Bulgaria’s Azis

Bulgaria’s Azis
You don’t count Azis’s press cuttings, you weigh them. Azis has proved there is a Bulgarian
Dream, one which emphasises it’s not important your ethnicity or family but how big your dreams
are. He has proved that if you trust your self nothing can stop you. ‘One day I will be like Madonna!’ These words of little Vasko made his friends laugh. But the times show he has the qualities of many world superstars. Mostly they compare him to Madonna and Michael Jackson – and he agrees he’s
influenced by them – but now he is not like anyone else. At least under the Bulgarian sun. What is
sure, Azis will go down in the history of Bulgarian showbiz as a phenomenon. And he still didn’t say his last word. His life is maybe like the story of the ugly duckling. He never hid that he was Gypsy.
He was never ashamed to do any kind of job to earn some money. He walked dogs of rich people. Cleaned offices. Barman and waiter. But thanks to God that in all that time he continued to do what he could do best – sing and perform. Wise men have said hat luck goes to courageous individuals. That means Azis….”

The overheated prose continues like this for several thousand words. Understandably so, it comes from a fan magazine issued to coincide with Azis’s concert at Sofia’s National Stadium in October, 2003. Thing is, I’d normally never quote such stuff but with Azis . . . well, there’s a ring of truth to it.

Azis . . . where to start? I first bore witness while on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast in early ’03. It was early in the season and the bars were shut so my evening entertainment revolved around demolishing a bottle of the local Cab Sav in front of TV Planeta. Beginning to nod when a chiaroscuro video featuring the most extreme looking Gypsy I’d ever seen (bleached hair, eyebrows, beard, moustache, Satanic gaze) unfurled across the screen. It was one of those TV moments worthy of Japanese horror flick The Ring: this creature, leering and teasing, revelled in a nightmare of latent sadism and sexual insinuation. Double lock the door and resolve to quit drinking. “Who was that?” I asked everyone I encountered. All knew the answer: Azis.

What is Azis? He’s a Gypsy chalga singer. And then some. Check it: nothing (and no one) else in Bulgaria has quite so brazenly rejected the numbing greyness of official Bulgarian ‘culture’, one so long proscribed. Not that Azis is a political activist. Indeed, I doubt if older he would have actively opposed Zhivkov’s regime. Laughed at it? Sure. Winked at it too: I imagine he appreciates a man in uniform.

Initially Azis resembled a chubby, youthful Andre Agassi (big hair & stubble) and was viewed as just another Gypsy chalga singer, albeit one with a beguiling vocal style, his voice pitched high and keening. His metamorphosis into the most controversial entertainer in Bulgarian history involved a daemonic appearance shift and videos so lurid, so hallucinated with desire, they leave efforts by The Prodigy and Marilyn Manson gathering MTV dust. For the AZIS 2002 album he was appearing in saris and belly dance costumes, high heels on his feet, bleach in his hair, chest and armpits shaved. As were melodies from Greek, Serbian, Turkish, Egyptian and Bollywood songs, Azis adding lyrics (in Bulgarian and Romani) and a twisted eroticism: the beefy Gypsy boy transgressed into a symbol of the new Balkan night.

Indeed, Azis’ concert at Sofia’s Palace Of Culture (in February 2003) was a near perfect distillation of how Ottoman/Gypsy values have outlived Stalinism’s attempt to crush such. The POC’s a concrete haemorrhoid, 17,000 square metres of crap communist architecture. Opened in 1981 for the ‘1300 Years Of Bulgarian Nationhood’ celebrations, the POC was once named after Todor Zhivkov’s daughter, Lyudmila Zhivkova, who ruthlessly ran the Culture Ministry. 1981 was a big year for Bulgarian mythmaking and Lyudmila ensured daddy’s nationalist fantasies were turned into epic, banal festivities; history got rewritten and state funds squandered.

Appropriately, when the POC hosted Azis he offered his own epic and beautifully banal fantasies. Taking the stage on a Harley accompanied by leather boys, his performance included simulating sex with men and women, marrying a body builder then discarding said Muscle Mary so to gaze into a mirror and marry himself. Along the way he sang his hits, shook his tush and had a very good time. Parents, who’d somehow managed to overlook the blatant S&M tendencies in Azis’s videos, declared themselves shocked and dragged little Boris and Dora away.

