Music is important!

If you go to Albania, its music is one of the things you will immediately notice. Music is played all the time in most buses, shops and bars. In contrary to the other Balkan countries I have been before, western music (Rock or HipHop) is quite unpopular. Albania has of course its own folklore music and made their pop music out of it. Let's listen to some very popular songs I heard there:

• Silva Gunbardhi - Te ka lali shpirt
  Albania has a population of 2.8 million while this video has incredible 39 million clicks!!! This illustrates how important music is for the Albanians.
• Desislava - Pusni go pak
  Like in Jamaica where the same riddims are performed by different artists, the same is the case for some Albanian music. In this case the text was modified and another woman sings the refrain.
• Sinan Hoxha - Gili Gili
  The music videos are often quite "strange" in my opinion but funny.
• Poni & 2 STEP - Dale and Sergio ft. Vani - Emanuela
  Sometimes you hear non-Albanian words.
• Meda - Sinan Hoxha ft. Seldi - Kuq e Zi
  A song with more traditional music.

The videos of all these songs have much more views than the Albanian population. It is also interesting that about 80 % of the songs were produced by one single producer named Alfred Sula.

While listening, have a look at some photos of the inner city of Shkodër:

In the sheshi Parruce. (They just renamed many streets
and places so that you will have troubles with older
tourist maps and Google maps etc.)

In the same place. Later in the evening it was overcrowded.

One of the palaces in the same street.
(I don't know its name).

The same palace at night.

A mosque. Note that Albania is no religious country.
I will come back to this in a further post.

I was baffled to see a Big Brother fan shop.

The rruga 13 Dhetori at night. ("rruga" means "street")

The same street during the day. (Image taken from the Wikipedia)

Besides the Albanian pop music, folklore music is still wide-spread. There are many bands playing traditional instruments at weddings, town festivals etc. Some examples:

• The Seferi brothers
  Unfortunately I could not listen to such a performance. (Btw. nice drum solo at 4:40)
• Mir Seferi & Berti Sula
  This is how I saw bands playing - the drums are programmed and the keyboard does the most. The mandolin-like instrument is a Bağlama. Another popular instrument is the Çifteli.

Lessons learned:

1. Music is important!
2. Shkodër is more beautiful than what one might think at the first look. (Unfortunately I left it too early by mistake.)