Voodoo Popeye – writer, poet, rapper, music composer, master of puns, and much more. He has been on the Serbian, and even Balkan music and literary scene for 30 years, with a strong fan base. He has released 8 albums, several books, novels, and collections of poems, and was also the inspirer/initiator/collaborator on a comic-book “Feather Pickers Fly Early” (published by ‘Draslar partner’, 2006) inspired by his works, with another three authors. He made the comic-satirical film “Attack on Express Station” (2007). In addition to countless performances during his 30-year long career, he performed at the “Nišville International Jazz Festival 2022″. He recently performed at the Art club “Svitac” (Firefly, eng.) in Jagodina (Strawberry City, eng.) on July 4, 2025 (support by DJ Sjahman), and on that occasion he gave an interview for our digital magazine. In this text, you have the opportunity to dive with him into some of the universal stories about life.
alxspirit: In the text for Radar (popular Serbian media outlet and newspaper weekly), you explained the meaning of the name of the album “Stereporoza” (Stereoporosis, eng.) (2024). What else can you tell us about the album “Stereoporosis” in terms of the collapse of musical compositions and ideas, with the association to the golden age of Hi-Fi systems, as well as the association to the golden age of music in a broader sense?
Voodoo Popeye: “Stereo” is a musical term used in that coinage with the message that music is somehow in trouble. When we add “Porosis”, it further means that the music is in deficit with ideas, and many other things. And the circumstances are not very great, especially for original bands and individuals. The meaning can be further sought in the music crisis and events like COVID19 and various other happenings. The digital sphere has also had the effect on making music – and its very value – for everything to simply become cheaper. Everything has become so easy, light and accessible. That would be a message through that little pun: “Stereoporosis”.
alxspirit: What can you tell us about your versatility and kind of “mind punning”? Where did you get that gift?
Voodoo Popeye: Well, I don’t know how to explain it… I think that I am certainly diverse, not only in that, but also in many performance techniques, various imitations that I present myself in all possible ways, and then in the variety of topics, etc. There are many components to satisfy in order to be a serious artist, so it’s not just one thing, it involves a lot. I tried to fulfill that, while remaining myself and not belonging to any quasi-elites, parties, clans, etc. – and that is a much more difficult path to success. That human side is very important, in addition to the artistic side. So it is another segment or brick in the wall of (my) peculiar talent and some skills that I present not only through songs and through my work – and not only through music. I went into other fields as well – literature, first of all, which is my place in the original sense, and then a little bit into film, comics, etc. So these are very demanding operations. The more of these sections you fill in, the more significant you are in some sense. At least that’s what I think.
alxspirit: Your second album “Epopeye2” (2000) had, through several songs, a rather deep and strong socio-political (at times religious) sub-context that predicted and defined the next couple of decades. You knew that too, which can be concluded from lyrics like “my album was not late, but early, and that’s why I’m going through everything I said before”.
Voodoo Popeye: I said a lot of things in advance, knowing what could happen and what pitfalls could be found on my way, creatively and artistically, so I shut many people’s mouths even back then.
alxspirit: There is also a verse that describes our way of functioning quite well here, where everything is done excessively and over the measure, like a cultural matrix, and the verse reads: “there is no place on the roads where everyone want to drive 200 (Km/h) – either you get out of the lane, or you’re a sold-out bride”. What is today’s message to ethical and moral people who consciously “switched off the lane”?
Voodoo Popeye: From a religious standpoint I can understand those people, if it’s set up as some sort of “genuine world track”. I also have a line in the song “Cottage cheese” that reads: “I am not from this world, remember that, I only stopped by to buy some cheese!”, and actually that’s how I’m saying that people who are turned to faith are “passing through” here. There is a new world after this, a new life, and in that sense I can understand that people deviate from that lane and live some parallel life, as it happens, where they are turned to faith and some values that in this world have definitely been shaken from their foundations, if not reversed to the extreme. I can support such an act. If the situation is like that, we will go some other way, but we will deserve the respect, which I feel and receive from people at every step. I’m here to send some messages, like a “Messiah” thing from the second album, and it’s great if I managed to shake someone positively to use their mental abilities far. It means to predict everything and anything. If he is a natural man and if he does not force such a desire and ambition, it will be given to him, as it is given to me to guess many things.
alxspirit: How do you interpret the current social momentum (in Serbia)? I would like to remind you of your verse: “I want to fight, but the fight is not fair, because we do not carry the same weapons in our hands”.
