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First, nothing to do with the rest of this post, but I wanted to call attention to "April's Army" on Regrety. Regretsy is a very funny (though often very adult) blog site highlighting ridiculous things mostly found on Etsy (which specializes in unique handmade goods). This particular post, however, is about raising funds to help someone who needs expensive treatments for cancer. It has links to two Etsy shops donating their proceeds to the cause. You might want to take a browse through. I think I'll be trying the blueberry soap, myself.
With that said, I'll move on to what I was mainly planning to post about: the follow-up to that post about those two songs. Only one of you commented, so I'm not sure how much interest there is, but I'll go ahead and ramble on under the cut.
When I first heard 99 Red Balloons, I didn't really pay much attention to the lyrics. I'm bad about that in general. Though I've found more than a few times that paying attention to the lyrics can ruin an entire song (Meat Loaf's "Anything For Love" and Uncle Kraker's "Follow Me" spring to mind). So mostly I heard an upbeat tune that, really, would be fun to whistle when you're in a cheerful mood. From the words and phrases I caught, it seemed like the song was kind of silly. Someone lets a bundle of balloons go and a bunch of fighter jocks who think they're superheroes see it on their radar and rush over to check it out. I also had it sort of conflated in my head with The Red Balloon, a short, whimsical movie about a living/magical red balloon that befriends a schoolboy in Paris. Later, I was listening to the song with my sisters, and they told me what it was really about.
Safety Dance, on the other hand, always made me think of "Duck and Cover." During the 50s and 60s, in the midst of the Cold War, there was a very real fear of nuclear war. Schools had drills teaching the children to "duck and cover" - hide under their desks. Kind of futile in the face of nuclear bombardment, but my personal theory is that at least it gave the kids something specific to do (which would keep them from running around in a panic, and perhaps take the edge off their worries). The idea of a "Safety Dance" seemed much the same to me. "Don't worry; you'll be fine as long as you Duck and Cover." "Don't worry; you'll be fine as long as you do the Safety Dance." I had no idea if that's what the band meant, but it was the association I had. It wasn't until I saw the video (in particular, the last few seconds of it) and looked into it a bit more that I found out.
Since then, I've wondered how many people actually understood either song. My vague anecdotal impression was that 99 Red Balloons more or less got the message across to those paying attention, but that almost no one got Safety Dance. (Whoever made the "literal version" clearly didn't. But then, they also seemed to have no idea what a maypole was.)
I'll give you one more chance, if you want, to go back to the earlier post and watch the videos. Maybe even leave a comment, if you want. I think I'll just leave them screened. When you're ready, you can scroll down...
Both songs are about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Most, if not all, of you should know this stuff, but just in case, a quick overview/recap:
NATO (the North American Treaty Alliance, made up of the US, Canada, and Western Europe) versus the USSR (the United Soviet Socialist Republic, composed of Russia and the Eastern European countries it swallowed up). Both sides stockpiling nukes. Each with enough to destroy all life on Earth a hundred times over, and frantically building more. The idea being that it was a deterrent - so many nukes spread around so far and wide that any move you made against the opposing side would mean instant and overwhelming retaliation. Decades of each side eying the other, waiting for someone to sneeze, and knowing that any move would result in the obliteration of all concerned (and the slow deaths of everyone else). It was tense, to say the least. It was insane. You want to see how insane? Take a look here. (Worth watching, even if you lived through it.) And we came all too close, more than once, to actually doing it.
Nowhere was this reality more tangible than Berlin. After WWII, Germany was cut in half, split between the victors. East Germany was controlled by a repressive communist regime while West Germany became a flourishing democracy. (Or at least that's how it was told to us; I'm not sure how much of that was spin and propaganda.) Berlin had a giant, heavily patrolled concrete wall down the middle. We'd hear almost regularly about someone attempting to make it over from East to West - generally to be arrested, shot, or both. The Berlin Wall was the very real, very visible border between the two sides of the Cold War.
Enough of the history/context (and sorry if I screwed anything up or glossed over too much).
In West Berlin, a band was playing a concert and one of the fans released a balloon. One of the band members saw it and thought about what would happen if that balloon floated over the Berlin Wall. Two sides tensely watching each other, on constant alert for decades. Something unexpected goes over the wall. Result: epic military freakout, ending with the entire city (and perhaps the whole world) reduced to a cloud of dust.
