New Primitives
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The New Primitivism was an urban subcultural movement in Sarajevo in the early 1980s. Some of projects that came from the New Primitives were Zabranjeno pušenje, Top lista nadrealista, Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors, Bombaj Štampa, Plavi orkestar, Crvena jabuka. Its creators include Elvis J. Kurtović, dr. Nele Karajlić, mr. Sejo Sexon, Branko Đurić - Đuro, Boris Šiber, Zenit Đozić from Sarajevo neighbourhood of Koševo.
The movement expressed itself primarily in musical (Zabranjeno pušenje, Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors) and radio/TV (Top lista nadrealista) form. Film director Emir Kusturica was an associate and friend of the crew, and although his movies can not be directly associated with the movement, their spirit certainly shares some sentiment with New Primitivism.
New Primitives were actually more a group of neighborhood friends than a coherent movement. It is hard to identify many actual followers of the movement. However, the fresh spirit that the group left in the urban Bosnian culture and a quite new way of expression, flooding directly from street subculture, attracted significant popularity and made it one of monuments of modern Bosnian culture.
The discourse of New Primitivism was primarily humorous, based on the spirit of Bosnian ordinary people from cultural underground. They introduced the jargon, rich in Turcisms, of Sarajevo mahalas (suburban neighborhoods) into the official musical and TV scene. Most of their songs and sketches involve stories about small people -- coalmine workers, petty criminals, provincial girls etc. -- put in unusual or even absurd situations. There are comparisons between Monty Python's Flying Circus show and New Primitives methods, as they share the form of short sketches and utilize absurdity as means to illicit laughs from the audience.
[edit] The Name
The name of the movement arguably came as a reaction to two then-actual movements: New Romantic in global pop music and Slovenian Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). On one hand, the term New Primitivism was a clear anti-reference to New Romantic, as they sought to be anything but romantic and sugarsweet. On the other hand, they wanted to emphasize the contrast encountered in many jokes about Bosnians and Slovenians – the former raw, unsophisticated, vivid, and open-hearted, and the latter stiff, cold, serious, and blasé.
