Danza's seven bars from his song featuring Venok - TENZIJE (TENSIONS)

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Glamur je fikcija jebla te kamera

Šljunak ispred kuće kuća bez maltera

Neka polako daj da se zapjeva

Rupe od metaka - Dejton estetika

Ožiljci geler prostetika, jebiga

Ni nama se sve to ne sviđa

Pitaš me kako je, ne pitaj

 

The glamour is fiction, fuck your camera

Gravel in front of the house, the house with no mortar¹

Let it slowly be sung²

bulletholes, Dayton aesthetic³

scars from the shrapnel prosthetics, fuck it

we don’t like all of this either

you ask me how it’s going, don’t ask⁴

 

This translation is designed to be read line for line and will appear clunky, that is done in the effort to analyse each line independently rather than abide to time signatures, rhythms or rhyme in the respective English translation. 

 

¹Gravel in front of the house, the house with no mortar. After the war, many homes were left either destroyed or half destroyed. A recurring aesthetic phenomenon of many villages across Bosnia (and ex-Yugoslvia) are half finished houses; the gravel in front of a home, the home with bricks and no mortar to hold them together. These homes typically have a foundation set but the first or second floors are made up of stacked bricks not being held together by anything. They are inhabitable past the ground floor. Due to this, the homes in villages where the war was very prevalent often posses similar aesthetics: paint-less with tonal colours that bricks, cement, plaster, mortars, gravel and similar typical building materials posses. This is the outcome of living architecture in the process of rebuilding after the war. Even though some live in them now, for the most part the houses are unfinished. 

 

the preceding line The glamour is fiction, fuck your camera is a direct criticism/reference of the following Gravel in front of the house, the house with no mortar: The families that have returned to live in their houses share photos online or in social circles of their new lives. The artist here implies that this is simply a projected glamour because the reality (the mentioned homes) is far more dire and hopeless than Instagram would have you believe.

 

However in the following line ²Let it be sung he absolves all actions of people posing for glamour against the bland reality of half-finished homes. A more literal translation of the line could be It’s ok to slowly allow (oneself) to sing. This is a typical phrase in the Balkans that would mean something like Let it be, what’s done is done. This harkens back to a different time. The Balkan culture, steeped in hundreds of years of oppressive Ottoman rule, is rich in song and poetry from the years where collective attitudes, whether jovial, sombre or dramatic, had an element of We keep singing and going on with the oppressive conditions. The what’re you gonna do? sentiment is something that is historically ingrained for us, meaning both; we do what we can against the forces and we do what we can against the forces whilst accepting/succumbing to their overwhelming powers.

 

It is both: Acknowledging the hope and acknowledging the lie. The projected Glamour and the unfinished House.

 

³Bulletholes, Dayton aesthetic. While similar, unlike last week’s example of the same lyric, contextually here this line becomes a more hard hitting verse. After painting the picture many Yugoslavs have come to know (of the gravel and the bricks), the artist adds details to the portrait of the bulletholes (Rupe od metaka literally translated is Holes from bullets) and the scars from the shrapnel prosthetics. Here the full picture of the architecture these kids grew up with is complete; one of holes from bullets and marks from shrapnel from a time before, juxtaposed with the current ambition of fresh cement, fresh bricks and fresh mortars on houses potentially new but never finished. 

 

In one instance you are reminded of a violent past and in the other of a hopeful future, and in between the reality; neither seem real. The architecture is a reflection of an almost schizophrenia of national identity. The ambition embedded in every natural organism to overcome is met with the reality of Man’s horrific ideologies imprinted violently for the coming generations to reckon with. 

 

The artist throws all this away, not with a soft song this time, but with a fuck it.

 

⁴You ask me how it’s going, don’t ask. In Serbo-Bosnian if someone responds with Ne pitaj (Don’t ask) it means Don’t even go there my guy. This could refer to a relationship, to work, to anything at all. Here the artist, after claiming [he doesn’t] like all of this either urges the listener to not even ask how it’s going because no good can come of this, no good can be seen in the holes from bullets, the shrapnel, the dilapidated homes, the projection of glamour. His final thought for us is a short dialogue: You ask me what it’s like? Don’t even go there.

 

The major difference between this and Danza’s verse last week is that here there is no mention of the Western Capitalist norms; no one is saving for a Maybach, no mention of street violence, the kind popularised by American rap, there is no basketball or cinema reference, no materialistic braggadocio, the only references are ones that Serbians, Croatians, Bosnians who come from similar places would understand. This was no plea to the West, the artist here did not attempt to build any bridges between worlds or to mould himself into the usual rap norms of clever references to pop culture, to street violence and a tinge of the Balkan tragic in an attempt to reach the popular Westernised masses. No, here he was speaking to us, children of villages whose soul, life and architecture was torn by animals who behaved like Gods, who never spent a moment thinking of us, never spent a moment wondering what kind of houses they would be leaving behind, never considered what bullet holes or shrapnel scars would look like, what the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from their ancestral homes looked like, and what it might look like if some of those thousands attempted to return (to normalcy), to try and rebuild a life again, a life, not in a desert, not on a blank canvas, but a life in a dilapidated, unrecognisable and heartbreaking environment they once used to call home and now pretend still is. The place which feels so familiar but now is alien.

 

It is a schizophrenic and sombre existence. The people that have returned are mostly old. The young have nothing back there. The old tell us of how it was. And the young listen. The old argue about whose fault it all was. The young listen, but they know. It certainly wasn’t ours. The old have ruined a good thing. The old will leave earth soon and we will be left with their aesthetics of the Dayton Peace Accords. Now the question remains, How’s it all going to go?

 

Better no to ask.

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The analysis of both of these songs and artists is important not because they are children of war but because they are children born after the war. These children have been saddled with the decisions and misgivings of generations that came before them; the hard survival of everyday life, the daily witnessing of buildings with bulletholes and half-finished houses as living monuments of the past and the current normalised capitalistic hyper-ambition. These artists effectively achieved all this in six to eight rhyme schemes, one needs not wonder which side of history they are on : The architecture of genocide is still genocidal, regardless of reason or faith.