Tusta

Tusta made his first musical steps in the 1980s, when the band Kud Idijoti was established. What makes Tusta special and what definitely goes beyond the boundaries of music is his powerful and unrelenting antifascist orientation and the background of a sort of Balkan’s “working class hero”. This attitude was what made Tusta and Kud Idijoti the spokespeople of a series of generations growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. The very fact that Kud Idijoti were banned in the 1990s on most radio stations and branded as “traitors of their country” because of their punk-rock adaptation of the song Bandiera Rossa is quite telling about Tusta’s involvement and fight for tolerance, coexistence and social justice in the times when such values were a sign of “the communist stigma”. We saw no politicians at Tusta’s funeral, but we did see hundreds of people from all former Yugoslav republics who travelled thousands of kilometres to say goodbye to the musical “Che” of this region.