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About: Pop
The pop music of Croatia generally resembles the canzone music of Italy, while including elements of the native traditional music. Croatian record companies produce a lot of material each year, if only to populate the numerous music festivals. Of special note is the Split festival which usually produces the best summer hits.
Seasoned pop singers in Croatia include: Mišo Kovač, Ivo Robić, Vice Vukov, Arsen Dedić, Zdenka Vučković, Darko Domjan, Tereza Kesovija, Gabi Novak, Ivica Šerfezi, Oliver Dragojević, Tomislav Ivčić, Doris Dragović, and many others.
In more recent times, younger performers such as Severina, Gibonni, Marko Perković/Thompson, Toni Cetinski, Divas, E.N.I., Lvky, Danijela and many others have captured the attention of the pop audience. Each of them has successfully blended various influences into their distinct music style. For example, Thompson's songs include traditional epic themes from the Dinaric regions; Severina threads between canzone and an oriental sound.
Croatian pop music is fairly often listened to in Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro due to the union of Yugoslavia that existed until the 1990s. Conversely, Bosnian singers like Kemal Monteno and Dino Merlin and Serbian Đorđe Balašević have a large audience in Croatia, as well as many others. Turbo folk, while being frowned upon by establishment and despised by majority of music critics and social commentators, was popular among large sections of Croatian youth, only to become somewhat more accepted in recent years.
Croatia is a regular contestant on the Eurovision Song Contest. Back in Yugoslavia, Croatian pop group Riva won the contest in 1989. Some of the other Croatians who performed on the ESC include Danijel Popović, Put, Boris Novković and Claudia Beni.
Rock
There are several rather popular and long-lasting mainstream rock acts like Parni Valjak, Prljavo Kazalište, Crvena Jabuka, Atomsko Sklonište etc. They originated in the 1970s and 1980s, and for the better part of their career resorted to a more mellow, mainstream pop-rock sound. Of some note is also the Sarajevo school of pop rock which influenced many of these bands, and which also included singers like Željko Bebek who later worked in Croatia.
However, Croatian New Wave (Novi Val) movement, which exploded in 1979/80 and lasted throughout the eighties, is considered by many to be the high watermark of Croatian rock music, both in terms of quality and commercial success. The most influential and popular bands of Novi val were Azra, Haustor, Film, even early Prljavo Kazalište. Other notable acts were Animatori, Buldožer, Paraf, Patrola etc.
In the late 1980s, the region of Istria became home to a kind of called Ča-val, which often used the Čakavian dialect and elements of traditional Istra-Kvarner music.
The New Wave scene has collapsed by the end of the eighties, to be replaced by the newcomers like Daleka Obala, Majke and Laufer. While Daleka Obala sported a pop-rock sound influenced by Novi val, Croatian pop and even Dalmatian folk, Majke were a back-to-basics, garage-rock act stylistically influenced by bands like the Black Crowes, Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, as well as their Serbian counterparts Partibrejkers. Laufer, led by Damir Urban (who later went on to form Urban & 4), were an early nineties alternative rock band taking their cue from the grunge movement.
Let 3 and KUD Idijoti are also prominent rock acts, popular both for their music and their interesting, often controversial, performances and stunts.
Beginning in the late 1980s, folk-rock groups also sprouted across Croatia. The first is said to be Vještice, who combined Međimurje folk music with rock and set the stage for artists like Legen, Lidija Bajuk and Dunja Knebl. At the same time on the other side of Croatia, in Istria, a band called Gustafi started playing their own strange amalgamate of rock and Istrian folk, but it took them more than a decade to reach the nationwide audience.
The Sisak surf rock band The Bambi Molesters has in the past years gained sizeable international fame and are often touted as one of the best surf-rock acts in the world today
Dance
Dance music in Croatia was an offspring of the local pop music and more Western influences. It developed during the late 1980s and early 1990s, picking up on the trends such as euro disco and eurodance. It also spawned a wave of electronic music artists, mostly house, techno and trance.
The singer Vanna rose to prominence through the dance trio E.T., and the music of Vesna Pisarović has a fair bit of dance beat.
Although E.T. still operates, they've changed singers several times and lost in popularity. The band Colonia is perhaps the only one that rode the dance wave of the '90s and is still popular
Rap
The 1990s were marked by the emergence of Croatian rap music. The Ugly Leaders released the first ever Croatian Hip-Hop album, and gained a strong following in and around Rijeka. In 1991, the Croatian Liberation Front released two widely popular protest singles. The first rap band to gain widespread and lasting acclaim was The Beat Fleet (TBF) from Split, whose members took inspiration from harsh economic and social condititions of war-torn Dalmatia, not that different from American inner cities. Their act was followed by multitude of artists and groups in Zagreb, taking inspiration from American gangsta rap. The Zagreb rappers Bolesna Braća (also called Sick Rhyme Sayazz) and Tram 11 became particularly popular, and to an extent also the duo Stoka & Nered.
The Croatian rap gained much from the fact Edo Maajka signed on to a label in Zagreb. Recently a rapper known as Shorty gained a lot of popularity by having songs with strong regional flavour of his native Vinkovci. The Zagreb band Elemental also burst into the scene featuring one of the few Croatian female rappers.
