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Yugoslavia is dancing Rock’nRoll
everything around you is straightening and bendingElektrikni Orgazam
I arrived in Nikola Tesla airport five summers ago to visit my fiance’s family in their home below the Romanija mountains in Bosnia. We set out for Sarajevo across vast reaches of Serbian plains and farmland, not a hill in sight until we finally arrived at the Bosnian border where towering limestone karsts loomed before us. As we entered this new territory the landscape’s geography gave way from the endless empty plains of flatlands into winding mountain highways and through needle peaks amidst Bosnia’s craggy pine topped alpine ridges. I found the landscape was startling in its familiarity, yet instantly disorienting in its difference, simultaneously recalling national parks of the American West and the forests of European folktales, haunted throughout by the vestigial reminders of the long defunct national machine of Yugoslavian communism. There were moments where it felt as if I could have been in Colorado, but after driving past the startling monolith of the Sutjeska Partisan monument, rising like weathered wings of granite to form a gateway into the mountains where Yugoslavian partisans had fought and won to wrest their country from fascism, I was reminded of the weight of history borne by this small country torn between great powers.
As we drove deeper through the cliffsides, Marina’s father began to adjust the dials of the car radio, crackling through the airwaves to land on the syncopated percussion, snarling vocals and distorted guitars. I leaned into Marina and asked, “What do they call this?” and she answered “Oh this? This is novi val. Our new wave”
The Western Balkans has historically been the site of a vicious tug of war between East and West on the European continent. It was reviled as an underdeveloped no- man’s- land in the wake of the most violent confrontations of the 19th and 20th century, and always had trouble rebuilding after abandonment by the many empires that used the territory as a violent stage for their expansionist ambitions. The fatalistic mentality that the region will ever find stability or prosperity, even more integral to Balkan identity today in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars, would be the fertile ground that gave rise to the music that became Yugoslavian punk, New Primitivism and novi val.
Yugoslavia took a different path to socialist nationhood than most of the countries that emerged after the destruction of World War II in Eastern Europe. Since the 50’s it was a kind of sister nation to the United States, serving as the Slavic inversion of America utopianism, managing to maintain what was at times an uneasy partnership during the Cold War. Like the United States, the Yugoslav model was built upon a social opposition to European aristocracy and emphasized a strong freedom of expression, with the exception of political dissent against the state. On the other hand, Yugoslavia developed a nationalized industrial labor complex heavily modeled on the USSR’s socialism. With a fusion of market and command economics tolerable to the West, Yugoslavia served as a useful cultural barrier in Europe, simultaneously the buffer and the bridge between the capitalist West and the Soviet East. Titoism and Yugoslavian socialism aggressively staved off the USSR’s many attempts to absorb it as a satellite state, maintaining its own unique political and ideological organization and serving as a strong socialist alternative in Europe to the increasingly dystopic model in the USSR.
In no place was this more apparent than the often disregarded Yugoslav cultural landscape, vibrant with independent artists and intellectuals. The rock scene was no exception. The generations of Yugoslavian youth that had grown up listening to musicians ranging from Carl Perkins and the Rolling Stones in the ‘50’s to the Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin in the 70’s and eventually the Clash, Sex Pistols and Ramones into the ‘80’s, created their own bands and syncretic musical narratives. When heavy metal’s progenitors emerged from the United States and the UK in the late 60’s to the early 70’s, Yugoslavia responded quickly to the echoes from across the airwaves with equally powerful and dynamic bands like Bijelo Dugme and Azra. Subsequently, Yugoslavian punk emerged as the second stage of this engagement with Western rock music, creatively borrowing elements from its Western counterparts while taking on regional flavors and addressing the tastes and political concerns of local audiences.
One of the greatest political strengths of punk in Yugoslavia was that it was ultimately a multi-ethnic and anti-establishment movement that provided a space for individuals of many backgrounds and opinions to dissent against the state and mainstream society. Despite the decades of political openness preceding the violence of the ‘90’s, in the blink of an eye Yugoslavia and all its achievements were erased and its people were reduced by Western media to a backwards tribalist society that could never cease fighting long enough to build a functional State. As a result, many in the West could not comprehend when the leaders of the Serbian rock underground organized mass protest concerts in Belgrade and Novi Sad, or the anti authoritarian Otpor! movement and its leaderless struggle against Milosevic—one of the most innovative youth protest movements in history which went on to set a historical precedent for mass mobilizing dissent decades in advance of Occupy Wall Street and Tahrir Square.
