By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
When I first heard of a vocal soloist named Baja Mali Knindza, I thought it was just another self-parodying tavern singer, a copy of Mica Trofrtaljka. For younger readers, Mica is the author of underground hits such as “Even a Worn-Out One One Can Amuse,” “The Old Man Is After Some Young Sweetness,” and “Drive Your Car Into My Garage.”
I was wrong because I had misheard the name as “Baja Mala Mindza (*vulgar slang for vagina).”
My mistake also contained a grain of truth. Because with the same hyper-provincial lasciviousness with which Mica sang about sex, Baja sang about war crimes. Mica is a champion of vulgar eros – Baja is the absolute champion of the same kind of thanatos.
Baja is a singer of ressentiment. And ressentiment is bitterness, a feeling of injustice that creates a constant desire for revenge. Ressentiment is, as we know from Nietzsche, the ideology of slaves. Baja is the poet of slaves. Baja is the poet of people who fled their homeland on tractors, who never fully integrated into the “mainland,” who sell plastic goods at markets and, out of spite, sing semi-animalistic chants glorifying the ideology because of which they once lost everything. Baja is the Thompson of those crushed by Thompson’s army.
That is why Baja was chosen by Vranes and his team for the concert in Pljevlja: because it is their idea of revenge for Montenegro’s independence. That revenge is retarded, infantile, powerless, miserable, subcultural, and sub-political. It is the same kind, in fact a continuation, of Kovacevic’s extended middle finger while the Montenegrin anthem was playing. These are the affairs of the pathetic. That middle finger usually ends up in the ass of the one who raised it.
I am against banning Baja’s concert because I am against hypocrisy. How is it that Baja disturbs multiethnic harmony and public order and peace, but it is not disturbed by the fact that in Pljevlja and in the state there are people in power who are calling for Baja’s concert—people who see Baja as the one who most faithfully expresses their ethics and politics?
If the new authorities in Budva could celebrate by singing Baja, why shouldn’t Mandic’s people in Pljevlja be allowed to dream about their politically failed project while listening to Baja? Why should rural vulgarity be acceptable in Budva but not in Pljevlja?
Baja is the singer of a failed, collapsed ideological rag, which has been militarily defeated by everyone, which today lies by the roadside like, as Bora Djordjevic would say, a “pissed-on flower,” and which even its most important actors no longer dare to openly acknowledge.
Baja has sung about Dritan. If I were Dritan, now that he has been banned, I would invite Baja to sing at my place at Ada. I would prepare a good meal and invite my Karadjordjevic best men so that Baja could sing for us—because there is no living person who better articulates their shared worldview.
Just look at it.
In this short video is everything you need to know about Baja, the singer of suburban artillery salvos made of crates of beer and cheap synthesizers, the king of tarp-covered cement mixers, non-plastered houses, and balconies without railings from which the elderly, women, and children can fall at any moment.
Baja, like drug addiction, cannot be treated with bans.
Just as during the HIV epidemic liberal European countries distributed free syringes and needles to drug users, I would distribute roasted pigs and barrels of rakija at Baja’s concerts.
It is easy to see an enemy in another person. It is easy to feel hatred because someone enjoys Baja. But no: the helpless, meta-primitive rage and defiance of Baja’s audience is actually a cry for help.
(Columnists’ opinions and views are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial office)