The POC was a warm-up: in October 2003 he attracted 15,000 fans to Sofia’s National Stadium for an epic performance. Fronting a hot Gypsy band and flanked by a female bodybuilder and a local Playboy model wearing little more than body paint, Azis sang duets with several comely chalga stars, was groped by leather boys, surrounded by belly and fire dancers and even introduced his mother – a beautiful woman who grabbed the mic’ and gives thanks to God for her son. Beyond spectacle, Azis possesses the brightest smile in town and sings in a voice charged with eerie, erotic beauty, quite unlike all I’ve heard before. The arrangements are strong, the band – led by Boril Iliev – cook up the chalga and the audience, dancing and holding lighters aloft, gets Thracian. It’s Stadium Gypsy, good, unclean fun and I’d lay down lev to see him again.

For the nation’s hottest singer Azis is remarkably easy to contact. Rumi rang his manager who guaranteed an interview. In contrast, when Rumi contacted the ARA label who represent Sofi Marinova – Bulgaria’s most popular female Gypsy singer – she was told ‘Sofi only talks if she gets paid’. Explaining she’d get paid in ink didn’t help and I ended up being offered an interview with her PR who dropped such pearls as Sofi named her son Lorenzo after a Latin soap actor and how she has ‘a Gypsy character distinct from our Bulgarian character’.

Shame I never got to meet Sofi, her albums are horribly overproduced but she can wail with the best of them. I once caught a wedding video featuring Sofi singing with Jony Iliev, their voices weaving and teasing, coiled and sensual. And she was easily the best duet partner for Azis at his National Stadium gig, the pair of them tossing off lines in Bulgarian and Romani as Sofi wiggled across the stage in leather hot-pants. Sofi’s nicknamed “Romska Perla” (the Gypsy Pearl) and Roma communities across the Balkans love her. But in Sofia the answer remains the same: no cash, no Sofi.

Arriving at Azis’s management offices in central Sofia we’re informed Azis is running late: he’s filming a spot on the nation’s leading light-entertainment TV show and shooting is delayed. Which makes me wonder: Azis as light entertainment . . . damn, Bulgaria really is one weird nation. His manager Krum Krumov, crop headed and heavily muscled, provides coffee and cigarettes, fires questions at me (“how” and “why” does London know of and want to talk to his charge) and recalls Azis coming to him wanting to succeed. “I’d had an idea to make a movie about the Gypsies so I knew something of them. In Bulgaria there’s three groups of Gypsies. The Kalderash who are the businessmen and are the highest class. The second group are the Yerlii, singers and dancers and shoe makers. They’re middle class. And then there’s the Rudara who work with bears and make spoons and beg. They’re the poor Gypsies.” As potted ethnography it’s not exactly accurate but Krum’s point is this: “Azis is Kalderash so I knew we could do business.” Azis’s career took off after they made the first scandal video that showed him and “the Negro” together with a boa constrictor. “That drove everyone crazy.”

Krum then plays the new Azis video for Nikoi Ne Mozhe (Nobody Cares). The clip begins in silence. Sitting in a nightclub a Body Builder and his female companion stare into one another’s eyes. Then Azis enters and BB’s eyes are all over Azis. Who pays no attention. BB rises. Girl tries to hold him back. BB rushes to touch Azis. Bodyguards pound BB. Girl screams. Cut to Azis in a spangly Hindu Love God outfit and outrageously fake fingernails standing in a fountain surrounded by white swans. He’s wailing Bollywood style. Cut to Azis and Body Builder bonding on pink satin sheets. Swans. Satin. Manly hugs. It goes on like this until the song finishes and the video cuts back to the nightclub’s silence. Azis enters the toilets where discarded amongst the urinals is BB with a needle hanging out of his arm. Azis brushes a tear away. Fini. As a performer Azis is one of those rare artists who’s beyond embarrassment, no matter how tacky or kitsch his efforts. Krum asks: what do I make of the video? Uh, well, more fun than Trainspotting. The video was shot in O’Azis, the Sofia club Azis owns, says Krum. Boy’s done well.

And then the boy is in the room. Smiling, eyes twinkling (beautiful eyes), gossiping and giggly about his TV appearance, checking me out, puffing on a cigarette, wearing leather pants, black T-shirt, denim jacket, eye liner, tattooed neck. First impressions: he’s big for a Gypsy, tall, huge thighs, strong shoulders, already carrying the belly that signals success on the Indian subcontinent. And dark, caramel skin glowing. The baleful Azis has been left on set, today he’s more Liberace than Lucifer, his aura one of intrigue, mischief, of . . . Little Richard. Their impish sense of outrage, camp affectations, ability to blend musical forms and camp affectations suggest spiritual kin: Azis’ chants and yearning wail as distinctive as Little Richard’s shrieks and roaring “AWOPBOPALOOBOP ALOPBAMBOOM”.

