Nema više Dženis,
umro Elvis Prisli,
umiru lagano zvezde rock’n’rolla,
tek kad neko umre o njemu se misli,
započinje opšta rasprodaja bola.
O njemu se tada govori i piše,
pokojniku slavnom naglo skače cena
i svako se trudi da zaradi više,
lešinari trče po svoj deo plena.
Sale of pain, Fish Stew in 1979.
Poets are rarely angels; certainly not during my lifetime. Although he invoked an angel in his most famous song, it was not Bora Đorđević either. And he was certainly a poet. As good as his enormous, if permanently unbrushed, talent allowed, and as bad as he sometimes allowed himself to be. Maybe he could, maybe he couldn't do otherwise. At his best when he's wounded and vulnerable, at his weakest when he's singing in the name of something that's not himself, but to which he thought he was obligated to belong. At any cost, whoever will end up having to pay for it.
And the poet should not reveal the guild to anyone but himself. It is impossible that Bora did not know that. This is evidenced by every good and unique verse of his, every overflow in his raspy voice of an anti-romantic troubadour.
photo: tanjug / Dusan Aničić...
In the land of workers and peasants in the hilly Balkans, where no one took the so-called rockers, and rockers were just starting to take themselves too seriously, Bora was probably the first "shithole and jerk" to whom those sad older men in gray suits, prostate martyrs and m-teachers of simplicity, recognized the status of a poet. Pardon: writer. Poet is not a status, it is a calling. And Bora, happy and flattered, became a member of the Association of Writers of Serbia - just when the nationalists took over in it - which he, coming from a despised subculture, experienced as an honor, although he did infinitely more for them than they did for him. . And he began to pulverize his obsessions and the demons of lyricists and poets for their simple obsessions, believing them to be his too, or that they should be, if he had already been recognized and stamped by the competent authority as a True Serbian Writer. Thus, he gave the gift and voice to the vicious fantasies of the giftless. Fortunately for them, he wouldn't understand it then, or any time later.
And Riblja chorba recorded all the most important albums until then, Bora wrote almost all the important songs attributed to his gift, Bajaga went his own way a long time ago - which will prove to be one of the most far-reaching moves since the guitars included in electricity - and everything slowly became a medieval-Tezgaro routine, and Bora looked more and more like a Chinese copy of himself, a talkative vice-macher for a team with cheaper tickets, the one that will anticipate or simply enable the poetics of "Kursadžija". Well, it will be in some distant, undreamed-of future. Which had to come, because almost everyone was leading to her. Everything with Bora, don't doubt it.
But, long before the sad third act, there was a beginning, a change seemingly out of nowhere. The fish stew will appear somehow before Tito's illness in Ljubljana and the general Yugoslav death, and in the years of the too slow exhalation of barren and boring, depressingly provincial rock and roll that was the natural soundtrack of the meek and sleepy SFRY of the seventies (with rare exceptions such as Bulldožer and... it must have been anyone else?!), and before the explosion of punk and the New Wave, as the first real Events on that front "ever". The fish stew could perhaps formally and stylistically resemble a derivative of the former, but in terms of boldness and attitude, it was much closer to the latter, without actually belonging to either here or there.
The fact that, as the 1980s progressed, she became more and more directly political, in fact, also gave Chorba a kind of "punk" credit that she would neither have nor ask for. The fact that this politics went completely astray at one point is another pair of sleeves. But at this point it is perhaps more interesting to mention something else, because our rock and roll hagiographers never talk about it; so never that it cannot look like an accidental oversight.
Bora, namely, entered the tragic "years of unraveling" as zoon politikon and clearly chose a side in them, succumbing to the seductive illusion that it was his and that it was good - or at least that it was only his; yes, it would be better for him and for everyone if he didn't. But what was on the other side of an aesthetic-generational wall? How many times have we listened to and read the bitter lamentations of the champions and heirs of the Yugoslav, and especially the Belgrade punk-novotalaština, of all those package arrangements, artistic work actions and the like, how everything was so beautiful for them at that time and how very little they were war and the bloody disintegration of the country literally from tomorrow in the repertoire? Well, jeez, they didn't tell us anything... In what kind of bubble of surface decadence of two and a half capital streets, clubs and cafes did those people live their potentially most creative years? While literally two or three buildings away from them - not exactly in any special secrecy - wars were brewing, they were "cooking" in the salon apartments what is boiled on a spoon under the flame of a lighter, believing not even that they are above the situation, but that there is no situation! And when the devil had already come for his own, and with interest, and when it was too late for everything, suddenly there was a shock and a squirrel - phew, look at the shit, when I crawl I can't trample... Really? Damn it.
photo: miloš milivojević / tanjug...
Bora could not allow himself that luxury, if nothing else, then because he allied himself with those who did everything they could to make the situation happen. And he did that consistently from the very beginning to the end, giving voice not only to the worst of himself, but to the worst of the worst. It was his curse, but also his choice as an adult and sober man. It's sickening to listen to how they lament him now - actually defending some of their life's blunders, not his - they patronize and talk about how our Bora, a frivolous poet-boy, "didn't mean it seriously". However, these are serious mystifications. It didn't slip out of his mind by accident and by the way in some tavern drunkenness, but it was something that he believed in as an important part of his identity and his beliefs and that he stuck to. Why is it suddenly such a terrible heresy today to say that? Because the man died? Given that everyone alive will die one day, it is best to never speak critically about anyone, because one day they will grow angel wings, and you could be covered in tar and feathers. Until you become an angel yourself...
What does the poet of the feathered feather, after all that he honored, but also with what he may have distressed either himself or others, mean to each of us who, among others, took his poems with us in our own unavoidable baggage of growing up? Everyone can answer that only for themselves, and in principle there are no incorrect or incorrect answers, if they are honest. This also implies that there is no political agenda behind them, in which the deceased poet should serve as a handy tool for washing the biography or some other form of scratching the content of the estate discussion of anyone from the typically rapidly multiplying Bereaved Family.
And for me, of course, Bora could be so many things, and was, and will be. And the poet of some ancient dawns over the church of Saint Mark, not necessarily the one he meant. And a man who, even in deep peace, knew what it was like when some women follow soldiers (and then forgot about it after a while), and a man who disappointed me once, and then made me angry many, many times. Which was no secret to anyone, least of all to him. And the man with whom I loved to play in Satan's Warrior, and to fight in Cultural Knockout - like, over the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, which here are always codes for something else - without ever having met.
But I choose for him to be, above all, a strong, sensitive voice for me, almost a cry homesickness from my homeland and his. This is the voice that sings together with Arsen Dedić and Zoran Predin: "all over rivers, forests and mountains, to the green island of my homeland". He was born in that homeland, in Čačak, and died in that homeland, in Ljubljana. I will do the same, that is similar. There is no other homeland for us; if he tried to forget about it, life placed him where it should be, as it does to all of us.
