Mesečina

"Mesečina" — "Moonlight" — is Goran Bregović at his most riotously bittersweet, a Balkan brass eruption forever tied to Emir Kusturica's film "Underground." A Roma-style fanfare orchestra detonates the arrangement: tubas churning a drunken oompah bottom, trumpets screaming in unison, the whole thing barreling forward at a manic, celebratory tempo that teeters on the edge of chaos. The vocals, sung in Serbian with raw folk grain, ride this storm with a kind of gallows abandon — the lyric a wry lament that nothing is built, everything is destroyed, sung as if the only sane response to catastrophe is to drink and dance harder. That is Bregović's genius and the Balkan emotional code itself: grief and ecstasy fused so tightly they become inseparable, a wedding and a funeral in the same breath. Culturally the piece carries the weight of the Yugoslav wars and the film's mordant allegory of a country tearing itself apart while the band plays on. It is music for the kafana table at 2 a.m., for a wild dance with tears in your eyes, for any moment that demands you laugh in the face of ruin. Few pieces capture so completely the intoxicating fatalism of Balkan music — the sense that the world is ending and the only thing to do is play louder.