CSMR Editor
CHICAGO, USA -- Of the more than 100 profiles of Euro schlager and pop artists that we have written for these pages, no subject has been more unusual and multifaceted than that of the Croatian pop sensation turned American Catholic evangelical, Tajci.
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| Tajci represented Yugoslavia at the 1990 ESC and became an overnight pop sensation |
Depending on your perspective, Tajci's story is either an ill-starred, fate-driven tragedy of lost opportunity or an uplifting morality play of Paradise Found.
She was born in 1970 as Tatjana Matejaš in Zagreb, the principal city of the Croatian sub-state within communist Yugoslavia. From a very young age she was performing onstage with members of her show business family and eventually, Tajci became something of a Yugoslav child star, appearing in a number of musical productions on stage and on state television.
She later attended the Croatian Music Conservatory, studying classical piano.
In her late teens she turned to pop music and her big break came in 1990 when she won the competition to represent Yugoslavia in the Pan-European Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).
She came in 7th in a field of 22 ESC contestants (she did beat out Austrian schlager star, Simone, who also debuted that year and finished 10th), but performing before a home town crowd in Zagreb, that year's ESC host city, her high-energy entry, Hajde Da Ludujemo (Let's Go Crazy) became an instant fan favorite and immediately began its ascent to the top of the pop charts in the Balkan countries.
Her pert, vivacious on-stage demeanor and hot Marilyn Monroe-styled persona made her the subject of a kind of regional fan mania, not unlike that which accompanied Lena Meyers-Landrut's 1st ever ESC win for Germany in 2010.
Accompanied by slick, Western-styled, avant garde videos, Tajci's next several pop releases were ecstatically received. Her musical style then was a kind of retro, pop/dance, heavily influenced by American teen pop of the late 50s and early 60s.
She recorded a Croatian language cover of 60s American star, Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again," and her breakthrough hit, "Hajde Da Ludujemo" evokes images of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello from the early 60s days of "Beach Blanket Bingo."
But in 1991, a mere half year after her victorious Zagreb performance, her world began unraveling.
Yugoslavia was a contrived concoction of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which had thrown together a hodge-podge of contentiously antithetical, Slavic ethnic and religious groups, many of which had been at each others throats for centuries.
Tito's murderous communists managed to keep the lid on the ethno-religious pressure cooker for 45 years, but by 1991 the cauldron was ready to blow. And blow it did, as a large scale shooting war began in the Spring of that year.
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| Tajci as Roman Catholic Musical Minister |
The resulting Serbo-Croatian, Serbo-Bosnian war eventually took an estimated 130,000 lives. It is largely considered to be the most brutal conflict to have afflicted Europe since WWII, complete with genocidal ethnic cleansing, Red Army-styled systematic rape, and indiscriminate physical destruction.
Tajci might have urged post-communist Yugoslavs to "Go Crazy," and that they did, but not quite in the way she envisioned.
These events had catastrophic consequences on the career of the 20 year old pop star from Zagreb.
With artillery shells crashing and bullets flying in the streets, pop music was a luxury Tajci's natural fan base could no longer pursue. At the very moment of her greatest success, her career was seemingly at an end due to forces entirely beyond her control.
After spending the better part of a year entertaining Croatian front line troops and war-wounded, Tajci decided to abandon her embattled countrymen, applied for an American student visa and fled to the greener pastures of the USA.
By her account she arrived in New York City, knowing practically nobody and speaking little English. There she studied English, subsisted on a number of menial jobs (something quite illegal under student visa status) and studied musical theater.
Eventually she made her way out to LA to test the waters in the US music industry. Coming up dry in Tinseltown, it was somewhere around this time that she says she experienced a Christian Epiphany.
A matchmaking California Carmelite nun then introduced her to her future husband there, Matthew Cameron, a devout, fellow Roman Catholic who urged her to undertake the role of musical missionary.
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| Tajci and Cameron with the Pope |
The two then set out on a picaresque cross-country trip in a minivan, entertaining and musically preaching at Catholic churches across the USA as they went.
After her failure to revive her pop career in Hollywood, cynics may say she was essentially making an opportunistic virtue out of necessity.
But three children, a decade and a half later, half a continent away from LA in Cincinnati, Ohio, Tajci continues those very musical missionary endeavors.
She forays out on two concert tours a year, designed to correspond to the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar (Lenten Tour and Advent Tour.) The venues are almost exclusively Catholic Churches or places designated by a local church.
Tajci composes and performs her own devotional music dealing with such subjects as Christ's agony on the cross (Eli, Eli), his resurrection from the Dead (Alleluia), the Blessed Virgin Mary (Magnificat), Roman Catholic catechismic beliefs with an almost verbatim musical rendition of the Nicene Creed (I do believe) and the concerns of a mother and wife during Christmastide (How I Love the Christmas Season).
To her great credit, she adheres strictly to religious themes and steers clear of the annoying Catholic tendency to left-wing pop sociological and neo-Marxist Liberation theology themes, which have so contaminated much of the Roman church's post-Vatican II musical fare. (Does anyone still remember that ridiculous Kumbaya which was such a favorite of Novus Ordo nuns in the 60s?)
Tajci's music today defies classification into a particular genre. It is not what Billboard considers "Contemporary Christian" in that it doesn't overtly mimic the mainstream secular style de jour, ala Amy Grant or MercyMe.
But Tajci's compositions do contain elements of the American showtune style, likely a function of her having studied that during her New York days -- and it is there where she is at her best, most notably with her poignant and very moving composition about a harried Christian housewife during Christmastime, How I Love the Christmas Season.
Additionally, Tajci has written, produced and performed in a play, My Perfectly Beautiful Life, about the travails of mothers leading a Christian life, which was performed at a community theatrical venue in Cincinnati, Ohio..
Her current 2012 Lenten tour will be taking her soon to several church venues in the Chicago area, including St. Joseph's in Downers Grove, St. Cecelia in Mt. Prospect and St. Patrick's in Yorkville as well as to a number of cities from Pennsylvania to the Dakotas.
Here from her first career incarnation, is Tajci's 1990 Eurovision Song Contest entry, Hajde Da Ludujemo (Let's Go Crazy):
Here is one of her nicest compositions from her post-pop era, How I Love the Christmas Season":
Here Tajci sings a paean to her adopted home, Irving Berlin's classic, God Bless America:
Thanks to Ralph Bellendir, CSMR reader and Catholic Lay Minister of Communion at St. Margaret Mary's Church in Chicago, for the excellent suggestion that we profile Tajci.
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