In the US, on the other hand, most people ignored the problem. We heard about it on the news. We listened to the President speaking about it from time to time. We shook our heads. We talked about how stupid it was that there was an arms race between a side that could blow up the world 500 times over and a side that could do it 600 times. Every once in a while, we'd hear about a close call and there'd be a fuss, but then we'd move on. (Sort of like California and earthquakes.) Culturally, I think, we'd been living on the edge for too long. Our military and our leaders were still fired up about it, but the rest of us... we had lives to live and things to do. Russia was halfway around the world. And we couldn't really do anything about the situation. So we grumbled and we worried and then we went back to living our lives. At least, that's how it felt to me. And to many of those around me.
Safety Dance is about that. It was supposed to be a wake-up call. If you just keep going about your normal lives, if you ignore the fact that, at any moment, someone in our government could make a decision that would literally destroy all life on Earth... you might as well be doing the Safety Dance. You're living in a fantasy world. You're pretending that as long as you keep dancing, everything will be fine. And it will... right up until the bombs drop and we all die.
99 Red Balloons has its message in the lyrics. Like I said, if you pay attention, you can mostly get what they're talking about. But the video? It looks like it was made with a $50 budget. It's grainy footage of them in concert, dancing around on stage. And the lead singer out in a field, wiggling on a log. And a shot of a balloon floating up into the sky and then popping. That's it. Might as well be just another pop song with a catchy tune.
As for Safety Dance, there's nothing in the lyrics. I'm not even sure how my subconscious made the correct association. The music video depicts the fantasy world, which does indeed come to a sudden end when the bombs drop... but I think that just left most people confused, thinking it was strange and random. There's nothing to tie it to our world and then-current events.
Two songs about how crazy it is that we lived for generations in a world where two countries were ready, at the drop of a hat, to literally destroy literally everything. And I've always kind of wondered how many people understood either one.
With that said, I'll move on to what I was mainly planning to post about: the follow-up to that post about those two songs. Only one of you commented, so I'm not sure how much interest there is, but I'll go ahead and ramble on under the cut.
When I first heard 99 Red Balloons, I didn't really pay much attention to the lyrics. I'm bad about that in general. Though I've found more than a few times that paying attention to the lyrics can ruin an entire song (Meat Loaf's "Anything For Love" and Uncle Kraker's "Follow Me" spring to mind). So mostly I heard an upbeat tune that, really, would be fun to whistle when you're in a cheerful mood. From the words and phrases I caught, it seemed like the song was kind of silly. Someone lets a bundle of balloons go and a bunch of fighter jocks who think they're superheroes see it on their radar and rush over to check it out. I also had it sort of conflated in my head with The Red Balloon, a short, whimsical movie about a living/magical red balloon that befriends a schoolboy in Paris. Later, I was listening to the song with my sisters, and they told me what it was really about.
Safety Dance, on the other hand, always made me think of "Duck and Cover." During the 50s and 60s, in the midst of the Cold War, there was a very real fear of nuclear war. Schools had drills teaching the children to "duck and cover" - hide under their desks. Kind of futile in the face of nuclear bombardment, but my personal theory is that at least it gave the kids something specific to do (which would keep them from running around in a panic, and perhaps take the edge off their worries). The idea of a "Safety Dance" seemed much the same to me. "Don't worry; you'll be fine as long as you Duck and Cover." "Don't worry; you'll be fine as long as you do the Safety Dance." I had no idea if that's what the band meant, but it was the association I had. It wasn't until I saw the video (in particular, the last few seconds of it) and looked into it a bit more that I found out.
Since then, I've wondered how many people actually understood either song. My vague anecdotal impression was that 99 Red Balloons more or less got the message across to those paying attention, but that almost no one got Safety Dance. (Whoever made the "literal version" clearly didn't. But then, they also seemed to have no idea what a maypole was.)
I'll give you one more chance, if you want, to go back to the earlier post and watch the videos. Maybe even leave a comment, if you want. I think I'll just leave them screened. When you're ready, you can scroll down...
Both songs are about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Most, if not all, of you should know this stuff, but just in case, a quick overview/recap:
NATO (the North American Treaty Alliance, made up of the US, Canada, and Western Europe) versus the USSR (the United Soviet Socialist Republic, composed of Russia and the Eastern European countries it swallowed up). Both sides stockpiling nukes. Each with enough to destroy all life on Earth a hundred times over, and frantically building more. The idea being that it was a deterrent - so many nukes spread around so far and wide that any move you made against the opposing side would mean instant and overwhelming retaliation. Decades of each side eying the other, waiting for someone to sneeze, and knowing that any move would result in the obliteration of all concerned (and the slow deaths of everyone else). It was tense, to say the least. It was insane. You want to see how insane? Take a look here. (Worth watching, even if you lived through it.) And we came all too close, more than once, to actually doing it.
