The musical offerings on the streets of the homeland make you wonder: 'Are my ears doing something?'
Author: Rakela Hunci
On Saturday mornings, the only place he drags himself out of bed is the bus that takes him back to his family. It was hot, July, and as soon as she entered, Erisa Bida saw in the first seat that a woman had taken off her shoes. And when the van made its way to Korça, from the speaker – one of those speakers that engineers say only coughs up three of the 20,000 hertz it's supposed to put out, and they had no plan – it played non-stop. Faja fell from the fig tree, it fell like a rubber band.
O driver, aman, O man of the earth, what kind of music do you have!
"What do you do?" says Bida, a 32-year-old who works as a barista in Tirana, while we discuss on Messenger the phenomenon of music that brings her to the tip of her nose on the bus. "The driver is in most cases the generation of the uncle's time. You will hear these kinds of songs."
"I'm crazy!" remembers. "I tell (the driver) to change it. He put Dyly's Carriage. "
Not only Bida. Florent Rizvanolli is a 58-year-old electrotechnical engineer from Kosovo living in the city of Charlotte in the United States, and when he returned home to Pristina years ago and took the bus to Prizren, he did not know what disgusted him the most, "to I am forced to listen to (that) kind of music, or loud music,” which does not even allow him to read. I find it hard to imagine Rizvanolli resisting a space filled with a lyrical outburst of the type I've made a mistake/Come back, love, back to me/For you, I'll kill myself/Apart from me for the rest of my life. It doesn't matter what the exact music is, he says.
Or like the other one who crossed the entire south of Albania under the leitmotif of visa liberalization, Let all Europe know, we are the oldest nation, from the same community of artists who sang with such pathos to LANÇ, the Party, Corridor VIII, and now recently, the report on the opening of negotiations with the EU.
Or me myself, as, under the sun in the square that serves the bus station, I hear the frenzy and loud voices coming out of the box of Veke's cart, the seller of compact cars that everyone knows in Korça, You were very fat. All this ten minutes before I take one of these buses to return to Tirana.
The buses and vans that connect the provinces of the homeland often resonate as guides to the spiritual production of the areas they pass through. Or the state of a society – what is called in French inventory.
They are also expressions of budget travel and the social stratification that this brings. When you are in Pogradec or Korçë, there are more chances to hear Eli Farë and the brothers Endri & Stefi. When you approach Elbasan, a mysterious algorithm brings Sinan Hoxha into the repertoire. Often, the buses that come to Greece change gears when crossing the border - Albanian here and Greek there, Chameri here and immigrant integration there. Passing through the rough valleys of the south of the country gives way to the polyphonic ooo and through the northern ones to the cuk-cuk-cuk of the couplet. Top Albania Radio was often on top.
The reasons why you don't like a piece of music can be many. It can be a taste given by age, where you come from, or musical culture, says Mikaela Minga, musicologist at the Institute of Anthropological Studies in Tirana. It may be the constant repetition that makes it boring. And whoever listens to Noizy will fall asleep listening to a contemporary jazz musician of the type Pat Metheny, and he won't dance Matilda Shaqiri after Metheny.
However, the number of those who have at least once in their lives turned their brains into an electric substation made of soot from a short circuit, precisely because of the music of the bus, is quite too big to ignore. I myself have spoken to over a dozen people about this and all of them had experienced such moments. And, seriously now, what does she owe the deserter who pays the ticket to the driver, and he keeps her locked up for three hours in a row in the cage with which he plays unbearable music. Come with me, take off your clothes, my love of Merita Lika, for example (don't touch me / the grandmother is in the yard). In these surrounding areas - and this seems to be the work of Albanians - there is a tribute that you have to pay if you take public transport to go to Gjirokastër, Shkodër, Mitrovica or Tetovo.
"I wouldn't call it annoying music," says Minga. "I would call it a preferred form for consumers. You may not like it but others like it, for the driver it may be a way not to fall asleep."
Holta Shupo, professor of communication theory at the University of Tirana, says that the problem does not come from the type of music, but from its imposition. When you're on a bus or minibus, you practically share space with others, she explains. But you impose yourself with your music. Then, she adds, "listening in the community is also an imposition of status." There is a tendency to identify status by the music you listen to.”
Rizvanolli fights with the drivers for this job. "They, conductors and drivers, do their own thing, without consideration. As if they have any pride." They tell him that the individual pleasure of each traveler cannot be seen. Thanas Shano, a 68-year-old retired musician who often takes the bus, says people love background music. "Once, the driver had forgotten to turn on the music, and when he saw it, the passengers said, 'thank you for turning it on, we were deaf.'"
It is not only the music but also the video that is produced for such songs, says Rizvanolli. The images make him think "that this program is produced by an army of people.
"Not only songwriters, but also video producers, people who dance, play instruments, and who knows how many others. A real industry.”
The industry begins with a studio with an electronic keyboard and computer, a person in front of a microphone who lines up sentences like out-of-control gun drums. It continues at the CD seller's box on the streets of the city, but now, more than ever, with a USB stick. "We get it from them, from the internet bags," a driver in his fifties tells me, at the bottom of the food chain, at the Southeast bus station in Student City.
They are poor materials, only computers or electronic keyboards, without professional sense, says Minga, musicologist. People complain about pimps, she adds, but it hurts to hear songs on the bus that they don't even know the meaning of, or that have a controversial message. "Sabian's song, for example." The song continues like this: You have the bald man by your side/I have hair and money/I have money, I have money/I also have unisex on my side. "There is the element of the kalash, of a woman dancing on a pipe. There are a number of elements that make it problematic. They exhibit luxury, get-rich-quick. The issue is who can understand and relate." Unixes have a strong hand who, in the few cases when they do not have intense spiritual activity, as in the present case, do exercises with gira.
"And music has been used for torture," says Minga.
Eh, the use of music as torture is relatively early, since the invention of the tape recorder, the radio and the loudspeaker – used (if we are to believe Wikipedia) by the CIA, the KGB, the US military in Iraq, Israeli investigative agencies, and by Greek military investigators during the dictatorship in that country. It is written about the terrible megaphone of the festivals in the courtyards of the political prisons of the dictatorship in Albania. Listening to it for a long time has consequences for your health and brain. "It's not the same situation anymore," says Minga. "But noise pollution affects hearing and behavior. It makes young people more aggressive."
Driver!!
During those years when he was visiting Kosovo, Rizvanolli took a van from Podgorica to Sarajevo. "The journey was about eight hours, in a large nation with about twenty travelers.
"There was music, but the sound was so low and unobtrusive that once it happened to be an old Serbian song that I really like, and I had to ask the driver to turn up the volume of the radio, because the music was barely audible. But I didn't tell him, because I was reading and I didn't know if I would like the song that came after that.
"What a contrast!"
Loud music sets us apart. Is it a music issue or a volume issue? Thanas Shano doesn't like van music either bad or loud.
He tells how once, when he was on the bus with his wife, the boxes were booming. "I'm old and I can't hear very well now," he tells me. "I say to the woman, 'Turn the speakerphone away from me, because I don't understand what you're saying.'"
"We like high volume, it can be understood from our tendency to shout," says Minga: "But you don't hear (music) at such a high volume (everywhere)."
The van that takes me from Korça to Tirana, with its green roof like a flooded roof and with a bunch of garlic waving over the driver's head, is giving for the fifth time, with a loud volume, I lit a cigarette that tastes like Lazarati/For a girl from Lazarati, I'm on fire like a volcano. The context leads me to the dilemma of Hamlet: Shall I roar?
Put on the headphones.
* The title of a favorite song on the urban station in Korça
