When asked if this country and current youth still need a festival EXIT, the answer might also be questionable. And what/who else? What's the deal with the Festival, now and then? Is this "now" different from that "now" a quarter of a century ago? And what, realistically, are the other options? At the end of this enumeration - and after it EXIT 2025. triumphantly concluded the other day with a performance by the Sex Pistols with new singer Frank Carter - you feel as confident about the Festival as you did in the early days.
So, in the midst of vicissitudes such as whether this year's EXIT will happen at all, whether this is its last edition in Serbia under the current circumstances, what is the quality of the music program and whether it is right to attend it, no matter how good it is - the Festival was held. And what kind!
And Charlie ain't no Nazi
She just likes to wear her leather boots
'Cause it's exciting for the veterans
And it's a tonic for the troops
(The Boomtown Rats, She's So Modern)
On the first day of EXIT, the weather is worryingly broken in the skies. Approaching the foot of the Fortress, you feel a completely different vibe. Columns of young, beautiful people make their way patiently up the hill, different languages murmuring around their heads. Atheist Rap are on the Main Stage, sounding like the Ramones, fresh and thunderous, even after all this mileage. Because there really is that simple belief in the power of rock and roll, and these guys from Novi Sad are its embodiment. The messages of the band Atheist Rap are completely clear and hammer the truth straight to the head, there is no room for second thoughts about whose side their hearts, minds and everything else that makes rebels stand on.
And Bob Geldof, with his legendary The Boomtown Rats, decided for this occasion to collect the entire revolutionary will of an ancient world in which it was conceived and spread it before the rebels of the latest generation. However, it would be difficult for much younger performers to give you his explosive performance today. Because everything here is totally "vintage" - both passion in storytelling, even in the most ordinary things, and that touch of the tragic, and sensuality that moves the senses with invisible threads and makes the hips sway, not to mention heroism. And yet, regardless of the unequal struggle with the whole damn world - there is no reason to give up, say Geldof and The Boomtown Rats in their anthology songs, from Steering Trap over I Don't Like Mondays do She's So Modern: life is worth living, solutions are around the corner, even if they are not there, it doesn't matter, the only important thing is that the torch of conviction and faith must be constantly kept hot. Geldof's voice still serves admirably at 73, his panther-like swagger across the stage in gold-stitched bell bottoms and buckskin jacket as impressive as it was back in the Seventies, and his eternal credit for Live Aid in 1985 still seems absolutely elusive almost exactly 40 years on. It must be admitted that Geldof especially now fits EXIT as well as EXIT him - as if they were made for each other. In short, The Boomtown Rats, with their charismatic frontman, read a lesson to all generations, summed up history in their irresistible performance on the Tesla Universe stage and added fuel to the engine of relevant rock and roll as the crucial future of the world.
I'm the trouble starter, punkin' instigator
I'm the fear addict, the danger illustrated
I'm the self-inflicted mind detonator, yeah
I'm the one infected, twisted animator
Hey Hey hey
I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter
(The Prodigy, Firestarter)
Photo: @zamrznutitonoviThe Prodigy
Photo: @zamrznutitonovi
We have already spoken here several times about faith, jubilees, generations. So what else can be said about the presence of The Prodigy band at this year's EXIT? They opened our eyes in 1995 in Belgrade's Pionir Hall in the middle of the demolition of the Milošević regime, they returned to Belgrade and Novi Sad several times in the meantime, and now - 30 years after that first meeting - they are undoubtedly the most invited to speak about the revolutionary energy of a generation and confidence in the realization of one's own dreams, even after the painful loss of Keith Flint (1969-2019). They survived everything, so they should be bowed down to the ground. Well deserved. Because, The Prodigy's great, compact concert at this year's Festival raised everything you expected from them even in your wildest imaginations by a lightning-fast level.
The Prodigy, as the exclusive owners of eccentric perception and neurasthenic eyepieces of society, which go deep below the surface of the apparent world to codify all the unwanted ugliness of its reverse side, injecting wild euphoria into our ears along the way - they do all this in the spiritual landscape of the encounter between the frenzied supermachinery and man as a psychosomatic native. They are almost no longer human beings - as if they inhabited the abode of deities a long time ago electropunk from where they only occasionally rush among us mortals, to shock us with a voltage of a billion volts and shake the stuck ruts of our lives. What Liam Howlett and Maxim do on stage, with the help of fantastic drummer Lee Crabtree and wicked guitarist Rob Holliday, is some moody hell of a saint underground, a poignant theater of shadows where stories of good and evil are told, in which the main character can also suffer, as happened to the never-repentant Flint. That's why it resonates Firestarter they pay tribute to their beloved comrade, with Maxim's eerie immobility. No voice will ever be heard live in that place except Keith's. Amen.
Photo: Marko RisticMystic Marley
Photo: Marko Ristic
But, in the introduction of this unsurpassed evening, with tens of thousands of enthusiastic young people in front of the Main Stage for The Prodigy, the audience was excellently warmed up by the powerful Rhythm of Riot and the new Belgrade hardcore Marigold stars. All honor and respect to the rhythm of chaos for the music that carries and shoots with its undeniable power. But the Neven group really breaks and breaks with an authentic prediction of hardened sound acceleration. Singer Miloš Stevanović is an extraordinary frontman at the same time, slim and tall and healthy and unstoppable as an arrow, while with his indomitable friends he delivers so many fascinating ideas that you constantly ask yourself - what else can happen? And - it happened without you even having collected yourself. Good for Neven!
