Rock and Rijeka: how Yugoslav youth magazine Val changed one Croatian city forever

Val may not have been the first Yugoslav youth publication to challenge the certainties of communist power, but it at least had the distinction of being the last magazine in Yugoslavia to be officially banned. “It was issue number 268 (in March 1989) that was impounded by the Croatian Supreme Court, due to its texts about Serbian nationalism in Kosovo,” explains Rijeka journalist Edi Jurković, a long-term contributor to Val who served as its editor from 1985 to 1987. “Val spent most of its time dancing on the edge of compliance with the system and satirical provocations.”

Re-exploring Val’s legacy is Jurković’s new book, Kad je život bio novi val, “When life was new wave”. It is a smart play on words which makes neat reference to the fact that the lifespan of the magazine, which lasted from 1976 to 1990, coincided with a new wave in popular music, and a new wave of ideas.

Val was by no means the only trailblazer in this regard. Mixing pop with politics, Zagreb youth magazine Polet (“Zest”) was assiduously read throughout the whole of Yugoslavia. Slovene youth weekly Mladina (“Youth”) opened up many themes that the mainstream media considered taboo, and played a crucial role in Slovenia’s democratisation.

Val’s own potential for subversion was, to begin with, far from apparent. Its early issues were dully conventional, publishing news of youth work brigades, or reporting on the comradely benefits of doing one’s military service.

Rijeka’s (and Croatia’s) first punk group, Paraf, was a case in point. Their work was full of corrosively ironic references to the system: “Narodna Pjesma” (“Folk Song”) famously declared the Yugoslav police to be the best in the world, while “Živjela Jugoslavija” (“Long Live Yugoslavia”) was one long pastiche of official slogans (including “Mi volimo liniju!” or “We love the [party] line!”). Another classic of the era was Termiti’s “Vjeran Pas” (Faithful Dog), whose refrain “U životu prolazi samo vjeran pas” (“The only way to get on in life is to be a faithful dog”) remains a sarcastic rallying cry to this day. Soon the city had given birth to a host of other bands; indeed Rijeka’s punk scene metamorphosed into a typical synthesiser-driven 80s pop scene, with keyboard-based acts like Denis i Denis, Xenia and the (all-female) Cacadou Look filling disco dancefloors all over Yugoslavia.

Val provided a visual chronicle of these pop cultural changes, its photographers documenting the city’s youth tribes and their dress codes. There are innumerable pictures of young Rijekans hanging out outside the cafe of the Kontinental Hotel, a cult meeting place where everybody would go to socialise and be seen.

The idea of Val as a document of its times had a lot to do with Edi Jurković’s ambition to complete the magazine’s transformation from erstwhile youth league bulletin into a full-blooded lifestyle magazine. Having first written for the magazine as a 15-year-old schoolboy in 1979, Jurković had gone to Zagreb in 1982 to work for rival publication Polet. He returned to Val in 1985, charged with injecting new energy into a magazine that had begun to stumble. “Val was at that time a little too hermetic; it was selling badly, and I wanted it to be read. I persuaded the publisher to give me a free hand, and transformed the magazine into what we called “Yugoslavia’s first youth tabloid”. The texts got shorter, and we included a lot more photographs. I opened the magazine up to different opinions: we kicked the red star off the front cover and put young models on it instead.”

Val was also making its own significant contribution to the local artistic scene, with culture editor Mladen Urem setting up an offshoot literary journal called Rival, and a publishing arm dedicated to local contemporary writers. “The generation of writers who came to maturity in the 80s included an incredible number of talented individuals. My intention was to present this new literary scene, a scene which had a modern sensibility and a new sense of freedom,” says Urem. He used Val as a platform for international cultural exchange. “I wanted to build bridges between cultures so I published a lot of international work in Rival, and also sent a lot of Croatian writings to literary journals abroad.”

Jurković took a step back from the editor’s chair in late 1987 in order to concentrate on finishing his studies. His successors, Davor Štimac and Bojan Mušćet, continued to develop the pop-plus-politics recipe — although with Yugoslavia’s economic and political woes becoming ever more pressing, it was politics that increasingly played a dominant role.

With different Yugoslav republics increasingly adopting different strategies to deal with the crisis, political debate became increasingly fragmented. Croatian magazines such as Polet and Val were beginning to write critically about Serbian communist strongman Slobodan Milošević at a time when the Croatian communist party was still nervous about taking Milošević on. When Val sent journalists to the troubled province of Kosovo to report on clashes between Serbian police and ethnic Albanian demonstrators for the now famous issue number 268, the Croatian political leadership had the entire issue impounded.

Unfortunately, it was not the bold spirit of openness fostered by Mladina, Polet and Val that became the dominant motor of change as communist Yugoslavia began to fracture, but a new sense of hermetic nationalism which had little use for liberal journalism. Youth magazines in the republic of Serbia had either been extinguished or subjected to strict controls following the seizure of the party by Slobodan Milošević’s nationalist hard-liners in 1987. Zagreb’s Polet and Rijeka’s Val disappeared from the stands not because of political diktat, but because there was no longer any money to publish them. In the post-communist landscape, the idea of a state-funded youth magazine was one of the first socialist concepts to bite the dust. Indeed, the only Yugoslav-era youth magazine which still survives today is Slovenia’s Mladina, whose weekly mix of hard journalism and withering satire continues to be a thorn in the side of power.

“One of the last articles I wrote for Val came out at the beginning of 1990,” says Jurković, “when it was clear that a transition from communism to capitalism was about to take place. It was about how company directors would simply change their coats, use their position and their contacts, and carry on working in privatised companies and for their own profit. Which is how things turned out.”

The staff of Val did in fact try to surf the wave of change themselves, launching a newspaper called Ri Telefax (“the first private daily newspaper in Eastern Europe,” Jurković states) in October 1990. The onset of war in 1991 brought the experiment to a close.

But in the 30 years which have since passed, Rijeka has preserved its reputation as something of an avant-garde, open, and cosmopolitan enclave in a country that frequently shows outsiders a conservative face.

Back in Val’s heyday, Rijeka was a busy shipbuilding town with a large working class; punk rock and rebel attitudes somehow went together with the city’s mixture of muck, grit, and industrial pride. Now, it is a post-industrial city in the throes of reinventing itself as a city of culture and innovation. The tendency to look back admiringly at the Rijeka’s new wave heritage is more than mere nostalgia; it’s an important building block in the reconstruction of the city’s image.

That desire to be different could be found in Rijeka’s stint as European Capital of Culture, which opened in February 2020 with an ear-splitting avant-garde noise spectacle entitled Opera Industriale, a gleefully unforgiving summation of the city’s abrasive charms.

“The impact of Val was huge”, agrees Goran Lisica-Fox. “Val was the locomotive of the music explosion in Rijeka. And writing about punk and new wave meant writing about the desire for change in society as a whole. Rock music in Rijeka had always been strong, but with the punk and new wave bands we wrote about, rock music became a kind of cultural trademark. Today Rijeka has the image of being the rock capital of the whole ex-Yugoslav region, and the most liberal city in Croatia.”