These sentiments are particularly powerful in Bosnia as it was the epicenter of the proxy war being waged between nationalist ideologues from the most powerful of the fledgling states of post—Yugoslavia, Serbia and Croatia, and thus suffered more atrocities compared to the insulated inner territories of Croatia and Serbia and the distant removed reaches of Macedonia and Slovenia. However, while the nature of Bosnia as a pluralist nation, home to three distinct ethnic groups functioning together as a whole, perhaps led to greater hardship to the region, it also uniquely positioned its cultural movements compared to its relatively homogenous brother and sister territories. The evolution of punk rock and new wave in Bosnia was no different, serving to provide a stage on which questions of culture, politics, marginalization from the body of Europe and echoes of internal nationalism were satirized.
In the upper-middle class suburbs of post-war Sarajevo and Kosevo’s blocks of concrete communist apartment towers, the erstwhile progenitors of New Primitivism began forming bands inspired by the rockabilly, punk and garage rock bands from the United States and the UK. These early interactions began to incite an urge for counter-cultural spaces across Yugoslavia. Although few of these early bands would ever come to gain real recognition, their members would go on to found different groups and artistic spaces that would define New Primitivism in Bosnia, like the bands Zabranjeno Pusenje (No Smoking Orchestra) and Elvis J. Kurtovic and the Meteors. Art critic Nermina Zildzo describes Sarajevo’s New Primitive movement as:
“…the exploration of identity — an attempt to explain one’s self in one’s own words, through one’s own, un-imposed prism. It manifests itself in: an alleged anti-intellectualism; the use of local iconic and lexical properties; the manipulation of prejudices about Bosnians, with a particularly productive use of elements from the Muslim milieu in the Sarajevo suburbs.”
Ironically playing with the Yugoslavian cultural stereotype of Bosnia as a cultural backwater of uncivilized peasants, seljachina, incapable of modernisation, these self-styled hooligans quickly began carving out a significant niche of the Yugoslavian media landscape. One of Zabranjeno Pusenje’s founding members, Nele Karaljic with friends from the Sarajevo New Primitives, began an alternative political sketch comedy show named “Top Lista Nadrealista” or the “Surrealist Hit Parade” while one of its other members, Emir Kusturica, was rapidly gaining international renown as one of the Balkans’ most famous film directors.
Serbia also had an early punk scene, starting in Novi Sad in 1978 it continued to grow rapidly until it expanded to Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, with a slew of revolutionary bands referred to interchangeably as punk or new wave/novi val. Belgrade became the convergence point upon which the many movements of Yugoslavian punk overlapped and intersected, coming from as far away as Sarajevo or Ljubljana to meet for the first time. Some of the most iconic groups of the period comprised a vast range of musical styles, from the raucous proto-punk snarl of Partijbrejker’s anthemic punk rock, recalling the Ramones or Stooges, to inflections of Ian Curtis’ cold and doleful post-punk in Ekaterina Velika. The band Pekinska Patka proclaimed themselves the “first Orthodox punk band” in opposition to the staunchly atheism of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Other bands like Disciplina Kicme, equally brash and iconoclastic in their early incarnations, represented stronger roots in noise-punk having more in common with bands in New York City’s No Wave movement. The vastness of the musical range in counter-culture Yugoslavia soon attracted interest from abroad and artists and intellectuals from the United States, like Jim Jarmusch and others, were known to spend time in Belgrade with artistic peers from Yugoslavia’s own movements.
The punk movement in Yugoslavia continued unimpeded by authorities for a long time until an ironic fascist aesthetic was adopted by the new wave band Laibach and Slovenia’s counter-cultural movement “Slowenische Neue Kunst,” creating ripples of tension within the Yugoslavian establishment. Amongst politicians in the state apparatus, Laibach’s satirical appropriation of Nazi iconography created a growing concern about the emergence of a fascist political movement within Yugoslavia. While this suspicion was largely unfounded, these tensions came to a head when a populist newspaper in Slovenia falsely accused three punks wearing anti-fascist pins, with swastikas crossed out, of being members of a Nazi party attempting to create their own Fourth Reich within Yugoslavia. This incident was all the ammunition that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia needed to come out in full force against punk as not only a symbolic social problem, but an ideological one. Punk quickly became taboo and its disciples considered persona non grata in polite communist society, pushing the movement further into an underground of clandestine and alternative spaces.
At this point the space that punk music occupied in Yugoslavia was a broad one, but universally against stifling of free expression by the Yugoslav state. Most of the groups that comprised this community were anti-establishment, tending to lean hard to the left, and many went on to support the radical Otpor! movement against Milosevic in the late 90’s. However, with the onslaught of ethnic nationalism, even members of the counterculture became more susceptible to becoming used as tools within the anti-Left propaganda machine.
