On 28 October 2013 we launched a song. Not a jingle buried at the end of an ad, but a full campaign anthem with a title that told you everything about the party in four words: “Do të bëhem milioner.” I will become a millionaire.
Bota Sot covered the launch: Partia e Fortë lansoi spotin ‘Do të bëhem milioner’. I helped present it at the press conference in Pristina. I want to write about why a song was worth that much of our attention, because it was one of the most deliberate things we did.
The genius of the concept was not mine, but I understood immediately why it worked and pushed hard to get it in front of as many people as possible. Every real campaign sells aspiration. Vote for us and your life will get better, you will prosper, you will get yours. “Do të bëhem milioner” simply said the quiet, selfish core of that promise out loud and with a straight face. It was not “together we will build a nation.” It was “I, personally, am going to get rich,” which is what a great deal of actual political ambition amounts to once you strip the decoration off. We just removed the decoration.
A song did things a Facebook post could not, and this is the part that matters for anyone thinking about how a message spreads:
- A song is portable in a way text is not. People hummed it. It got stuck in heads. It could travel by voice, person to person, in places our posts could never reach. Melody is a distribution channel.
- A song is repeatable without getting stale. You can play an anthem again and again. A joke told twice usually dies; a song told a hundred times becomes an identity.
- A song turns an audience into participants. Once people know the words, they are not consuming your message anymore, they are performing it. That is the deepest kind of engagement there is, and you cannot buy it.
Launching it as a proper event, with a press conference and coverage, was also a statement in itself. Real parties launch their campaign songs with fanfare. So we launched ours with fanfare, completely straight, which made the whole thing funnier and, paradoxically, more legitimate. The seriousness of the presentation was part of the joke, the same trick that ran through everything we did.
The numbers back this up. On our YouTube channel the song’s video passed 44,674 views, on a channel of 1,219 subscribers. Read those two figures next to each other and you see the whole point of shareable satire: the video reached roughly thirty-six times more people than actually subscribed to us. It traveled far beyond our own audience because people passed it on. That ratio, not the raw view count, is the thing I was actually chasing.
I have made plenty of things that vanish by the next scroll. This one, people are singing back to us. I did not know that was a bar you could aim for until we hit it. We made a thing people can sing, about a truth about power that everyone recognizes and nobody in serious politics will say. That is what satire is for, and a song is turning out to be the perfect vehicle for it.
More from this stretch: our official candidate list and why we ran the youngest slate in Prishtina.
Write a comment