Voodoo Popeye: Well it’s very tragic. I am sad because of the circus on all sides, because of some tension, the realization of some ambitions in an ugly way. I can only say that they are ungodly people who do not see the Christian path, which means that you have to give up something and bend your back for the sake of that faith, but it is difficult to talk about it because the value system is unfortunately the other way around. It was deliberately made so that their starting point would be very bad, and that’s why when people seek the lesser evil – they are already of a weaker character. A normal and righteous man who is eager for a better tomorrow will not choose between two evils, but will say “I want the best and most correct thing that exists”. Maybe people need to go through those cycles every time, but I’m not sure that anything will become clear. Somehow these paths are always the same.
alxspirit: In the song “Acting and Lie” you described hypocrisy as the backbone of our society. How tired is our country of “Tired Blues” and “Mechanism” (some of his songs) that we have been living in for several decades? How to get out of the mechanism?
Voodoo Popeye: Well, acting and lies reign through pretense. There are also social networks that make it possible. Those networks are already established in such a way that people falsely present themselves and somehow people are used to living in that lie, so we from the Balkans also get those false epithets – that we are frauds, that we lie, that people cannot rely on us, etc. As for that “mechanism”, it is always there, from some depth that unfortunately does not allow you to peek out of that hole. You should not take it upon yourself, and when you have something – if nothing else, at least leave a message that you do not agree with the one who does something bad to you. It’s always been like that with me. If I can’t really resist – at least I’ll say it. In the same way, people somehow should show resistance to everything that is bad and that is named “mechanism”. You can get out of it through faith, you can say something, look for like-minded people, strengthen that structure of resistance. It may even be some individual actions and sensibilities. We are not all the same, just as not every illness is the same, nor is its treatment – and it depends on what type of illness you are. Individuals are complex and specific (me first), anyway. Life forms us to be different in some way, and will we become uniform? We usually dress up for some interest and become recognizable picture models. I think that a person should use his brains as much as possible. My brains are like brothers to me and they often automatically think for me, and they allow me to solve various obstacles in life – and same goes for the people, it can also be an option for them – to turn to some things that they have certainly not finished in their life and to deal with it in some parallel track, and then when some conditions are created – to appear on this main track.
alxspirit: Your film “Attack on Express Station” (2007) was a fun story about social disharmony. What is the state today in the world of universal “digitized disharmony”?
Voodoo Popeye: What happens in the digital world – happens in reality. People on social networks are not particularly better at anything, and vice versa. The benefit of having all these social networks is not much, if people are just going to impersonate themselves but still be bad at their core. It’s just a question of what they will show first and where, in some reality. These social networks enable a much wider reach towards people. Even if someone doesn’t have any friends in real life, they can find as many as they want there. If these people are corrupt as in real life, then again nothing – the result will be bad. A person should try, regardless of those difficulties, and increasingly difficult circumstances – because what else can he do, except to try as hard as possible. The more difficult the circumstances – the more he has to try to reach some like-minded people, either in partnership or in friendly relations. If we look at it through “love, health, work”, that love is certainly an important factor in life. That’s how it happens that some people don’t have any of those three factors, or they have two good factors and don’t have the third one or it is a bad one, so they’re in trouble again. The more that is achieved there, the more complete the story is. Disharmony in society is terrible. In the first place is disharmony in communication, which is what the film tried to show. People really have become like “teletubbies”. They don’t hear, they don’t see. You write something to them – they skip it. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate and everyone has their own definition of a concept, whether it is justice or injustice, for example. Everyone interprets everything in their own way, often distorted. It also depends on which time he comes from, so he interprets some things in relation to “his time”. I don’t know where it leads because now we have audio messages, correspondence, talking and seeing each other, so some of that is skipped in those processes. Networks become incomprehensible. If you start looking for a friend, the networks often offer you as friends some people who are not your friends at all. In fact, it makes everything harder for you. Actually, it’s a very interesting contrast called “social network”. For most people of my generation, it is neither clear nor typical, so we do not have a relationship with social networks and the people who appear there. If Facebook were to shut down, an entire generation could simply die, because there would be no way to reach some people because of alienation in real life. Social networks are more complex to understand and operate. They are the opposite of what they are supposed to serve, which is to be social networks that serve to meet and connect people. Not to mention Tik-Tok. It offers none of that at all. It all boils down to getting up in the morning, spending 10 minutes reading the news, responding to comments and postings on social media, and then suddenly realizing that there is no life. If you don’t go to work, you’re done. You have nothing to do all day, and you can’t play cards with your partner because for him it’s “outdated”. As for me, I love board games. There are a lot of good and important things there. They are not used without reason in nursing homes. Analogue ways of social life – that’s gone! Life turns into just a few things: a job that takes up the whole day or being a slave to work, and an hour or two spent on social networks in the digital world. Slavery to work consists in getting paid for something where some others do not want to break their spine (mentally or physically), and the screen has become Point No.2 in our lives, at the top of our priorities. Sleep would be the third thing, but even that is questionable today, because people often don’t even achieve that. The fourth thing is “shopping”, and maybe the gym as the fifth thing. It is devastating for humanity that their life is reduced to 4 functions: screen, sleep, shopping and work. Is it possible that we have come to this and that we cannot have any other content in life? That’s something that makes me sad.
alxspirit: That brings us back to my first question, about “Stereoporosis”, in the sense that it all carried over to the music too. Could the message of the title “Stereoporosis” be interpreted in the opposite direction – “Go back to designing a new quality”?
Voodoo Popeye: Hardly anything will go back to the 70s, which in my opinion are the peak of something man-made, after which everything goes downhill. If anything secular was made, it was in those years. If there was any relaxation, that was the height of it. After that, everything kind of loses its meaning and some news and fears about possible wars start to appear. We already know about the “90s” (the breakup of Yugoslavia), so we don’t have to talk about it. So, as I said a little while ago, it is that “devil’s work” that is there to occupy people, preferably to occupy them with as few items as possible: sleep, work like a slave, stare at the screen and go shopping – and in the end it will all be downsized to maybe one thing for which I am not yet sure what it will be. Total degradation of man, his capabilities and his functions. Unfortunately, people cannot resist it, because they are generally enslaved by some interests that are mostly material in nature. There is also the aforementioned phone/screen, which is there to make some of those material things be realized, and not to serve some other purpose – but somewhere I think that there has been a saturation with that digitization, and that people could somehow become aware of it and realize that in addition to these few things that they do, the digital world does not make them as happy as they might have wanted.
alxspirit: What can you tell us about the authentic spirit of Belgrade? What is the magic of the “Zemun quay” itself and of Belgrade in general? Why do you spend so much time on the “Zemun quay”?