Introductions are made. Azis starts to talk.

“I was born Vasil Troyanov Boyanov in 1978 in Sliven (a central Bulgarian city that hosts the nation’s largest Roma community). Vasko’s always been my nickname and even as a child I knew I could sing. My parents were always feeding me and always afraid to let me go out by myself. When I wanted to go alone they would follow me, hidden! One time I went to see Indiana Jones. There was a horrible moment when they pull out the heart of a man. I screamed. You know how high my voice is now, imagine it then in the cinema! Suddenly I heard my father call out, ‘Vasco, I’m here. Don’t be afraid!’ As a child I always liked dolls and sometimes I would dress up in my mother’s clothes and do theatre for my grandmother. And I’d make her promise not to tell my mother! Although my father was a professional accordion player he didn’t like the idea of me being a musician at all. I started singing in the church choir, singing in Rom, but this was not enough for me.

“We shifted to Barnishora (a working class part of Sofia) and when I was eleven we formed a family ensemble and travelled all over Bulgaria and I would perform every night impersonating Michael Jackson. I took my school books with me but I never liked school, I always wanted to be at home watching my Madonna videos. A friend of my father gave me a cassette of Indian music and it impressed me very much, I listened to it day and night. My father saw my voice was not too different from Indian voices. The women of India impressed me very much and whenever they showed Bollywood movies at the cinema hundreds of Gypsies would be waiting and when the movie started we would all begin to cry.

“When I was thirteen my family shifted to Germany. In Stuttgart my mother gave birth to my little sister. My parents love one another very much. When my father sings love songs in restaurants he would think of my mother and cry. And my mother is very beautiful. In Germany people would think she was Whitney Houston. Every time I see Whitney Houston on TV I cry and call my mother. I didn’t like the people in Germany at all. They weren’t from my blood group. Cold, grey, tense. It’s different in Bulgaria. I wanted to come home to my granny. I cried my eyes out. My mother wouldn’t let me go for a year and a half but finally agreed. At least I learned perfect German. When I came back to Bulgaria all my relatives were at the airport, collapsing, crying. We the Gypsies are more temperamental, we cry for the smallest thing. I started living with my granny in Kostinbrod.

“I promised my mother that I would go to school when I returned to Bulgaria but I had totally different plans. I remember how everyone in the classroom was reading some books but that wasn’t interesting to me. When they asked me why I wasn’t reading I told them that I would be a star. The whole class was laughing at me, they constantly made jokes about me, but I knew I’d show them. I didn’t want my mother or granny to give me money. They were worried what the people would think, that I would work and they would not support me, but I wanted to be self-sufficient.

“I started singing in my cousin’s bar where I worked as a waiter. When the band left the bar they asked me to come with them as their singer. I had lots of jobs, did anything, I was determined to make it as a singer. Sure, I did weddings and traditional Gypsy things like that. But not for long. It’s too small for me. I know Jony and Sofi but I’ve never been interested in doing that traditional Gypsy music thing. I’m for the big stage with professional sound and lighting. The small party, the small business, it doesn’t interest me. So in that way I’m not the typical Roma performer. My parents did not make a big deal about being Gypsy and while I don’t hide my Gypsy heritage I wouldn’t say I was very proud of it.”

OK, bait the liberal Gadje time. But I’m not biting. Azis sings in Romani, employs Gypsy musicians, has supported Roma organisations. He might not confess such but word gets about. Bulgaria’s Roma love him for this, for his success, for his fearless personality, for his freedom and fame. And for his music – no one anywhere in contemporary music has quite so much fun as Azis; he creates, to paraphrase Phil Spector, little Gypsy symphonies for the kids. Songs lurch into being, tablas bang out rhythms, cheesy synths boil, clarinets squeeze Gypsy juice across the melody, Azis chants before drifting into his lovely effete vocal, then the tune explodes – abrupt rhythmic changes, snippets of English (“Have mercy!” “Eat this!”) are dropped in – Azis squeals “wey-hey!” and it’s lush and crazy and camp and slick and trashy and ridiculous and funny and engaging and magical and senseless and vivid, yeah, extremely vivid . . . the mad Balkan Bollywood experience packed into four fabulous minutes. Where the 1990s’ dance music boom produced a sound bereft of wit and rhythmic ingenuity, bland on bland, Azis offers a musical rollercoaster, the sound of surprise. “I really like your songs,” I say.

