a 2014 column, he explained it as "a gesture of self-irony, which served as a way for the city of Sarajevo to get out of its cultural cocoon and, for a short time at least, become the cultural capital of Yugoslavia" before adding that it also brought "a mockery of the regime and a complete carnivalization of everyday life while threading a fantastic ability to tell a 'small story' as well as provide tribute and homage through storytelling". Writing in 2017 about the language, style, and metaphorical associations used by the new primitives, Jergović saw all of it as "part of an artificial Sarajevan čaršija code these guys invented for the purpose of telling their stories and writing their songs, the same code that would eventually find its way to the city's streets and even into its intellectual salons—bullshit chambers of the new Sarajevan cultural and literary elite". Jergović furthermore exclaimed in the same piece that "the language in the early Top lista nadrealista and initial Zabranjeno Pušenje's and EJK&HM's albums had no bearing in reality as no one in the city of Sarajevo actually spoke that way", explaining it all as "a persiflage of sorts, a knowing self-mockery that assumed all kinds of embellishment". He concluded by saying that "what began as a persiflage soon ended up as a widely-accepted standard [in Yugoslavia] so much so that because of these few uniquely talented and humorous individuals, the gift of humour became a collective one in the sense that if the stereotype that Gypsies are good at singing and playing instruments is true, and if all Black people know how to dance and hold rhythm then everyone in Bosnia must be able to tell a joke and entertain a crowd". In his scathing 1993 rebuke of the movement, Muhidin Džanko, a professor at the University of Sarajevo's Faculty of Philosophy, labeled New Primitivism an "exceptionally anti-Islamic movement" that "thanks to the charisma of its protagonists, managed to directly obstruct and even eliminate the national feelings of the Bosnian Muslim youth, majority of whom are proud members of the 'new primitive nation'". He furthermore saw the poetics of New Primitivism to be rooted in its specific language containing "supposed speech patterns and parlance of the Sarajevo čaršija and mahalas", before rejecting it as a "cheap trick meant to lampoon the traditional verbal expression of Sarajevo Muslims and degrade their Oriental lexicology".