🎶(the)END?— A New Wave of Musical Prose with Caribbean Soul 🎤📖 🎸
artwork & poetry specially provided by NS
What happens when you try to rhyme truth about your homeland—without flattering the state?
This is where our characters find themselves: Havana heat, socialist ghosts, and a Ministry of Culture back in Bulgaria launching a patriotic hip-hop contest titled "Homeland."
The irony isn’t lost on them.
In “(the) END?”, a chapter of a larger work-in-progress, we follow a small group of expats and artists—Stella, Stan, and Desita—who decide to enter this contest not with applause, but with honesty, anger, and poetry.
What begins as a sarcastic critique turns into something deeper: a musical exploration of lost roots, black angels, inner gardens, and freedom vs. conformity.
“A crowd of Todor Zhivkovs
and candidates for Bateto,
naked knights of the spoon
and drunken dreamers…”
Their lyrics blend raw Balkan disillusionment with personal myth-making, echoing truths many Eastern Europeans still wrestle with:
What does it mean to belong?
Can you love a country but hate the system?
And is there, finally, an END—or just a long caravan of compromise?
This chapter features:
🧠 Sharp political insight wrapped in poetic hip-hop
🌍 Global/local tension from Cuba to Bulgaria
🎧 Studio scenes with real beats and raw verses
💬 Dialogue-driven depth exploring identity, exile, and the eternal question: Is there an end, huh?
“They’ll understand it abroad—as critique. But in Bulgaria?
They’ll say you’re spitting in the well.
But this is for people still searching for water.”
⚠️ This isn’t a lament.
It’s a story.
A mirror.
A march of black angels.
Read the full chapter below.
Let me know what image stayed with you.
And if this were your homeland…
Would you enter the contest?
🖤
—To be continued.
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(the) END?
Havana smelled of burnt sugar, rain, and a history unashamed of itself.
Stella stood before the old fan in Desita’s apartment, wearing an N.W.A. t-shirt and Cuban fringed slippers. Her laptop was open to ContraCult, the news shouting patriotic slogans:
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria announces a contest for a hip-hop song on the theme “Hometown.”
“This is absurd,” Stella said, nodding at the screen. “Our dear Bulgaria wants us to rhyme praises after decades of tossing us through airports, borders, and temporary contracts.”
“Typical: ‘Love us, but from a distance,’” Stan added, lying on the floor reading Open Veins of Latin America in English. “Institutionalized nostalgia.”
“Wait,” Desita interrupted, sipping her sweet coffee. “What’s the difference between a country and a state?”
“The country is where you’re born. The state is the machine that complicates your life,” Stella replied.
“So you can love one and hate the other?” Desi asked.
“Absolutely,” Stan said, sitting up. “You love the mountains, the language, childhood memories... but despise ministries, Soviet monuments, and bureaucrats.”
“So this contest tests if you can speak of your country without flattering the state,” Desi said. “Or if you simply... can’t.”
Silence.
Salsa music drifted from the street. The washing machine spun in the kitchen. Stella looked at Stan, who’d already decided to enter without a word.
“So, we’re doing it?” she whispered.
“Only if it’s honest,” Stan answered.
“Honest means not sparing the fact that most people here ‘watch which way the wind blows’ instead of choosing their own direction,” Stella said.
“Are they bad?” Desi asked.
“They’re not bad,” Stella said thoughtfully. “Just... foldable. Conformists. Seemingly kind, but sly in a Balkan way. Like every second person is a little Todor Zhivkov with a garden and a friend in the municipality.”
Stan laughed:
“A nation of Todor Zhivkovs. The average Bulgarian dream? To be like ‘Bateto’—the Dictator’s son-in-law: unaccountable, radiant, jokester... A privileged bohemian. No risks, no effort.”
“Just to fit in. Lay low. Wait,” Stella added.
“Philosophy of caravan and dogs,” Stan nodded. “The caravan is the state. The dogs are the rebels. They bark but don’t stop it.”
Stan left, returned with an old notebook and the first verse:
A crowd of Todor Zhivkovs*
and candidates for Bateto*,
naked knights
of the spoon
and drunken dreamers.
How boldly you live
freedom and the stove,
and the bottle of rakia
on payday.
A lifetime of
“Hold on, better days will come.”
Shit...
And the caravan keeps moving.
Silence.
“This is great. Should we write more?” Stella whispered.
“Throw out ideas,” Stan said.
“Where is this caravan going?” Desi asked. “East? West?”
“To hell with it...” Stan answered.
“That can be poetic,” Stella smiled.
‘Closer and farther,
more to the east
and more to the west.
The road is long,
the exit — short.’
Stan jumped up and shouted:
“Is there an end, I ask,
is there an end, huh?”
Stella gave a quiet thumbs up.
