You guys. There is a Romanian manele singer named Susanu who has a song called “Talent Like 50 Cent.”
But beyond the Buzzfeedesque point-and-laugh, there’s a lot of complicated race, class and ethnic stuff going on here: manele is underclass party music with a strong Roma influence, and because it is the twenty-first century any underclass party music has a hip-hop bedrock, though the specific beat strikes me as closer to dancehall, reggaetón or crossover kuduro. Roma are very much an oppressed and despised European underclass, and while I have no idea what Susanu’s ethnic makeup is, he reads as white — to the extent that at least one of his outfits would be culturally coded as “country” in the US. There’s the inevitable air of cheesiness that pretty much any Eastern European pop music is going to have to U.S. eyes, but I’m not sure how seriously he means any of it; for all I know he’s the Romanian Paul Barnam. His album is called Manelistic and his first viral video was a cover of “Boombastic” — so there’s way more going on here than I can parse without reading Romanian.
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