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look?
Ooh, some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the book.
(Bob Marley, Redemption Song)
If you are a fan of the great Bob Marley, then you did not miss hearing his granddaughter on the third night of the EXIT festival. Mystique Marley is a young woman with an exceptional voice who confidently rules the Tesla Universe stage, summoning the light of her famous ancestor with a song to grace everyone present from somewhere above. And it's all so spontaneous and without any set-up, only the vocal gift of this enchanting descendant is glamorous. Because this is not a mere reproduction of Marley's genius, but an original vision of female empowerment. Bob and Rita, her grandparents, can proudly recognize their part in the unruly nature of Mystic Marley. Being a dark-skinned woman in today's world is just as, if not twice as complicated as it has ever been in history, and will continue to be. That's why the melodious voice of Mystique Marley on the Main Stage overcomes everyday vanity and greed. We will remember this mini-concert forever - as a spiritual medallion of kindness and grace that EXIT was so lacking and as a chaste cry of protest on behalf of women of all races. The fortress, also female, shook her hips, making this moment the most sensual one possible.
Hurts are EXIT's old favorites, romantics of the third millennium, delicate continuers of the great English tradition of vocal interpreters, which stretches from Brian Ferry, through Mark Almond, to Theo Hutchcraft on this very special evening. The ease with which the Hurts communicate with their thousands of rapt devotees is remarkable. Yes, it's too pathetic to say the least, it wouldn't be said that it had a renegade quality, so it doesn't have that controversial element that fits with today, but who cares? Because Hutchcraft dances his perfect solitary dance in front of a well-coordinated band, like a kind of ideal soloist in an imaginary vaudeville that evokes echoes of early British electro pop scenes, offering the illusion of an ideal escape from reality. Well, in that sense, his performance also becomes, in its own way, a kind of unparalleled velvet sabotage.
I am an Antichrist
I am an anarchist
I don't know what I want, but I know how to get it
I want to destroy passersby.
'Cause I wanna be anarchy
(Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK)
Photo: Rastko ZekićThe Sex Pistols
Photo: Rastko Zekić
And on the final night on the Tesla Universe stage - after the genuinely ecstatic Goblins, whose superior muscularity simply flattened and cleared the stage - the time finally came to from punk be enthroned again as the password of change, like that driving whistle in the grindstone of everyday perverse capitalism, by which the direction of the grind reverses even for a moment and begins to turn backwards, crumbling into dust and ashes the ugly creatures of oppression on the opposite side. As good old Orwell teaches us, all totalitarian regimes first attack the objective truth and, if necessary, adjust both the past and the future to control the present - but what to say about a world that in the meantime has completely become just like that? It turns out that from punk still hides the answer, contained in the gospel according to the absent Johnny Roten, who d God Save the Queen howls: "No future for you" trying to show us that this coming future will no longer be real when we finally get to it. Only now do we really understand it! Playing with situationist methods of turning pop culture products into a subversive message, from punk made it possible to find meaning in freedom from fear before the totalitarian fist, anytime, anywhere.
All of this becomes very important when Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glenn Matlock and - the new singer of the Pistols - a young Frank Carter step onto the Tesla Universe stage. At the moment when these experienced breakers of all musical rules take up their instruments, their "wall of sound" hits you right in the face as a kind of metaphysical slap, after which you instantly learn to distinguish the mundane, seasonal renegades from the real ones who risk their lives, or at least what looks like it, for an idea, for that one and only survival drug.
Because their noise is real, and their ideal is the highest possible. That age-old pain from hellish cul-de-sacs, inhabited by English teenagers around the mid-1970s, poured into Pretty Vacant, Liar, God Save the Queen, EMI. and, of course, Anarchy in the UK., which the whole audience sings together, in a moving harmony with the band. Frank Carter really gives it his all - his youthful eloquence is contagious, and the energy of his performance and the furious pace with which he ignites the exalted mass of devotees almost bring to life the lucid Zen paradox of the former Johnny Rotten. Carter's performance of these mythic tracks is superb, almost making you believe that the time machine in your head has stopped decades ago and that you are therefore hearing an authentic Sex Pistols performance from the home era.
Besides, the Sex Pistols at EXIT 2025 don't sound like a tribute band to themselves at all - not at all. Nor like some impeccable karaoke obsession of the forty-one-year-old Carter, who wasn't even born when the album was released in 1977 Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols his current colleagues and comrades. Lydon mad or not, this guy delivered more than he did back in 2008 at the same venue. By his honesty, he threw gasoline on the smoldering sparks of these from punk antiquity and they have risen like genies from a bottle to show the world once again how to make a fuss that doesn't seem like it will ever stop.
Because the stripped-down songs of Sex Pistols are like the words spoken so many times in the prayers of revolutionaries. Like dear and well-known toponyms on the globe from childhood. Like the names of metropolises on an old radio. Carved in stone, they burn for all future generations. And after all, EXIT, who made it possible, with them. Long live rock and roll!
