Serbia: Ideally Bad

The timing of Ceca has been impeccable in her more than 18 year long career as the star of the Serbian pop scene. From gangster bride to heroic widow and Serbian J-Lo, she demonstrated a better sense of where Serbia is going than some political analyst. Only in 2003, as she was arrest during the state of emergency following the assassination of prime minister Zoran Djindjić, her star seemed to wane as few stations wanted to play her music. However, this time, the timing was too good to be true.

Within a few days of Ceca releasing her new album “Ideally Bad” (Idealno loša) and singing its tunes to the biggest crowd ever gathered for a concert in the Balkans, more than 100,000 people saw her live at Ušće, the confluence of the Sava and Danube in Belgrade, on June 17 (the same place one of the biggest demonstrations took place to praise another idol, Slobodan Milošević in 1988), prime minister Vojislav Koštunica harshly criticized the EU for its treatment of Serbia and called it “deeply wrong” in his “ideally bad” interview for the news agency Fonet.

With both Ceca and Koštunica being ideally bad, one might ask is this just a coincidence. The text below suggests that the popular folk-star, cum widow of indicted war criminal Arkan, cum self-styled icon of Serbia, and the less popular prime minister Kostunica apparently have the same ghost-writer. In fact, the similarity between notes to Kostunica for recent talks with EU-Enlargement Commission Oli Rehn and Ceca’s tunes suggests nothing less.

Notes to Koštunica (unknown origin, crumbled up piece of paper, found in trash can near government building):

You might say to yourself:

“This world is for smarter ones,

this is the path for more courageous ones…

my heart is a chick, rained on, yellow and small”.

You might get cold feet before the meeting and say to yourself:

“Already I am panicking a little,

still nobody has invited me anywhere.

I will go by myself, what else. …

Everything annoys me here.”

But find your courage and tell Oli Rehn:

“Once the ground cracked beneath our feet…

You were the one I could call when the whole world forgot about

me.”

“But now, it is only will you leave or stay,

now everything between us is, do you want to or don’t you.”

“I offered myself to you, I offered but you rejected me.“

“Never, never, with you never again”

“In my room there, everything is crap and broken,

just as everywhere else in my city.

If you don’t know with whom you want to be, where you want to be, and why,

then for you this

is ideally bad.”

After you have told him, you might think to yourself:

“You don’t know anybody, but know them all,

that’s how it is when you’re alone,

as if it all happened to you before.”

(The text is taken from songs: “Čulo bola”, “Koža pamti”, “Ponuđen ko počašćen”, “Viski”, “Lepi grome moj”, “Idealno loša” and “Pile” on the new Album of Ceca Svetlana Ražnatović, Idealna loša)