Turbo-folk is thus better understood in line with Jodi Dean’s rearticulation of the vanishing mediator as a ‘displaced mediator’ – that is, ‘a mediator whose functioning is displaced from what might have been understood (retroactively) as its original role’.49 Both punk and turbo-folk as vanishing mediators did not vanish, but rather were displaced from their earlier position by the onset of capitalism. With turbo-folk, this displacement refers to the shifting in nationalist cultural politics, from a political (nationalist) position to a seemingly apolitical popular cultural form. What originated as a deeply nationalist cultural form of populism has, through Western standards of commercialisation, turned into an ostensibly harmless popular musical form. If nationalism is, as Dean suggests, a ‘shock-absorber against the structural imbalance of capitalism’,50 then turbo-folk is its extension – a shock absorber that usurps nationalism as resistance to global capitalism into the economy as a consumable commodity.