Relja Popovic: If I Fail Here, I've Failed at Everything

Relja Popovic said publicly for the first time, on July 31, 2026, where he and Nikolija Jovanovic actually come from. Speaking on the show “Televizija bez odjavne spice” on TV E, the musician said neither of their two families of origin worked the way a family should, and that everything he now calls his mission grew out of that.

Telegraf published parts of the conversation the same morning at 10.53, Mondo at 12.16. A rapper who had spent years steering around questions about his family did not cut this answer short.

What Relja Popovic said about being a father

One sentence carries the whole interview, and he delivered it without a hedge:

That is my mission, and if I did not manage it, then I would consider that I had missed everything else.

By “it” he means raising his two daughters. Success and money mean nothing to him, he said, if the children are not brought up well, and what pleases him is hearing other people praise them. He described his older daughter as funny and bright.

He did not present fatherhood as something that happened to him. He presented it as a role he picked:

I chose the role of a parent, and the two of us have a mission, regardless of the fact that we both come from families, hers and mine, primary ones, that were not that functional.

Then he finished the thought with a plan rather than a complaint:

Now we have a mission to build a functional world together, first for us and then for them.

Why is he talking about his family of origin now?

Because he never had, and because the biography sits underneath every word. Relja Popovic lost his father when he was a year and a half old. His mother later remarried Srdjan Popovic, and that is where the surname his audience knows comes from.

On the other side there is a similar story that is not the same story. The parents of Nikolija Jovanovic are divorced. When he says “hers and mine, primary ones” in a single breath, he is not generalizing about Serbian families. He is naming two specific files that both of them carried into a home of their own.

That background also explains his word choice. He did not say they want a happy home, or a harmonious one. He said functional. That is the vocabulary of someone who has watched a family fail to function.

Honesty and freedom, the two words he picked out

Asked what he wants to hand down, Relja Popovic named exactly two things:

• that they be honest, in the old sense of upright
• that they feel free, and do the things they want to do

Neither word belongs to the language of Serbian show business. There is no mention of a career, of fame, of never having to ask anyone for anything. Honesty and freedom, in his telling, are the only luggage worth packing for a child.

He set the yardstick himself

What Relja Popovic really did on that show was set a public standard for his own life. A musician with records, tours and songs that have stayed in rotation for years said he would count all of it as a miss if he fails at the part no audience will ever see.

For a public figure that is an unusual move. Once you say out loud that raising your children is the only thing you want to be judged by, you no longer get to choose the criteria. The unwritten rule on the Serbian scene runs the other way: say nothing about the family until you have to, and when you do, say something general.

This time he did the opposite. He named the problem, named the plan, and said plainly what it would mean to fall short. His daughters, who are minors, contributed neither a name nor a quote to any of it, which is exactly as it should be.