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Sarajevo — the press called them long-haired punkers, but they were short-haired pranksters who had beaten up hashish users near Skenderija

The Sarajevo press in the early 1980s reported that 'conscientious youth near the bridge by Skenderija had beaten up a group of long-haired punkers.' The older journalist who wrote the piece thought they were punkers. They were actually short-haired local toughs who had, with a long scythe, beaten up some hashish users. The New Primitives were not punks. They were not a movement. They were, in Mirko Srdić's words, 'just messing around.' The name itself was a joke about the Slovenian movement Neue Slowenische Kunst.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The New Primitivism movement, Novi primitivizam, was born in Sarajevo in the early 1980s. It produced two rock bands, a radio show, a TV show, and a cultural vocabulary that shaped the city for a generation. Its members went on to dominate Yugoslav popular culture for the rest of the decade.

And according to the people who created it, none of this was the plan.

The press got it wrong

Mirko Srdić — the musician who performed as Elvis J. Kurtović — told Erol Handžar in a 2020 interview how the Sarajevo press covered the emergence of the New Primitives:

“Once there was a news story that conscientious youth near the bridge by Skenderija had beaten up a group of long-haired punkers. The older man who wrote the piece thought they were punkers — that they were long-haired. A group of local toughs who couldn’t stand these guys with their long scythes had, in fact, beaten up some hashish users.”

(Handžar, 2020, p. 117, interview with Mirko Srdić)

The journalist had assumed any young subculture in early-1980s Sarajevo must be punk. They were not. The New Primitives were, in Srdić’s telling, something else entirely: young Sarajevans from educated families who had read about British youth movements in the press and decided to create their own version.

The naming

Srdić continued:

“We thought about what we could call ourselves — we wanted to be modern, but not just ordinary guys from Ilidža. We wanted to be dressed like those British kids who had to have exactly the right shoes and exactly the right T-shirts and had to look like British youth groups. So we named ourselves New Primitives. We never thought we’d actually become that — we were just messing around.”

(Handžar, 2020, pp. 116-117)

The name was partly a joke about Neue Slowenische Kunst, the Slovenian art movement whose most visible representative was the band Laibach. Laibach (the German name for Ljubljana) represented an extreme, almost provocative, intellectualism in the Yugoslav cultural landscape. The Sarajevo group chose the opposite pole: “new primitivism” as a deliberate contrast to “new Slovenian art.”

As Nenad Janković wrote in his memoir Fajront u Sarajevu: “If we’d had the organisation that the Slovenian Neue Slowenische Kunst had, our stuff would now be permanent installations at MoMA” (Janković, 2014, p. 115, cited in Handžar, 2020, p. 53).

Janković also described how the name survived: “We couldn’t change it, even though that was our wish”; it had stuck before anyone could revise it (Handžar, 2020, p. 58).

Not a movement

Srdić was clear about the limits of intention: “We never thought it would become a real movement. We were already dabbling in music and humour by then. We’d been reading in newspapers about various movements in Britain — punks, heavy metalers, skinheads, teddy boys, rockers, mods. There was even a film about how they fight on a beach in Brighton. We had no youth groups here at all” (Handžar, 2020, p. 116).

The absence of any existing youth subculture in early-1980s Sarajevo meant the New Primitives filled a vacuum. They created the subculture because there wasn’t one. The result — a movement that combined rock, radio, TV, pseudonyms, street language, and deadpan satire — was, in Srdić’s account, accidental.

What was planned

One thing was deliberate. Srdić told Handžar that the satirical intent was real from the beginning:

“I probably always was that way. Already in primary school I fought against injustice. My friends remember that I wrote something to the teacher about social and other problems. Young people look at what’s wrong and they look to fix it — unlike the adults who shout ‘just so it doesn’t blow up.’”

(Handžar, 2020, p. 117)

The satire was sincere. The movement was accidental. The name was a joke. The press got the haircuts wrong.

Thirty years later, the songs are still sung, the sketches are still quoted, and the New Primitivism movement, the one that was never supposed to be a movement, is studied at the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Political Sciences.

The relationship to TLN

Srdić drew a distinction between the two main products of the movement. He told Handžar: “TLN was a humorous series for the broad masses, and it was the scene for children, while rock was always for the more mature people, for that layer of the intellectual public that was never too numerous” (Handžar, 2020, p. 102).

The TV show reached everyone. The music reached the ones who were listening.

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