Remembering the Mexican parody songs of the former Yugoslavia · Global Voices
Cover art for the albums ‘Celovečernji the Kid’ (1983), ‘Pozitivna geografija’ (1984) and ‘Mi imamos mnogo problemos’ (1987). Fair use.
Most people wouldn't associate Balkan pop culture with Latin America. However, Mexican music was massively popular in the former Yugoslavia for several generations — first in earnest, and then as farce.
The YuMex phenomenon is partly explained by Yugoslavia's unique position in the Cold War after 1948 — a socialist country that was a de-facto enemy of the Soviet Union under <PERSON>.
Speaking with Public Radio International, Slovenian author <PERSON> said: “This rupture left the country in a very difficult position, in the middle between the Eastern bloc and the West. (…) This caused problems — one of them being what to show in cinemas. 739
We could not import ‘capitalist’ movies from Hollywood. But we could not buy Soviet films anymore.”
<PERSON>-led government's solution was to import films from Mexico, which was not only living its Golden Age in the 1950s-1960s, but also frequently referenced the Mexican revolution — a perfect match for the country that had just been reborn as socialist out of the Second World War.
Influenced by the movies, dozens of bands from all parts of the Federation recorded famous Mexican songs, in Spanish or translated in the national languages.
One of the most celebrated was <PERSON>, from Skopje, whose career spanned over 25 years — their last album was released in 1983.
By the 1970s, British and United States’ pop and rock took over the scene in the Federation. However, some of those new American-influenced bands took a jibe at their predecessors with parody songs of the previous Mariachi trend. And those parodies were just as popular as the new rock ‘n’ roll songs.
In 1983, singer-songwriter <PERSON>, from Novi Sad in Serbia, released the album “Celovečernji the Kid” (which could be translated as “Wholevening the Kid”) featuring the smash hit “Don Francisco Long Play,” with English lyrics sung in an exaggerated Mexican accent.
The song tells the story of an eponymous character reminiscent of the gunslingers of classic Westerns as “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Vera Cruz“:
You must be careful, my compadre,
you must be very careful if you going south,
because in mountain Sierra Madre
is very best for you to shut your dirty mouth.
O, there are banditos mucho danger,
they want your money and your horse.
You are a gringo, I mean, You are a stranger,
but you know everything of course
about famous and very popular
Don Francisco Long Play.
A year later, the Belgrade pop-rock band Bajaga & Instruktori (“Bajaga and the Instructors”) released their first album, “Pozitivna geografija” (“Positive Geography”), featuring songs about various parts of the world, from Berlin to major cities in Russia, from Asia to the Americas.
One of them, “Tekila, gerila” (“Tequila, guerilla”), sung in Serbian, also tells a story of a fictional Latin American character: <PERSON>, a young boy who gets drunk on Tequila and starts a revolution in order to save his kidnapped girlfriend from the clutches of a stereotypical evil general. The events take place in Macondo, the fictional town of <PERSON> novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and have no claim of historical accuracy at all.
Ni <PERSON> ni <PERSON>
Nisu znali <PERSON>
<PERSON> su čuli da mu je deda
<PERSON> lično <PERSON>
Neither <PERSON> nor <PERSON>
Knew about <PERSON>
But they've heard that his grandpa
Has personally met <PERSON>
Mescalito, the popular name of the peyote cactus that contains the hallucinogen mescaline, is an allusion to a fictional leader of the Mescalero Apache in this case.
The album became a major hit and solidified the reputation of the young bandleader <PERSON>, also known as <PERSON>, as lyricist and performer. 260