This paper offers an analysis of the youth magazine Plavi vjesnik (1954–1973) and a number of discussions on the topic of youth and popular culture published at the same time. By doing so, it aims to contribute to the study of the Yugoslav culture that emerged in the post-WWII period not only by mapping a previously unresearched field, but also by underlining the exceptional significance of the field of the popular and the category of youth for the broader issue of the Yugoslav socialist project. Based on an examination of specific articulations of the figure of youth and the audience of popular culture, this paper shows that youth came to function as the privileged space for negotiating the tensions that characterized the relationship between the Yugoslav vision of modernity and the developing field of the popular.