A Romanian rapper has ignited a maelstrom of moral outrage -- and some support -- after teenagers sang along to his raunchy, gangsta-style lyrics at a Transylvanian music festival.
Gheboasa, a 21-year-old Romany hip-hop artist whose real name is Gabriel Gavris, performed at the four-day Untold Festival of electronic music in Cluj-Napoca on August 4. After days of outrage on Romanian social networks and furious cultural debate in the media, Gheboasa was fined for language that disturbed the peace or offended the public, which he has said he will appeal.
The public furor has mostly been focused on perceived misogyny, the elevation of violence and drug culture, and racism and ethnic stereotyping -- issues that have dogged the male-dominated world of hip-hop and rap music for decades.
It led to the announcement on August 8 of a 1,000 lei ($222) fine for Gheboasa for "uttering insults, insulting or vulgar expressions, likely to disturb public order and peace or to provoke indignation among citizens or to offend their dignity and honor."
The Cluj-Napoca police also referred Gheboasa's performance to the National Council for Combating Discrimination "to analyze the artistic act, the words and expressions used, with a view to the possible committing of antisocial acts of discrimination."
Gheboasa responded on social media by accusing authorities of fining him for his "pretty eyes" and because he is a "Gypsy."
Gheboasa grew up in the Romany community in a poor neighborhood of Targoviste, a city 80 kilometers from the capital, Bucharest, and has spoken about his difficult upbringing surrounded by poverty and violence. With his father in prison, his mother abandoned him at birth, and he spent his early years in foster care.
There are an estimated 1.85 million Roma in Romania, around 8 percent of the population, according to the Council of Europe. However, the latest Romanian census carried out in 2021 put the number at over 560,000, a figure that has been challenged by some sociologists who say many Roma do not declare their ethnicity or do not participate in the census.
According to Amnesty International, Roma in Romania "face widespread poverty, social exclusion and discrimination, including in education, health, housing and employment."
Within hours of Gheboasa's performance at the Untold Festival, Catalin Tone, who leads antidrug efforts in Bucharest for the Romanian police's directorate to combat organized crime, drew broad public attention to a teen-filled audience chanting the words to the rapper's biggest hit, Da-I Tiganca!, which roughly translates as Give It Up, Gypsy Girl!
Tone shared Gheboasa's lyrics alongside a clip from the festival warning that "these are our children's idols!":
"Give it up, Gypsy girl/Break the bank/Oh, what a beautiful Gypsy girl/How she moves her hips/Horror flicks/She's filthy."
Da-I Tiganca! also lends a potentially offensive meaning to the word "bank," which can be used as slang to refer to a woman's buttocks. Tone noted that another Gheboasa song refers to drugs and a vulgar pejorative for female genitalia. In it, Gheboasa boasts of consuming both.
"Let's protect our children!" Tone urged.
It's easier to blame the music than to admit that you're doing a crappy job as a parent."-- Commentator Ariana Coman
Gheboasa, whose name in Romanian is a feminine form of the word hunchback, has legions of young fans, racking up tens of millions of YouTube views and hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram. He was a contestant on this year's Survivor Romania, a reality TV show, but abandoned the taping after its first week.
Gheboasa's musical style has been termed "trapanele," a blend of trap -- the hip-hop subgenre that emerged from the American south in the 1990s -- and manele, a genre of pop-folk music with Turkish, Arabic, and Balkan influences that is popular among Romania's Romany community.
The name trap derives from "trap house," Atlanta slang for a place where drugs are sold. While trap's origins were in poverty-stricken American cities, with artists rapping about street life, violence, and drugs, its distinctive sound of heavy bass and frenetic hi-hat has crossed into the mainstream and is used by artists such as Beyonce and Rihanna. Many international trap artists borrow and adapt the genre's style and raw lyrics from their U.S. counterparts as they routinely freestyle onstage.
After the fall of communism, Romany youth across Europe embraced U.S. hip-hop, identifying with common themes of social injustice, police violence, and poverty. Many Romany rappers have become popular, often blending the original genre with local music styles.
'I'm Not Here To Educate Children'
Gheboasa has hit back at his critics. In an appearance on Romanian TV on August 7, he responded to his detractors, chiding parents who accused him of warping young minds.