Voodoo Popeye: Geographically, that’s one point where I was born. Zemun (municipality in Belgrade) is not exactly rich in those musical events. Apart from that club “Fest”, there is hardly anything there. There are some things at the municipal level, but it is more like a passing place. We have Gardoš and (the) Quay. We have some hidden places along the Danube. We also have some architecture that was left to us after Austro-Hungarian Empire. We don’t have McDonald’s, for example, but our neighbors in Borča do (another neighborhood in Belgrade), so I’m comparing those things a bit and how much Borča follows these events. I am not a “man of plains”. I spent a lot of nice time there, but mostly thanks to the people who live there or who came from other parts, so I took them around and went along those roads to show them that Zemun. Later I began to realize that it was not really a place that belonged to my nature. I’m kind of more of a “mountain man”. I’m not in favor of those flat places on the muddy Danube, similar to the scenes from the movie “Disappearing Oasis, Last Oasis” (1983), where a slimy piece of wood emerges with a wet bird sitting on it, and across the street are trimmed rows of trees. I’m not exactly thrilled to be in such a place. However, every place can be good and can bring you all sorts of interesting and useful things. In the case of plains – you are focused on people for example, seen from the positive side. And then in some years you catch yourself having no one to go out for coffee with, so you go out alone and start thinking about where you are and in what kind of place you are. Generally speaking, Serbia is a country of great beauty that we can visit as tourists, if we have money to go somewhere and see something. All that beauty requires resources. Sometimes people end up asking themselves “what do I have with beauty that requires funds?”, and they end up leaving their country. The problem is that we have very nice places, and then you come across some bad people, or vice versa. You have good people, but the place does not fill you with any beauty of life. We lack some work on that to bring it all together – human relationships and values with the places we live. When we untangle that political ideology, we will come to the conclusion that politics is a wh*re and that politicians are frauds, etc. The problem with people is that they want to keep some bad values and that’s why they will vote for someone so that they can “swindle and hustle”. They actually have to change some bad things about themselves, and this is where we come to “what kind of people – that kind of government”. Throughout history, we have some scenes of outings, when someone who is correct appears and says “you can lie and cheat, but you will be punished, so think about it if you don’t want to change”. If we start from the fact that people should change themselves, their values and their bad actions, then someone should come and say “okay, you don’t have to, but you will be punished, you will be in prison, your life will be destroyed, so don’t change”. If something like that were to appear, it could change people in that sense, so that they would find a good option in some elections, instead of saying “everyone is bad, we have no one to vote for”. We are spinning in that thing like “lesser evil VS greater evil”, but actually it is less at first, and then it grows, and so on, like a circle. People are not so far-sighted and do not have the character to understand that and to say “I will neither want less nor greater evil!”.
alxspirit: Your impressions after the concert in Jagodina (Strawberry City)?
Voodoo Popeye: It was great, really! One of those concerts with very good energy, with people who are obviously strong and who showed considerable respect. We tried our best to respond to that, and all in all, I think we all had a good time together. Not to sound like a cliché now – but it was really a very good energy. Maybe it’s some spirit that has persisted from some earlier times and concerts. That spirit wanders here perhaps through some generational combinations and schemes, from generation to generation. I know that in that area (the Moravian region) there are also those rockers who will come to the club or send their child. It is a good formula for maintaining that spirit and that energy that a person needs, especially in these times when, in addition to so many imposed contents, you are looking for some good channel that can still operate and can be found. This club (“Svitac”) also has very good energy.
Voodoo Popeye: Official web-page (& shop), Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X.
A word from the author:
Here’s some insider information for the greedy (without the editorial board’s approval, so they might delete it!): The working title actually was: “Contraversations with an urban philosopher – The great predictorator of things and murky global ruts”, but the editor disagreed. He said to me: “What are you talking about?! You’re writing an article! You’re not writing a column!”. Then he gave me a short lecture on how I have to respect journalistic forms and norms. For God’s sake… Tired of compiling this interview and “editorial wars” inside the office, I complained to the secretary who was the only one in the room at the time, and told her: “Make my bed, not war!”. She looked at me somewhat strangely. Shortly after that, the editor called me to come to his office: “That was not the way to address Mimi! Are you crazy?!”. It crossed my mind that maybe she misunderstood something… That could happen, especially if she thought I was talking directly to her since there was no one else in the room, even though I was thinking of the editorial staff, in plural. Wonderful, now that beautiful creature has taken a toll on me. Basically, he told me: “If you don’t pull yourself together, I’ll throw you off that same Zemun quay into the water!” (notice, not into the river – into the water!, really?). One line instanteniously, pardon, instantly crossed my mind: “Zemun’s sadness is immense, I was thrown into the water, and Popeye is gone!”. I silenced that thought and politely thanked him for the offer, and he raised his eyebrow and asked me: “Are you really winding me up?! Out! ‘Till the article is published!”.
Photography: alxspirit | Video: YouTube/MKArtStudio
Date: July 4/5, 2025. | Location: Art club “Svitac”, Jagodina (Strawberry City).
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