In 2022, Konstrakta ended her performance of In Corpore Sano with the question: So what now?
And she’s answered it in her 2024 song Novo, bolje.
Now, I usually like to wait to review songs until we’ve got some data on them – a video, a live performance. I need to spend some time to let the song bed in to my ears, and turn the lyrics over in my brain.
Not so for Konstrakta and her new song.
I can’t wait to write about it because there is no single artist who is better at capturing the angst of life under late capitalism. Her songs are musically proficient, yes. Their real art lies in the lyrics. In three short minutes, Konstrakta manages to convey the anxiety felt by people who are seemingly well off, but are tortured by internal, existential concerns.
In Novo, bolje, Konstrakta (who hopefully now has health insurance) starts the song with a visit to the doctor. She’s consumed by the desire for something new – answering the question that she posed at the end of In Corpore Sano. What now? Something new. Something different. Something better.
Of course, this desire isn’t limited to Konstrakta – this desire is one that’s marketed to us all the time. We’re constantly surrounded by advertising that is telling us that our current state of affairs is broken – that our lives would be better only if we bought the new phone, or the beauty product that made our hair better, or the sneakers that would make us run faster. Improvement is always one product away, until the next product comes along.
And as the song progresses, Konstrakta begins to view this as a personal failure. Her inability to be satisfied with what she’s currently got is making her miserable. She looks back on her past actions with regret – if she’d only been smarter, she could have been richer. But what starts to emerge here is also a sense that she’s missing out on life in the way that other people are experiencing it.
The way I read it here, Konstrakta is critiquing the way that we’re presented with an idealized view of life through social media that can never match up to the reality as she experiences it. She finally gets to experience a vacation to the Pacific Ocean, and can’t enjoy it because the ocean is too loud – something that’s not apparent from the filtered photos that appear on Instagram. And this leads her to conclude that she’s the butt of an elaborate practical joke, where she is the only person experiencing this dissatisfaction. We know she’s not, but the artifice of the influencer lifestyle glosses over the human discomforts.
And despite her obvious disquiet at the state of affairs in which she finds herself, Konstrakta is trapped. She can’t stop wanting new things. She can’t stop being dissatisfied with the experience of these new things, with the reality of having them not living up to their promised effect. The desire is never satisfied by the consumption, and she’s stuck on this treadmill of need.
And now we get to the saddest part of the song – after Konstrakta has laid out her symptoms in detail, the doctor says:
Šta, bre, šta ti je? Nije ti ništa, šta ti je?
(What the hell do you mean, what’s wrong with you? Nothing’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you?)
Like many women seeking care in the health system, Konstrakta is ignored. It’s unclear whether it’s because the doctor genuinely doesn’t see anything wrong with the capitalist cycle of consumption and desire, or because he is simply ignoring her pain as hysteria, as many doctors do.
But the final verse of the song – and the reason I am so excited to see this staged – suggests that ignoring it is the wrong choice. While her Greek chorus chants “here it comes,” Konstrakta yells out in pain, sounding like she’s heralding the birth of a child. “Here it is, doctor!” she yelps, before calmly announcing “And it will.”
Whatever it is that is coming, it has arrived. It could be this song. It could be something more sinister. I can’t wait to find out.
I’ll probably change my mind 15 times about the meaning of this song as things unfold over the Eurovision season. But I’m just so glad that we’ve got back an artist who is the queen of subtext and layers, all done to a relentless disco beat. She said she’d come back if she had something newer and better, and, both as a title and a song, she does.
dudepoints.fun 