New Primitivism
New Primitivism was a subcultural movement established in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in March 1983. It primarily used music, along with satire, sketch and surreal comedy on radio and television, as its forms of expression. Its protagonists and followers called themselves the New Primitives.
Functioning as a banner that summarizes and encompasses the work of two Sarajevo-based rock bands, Zabranjeno Pušenje and Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors, as well as the Top lista nadrealista radio segment that eventually grew into a television sketch show, the discourse of New Primitivism was seen as primarily irreverent and humorous. Additionally, two other prominent bands, Plavi Orkestar and Crvena Jabuka, that reached great commercial success in Yugoslavia during the mid 1980s were also tangentially associated with the movement though each abandoned its sensibility early on in favour of a more mainstream conventional musical and stylistic expression.
The movement officially disbanded some time in 1987, although the bands and television show continued for a few more years after that — Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors until 1988, Zabranjeno Pušenje until 1990 and Top lista nadrealista until 1991.
Characteristics
Basing itself on the spirit of the Bosnian ordinary populace outside of the cultural mainstream, the movement was credited with introducing the jargon of Sarajevo mahalas into the official Yugoslav public scene. Many of the New Primitivism songs and sketches involve stories of "small people" — pensioners, coalminers, petty criminals, street thugs, provincial girls, etc. — being placed in unusual and absurd situations. Stylistically, the New Primitives' methods drew comparisons to Monty Python's Flying Circus, sharing the short sketch form and utilizing absurdity as a means of eliciting laughs from an audience. The embodiment of New Primitivism is a youth who both reads challenging works such as Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit, but also does not mind having fistfights. In the most general sense, the movement was established as a Sarajevan reaction to the New wave and Punk movements that had been sweeping the Yugoslav alternative music scene for several years already. Some of New Primitivism's most notable traits were promoting and popularizing Sarajevan street jargon and slang that had not been well-known outside the city in others parts of Yugoslavia where Serbo-Croatian is spoken. In doing so - by depicting local fringe characters such as petty criminals, neighbourhood kafana alcoholics, lesser-known pop-cultural figures, blue-collar workers and local streets hoodlums - the movement exposed aspects of the Sarajevan mahala culture to a wider Yugoslav audience and eventually came to be considered a locally patriotic and eclectic expression of Sarajevan urban culture.The movement's protagonists had a specific view of New Primitivism. Perhaps the most prominent of them, Nele Karajlić, explained it as being "created within clearly defined historical coordinates, both spatially and temporally, at the precise midpoint between the spot where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 and the spot where the Olympic flame was lit in February 1984 while temporally, it took place some time during the period between Tito's death in May 1980 and the beginning of the Agrokomerc Affair in 1987" and seeing it as "resistance to any form of establishment – cultural, social, and political – not just the rock'n'roll one that dominated Sarajevo at the time with so-called 'dinosaur' bands like Bijelo Dugme and Indexi, which the new primitives held in contempt to a certain extent". The movement's dominant method of social and cultural critique was to fully localize the narrative to Sarajevo, and to use local urban legends, cultural and social phenomena and living fringe characters as catalysts for painting a wider political picture. In doing so, the movement became both a rigidly local expressional form that gave a platform to the language, culture and myths of the Sarajevan streets, while also breaking out into the wider Yugoslav arena. A major characteristic of the movement was the adoption of pseudonyms by all of its leading figures, which tended to be either comical in nature or based on the semantics of nicknames that have always been very prevalent in Sarajevo. The main reason for this was so that none of the members could be ethnically identified. The second reason was to give a platform to the stylization of nicknames that was prominent in Sarajevo — a form of local patriotism and self-mockery.
The movement's "chief ideologue" referred to New Primitivism simply as "the first Sarajevan bullet to hit its target since Princip assassinated Ferdinand in 1914".