“Is this Bulgaria to you?” Desi asked. “A caravan of drunken dreamers wandering the desert, sometimes east, sometimes west?”
“That’s part of the truth,” Stella said. “A big part.”
“But are there other images? Ones not sarcastic?” Desi asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what is Bulgaria to someone who isn’t ‘Bateto,’ not a thug or conformist? To the kids growing up now? To the poets? Those who still believe? Are there symbols? Places? Words?”
Stan looked at her, then said:
A garden.
“What kind of garden?”
“Not literal. A place inside you. A place you plow, water, and it bears fruit. Needed by those who’ve been through darkness but still have the strength to sing. It’s not on the map, but it’s in the songs.”
“More symbols in your inner Bulgaria?” Desi asked.
Black angels, he said. Not white. Black because they’ve burned. Carry wounds. Not afraid of shadows. Always moving. Marching against time.
“That’s a new verse,” Stella encouraged.
Stan wrote:
There is a garden long known
to all those who themselves
have known the freezing darkness of the abyss,
the sword of the word,
the wild cry,
locked in the ancient power of songs,
in legends of anger and prayers for rain.
The black angels, in their march against time,
once brought me to this garden.
I was alone, tormented before the holy land—
I closed my eyes and felt the rain.
Silence.
“Let’s go back to the beginning.”
And Stan wrote:
Closer and farther,
more to the east
and more to the west.
The road is long,
the exit — short.
Is there an end, I ask,
is there an end, huh?
“Bravo! Now let’s record it!” Desita clapped. “Imagine if it wins?”
“We can’t send it without a title,” Stan said. “What should we call it? Caravan?”
“No. END,” Desita shouted.
“But... with the ‘E’ in parentheses, and a question mark at the end,” Stella said softly and wrote:
(the) END?
In El Gato’s studio, behind a rusty, creaking door like a Hemingway relic, sound was religion and words were weapons.
Under flickering fluorescent lights, time slowed. Stan sat at his laptop like a confessor, the screen’s blue light casting shadows as he shaped the beat—a dark pulse carrying stories left in the sun to sour.
“Where did you dig up this monster?” El Gato asked, one headphone off. Not envy, but respect.
“I made it. Mixcraft. One night.”
“Loops?”
“Only drums. Free loops from looperman. The rest played on the laptop keyboard.”
Cuban laughter—carefree, confident.
“If you ever need drums, congas, maracas—anything wooden—just say.”
Stan’s silent gaze said everything: thanks.
They layered the vocals:
A crowd of Todor Zhivkovs
and candidates for Bateto,
naked knights
of the spoon
and drunken dreamers.
Stella and Desita flipped lyrics like relics from a lost civilization.
“They’ll understand it abroad—as critique. But in Bulgaria?”
“They’ll call it pessimistic,” Desita said. “Or say you’re spitting in the well. But this is for people still searching for water.”
“Or rain,” Stella whispered. “Like the end.”
Stan finished in two takes, twenty minutes. He lit a cigarette.
“Let’s hear it…”
The track played.
El Gato didn’t understand the words but felt the rhythm. Bulgarian sounded like torn fabric and drumbeats.
Outside, rain fell fine and persistent. Inside, four souls wrote a biting necrology of socialism and an indictment of post-socialist deadlock.
The conversation turned to politics. The old debate flared:
“I was just in Bulgaria. It’s a republic without the ‘people.’ People rummage trash. Neighborhoods of ghosts. The young flee, the old starve. Is this freedom’s fruit? Market economy, NATO, EU… but crumbling asphalt and crumpled lives. Is it better?”
“Better, because we can choose. Speak. Argue. Under communism, every word cost your future. Order bought with fear. Privileges were a noose. Weak but dangerous.”
“Now?”
“Privileges again. Different names: oligarch, investor. Before, at least security and order.”
“There was stagnation. Privileges weren’t inherited. If you messed up, you were nobody. Order by obedience. Department heads were gods but also hostages. Terror.”
“Now people sink, ignored. Freedom is misery.”
“When ideas come before life, they become ideologies. Then not just people die. Freedom dies.”
“So money above ideas?”
“No. But when ideas stop people from thinking, earning, creating—money becomes rebellion. Salvation. Money you can use. Privilege is a leash. Money is a tool. The difference is freedom.”
“So freedom versus security.”
“Yes. Freedom births security. Security without freedom is a heated prison.”
Silence.
Rain erased footprints.
They knew the song wasn’t a manifesto or lament.
It was a story.
A caravan.
A garden.
Black angels.
The eternal question:
Is there an end?
*Todor Zhivkovs – conformists, named after the communist leader of Bulgaria Zhivkov who ruled for 3o + years
*Bateto – a nickname for Zhivkov`s son-in-law Slavkov, who was a famous hedonist
TO BE CONTINUED
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