International Relations

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, we’re taking a trip across borders with an “International Relations” theme — but not the kind fought with guns and flags. Instead, we follow how early 20th-century popular music imagined, borrowed, and sometimes outright distorted the sounds of “foreign” places. From the faux-exotic fox-trot of Hindustan (1918), to the heartfelt Latin American cry of Ay, Ay, Ay (1920), to the global journey of La Paloma (1902) — one of the first true international pop songs — we explore how music both connected cultures and flattened them into stereotypes. It’s a story of whitewashing, longing, and cross-cultural love, told through three spins of the shellac.