Kosovo’s Youth BOOM: 1982-1987
"Do not look at us in surprise
we are the sons of the new century"
Although already forgotten, BOOM, an annual celebration held from 1982 to 1987, was the largest rock music festival in Kosovo.
Initiated by the Kosovo Socialist Youth League (LRS) and organized by local bands and artists, BOOM became a platform for Kosovo youth to express their artistic creativity and youthful identity; a space to meet artists from other parts of Yugoslavia and to articulate a new image of Kosovars.
The establishment of BOOM did not happen in a vacuum: Kosovo in the '70s had experienced a relative increase in social welfare, especially after the recognition of Albanian language as an official language and the opening of the University of Prishtina. In the early 1980s, approximately 30,000 students resided in Pristina, making this capital of the autonomous province of Kosovo a university city with a young population. The engagement, activism and entertainment of this population was a serious preoccupation of the local communist authorities, especially after the student demonstrations of 1981, which were violently suppressed by the police following the protesters' demands for Kosovo to be declared a federal republic.
Representatives of the Socialist League of Kosovo and those of the LRS in meetings and interviews with the media were publicly preoccupied with the need for organization and ideological education of the youth of Kosovo "in the Yugoslav spirit." In August 1982, one month before the first BOOM was organized, during the meeting of the LRS presidency, Sanije Hyseni, member of the LRS presidency and initiator of the BOOM festival, had stated that “the current situation raises the need ... that [LRS]… pay special attention to ideological upbringing and Marxist education in the spirit of Yugoslav patriotism.”
Was BOOM a response to these concerns? It is difficult to find a direct link because in addition it was a mixture of circumstances that made it possible to establish a ‘western’ music festival that highlighted a youth subculture and pushed it into the ‘mainstream’ of Kosovar society.
BOOM came after Kosovo had experienced a relative economic and social development, which had created a middle class that could invest in recreational activities - musical instruments, records and gramophones. On the other hand, the popularization of rock music through Radio Prishtina (in particular the Second Program) and its opening to new vocal-instrumental ensembles (AVI) for new song recordings; as well as the functioning of the Youth Palace that had the Universal Hall which could accommodate up to 10,000 people - all were contributing factors.
But BOOM also arose in a politically tensed era: after the death of Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia plunged into a deep political and economic crisis, the consequences of which eventually erupted in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. During the 1980s, in addition to persecuting dissidents and suppressing basic freedoms, Kosovo Albanians faced a propaganda machine that portrayed Kosovars as inferior and savage (violent and violator).
With this complicated background, the youth of Kosovo were trying to find a vocabulary and voice to define themselves, to create a culture uniquely theirs and that to a large extent and for a short time managed to do so through rock music and pop.
BOOM was the embodiment of this attempt.
The first BOOM was held on September 3, 1982, in the Universal Hall of the "Boro e Ramizi" palace. About 20 local and regional bands performed: in addition to established bands such as Illyrians (Prishtina), Gjurmët (Prishtina), Minatori (Prishtina), Trix (Ferizaj), Tonik (Ferizaj) and TNT (Mitrovica), the first BOOM was a showcase of smaller bands such as Gezo (Peja), Suvi Led (Obiliq), Eufonia (Gjilan), and Strujni Udar (Gjakova) etc.; while the main performer was the Yugoslav band Galija from Nis.
In BOOM ‘82 also participated the band FAKS - ironically named in honor of the laundry detergent - which today is known as the first Turkish rock band in Kosovo.
Although ‘blessed’ by the party and sponsored by various social enterprises, the organizers of the festival were the participating musicians themselves and full of young people. In addition to Sanije Hyseni, members of the LRS leadership, the frontman of the Illyrian band, Shemsi Krasniqi, and the vocalist of the band Minatori, Naser Gjinovci, were the ones who organized the festival for years on a voluntary basis. Apart from them, all the participating bands were in one way or another involved in the running of the festival. Months before BOOM, lots of young people (including the band members themselves) started working on organizing the festival entirely on a voluntary basis. They distributed posters in cafes and all over the cities, sold tickets, borrowed and provided various instruments, and so on. Florina Jerliu, a member of the “Temples of Silence” band who participated in BOOM ‘87, recalls that when they decided to sing "live" all the musicians with instruments were "mobilized" to help them.