The most prominent example of this transformation from iconoclast punk to nationalist was Satan Panonski. Although it is unclear where the influence of his conversion emerged, many speculate it was the result of the bombardment on his home region of Slavonia in 1991, when Serbian military under the banner of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) began shelling the region, culminating in the battle of Vukovar where 31,000 were displaced and many thousands more were killed. During his time as a figure of note in Belgrade’s punk underground he was an openly gay anti-government, a known champion of interethnic collaboration and rejection of social and political labels across lines of ethnicity and sexual orientation.
When I foolishly wore a “No Smoking Orchestra” tour shirt while visiting downtown Sarajevo, I noticed smoldering glares on the faces of several people I passed in the street as I walked past the rickety tram-car lines that still rattle through the center of Sarajevo’s old town. Little did I know I had unwittingly donned the colors of the Serbian flag, emblazoned with the name of Sarajevo’s least popular hometown boy, turning myself into a nationalist billboard. These days he is known more as a Serbian nationalist and builder of an ethno-amusement park just across the border in Visegrad. His identification with Serbian culture and his rejection of his Islamic heritage has not endeared him to his former countrymen, nor has his espousal of certain pro-Serbian party lines regarding Kosovar independence. Kusturica’s bandmate Nele Karajlic, Satan Panonski and Bosniak pop-rock star Dino Merlin Have also become martyrs to these nationalist causes.
Other bands that fell victim to this trend spanned the musical spectrum, most occupying positions much closer to the mainstream. This was most apparent with Riblja Corba, one of the first popular rock groups of Yugoslavia’s 60’s and 70’s who, alongside Azra, inspired the nascent Yugoslavian punk movement of the 70’s and 80’s. After the Yugoslav Wars came into full swing, Riblja Corba demonstrated enthusiastic public support of the army of Republika Srpska with leader Bora Djordjevic recording pro-military songs like “E Moj Zagrebacki” that was read as a real threat of violent invasion into Croatia. In spite of these open displays of support for militant Serbian nationalism they were simultaneously and quite publicly positioned against the Milosevic regime, recording three albums against the Milosevic establishment, Zbogom, Srbijo (1993), Ostalo je ćutanje (1996) and Nojeva barka (1999), as well as on Djordjevic’s solo album Njihovi dani (1996).
The Milosevic government went to the additional extreme of banning alternative rock bands from the airwaves and heavily restricting visas for musical performers, film companies, and theater groups. Punk and other forms of counter-culture was more or less decimated, many of its progenitors fleeing as refugees into their ethnic national body–Serbs to Serbia, Croats to Croatia, or further afield to countries like Australia, Canada, the UK, the US, or greater Europe. Of the bandmates that stayed behind many were killed in combat and those that survived, in many cases became hyper-nationalistic or aggressively apolitical. In the absence of the anti-nationalists, these few turncoats have become the public faces for movements that were historically antithetical to their newfound nationalist beliefs. To this day one must join a political party in Bosnia, almost all of which use ethnic tension to feed their corruption, in order to ensure employment opportunities and a stable income.
This absence of the cultural innovators that had been swept away by the war or censored into marginalization paved the way for the post-war soundtrack. The new cultural landscape of the fractured Yugoslavia was already usurped by the end of the war by profiteers and mafiosos, who fancied themselves as patrons-of-the-arts for using their own money, while backing various ethno-political factions, to fund entertainment at roadside cabarets in the form of young women singing folk songs in a traditional style but backed up by electronic music and a heavy bass beat. This came to be known as turbo-folk and from the mid 90’s onward went on to conquer music in the former Yugoslavia all the way to countries like Albania and Bulgaria.
As the newly adopted anthem behind the Milosevic regime and its figureheads, turbo-folk celebrated a new, individualistic, wealth-driven, ethnically pure Serbia and later an ethnically divided Bosnia after the Dayton agreement. It was a scene where men were driven by capitalism and libido and women were objects to be acquired. This was a far cry from the Yugoslavia where all-female punk bands like Boye or Mu66 could reach acclaim.
It was ultimately impossible, however, for nationalism to flourish in the remaining spaces created by Yugoslavian punk because, in celebration of the chaotic clash of multiple identities existing side by side simultaneously and careening like free radicals against one another, these spaces were created in opposition to any singular ideology. Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the 70’s-80’s came to define an essential era the new generation of Yugonostalgia–a term that describes the youth that came of age during wartime who yearn for a Yugoslavia as a time of stability and cultural, if not total political, freedom. Most understand the drawbacks of this period and the Titoist regime, but in a society rife with youth unemployment and suppression of dissent by party politics, many believe it was a paradise when compared to the present. Interest is now returning to this period of musicians and their legacy, even though much of what their predecessors had accomplished had been pushed back during wartime. Still these musicians provide a symbol of hope for freedom of expression in this region that while so accustomed to the boots of oppression has never silenced the gleeful snarls of mounting underground resistance
