By Manjola Lloja Bushati/ Music is very important to me. I listen to a lot, all the time, and the more I have listened, the more I have become convinced that it is completely naive to divide it into good and bad. In my view, what comes after entertainment is always much more important, what music seeks to say about time, about society, about people. As with many other areas of human development, the same thing happens with music: older generations judge the music of young people before they understand it. This has happened with rock, hip hop, rap, and today it is happening with Albanian trap. Many people only hear the noise: the aggressive beat, the harsh words, the obsession with money, the arrogance. But music is rarely only what is heard on the surface. Music is often the most sincere reflection of a society.
This opinion is endlessly reinforced for me by the music of the artist Letskillua. Let's be clear, I personally like this genre of music aesthetically (I may be one of the few of my generation, but I will definitely go to his concert on June 12), but today I want to talk about it sociologically.
I listened to his album "Brr" as soon as it came out, and since then at least 10 more times. I wrote to Aris (the artist's real name) that his songs are, in fact, a genuine sociological analysis of a part of the reality of young Albanians, which is almost never talked about from this perspective. I teased him a little about the fact that he is now so famous, but his answer: "I am not famous, I am just an ordinary person who many people know", strengthens my idea even more that, by listening to his songs, we can actually feel the documented urban anxiety of a generation that has grown up very quickly emotionally.
Let me briefly explain to you what I learned and understood through this album and contemporary readings.
The type of music style in which this album is written is called trap. Feel me, that's what it's called. And if that bothers you as a banal word, well, get ready, because in these songs you will hear a lot of it.
Trap was born in the poor neighborhoods of Atlanta as survival music. This style is the voice of people living among violence, lack of opportunities and the obsessive desire to get out of poverty. It is now a global language of urban youth. Even in Albania or Kosovo, trap is not simply copying America, but is translating a local reality into music.
What is this album about? The lyrics of the album "BrrBrr" feature money, status, prison, loneliness, emotional isolation. I think this is where the misunderstanding between generations begins. It's no wonder that we adults hear glorification, while many young people hear identification with these songs.
“My friends are not in the summer season / they are usually in prison at that time”, says Killua, but I don’t think it’s pride. With a melody that makes me jump out of the chair where I am sitting and writing, these verses also seem to me like a tragic normalization of a social reality where the lack of perspective has become routine.
“Leku bro, never speak wrong”, I continue quoting, because we turned this ours into a society where money is moral authority. Institutions, meritocracy and collective trust often don’t work.
I know that in our reality, where some “celebrities” had to read English subtitles to understand the Greek language, Killua’s lyrics may come across as a bit heavy. And here I don’t mean the street slang and the “dirty” words. I mean the directness with which this guy tells us what we did to them. How our society today has in its bosom a generation that we raised with the idea that fame, money and social networks would make life easier. He is speaking with the greatest simplicity about how this generation, in fact, is facing loneliness, insecurity and distrust. And he is doing this by paraphrasing from personalities of world literature (it seems that we adults have really read all the authors that Arisi mentions), characters from Albanian showbiz, slang words mixed with English, which has already sat cross-legged in the speech of young people.
They do not seem to me simply songs… they seem more like resonances with strong contrasts of what is the reality in many corners of our country, with what we glorify day after day in public media.
The aggressiveness of the trap in this album is, in fact, screaming a great emotional sensitivity. The songs follow one after the other. The lack of love, its loss, the need for it, sex in search of it… “At a party alone / I dance for you”… this line is perhaps one of the most modern definitions of urban loneliness.
In one of his public appearances after the album, Letskillua says that he has left behind “a naive version” of himself and that he now understands the “hypocrisy” of the industry and people. I strongly suspect that he is talking only about music.
And this is why music is so important sociologically. It doesn’t just tell us what a generation listens to. It tells us what that generation feels, what it dreams, what it hides and what it lacks.
Believe me, this album is very much worth listening to. I feel like saying that our problem is much more than the prejudice that young people are listening to bad music. The simple truth is that music is showing us a society that we don’t want to accept. And perhaps, that we are doing too little to change it.
