“My Motto is: No one can choose their parents, time and place of birth, religion, appearance, skin color, and language from a catalog. But later on we have a choice: be a human or a beast.” Ivan Glišić, Yugoslavian punk, poet, and friend of Satan Panonski
“Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we not die of starvation entails to the risk of dying of boredom?” 
-Raoul Vaneigem
★Introduction★
It was Autumn of 1980 in Vinkovci, a Slavonian town of about 30,000 that locals jokingly called the Chicago of Yugoslavia. Pogreb X, likely the region’s first punk band, took the stage for their now legendarily short set at the Communist Party-sponsored “Youth Conference,” where rock n’ roll performances would mix with discussions of teenage delinquency, (mainly “drinking and Kung Fu movies”) and its danger to the socialist ideal.
While Rolling Stones and Ramones records were contraband behind the Iron Curtain, Yugoslavia’s “Velvet Curtain” allowed in the contagious anthems of disaffected youth through the thrift shops of Trieste, making Yugoslavia the eastern-most terminus of Europe’s 77’ punk wave. While punks would be suspected of neo-Nazism in Ljubljana and monitored as a potential agents of chaos in Novi Sad, Vinkovci’s bureaucrats, who had likely seen one of Pogreb X’s first gigs as a Sex Pistols cover band, apparently saw some potential in the vaguely leftist and iconoclastic songs poking-fun at monarchy and pondering the benefits of the other side of the Berlin Wall.
These organizers may have been surprised to see Pogreb X had a new singer that day. He was a beer-swilling, deranged-looking street-kid with a shaved head and ragged jeans. Power chords blasted, the singer growled, and the scheme of punkers and state aparatchiks walking hand-in-hand were demolished like a beer bottle against the vocalist’s skull. As blood poured down his face, he yelled, “You came to cheat and deceive, not help!” Horrified, the party members, Young Pioneers, and most of the audience ran in terror from the hall. One imagines them continuing to play their set to the empty room, the portrait of the recently-deceased beloved dictator Josip Broz Tito hung behind them as the last audience member. Continue reading →
KAMIKAZA 