Nowhere was this reality more tangible than Berlin. After WWII, Germany was cut in half, split between the victors. East Germany was controlled by a repressive communist regime while West Germany became a flourishing democracy. (Or at least that's how it was told to us; I'm not sure how much of that was spin and propaganda.) Berlin had a giant, heavily patrolled concrete wall down the middle. We'd hear almost regularly about someone attempting to make it over from East to West - generally to be arrested, shot, or both. The Berlin Wall was the very real, very visible border between the two sides of the Cold War.
Enough of the history/context (and sorry if I screwed anything up or glossed over too much).
In West Berlin, a band was playing a concert and one of the fans released a balloon. One of the band members saw it and thought about what would happen if that balloon floated over the Berlin Wall. Two sides tensely watching each other, on constant alert for decades. Something unexpected goes over the wall. Result: epic military freakout, ending with the entire city (and perhaps the whole world) reduced to a cloud of dust.
In the US, on the other hand, most people ignored the problem. We heard about it on the news. We listened to the President speaking about it from time to time. We shook our heads. We talked about how stupid it was that there was an arms race between a side that could blow up the world 500 times over and a side that could do it 600 times. Every once in a while, we'd hear about a close call and there'd be a fuss, but then we'd move on. (Sort of like California and earthquakes.) Culturally, I think, we'd been living on the edge for too long. Our military and our leaders were still fired up about it, but the rest of us... we had lives to live and things to do. Russia was halfway around the world. And we couldn't really do anything about the situation. So we grumbled and we worried and then we went back to living our lives. At least, that's how it felt to me. And to many of those around me.
Safety Dance is about that. It was supposed to be a wake-up call. If you just keep going about your normal lives, if you ignore the fact that, at any moment, someone in our government could make a decision that would literally destroy all life on Earth... you might as well be doing the Safety Dance. You're living in a fantasy world. You're pretending that as long as you keep dancing, everything will be fine. And it will... right up until the bombs drop and we all die.
99 Red Balloons has its message in the lyrics. Like I said, if you pay attention, you can mostly get what they're talking about. But the video? It looks like it was made with a $50 budget. It's grainy footage of them in concert, dancing around on stage. And the lead singer out in a field, wiggling on a log. And a shot of a balloon floating up into the sky and then popping. That's it. Might as well be just another pop song with a catchy tune.
As for Safety Dance, there's nothing in the lyrics. I'm not even sure how my subconscious made the correct association. The music video depicts the fantasy world, which does indeed come to a sudden end when the bombs drop... but I think that just left most people confused, thinking it was strange and random. There's nothing to tie it to our world and then-current events.
Two songs about how crazy it is that we lived for generations in a world where two countries were ready, at the drop of a hat, to literally destroy literally everything. And I've always kind of wondered how many people understood either one.
no subject
There is a great, deep and abiding love in this system for both songs.
Also, could I have your interpretation of Orange Crush by REM?
no subject
I'm awfully fond of both songs, too.
Orange Crush? TBH, I never thought about it. Michael Stipe's artistry often goes over my head. I'd also never seen the video for the song until now.
Description: It's in black and white and alternates between a young boy and a young, freshly enlisted soldier. I think the boy is imagining he is a soldier. There's an image of a dresser. The boy, even younger, ties what's probably a big military boot. The soldier (having tied his boot?) stands, shirtless and powerful. The boy takes a stick out of an old wooden box - I think it's a machine gun ammo box, actually. We cut between the boy digging in the dirt with his hands and the soldier pounding the ground with a large version of the boy's stick. Entrenching, perhaps? The boy runs down a road. The soldier crawls through the grass. The boy takes something out of the dresser drawer. The soldier lies weakly on the beach. The boy puts something in his pocket. The soldier gets up. The boy runs back up the road. The boy takes a wooden plank and a rod out of the dirt. The soldier stands, partly hidden by a tree. Cut between the boy and the soldier tying the wood pieces together. The soldier stands beneath the tree. The boy digs in the dirt and pours water on it, as if he's planting something. The boy's hands lift out of the dirt. The soldier lifts his hands, covered in dirt, to smear over his face as crude camouflage. The boy takes the thing out of his pocket. It's a bullet. The soldier is still rubbing his face with dirt. The bullet gets put into the twine holding the wood together. We zoom out to see that the wood has been tied into the shape of a crude rifle, with the bullet held about where the chamber would be. The end.
