Rama's star: white, or green...

Alfred Lela

Not without purpose, Sali Berisha, among those who greeted at the beginning of his speech at the presentation of the PD-ASHM coalition program, also mentioned Renis Gjoka, the singer-songwriter of some well-known melodic lines.

The mention of Renis is not related to the fact that he is right-wing, or that he has remained the only artist openly on the side of the opposition (minus 2-3 other cases), but to what Renis embodies, to what Berisha seeks to embody the opposition and Albanian society.

Renis, symbolically, is the dividing wall between serious art and pop-culture, between noise and sound, between the socially inclusive and the exclusionary message. Mostly, it is the gap between the model and the anti-model.

Berisha, mentioning Renis, but also selecting him in all the events of the last years of the electoral campaigns, seeks to give a message and contrast an anti-message.

Our values are these. It is Renis, a successful rocker, a good parent and family, it is Renis "çun Tirone", but also a man, he is the artist who makes art to feel good about himself, but also to improve others, Albanian music, so also society.

I do not want to prejudge the selections of SP and Rama at all. They are theirs and they must also be confronted aesthetically and ethically. Much less the singers themselves, who, in a free society, are free to choose who they are with, which musical current they follow, etc.

But we can talk about the model, the ethical and social one. If society needs the laryshia (variation), it also needs the axis, i.e. models that keep it framed and limited.

The latter is a religious principle, I know, according to which freedom lies in limitations, but it is at the same time ethical and secular. History gives us endless examples of declines, of people and states, coming from excesses, from spillovers, from non-restrictions, from 'everything and all is okay'.

Noizy is the anti-model turned model, and Rama and Veliaj have helped. The principle was: these are popular with the youth, so we use them for our purposes. I do not doubt that Rama is understood in taste with Noizy, but I doubt that Noziy understands that he is being used by Rama. Both take advantage of each other's fame, but what is lost is the model's communication.

Because, teenagers may hear from their parents [probably amateurs of Celentano or Dire Straits) that Noizy has nothing to do with music, but when they see him beating the prime minister, whom they see in the media from morning to night, things change. Rama normalizes, an individual or phenomenon, which in neutrality is abnormal. He thus removes the blade from the abnormal, normalizes it.

This is a seemingly scholastic change, an excessive philosophy for electoral campaigns, where number matters, not taste or quality. But a statesman also leads by setting agendas, defining narratives, sketching frames.

The framework that Edi Rama has set in 12 years of government is the disregard of all frameworks. Nothing is sacred and everything is profane. Electorally, this may have worked, but at what cost to society?

This must also be counted on May 11 at the ballot box.

To indulge in the 'European passport' as a 'model of benefit', ignoring the 'central models', principles, rules, frameworks, vision, is to build an anti-model. It is Europe where you go to scrape something, not as Europeans.

So far, this is the Rama model.

Noizy is one of the illustrations.

Apparently, Rama, more than in the blue of the flag and the flag of the EU stars, is represented in the motif of one of Noyiz's songs: white, green/ white or green/ we don't shop under a hundred kilos.