 1983) Bebi Dol says:
"In our conditions, we singers are left to ourselves. And I myself am not able to deal with the image of my grandmother. I have red hair, I dress the way I dress, I put on makeup accordingly, but none of that is meant for a career goal. If we worked like in musically developed environments, I would accept what is necessary, appearance, behavior, everything. But we don't have time for much more important things than image. "
Photo by Bebi Dol taken from Tportala.hr
This is one of the first hints that the camp at Baby Doll was used as a critique of the domestic music industry. In the first mentioned interview with Nešković, after the release of Mustafa and On the Planet of Sighs in 1982, Bebi Dol made an introduction to her attitude towards the industry in which she moves, saying that it does not occur to her to perform live because it is not done properly on the domestic scene (there is no one who would organize everything properly). In addition, the narrative of her life story, and viewed from an anthropological perspective, the meta-narrative and biography, is based on emphasizing the unusualness of her growing up and family relationships, and Baby Doll herself describes herself as 'weird' in relation to her surroundings.
For example, in a conversation for TV personalities, Like the whole normal world (2008), Bebi remembers her going to school in Belgrade. As her father was a jazz musician, that was enough for Baby Doll, then only Dragana, to stand out from the other children whose parents were engineers and lawyers. She remembers the first lesson that pointed out to her that she was "weird" and "didn't fit" when other children burned her "white fur boot" in the living room, which was only part of her. a clothing combination that bounced off what other children wore.
About his growing up, which meant frequent travel and relocation from the famous environment, Bebi Dol says:
"If in life you find yourself on a path that means something a little, a little more than average, which is also a success, then you have to be ready to behave differently, to give more, receive, cook" - interpretation of the ambition of the camp work Sunday
An article about Baby Doll from the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest
Cross the spears
on the stars go into battle
in the conquest of heaven
from today he will guide you
Thousands of space's most beautiful warriors
tomorrow it will reach me, the planet of sighs
on flying horses spitting fire
in silver suits that protect the head
you will come to enslave my planet
Photo taken from the O5 blog without lines
The text is an excerpt from the work of researcher Jelena Beočanin , which will be presented in the final publication of the project, "Camping the trash out "
Text prepared by: Uroš Đurović
In addition to frequent childhood trips, Baby Doll often talks about life in Cairo, where she was known as Miss Baby. As she recalls this period of her life, continuing to build a narrative of uniqueness through special aesthetic images: "I always wore long dresses, hair tied in a ponytail and a scarf over my arms. I remember wearing a dress made of black Venetian lace, it was called a black widow. "
If we look at the creativity and music of Baby Doll, the first EP single Mustafa / On the Planet of Sighs is experimenting with music and video form. While he takes the melody for On the Planet of Sighs from Edward Grieg (In the Hall of the Mountain King, according to Ibsen's play Per Gint, 1867), it will not be the first time he uses a composition by other composers and artists and writes lyrics and offers his own interpretation. Even in Ibsen's play itself, which according to its form is unconventional for the 19th century norms of performance, there are fantastic motives and it is based on a Norwegian fairy tale and folk tale. In her interpretation, Baby Doll retained a moment of fantasy and mysticism.