Sounds from the Outer Yugoslav Periphery:

Masculinity, Satire, and Cultural Identity in the Bosnian New Primitives

Abstract

This article examines the Bosnian New Primitives movement as a distinctive expression of the Yugoslav New Wave, focusing on how cultural peripherality was transformed into an aesthetic and critical resource within late socialist Sarajevo. Through a close stylistic and semiotic analysis of three emblematic songs by Zabranjeno Pušenje and Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors, the study explores the interaction between musical form, humor, irony, and performance in the construction of locally grounded forms of modernity. The designation New Primitives, adopted by the movement’s protagonists as a deliberately parodic self-definition, functioned as a strategy for reappropriating external stereotypes that represented Bosnia-Herzegovina as a culturally backward periphery within both Yugoslavia and Europe. Rather than merely imitating Western rock and New Wave models, these artists reworked them through Sarajevo’s urban slang, black humor, grotesque satire, and performative self-irony, producing hybrid musical forms deeply embedded in local social experience.

While the Yugoslav New Wave has often been examined through sociological and cultural-studies approaches, this article foregrounds the importance of musicological analysis in understanding how sound, lyrical discourse, and performance operate together as forms of social critique. Particular attention is devoted to the representation of masculinity and patriarchal authority, which emerge in these songs not as stable social norms but as fragile and performative constructions exposed through humor, exaggeration, and parody. By situating the New Primitives within broader center–periphery dynamics, the article argues that the movement articulated an alternative, sub-peripheral modernity that challenged dominant cultural hierarchies in late socialist Yugoslavia.