Opinion

What Punk Rock Meant to Communist Yugoslavia

Miljenko Jergovic
RED CENTURY SEPT. 18, 2017

The scene at a concert by the band Laibach in Sarajevo, 1989.Milomir Kovacevic

ZAGREB, Croatia In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, during the 1984 Winter

Olympics, Elvis J. Kurtovic and his Meteors were performing a cover of Bob
Dylans Maggies Farm in a stifling little basement hall before 300 wild
punk rock fans. But it wasnt Dylans rendition they were playing, it was their
own, a deliberate extension that ostensibly was about Margaret Thatcher,
the prime minister of Britain. But actually, Elvis J. Kurtovic and his Meteors
were singing about in an extremely brutal way that should have been
unacceptable to the Communist authorities Yugoslavias own prime
minister, Milka Planinc.

It was a brilliant trading of identities that mocked the Yugoslav regime and
its ideology while playing with the form and content of a three-minute punk
song. It could be included in any global anthology of protest punk, though
the editors would have to have heard of this strange Sarajevo group, which
was led by Mirko Srdic, a 22-year-old engineering student and one of the
cleverest and most lucid authors on the Yugoslav rock scene.

In their version of the song, Elvis J. Kurtovic and his Meteors accused
Planinc all while calling her Margaret Thatcher of ineptitude and
corruption in Kosovo, then a rebellious Yugoslav province. If a journalist had
tried to publish anything of the sort, she would have ended up in prison and
been banned forever from working for Yugoslav papers. If an ordinary
citizen had talked like this in a cafe or on a tram, he would at the very least
have been investigated by the police for spreading false reports and
alarming the public. But this was a song that referred to Margaret Thatcher.
The police and the Communist Party pretended that it really was about
Thatcher, and nothing happened.

The Sounds of Subversion

A selection of punk tracks from from the last
days of Communist Yugoslavia.

Lublana je bulana
Pankrti
Yugoslav Punk by nytimes

Punk rock appeared early in Yugoslavia. Yugoslav punk bands already

existed by 1977, the year the Clash released its first album in Britain. The
first major punk concert, at least that I remember, took place in Pula, a town
on the Croatian coast, on March 22, 1978. Soon after, the first LPs came
out from bands like Pankrti, from Ljubljana, whose name in Slovene means
illegitimate or bastard children. These records were released through
state-run record companies, which were under a kind of informal but ever-
present party censorship.
Pankrti, formed in Slovenia in 1977, were one of the most influential punk bands in Yugoslavia, though not necessarily the most musically interesting.
Video by zoccaerg

From the standpoint of the regime these groups had extremely problematic
lyrics. They attacked the police, the authorities and the tenets of Communist
ideology. But still, they were sung and published with virtually no
interference. The reason was simple: It is less dangerous for something to
exist in the shop windows of record stores and on the stages of Party-
sponsored houses of culture than for it to live underground, conspiring
against the system. Such was the strategy of the leaders at the time, a
group that would be further liberalized after the death of Yugoslavias
lifelong president, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, in the spring of 1980.

Like its British and American counterparts, Yugoslav punk rock was steeped
in social scandal and radical political engagement. It was a time when
people were able to make a good living, and young people could find regular
paid work through youth services (a Party invention that allowed high school
and college students to work for money in their spare time), and with their
earnings they would go to the Italian border city of Trieste or to Vienna or
even to London to witness the new subcultural trends and buy records.
Because of this, the music of punk classics like the Clash, the Sex Pistols,
the Buzzcocks and the Damned found its way to Yugoslavia, along with that
of Patti Smith, the Stooges and New York Dolls.
Elvis J. Kurtovic, performing in Sarajevo in 1985.Milomir Kovacevic

Not everything was the same for us in Yugoslavia as it was in New York or
London, though. Yugoslav punk was based on rebellion, with the youth
escapism that characterized some parts of the punk scene in the West
almost completely absent. Punk rock in Yugoslavia emerged and developed
as a way to blaspheme the government and everything or almost
everything that our parents generation believed in. The artistry consisted
in writing songs that would be more anti-establishment than any before but
would not be censored. There was just one topic that was untouchable: Tito.
Everything else was allowed. One could sing more or less openly against
everything. Even against Communism.

Some of these songs sounded like everyday political commentary. During

the great strike in the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, when the labor
movement Solidarity, led by the electrician Lech Walesa, had just been
formed and was gaining support, the band Azra, from Zagreb, performed a
song called Poland in My Heart all around Yugoslavia. The song described
actual events, railed against the Soviet Union and even mentioned Pope
John Paul II. The Soviet Embassy in Belgrade sent an official note to object
to the song, but it wasnt banned. The recording of Poland in My Heart
was actually issued by Jugoton, then the largest and most influential record
label in the country.

The ideology of Yugoslav punk boiled down to anti-Communism, conscious

or unconscious. And here again is the intriguing paradox: Why did the
Communist authorities allow an anti-Communist youth subculture to
flourish? Yes, it was a useful outlet for youth rebellion. But the other answer
to this question became clearer a decade later.
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In 1990 and 91, Yugoslavia collapsed and Communism was replaced by

ethno-nationalism. That was when the old world would destroy itself from
within, and yesterdays Communists, the heads of secret agencies and
central committees, would seize power in the Yugoslav republics with
lightning speed, transforming themselves into nationalists and right-wingers.
The people who at the beginning of the 80s were convening Party
conferences to discuss anti-Communist excesses and in the 1990s would
take control of the newly established countries never cared much about anti-
Communism; they cared about power.

Punk and New Wave music in Yugoslavia in the early 80s was a unique
phenomenon in the Communist world. In the other countries of Eastern
Europe with the partial exception of Poland punk rock truly appeared
only once Communism had practically ceased to be. Russian punk rockers,
notably the women from Pussy Riot, revolted against a conservative,
Vladimir Putin, at a time when Communism had faded into the past. Punk
rock arrived in Russia as it had somewhat earlier in Hungary, Poland and
Czechoslovakia as a tardy echo of something that had taken place long
before in the West, and usually it was merely an imitation of American and
British models.

For many years, this was how popular and youth culture developed in
Yugoslavia, too. But with the liberalization of the political regime, and with
the material enrichment of society and the expansion of the middle class,
things had begun to change radically by the end of the 70s. In 1968, just a
year after it was produced in New York, the Broadway musical Hair was
staged in Belgrade, a landmark event in Yugoslav popular culture. From
Belgrades Hair to Yugoslav punk rock, and then until the fall of
Yugoslavia, things played out largely in synchronicity with the West.

In contrast to the Soviet Union and most other Eastern European

Communist Parties, whose leaders and commissars saw control of culture,
particularly popular and youth culture, as a means of safeguarding their
power, the Yugoslav Communists offered culture to their citizens, especially
the young, as an outlet to safely relieve social trauma, one that would also
present the illusion of freedom. Simply put, in contrast to Leonid Brezhnev of
the Soviet Union, Tito did not think that young people with drums and guitars
would bring down the state. And in the end, he was right.

Miljenko Jergovic is the author of Mama Leone and other novels. This essay was
translated by Russell Scott Valentino from the Serbo-Croatian.

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism
100 years after the Russian Revolution.

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