So... it's a boy playing soldier. Who possibly grows up to be a soldier? There's a voice in the background towards the end, but I can't make out all of what it's saying. I have a feeling if I could hear the full speech, the rest would make more sense. Orange Crush itself is a soda (which does not appear anywhere in the video, except possibly the glass bottle the boy uses to water the dirt).
Okay, let me see... Wiki says Orange Crush is a reference to Vietnam and Agent Orange, which I had kind of been thinking about, given the soldier and the tree and "orange." There's a claim that Stipe said it was about a football player who becomes a soldier in Vietnam, but it's tagged with "citation needed" and the more helpful citation earlier in the article takes me to what appears to be a broken link.
I did find the song's full lyrics including the parts I couldn't make out. That does make it very clear it's about Vietnam. But I'm not sure if you'll be able to read that page because I can't highlight the lyrics.
So... yeah. I had no idea, but if I'd been paying more attention (or could hear more clearly) I would have.
no subject
no subject
There are still a lot of nukes out there, and the threat of nuclear terrorism and the possibility of cyberterrorism and all sorts of others, not to mention the continuing environmental issues threatening the habitability of the planet or all the stuff having to do with the global economy. But, for all that, the fact is that we're no longer living in a world where two superpowers are staring at each other in constant vigil (for half a century!), each waiting for the slightest provocation from the other to do something that would destroy all life in the Northern Hemisphere in a single day (and utterly doom all life in the Southern Hemisphere).
There's still much craziness to go around, but at least we're safely past that.
no subject
no subject
Glad you found this of interest, anyway.
no subject
Also, I had to go back and rewatch the Safety Dance video, because you said "the bombs drop" and I didn't remember such a thing. And I realized it was the random stream of black and white pictures in the end. Which I thought at first was just a weird thing, but now I find it creepy.
(Although if it were just for the lyrics, I would never, ever have guessed. Even now I still don't see it.)
I don't know why we can't all live in harmony :<
no subject
I don't know why we can't all live in harmony :<
Me either. *sigh*
no subject
I never knew that about either of the songs. I'd never seen the videos either, until just now. (Btw, I'm totally the same way about listening to lyrics and having a song ruined. Also, I too conflated the Red Balloon movie with the song.)
no subject
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lol! That's one way to put it. Well done. And yeah... scary stuff. This isn't supposed to happen here. And I'm not sure how many people have noticed.
Nena is the one dancing in the video, I believe. She's definitely the one singing the song. And while her English is a whole heck of a lot better than my German, she does have a strong accent. And she's singing fairly quickly, too. It does make it hard to make out many of the lyrics, I find. Interesting that the video's setting still managed to get part of the message across.
no subject
the safety dance is literally about dancing. this is the video wikipedia cited.
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v16725574hRwbx5sZ
no subject
I would never have believed safe sex, just because, as I recall, that started up several years after the song came out.* But I was pretty sure about the nukes. Weird. Thanks for that! And sorry to have led you astray.
>*I have a vivid memory from the early 80s of going up for bedtime and hearing my parents put on the evening news. One of the top stories was "Another baby died of AIDS today." It struck me because I'd never heard of the disease. I was too young, and it was too new. New enough that a single death was enough to make the news. I stopped on the stairs to think about it and decided they must have meant that a baby had been killed by an aide, and I thought it was awful that there were such horrible babysitters out there, and enough of them to make the news.
A few years later, when I actually found out what AIDS was, it was still considered a thing unlikely to touch us. It was a disease that belonged to the gays, and only crossed over to normal people because of bisexuals or closeted people who brought it home to their wives. Really, if the gays would just stop having all this dirty promiscuous gay sex, the whole thing would blow over. ... Those were very homophobic times. (Not that there isn't still homophobia, but it was very much mainstream thought.)
Later still, around 1990, there were isolated cases of kids in our general area having the virus. So they brought us all together in the gym for a special lecture and Q & A to teach us about what it really was and how it was transmitted. They assured us that it was okay to play sports with someone HIV-positive. Kind of surreal, looking back on it, to think of an elementary school assembly on AIDS education, but I'm glad they did it.