New Primitivism (Serbo-Croatian: Novi primitivizam) 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 rock bands Zabranjeno Pušenje and Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors as well as 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.
The movement officially disbanded sometime 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 for introducing the jargon of Sarajevo mahalas (brimming with slang and Turkish loanwords) into the official Yugoslav public scene. Many of the New Primitivism songs and sketches involve stories of "small people"—retirees/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 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 getting into fistfights. In the most general sense, the movement got 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 hadn't been well known outside of the city in others parts of Yugoslavia where Serbo-Croatian is spoken. In doing so, the movement exposed aspects of the Sarajevan mahala culture to a wider audience by depicting local fringe characters such as petty criminals, alcoholics, lesser-known pop-cultural figures, blue-collar workers, and local streets hoodlums. Because of this, the movement was 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, explicated 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 sometime 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 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 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".