In addition to supporting and promoting rock and pop music, BOOM managed to create a community. This created a youth enthusiasm about BOOMs, according to Naser Gjinovci, tens of thousands of young people eagerly awaited the date of the festival every year.
"The main barometer [of BOOM] is that we have created a structure, an urban youth, that has communication with rock and roll, and rock and roll has communication with them ... that until then, did not exist," explains Gjinovci.
Deniza Begolli, solo singer from Peja who had performed together with Selection 039 and herself in BOOM’86 and BOOM’87, remembers that BOOM had been a central cultural event. "It was a very traditional [organization] and it was a very big event, people were preparing, the BOOM was welcomed as a festival," said Begolli, who was still in high school when she first attended.
In the beginning, BOOM was a multi-ethnic event: the festival scene hosted a considerable number of Serbian bands, as well as bands of other ethnicities and ethnically mixed ones. Bands like TNT from Tito's Mitrovica at the time were made up of a group of Albanian, Serb and Bosnian comrades.
The multi-ethnic aspect, or in other words the Yugoslav spirit of the event, was important to the Socialist League. Fatmir Bujupi, a correspondent for the Voice of Youth and a later co-organizer of the festival, recalls, "We had to introduce a Serbian musician / band as a participant in order to always shroud the party authorities in the spirit of 'brotherhood-union' and ' interethnic coexistence. ''
But over the years and the deteriorating political situation in the country, the organization of BOOM also reflected these tensions. In 1987, as Migjen Kelmendi writes in "Gjurmët LP", the heavy metal LED band from Fushë Kosova were not invited to BOOM after they had borrowed their equipment for the infamous rally of Slobodan Milosevic in April of that year.
However, ‘interethnic coexistence’ within the rock scene was not entirely artificial: even before BOOM, rock music was the common denominator of Yugoslav youth, while Albanian-speaking youth also listened to Serbo-Croatian music created in major Yugoslav centers.
Moreover, although just a few, some Albanians such as singer Zana Nimani, frontman of the Yugoslav pop-rock band Zana, and Shefqet Hoxha, bassist of the band Vatreni Poljubac (Fiery Kiss), had managed to penetrate the Yugoslav scene (however, only performing in Serbo-Croatian).
In addition to the need to perform Yugoslav unity, BOOM also served as a platform that symbolically equated Albanian bands - and as a result Albanians themselves - with bands from other Yugoslav countries. One of the significant concerns observed from the media coverage (comparing the quality of local bands with those of guests), as well as from interviews with the participants themselves, is the need to prove the contemporaneity of Albanian and Yugoslav artists and, consequently, the contemporaneity of Kosovars with other Yugoslav peoples.
Hektor Gjurgjeali and Fatmir Zajmi recall that when band 403 went to a Yugoslav festival in Opatija as representatives of Kosovo, other musicians from Yugoslav bands laughed when told that they were from Kosovo - they did not believe them thinking they were joking. Gjurgjeali and Zajmi were not representative of the stereotypes that existed about Albanians in Yugoslavia. Although both insisted that there were no more such differences at the time, they shared the same culture and were part of not only Yugoslav but world trends. "Those songs that they have listened to, we have also listened to them... we were on the same level with them, with some even higher," says Gjurgjeali laughing.
Lura Limani, Rina Krasniqi
This article is part of a wider research project for the BOOM festival (1982-1987) which is ongoing.
The “BOOM zine” project is funded by the “Changing the Story” project through a Global Challenges grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. This project is also funded by the Culture for Change program funded by the European Union, managed by the European Union office in Kosovo and implemented by the Multimedia Center and the Goethe Institute.