They invented a different reality

Dani joj čudno prolaze
I niko ne pita za nju
Svi misle da je luda

("Partibrejkers", "She Lives on the Hill")

"Partibrejkers" are for eternity, Dragan Ambrozić once said. Bastardizing powerful macho styles like blues and rock, they outdid their role models with angry punk bites. It's as if they wanted to shake the entire musical tradition out of men's pants and introduce a brutally sensual element into their work. Because let's not forget that here, in many places, the poet addresses the female person as a being of redemption and destruction, the way it also happens in ancient blues songs. A woman is the embodiment of angels and devils, of seductive human sensuality, but also of spiritual deliverance. She is the archetype of the temptation that always falls on a weak human creature, pulled out of the collective and faced with inexplicable forces, but she is also the lifeline that our hero clings to, singing during that calvary an endless epic about his own suffering. Apart from the woman, there is only the city, solitude, night and a fight with fate. Which was already revolutionary enough for 1985, as well as for any other year. "Partibrejkers", in short, returned the blues to the alternative culture, which at first hated it so much.

Noć je stigla u grad
svi se žure, zabava traje
dugo već stojim sam
jer nemam gde da odem

("Partibrejkers", "Night")

"Partibrejkers" brought engaged teenage passion to the sound of rock and roll throughout Yugoslavia at the time. At the time when their debut Party breakers (1985, Jugoton - produced by Dušan Kojić Koja and "Partibrejkers") was being created, some of the protagonists had just come of age. The band's intention to penetrate the primal verisimilitude of wanting, longing, whatever... for the truth, for tearing down the scenes of expediency, in search of immediate feelings instead of the offered blasé as a barren substitute that crumbles into dust and ashes under the fingers of a determined young man - resulted in the gloomy sound of the coming change. All those who had nowhere to go and were tormented by existential boredom... were looking for a change. And "Partibrejkers" managed to bring that change to everyone and make us realize how from gray impersonality, on the edge of apathy, a completely different reality can be invented, in which the freedom to be just oneself is something that, of course, is taken for granted.

photo: stanislav milojović

Sutra te, momče, čeka novi dan
Veruj da može da se desi ono što bi želeo
Izađi na ulicu i lutaj ko gluvo kuče
I gledaj da l’ se nešto promenilo noćas u tvoju korist.
Da li ima zabave za tebe?

("Partibrejkers", "Novi dan")

Since its inception in 1982, the band has mercilessly destroyed the Potemkin villages of self-governing socialism with sharp guitars and urban speeches of its singer, as chainsaws of newly discovered heroism and hedonism for adolescents. That unforgettable bloodshed, recorded on the first album Party breakers, marked the moment when every self-conscious youth in SFRY decided to break with the prescribed norms once and for all. In the air you could already smell the burning of obscene decorations of the establishment - but from these songs, smoke billowed like never before, made you cough, made you choke and burn your palate, realizing how much you like everything that until that time was marked as totally forbidden and dangerous. Pioneers of punk and new wave paved the way before, but this foursome finally turned their achievements into one triumphant cry.

Sve se ovde unapred zna
Posle noći dolazi dan
Svako zna šta da radi
zakoni vladaju u svemu

("Partibrejkers", "Loser")

Except for that one set i sve, which is persistently repeated in numerous songs - "You must be mine/Now!" ("You must be mine"), "I want now and I want everything" ("1000 years"), "Partibrejkers" on their self-titled debut also deal with the motif of the stranger, actually Poe's "man of the crowd". In addition to the energetic description of the mysterious stranger, who is a kind of intruder on the street - in whose customs he tries to get involved, allegedly expecting or at least wanting to meet someone "among those who pass by" - at the very end of the track "He Came with the Wind" you can hear something similar to the disturbing echo of a police siren. A similar sound will already sting you at the beginning of the song "You must be mine". That fatal vibration of the security socialization of every emerging puberty seemed to signal that our children, in the best of all possible worlds, were our very strict concern.

Police terror will get an additional ghostly note in the lyrics of the mythical song "Street Walker". Countless Yugoslav boys of the eighties, nineties and many more... ran into a lurking patrol that roughly legitimizes them and raids them during harmless night walks. The metaphysical panic contained in the lyrics: "I'm a street walker/And I'm no longer there/I'm disappearing...", testifies to how easily you can be "eaten by darkness" somewhere on the asphalt of your own city, as well as how quickly you can disappear in your own head, under the blows of cruel reality...

Večeras, večeras
želim da si sa mnom
Da li to možeš da uradiš?
Večeras posle ponoći
kad zakucaš na moja vrata i kad kažeš...

("Partibrejkers", "Veceras")

...

And, finally, hope awakens in "Včeras", that wild young man's version of "Azra's" song "Racket roll from Striborova forest". With Johnny Štulic, the protagonist almost gave up on the newly arrived, promising girls, having nothing real to offer them. His old manhood is satisfied at that particular hour with the mere pleasure of looking at the excited city and "talking" with losers like him, without the slightest despair, without regret, even with a certain joy and exaltation. In "Partibrejkers", on the contrary, there is that commanding fever of eros. Štulić's company doesn't lie either, as the lyrics say, but Canet's hero goes a step further, promising his chosen one that he will "find out the truth". In other words, he does not leave room for different outcomes, he does not pretend that medicine, economics and a degree are bait, like the "Azra" narrator, nor does he ask her not to be angry with him - he speaks as directly as possible about his unwavering desire. And that "desire" is wickedly strong and will attract a girl, without any doubt, right to his door after midnight...

Džoni, da li me čuješ?
Da li me čuješ? ... Da l’ si stvarno tako daleko, Džoni?
Džoni... pričam o tebi... najbolje si izgledao od svih
Kraj priče si uvek znao... Džoni, ali ja ti moram nešto reći
Mi smo ponosni, svi... Uvideli smo, Džoni, da smo veći od tebe
Tvoja devojka je večeras sa mnom... upamti, Džoni

("Partibrekkers", "Stay Johnny")

If ever a record has sung the longing for life as for a capricious partner, then only "Partibrejkers" carved such voluptuousness and insatiability - in that looming night over Yugoslavia, which will disintegrate only a little later - in the stone of their first album. With the debauchery of the original Belgrade windmills - let's not say Rolling Stones - with the audacity to demand absolutely everything and that immediately, from reality, love, constitutional order... "Partibrejkers" will forever be written in the book of ascetics of old age. It is an understatement to say that their legacy remains forever. Because if there was anything sacred in serving rock'n'roll, then Cane, Anton, Ljuba and Manzanera, with the record Party breakers, without any doubt, deserved nothing less than the Elysian fields.