It's a given that no matter how many strange things you've seen, you haven't seen them all. Innocent web surfing led me to a page about Yu-Mex, or Mexican music in 1950s Yugoslavia. Yeah, that's right. Apparently it was all the rage.
Of course, it all gets back to Stalin and Tito. Apparently after the famous breakup, Yugoslavia needed a new source of popular culture, and they chose Mexico:
it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?Of course, it's easy to laugh at things like this.Emilio Fernández's Un Día de vida (1950) became so immensely popular that the old people in the former republics of Yugoslavia even today regard it as surely one of the most well known films in the world ever made although in truth it is probably unknown in every other country, even Mexican web pages don't mention it much. The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays.
Mainly because they're really funny.
Did I mention that there's a bunch of mp3s on the site?
Posted by illovich at October 06, 2003 10:02 AM