The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
And The Winning Soundtrack is...
Tirana | 23 June 2009 | By Besar Likmeta
As Albanians head to the polls on Sunday to elect their parliamentary representatives who, in theory, will voice their interests in government for the next four years, everybody is wondering whose campaign will break sales records.
By sales records I don’t mean that people sell their votes in this country, though, to be fair, that has happened in the past. What I’m focusing on is the campaign songs.
Yes, hip-pop or rock - you name it - you can’t be a respectable politician in this proud Balkan nation if you don’t have a cheery tune with which to rouse the crowds at the end of each political rally.
Every time our leaders speak they are followed on stage by an army of entertainers ready to set the crowd on fire, musically. Now, there is nothing wrong with offering a bit of balm to the soul that only music can provide. What I have a problem with is lip synching.
Our politicians, just like those turbo-folk and pop queens that surround them on stage, are not really communicating anything new. Their political language is just reframed to a new beat in order to fancy the imagination of a generation whose life has been spent in the endless cycle of transition to democracy.
Like the divas, they have remodeled their old campaign promises and formatted them with the aid of campaign managers from the US and Europe, to look new, fresh and hopeful.
This newly formatted political lyrics that includes rhymes of hundreds of thousands of jobs, double budgets, three times more roads and watermelons, is now on offer in the electoral market by Sunday afternoon at most, everyone over 18 in this country would have to make a choice.
Although it all sounds complicated for most of us will be rather easy, because in the end, apart from the noise, politics and music are matter of taste. And as US journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce used to say, a vote, is just the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
2009-09-04 21:25:27