Origin of the term
The movement's name was introduced as a mock reaction to two early 1980s pop-culture movements: New Romanticism in the West and Neue Slowenische Kunst in the Yugoslav constituent republic of SR Slovenia. On one hand, the term New Primitivism was a clear anti-reference to New Romantic, as the Sarajevo lads sought to be anything but romantic and sugar-sweet while on the other hand, they also wanted to emphasize the stereotypes encountered in many popular Yugoslav jokes about Bosnians and Slovenians—the former portrayed as raw, unsophisticated, dim-witted, and openhearted, and the latter presented as stiff, cold, serious, distant, and calculated. In the artistic and expressional sense, New Primitivism was a reaction to the New wave and Punk movements.History
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a generation of kids from the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Koševo—all born in the early to mid-1960s—was coming up. Raised within upper-middle-class families inhabiting post-World War II apartment buildings typical of communist Yugoslavia, their interests included music, football, and movies. They soon converged on music as their main activity and simultaneously with entering high school started forming bands despite possessing very limited musical skills. Most of their musical influences were found in Western popular culture—from early ones such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, The Who, etc. to those found later on the emerging punk scene.By early 1980, the kids were able to adapt a cellar at the 19 Fuada Midžića Street low-rise apartment building into a makeshift rehearsal space where they held band practices, chamber plays, even an odd fashion show. Initially very informal with irregular rehearsals and frequently changing lineups, by 1981, the bands—named Zabranjeno Pušenje and Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors—took on a more serious note. Adopting garage/punk rock sensibility, they started devoting more attention to songwriting and began playing small clubs around town. In parallel, from May 1981, some of the kids from both bands got a chance to collaborate on Top lista nadrealista, a comedy segment on Primus radio show that aired weekly, Saturday mornings, on Radio Sarajevo's channel two.
1982–1983: Forming a movement
The idea to create a movement as an umbrella entity encompassing their entire activity had been tossed about for months during the second part of 1982 and early 1983 between the individuals in and around Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors—the band's manager Malkolm Muharem, its main lyricist and mascot Elvis J. Kurtović, and its singer Rizo Petranović—who had come up with the New Primitivism Manifesto printed in 1982 in a local fanzine.Additional notable members of the movement included dr. Nele Karajlić, mr. Sejo Sexon, Dražen Ričl, Boris Šiber, Zenit Đozić, and others from the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Koševo. Along the way, individuals outside of the narrow Koševo milieu, most notably Branko "Đuro" Đurić, joined in and would also become prominent. Despite being a bit older and also not from the same neighbourhood, film director Emir Kusturica was an associate and friend of the crew; although his movies can not be directly associated with the movement, their spirit certainly shares some sentiment with New Primitivism. With the bands playing small gigs around the city, they encountered other up and coming rock bands such as Plavi orkestar that also cultivated similar thematic narratives focused on stories of local small time characters, but would eventually move away from the aesthetic and overtly turn towards mainstream commercialism.
The movement's wider unofficial unveiling was said to have taken place at an Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors gig in Sarajevo's CEDUS club venue during early March 1983. Also playing the gig was Zabranjeno Pušenje. Influenced by movies like 1979's Quadrophenia that portray the youth scene of London with subcultures like mods, rockers, and teddy boys, the guys from Koševo tried to create their own local version of that. The formal introduction of the new entity changed nothing in the internal group dynamic as they all continued functioning as a neighbourhood gang of friends, but it gave the press something to latch onto and made it easier to market the bands outside of the city. By his own admission, Muharem used the movement to "try and create an impression to those in Belgrade and Zagreb that there's something more going on in Sarajevo than there actually is".
In addition to music and radio comedy, the lads decided to expand their modes of expression now that they functioned as a movement—attempting to come up with a clothing style to associate with New Primitivism. The movement's unofficial look was thus born with a démodé style consisting of waist tight bell-bottom pants, plaid suit jackets, thin golden necklace worn above the shirt, and pointy shoes —similar to the 1970s leisure suit look—which the lads adopted from petty hoodlums and small-time smugglers and pickpockets seen around Baščaršija selling, though not wearing, clothing items such as Levi's 501 jeans that were either smuggled in from Italy or counterfeit locally in Yugoslavia. Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors especially embraced the throwback look, with young crowds soon showing up to their club gigs dressed this way. Meanwhile, Karajlić came up with the movement's unofficial creed: "Tuđe hoćemo, svoje nemamo", a parody on one of the often used political slogans of the communist period: "Tuđe nećemo, svoje ne damo.".
One of the first activities on movement's behalf was writing an open letter to Sarajevo's own Goran Bregović, the best known and most established Yugoslav rock musician who was at the moment going through a well-documented creative and commercial crisis with his band Bijelo Dugme's latest studio effort getting poor reviews and selling underwhelmingly, in addition to reports of band members' infighting and vocalist Željko Bebek's imminent departure. Dripping with jovial sarcasm and backhanded compliments, the new primitives' letter invites Bregović to join them, offering him a fresh start along with creative reset.