What Punk Rock Meant to Communist Yugoslavia

Miljenko Jergovic, New York Times

ZAGREB, Croatia — In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, during the 1984 Winter Olympics, Elvis J. Kurtovic and his Meteors were performing a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” in a stifling little basement hall before 300 wild punk rock fans. But it wasn’t Dylan’s rendition they were playing, it was their own, a deliberate extension that ostensibly was about Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Britain. But actually, Elvis J. Kurtovic and his Meteors were singing about — in an extremely brutal way that should have been unacceptable to the Communist authorities — Yugoslavia’s own prime minister, Milka Planinc.