“Thank you,” says Azis and wiggles his head, a very Indian gesture given a camp cowboy’s twist. Considering the word ‘bugger’ is a distortion of Bulgar – the British once considered the nation full of sodomites – one could make a case for historic lineage out of Azis. Not here, not now. Still, it’s worth noting that Bulgaria under Zhivkov was straighter than straight – homosexuality was outlawed in the Soviet states – and only the carrot of EU membership has recently forced a reversal of blatantly homophobic laws in Bulgaria and Romania (Yugoslavia having decriminalised homosexuality in 1932). I’m unaware of any research into Roma sexuality. Most likely a community of outsiders value their own shadow dwellers, the ‘putzka’ (gays) have always played a subterranean role in Hindu and Turkish society. And with the cult of virginity still a determinant for bride price then where do young Roma men turn for sexual release? Celibacy? In Bulgaria? Hmmmm. OK, time for the money shot: Azis, tick a box – gay-straight-bisexual?

Azis smiles. A smile bright enough to illuminate Sofia. Eyes twinkle. Says nothing. Not that I expected an answer. Krum had warned me earlier, “no one knows if he is or isn’t. The mystery keeps them guessing.” And those explicitly homoerotic pop videos? Keep ‘em guessing. Sure.

“Azis’s last album sold 68,000 copies,” says Krum. “That is phenomenal for Bulgaria.”

Considering the majority of the nation don’t own CD players and live in effective poverty that is, sure, phenomenal. Are they buying the music or the outrage? The decadence is as calculated as Madonna’s efforts, sure, but the sound of Azis – yearning, playful, engaged – is light years removed from Madonna’s icy corporate moves. Azis, has the explicit erotic content of your songs and videos ever brought about censorship problems?

“There was a time when some of the TV channels tried to stop showing my videos. But the people protested and no one is bigger than the people and the people love me.”

Azis blags another cigarette off Krum and starts messing with his hair. As, so far, nothing is written in English on Azis I’m unsure how long he’s been recording for. Could he provide a brief career overview? Azis laughs and says something to Krum who searches through his desk and comes up with a cassette that’s passed to me. It shows a smartly dressed family on the cover and its Bulgarian title translates as Christian Roma Songs. “That’s my first recording,” says Azis with glee. It’s hard to see the connection between the handsome, stocky youth standing behind his parents and the exotic peacock in front of me. “Your parents must be very proud of you?” Azis cocks an eyebrow. “I suppose you could say that.”

It was 1999 that Vasko Boyanov signed a contract with Marathon Records and Azis was born. “I was watching a Turkish movie on TV when I was eighteen and a character was called Azis. I wrote the name on the wall because I knew immediately here was my name.”

Azis’s propensity for outrage came from looking East not West, his immediate spiritual ancestors being Zeki Muren and Bulent Ersoy. Zeki was Turkey’s cross-dressing crooner, once a very pretty boy and forever loved by Turkish housewives. He ran to fat and tired of touring in the late 1980s but, unable to resist the spotlight, attempted a comeback tour in ’96. Bad idea: presented with a four-kilo award for his contribution to Turkish culture the excitement was too much and Zeki had a heart attack. A trooper to the end, Zeki died with his makeup on.

Bulent is Turkey’s transsexual superstar. Banned from re-entering Turkey in 1980 after a sex change – the then military government saw Bulent as a threat to public morals – he settled in Germany and played to the Turkish community there. Invited back in 1987 (the President was a fan and missed having Bulent around), she’s not opted for a respectable middle age: singing the call to prayer on a recording, parading a variety of boyfriends (average age: 19) in front of the nation and, recently, announcing she wants to marry her current man. As Imams and military figures howled in outrage and rightwing organisations issued death threats, Bulent raised a false eyelash and winked at Turkey’s moral guardians, revelling in controversy. While Bulent and Zeki aren’t of Roma origin much Turkish music and dance is informed by Gypsy culture. In turn, Balkan Roma recall the Ottomans with some affection; Bulgarian communism smothered, but never extinguished, this cultural link.

Azis’s first songs were included in the compilation DJ Folk Marathon. His 1999 debut album Pain opens with the lead song sung in Romani. He then won Singer of the Year at the Stara Zagora Roma Festival in Central Bulgaria.

