Not everything was the same for us in Yugoslavia as it was in New York or London, though. Yugoslav punk was based on rebellion, with the youth escapism that characterized some parts of the punk scene in the West almost completely absent. Punk rock in Yugoslavia emerged and developed as a way to blaspheme the government and everything — or almost everything — that our parents’ generation believed in. The artistry consisted in writing songs that would be more anti-establishment than any before but would not be censored. There was just one topic that was untouchable: Tito. Everything else was allowed. One could sing more or less openly against everything. Even against Communism.

Some of these songs sounded like everyday political commentary. During the great strike in the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, when the labor movement Solidarity, led by the electrician Lech Walesa, had just been formed and was gaining support, the band Azra, from Zagreb, performed a song called “Poland in My Heart” all around Yugoslavia. The song described actual events, railed against the Soviet Union and even mentioned Pope John Paul II. The Soviet Embassy in Belgrade sent an official note to object to the song, but it wasn’t banned. The recording of “Poland in My Heart” was actually issued by Jugoton, then the largest and most influential record label in the country.

The ideology of Yugoslav punk boiled down to anti-Communism, conscious or unconscious. And here again is the intriguing paradox: Why did the Communist authorities allow an anti-Communist youth subculture to flourish? Yes, it was a useful outlet for youth rebellion. But the other answer to this question became clearer a decade later.

In 1990 and ’91, Yugoslavia collapsed and Communism was replaced by ethno-nationalism. That was when the old world would destroy itself from within, and yesterday’s Communists, the heads of secret agencies and central committees, would seize power in the Yugoslav republics with lightning speed, transforming themselves into nationalists and right-wingers. The people who at the beginning of the ’80s were convening Party conferences to discuss anti-Communist excesses and in the 1990s would take control of the newly established countries never cared much about anti-Communism; they cared about power.

Punk and New Wave music in Yugoslavia in the early ’80s was a unique phenomenon in the Communist world. In the other countries of Eastern Europe — with the partial exception of Poland — punk rock truly appeared only once Communism had practically ceased to be. Russian punk rockers, notably the women from Pussy Riot, revolted against a conservative, Vladimir Putin, at a time when Communism had faded into the past. Punk rock arrived in Russia — as it had somewhat earlier in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia — as a tardy echo of something that had taken place long before in the West, and usually it was merely an imitation of American and British models.

For many years, this was how popular and youth culture developed in Yugoslavia, too. But with the liberalization of the political regime, and with the material enrichment of society and the expansion of the middle class, things had begun to change radically by the end of the ’70s. In 1968, just a year after it was produced in New York, the Broadway musical “Hair” was staged in Belgrade, a landmark event in Yugoslav popular culture. From Belgrade’s “Hair” to Yugoslav punk rock, and then until the fall of Yugoslavia, things played out largely in synchronicity with the West.

In contrast to the Soviet Union and most other Eastern European Communist Parties, whose leaders and commissars saw control of culture, particularly popular and youth culture, as a means of safeguarding their power, the Yugoslav Communists offered culture to their citizens, especially the young, as an outlet to safely relieve social trauma, one that would also present the illusion of freedom. Simply put, in contrast to Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union, Tito did not think that young people with drums and guitars would bring down the state. And in the end, he was right.