A man who's afraid that...I'm ruining [a child's] education is a parent who doesn't take care of his child properly."-- Gheboasa
"Maybe they weren't the best lyrics, but I don't participate at festivals to educate children," Gheboasa told his interviewers. "A man who's afraid that his child won't be educated [after listening to my songs] and that I'm ruining [a child's] education is a parent who doesn't take care of his child properly, because I'm not here to educate children."
Contacted by RFE/RL's Romanian Service, Gheboasa's representatives declined to comment on the controversy.
Many of his most outspoken critics' arguments appear to reflect age-old generational differences over popular culture as much as any specific objections to Gheboasa's songs.
Political commentator Cristian Tudor Popescu criticized Gheboasa and warned his 308,000 Facebook followers that there was "something deeper and darker" underlying the "incident." Popescu acknowledged frequently using obscenities on the tennis court but said such language was not part of his "Weltanschauung," a German word meaning worldview or mindset.
Popescu then suggested that Gheboasa's references represent a Weltanschauung for those youngsters cheering him in the crowd and lead to "rape [and] the trade in human flesh" with "physical violence and murder…just one step away." He invoked a grisly recent murder, suggesting the killer was "a fan of Gheboasa and the Tate brothers," the dual U.S.-British Internet purveyors of hypermasculinity currently facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania.
Most of the more than 1,000 commenters on Popescu's Facebook post condemn the singer, with many lamenting the state of society and some calling for such language to be censored.
'Nothing New Under The Sun'
Along with his millions of young fans, Gheboasa has his defenders, too. Bucharest University sociology professor and podcaster Gelu Duminica acknowledged that the lyrics of Gheboasa and other popular acts at Untold were "vulgar and filthy" but argued that "there's nothing new under the sun with this kind of music and it has existed, in various forms, forever." The music and messages of such Romanian artists, Duminica said, are merely a reflection of trends at home and abroad and "an adaptation to the 'market.'"
Out of the desire to be accepted, out of the desire to belong to a group, a child consumes what their group consumes."-- Gelu Duminica, Bucharest University
The Untold Festival's organizers have defended their invitation for Gheboasa to appear along with around 250 other acts, while noting that he appeared on one of the event's side stages, not the main stage that hosted pop rock's Imagine Dragons later the same night. They also stressed their commitment to freedom of expression and said "each artist assumes his own messages and is responsible for the content he delivers."
But Untold's communications director, Edy Chereji, said the festival would carefully consider "the most appropriate path between the freedom of the artistic act and the impact that its messages during the concert could have."
"We can't pretend that there isn't a whole genre of music when it's so popular," Chereji told RFE/RL's Romanian Service.
Professor Duminica acknowledged that while he is no fan, "I can't help but see that [the] music is successful" and that "neglecting the current of trapanele in Romania is totally wrong."
"The problem is not Gheboasa the man; there has been 30 years of promoters of this message on stage," Duminica said. He added that history is chock-full of musical efforts to undermine authority.
"Out of the desire to be accepted, out of the desire to belong to a group, a child consumes what their group consumes," Duminica said. "I mean, we have to look at the fact that the main reason why such things are consumed is us. [But] of course, it's easier to beat up on people like Gheboasa."
The European Institute For Gender Equality has estimated that around 30 percent of Romanian women have suffered violence, roughly the same as the figure for the European Union as a whole, and domestic violence is regarded as a serious problem. The Council of Europe says the country has made significant progress to combat violence against women, particularly since it ratified the Istanbul Convention in 2016, but says more work is still needed.
Contributor Ariana Coman wrote for Romanian Vice that with or without Gheboasa, "no one has ever gone so far as to claim that Romanian trap [music]…is about the philosophical message it conveys." Rather, she argued, "It's about the tendency toward terribleness and the fantasy of listening to people talk about taboo things because they're not socially accepted. And the penchant for this sort of thing is nothing new."
She compared it to acts that spoke to previous generations of Romanians in similarly vulgar tones, groups like Parazitii and B.U.G. Mafia.
"You could teach your child how not to be a whiny misogynist, how to consume responsibly if he really wants to, and how to relate humanly to other people," Coman wrote. "But it's easier to blame the music than to admit that you're doing a crappy job as a parent."
