Sometimes the internet takes you to a place you should never go. A place filled with strippers, fast cars and clarinets. And African guerrilla soldiers taunting a chimpanzee armed with a semi-automatic weapon.
Welcome to the world of Ercan Ahatli – quite possibly the sleaziest man to ever blow a clarinet.
Ahatli manages to combine the sartorial splendour of Pitbull with the macho mullet glory of Kenny Powers — surely the two touchstone figures of 21st century masculinity. In fact, his whole shtick seems to merge these two into one seamless gold chain chalga wet dream.
The Bulgarian Ahatli is principally a clarinet player, just like dirty old perv Woody Allen, which puts him in further excellent company. He blasts his horny clarinet sounds drenched in a screechy digital melange of Balkan rhythms, oriental melodies and a bottom end that’s more Timbaland than trad folk.
It’s all in keeping with the Bulgarian chalga style, which is probably at the most debauched, vulgar end of the Balkan pop music spectrum, a genre of music which gets far too little attention outside of diaspora communities. (SBS2, I’m talking to you. If you can program PopAsia then surely you can find a tawdry place in your heart for a Balkan pop video show too.)
Ahatli’s grinding, twerk-friendly jams are perfect fodder for that rakia-filled 2am nightclub bender in a Black Sea resort town. You know the type of place I’m talking about.
If the great Ivo Papasov is like the Led Zeppelin of Bulgarian clarinet, then Ahatli is sort of like Kiss or possibly even Slade: you know the two are mining the same rich seam of gold, but while one returns to the surface with the real thing, the other somehow manages to find gold-plated nickel that he then pawns off to some poor village girl as real, before luring her to the big city to “star” in his music videos and dance on tables in his after-hours club in said Black Sea resort town.
However, it’s Ahatli’s videos that clinch him the title of World’s Sleaziest Clarinet Player. Ahatli really, really, really likes these things:
- Scantily clad women
- Driving around in his Ferrari or Mercedes
- Playing clarinet by the waterfront
- Scantily clad women washing cars
- Guns
His videos also include hijab-wearing women driving Ferraris for no apparent reason.
And I did mention the wall-to-wall strippers, didn’t I? In nightclubs, on stage, in shopping centres, dancing around cars, dancing on cars, dancing in cars.
He also does a lot of victorious but laidback fist pumping.
The result is as if Borat’s retarded brother Bilo had been let out of his cage to direct music videos. Or Russ Meyer had been reincarnated Bulgarian and given karmic grace to continue the good deeds of his previous life.
But Balkan pop is not all about Ahatli sleaze. The internet can take you to nice, gentle parts of south-eastern Europe too.
Thankfully, after you’ve immersed yourself in the pied piper plays the clarinet and leads you to hell damnation that is Ercan Ahatli you can escape to something more innocent, more wholesome, more Alpine.
Ladies and gentleman, I present to you Navihanke, Slovenia’s premier all-girl folk group, with their hit “Banjo, Flavta, Saksofon”.
But if that’s not ringing your bell, there’s always more Ercan Ahatli.
