Ceca Raznatovic: 'The Music Scene Is a Zoo'

Svetlana Ceca Raznatovic arrived today, September 21, for the filming of a new episode of Zvezde Granda and once again addressed years of talk about vanity and sabotage in the Serbian music scene. Asked whether the industry is a “snake pit,” the singer kept her answer short: sabotage, she said, doesn’t exist, only bored people who couldn’t think of anything smarter to do with their time.

Photographers and flashing cameras were waiting the moment she stepped out of her car at the filming location. For the occasion, Raznatovic wore a dress with an unusual cut, closed up to the chin yet still showing her legs, pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and finished the look with sunglasses.

Raznatovic has been sitting on the Zvezde Granda judging panel for some time now, where, she says, the atmosphere among the cast couldn’t be better.

“Joking aside, we really are a great team. We’re a very close-knit group and we function like a family,” Raznatovic told reporters at the filming.

When the conversation turned to the “snake pit,” where colleagues are said to scheme against one another, the singer rejected that picture of the industry. Kurir reports that the snake-pit question was asked separately from a question about which animal best describes the Serbian music scene, while Telegraf merges the two into a single answer. Either way, her answer was the same: “A zoo.” Raznatovic trained as a veterinary technician, so, as she herself pointed out, comparisons to the animal kingdom come naturally to her.

She went a step further on the subject of sabotage.

“There’s constant speculation: this one did this, that one did that, someone’s setting someone up, someone’s scheming… Those are conspiracy theories. That’s what people with too much time on their hands do,” the singer said.

She added that she herself has been the target of negative articles for years, but has never turned that into an attack on her colleagues. There isn’t a newspaper, she said, that hasn’t run the ugliest stories about her, yet she has never accused a fellow performer of setting her up, undermining her, or destroying her career. She called that kind of behavior simply rude, adding that stories which start that way usually end up on social media even though, in her view, there’s no basis for them.

As the real measure of success in the industry, Raznatovic points only to the audience.

“When people love you, you can see it out there. And when people don’t love you, you can see that too, absolutely,” Raznatovic said.

In her view, no force other than, as she put it, God and a good song can either build up or hold back someone’s career. When a reporter suggested she was “indestructible,” she pushed back.

“I just try to be a decent person,” Raznatovic said, adding that she works on growing as a person and tries not to leave anyone with a bad impression.

For context, at an earlier Zvezde Granda filming, when asked about Ana Bekuta’s departure from the panel, Raznatovic said Bekuta had left “for good reason,” since it had been her own wish, and mentioned at the time that she too would eventually leave the show: “One day I’ll leave too,” she said then, adding that new people would take over on the panel. That comment wasn’t made today, at the latest filming; Telegraf simply revisited it while reporting on her appearance.

Srpske Novine first reported on September 18 that Raznatovic was joining the Zvezde Granda panel, ahead of the new season’s premiere on Prva. Since then, the singer has regularly drawn media attention at every filming, and her comments about colleagues and the industry tend to make headlines in the entertainment pages almost every time.