“My music is addressed to the party people but my power is in the ballads,” he says when I ask him to describe his sound. “That’s where I spill my soul out.”

His second album Muzhete Sushto Plachat (Men Also Cry) was released in February 2000 and a video featuring Azis and a stripper raised eyebrows. “That’s when the visual change started in me – I would appear on stage in makeup and started bleaching my hair. I don’t know why I shouldn’t put makeup on when my female colleagues can go on stage only in bra and knickers. And for those who criticise me I only say ‘hate me, that makes me live’.”

In August 2000 Azis announced he was going to bleach his face. Just like Michael Jackson. He didn’t but the media were excited and Azis’s star kept rising. He scored a huge hit with Sulzi (Tears) and won the Best Live Artist award at The Golden Mustang festival in September 2000. In 2001 the Hvani Me De (Come On Catch Me) video found him dressed in Bollywood drag, playing with a python and licking milk off the chests of two underdressed black men. The ensuring hysteria guaranteed household name status.

“I touched many themes that are taboo in Bulgaria. I was in a hurry to do it as, one way or another, some one was going to do it. I either do something truly or I don’t do it at all.”

In 2001 Azis met Lili Ivanova and declared her his idol; Lily’s the grand old diva of Bulgarian pop, having built her career singing estrada (Russian-style pop). Once the nation’s darling, Lili still sings ‘though she’s now more famous for copious plastic surgery than her bland songs. In the 1960s Lili played Shirley Bassey to Emil Dimitrov’s Tom Jones; his big number – commissioned by the communists and still hugely popular – is Moia Strana, Moia Bulgaria (My Country, My Bulgaria). Emil’s still singing and, having never married, is assumed by most Bulgarians to be gay. All of which suggests Azis should enjoy a long and profitable homeland career.

The Azis 2002 album found him perfecting his sound (hits Obicham Te and Niama) and image – bleached hair, eyebrows, facial hair and contact lenses against chocolate skin made him resemble a Gypsy android. 2003’s very fine Na Golo (Naked) album finds Azis looking if he may have, with the help of surgeons (or Photoshop), crossed genders. Rumours abounded that he was now a transsexual. On the back cover he’s fetching in a bright sari and stilettos. Na Golo is fabulous, the best Balkan pop album ever. 2004’s Kraliat (King) finds him mimicking Madonna’s True Blue album cover and singing several epic Balkan ballads. The chalga numbers are less inspired, lacking the madcap bhangra exuberance of Na Golo. Azis is flash and hype, sure, but so are, say, Outkast and Prince, both of whom he bears a certain resemblance to. And when he sings a ballad it’s as if Smokey Robinson’s ethereal spirit was enticing the listener on, hand against heart, condoms and KY Jelly on show.

Back in the office the slow pace of questions being fed into Bulgarian and answers translated back into English finds Azis distracted, flicking through a magazine. Does he enjoy meeting fans? “No, no. It bores me.” What made him open a club? “Sofia needed a club like you see in movies where you can see naked women and naked men walking around.” What does he do when not working? “Watch TV, videos. I’m very lazy, I shift from this sofa to that sofa. Most of my friends are gay, very funny people, so we’re sitting, laughing, talking.”

OK. Thanks for your time. “Thank you very much,” he says in bubbly English. And flashes that smile. Waiting outside Krum’s office is the bodybuilder who featured as the doomed love interest in the Nobody Cares video. Rumi, who’d been reluctant to do the interview (“why do you want to talk to him? He’s so vulgar!”) is impressed. “Well, I’m surprised,” she says. “He speaks very good Bulgarian. Unlike all the other musicians you interview who speak rough Bulgarian because they spend all their lives speaking Romani. But he, wow, he speaks it without any accent, as beautifully as a politician.”

Out on the street I start chuckling. Rumi gives me one of her ‘crazy foreigner’ looks. But I can’t help this happy mirth, seeing Azis as emblematic of all the eccentric possibilities the Balkan future holds. And with Rumi now on side, Rumi who until this evening dismissed chalga out of hand and felt a strong nostalgia for the Zhivkov era, well Bulgaria looks bright. Now the world can only be Azis’s aphrodisiac . . . What’s that sound? AWOPBOPALOOBOP ALOPBAMBOOM!
Azis music > http://www.music-bulgaria.com/artist.php?xid=160-%c0%e7%e8%f1
18.03.2011