second round

(2) Nena, “99 Luftballons”
floated by
(7) Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax”
236-218
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/23.

Game Time Remaining

Janet Dale on “99 Luftballons”

Heute zieh' ich meine Runden
Seh' die Welt in Trümmern liegen
Hab' 'nen Luftballon gefunden
Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen

West Berlin, West Germany 1982

As the final strains of the Rolling Stone’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” died out, Carlo Karges watched bunches of colorful balloons released from the stage floating over the cheering crowd. He wondered what would happen if they “were blown over to the East” crossing the Wall both surrounding and dividing the city “and triggered paranoia there?”
This was the scene at Waldbühne, an amphitheater built for the 1936 Summer Olympics where all the men’s and women’s gymnastics events were held.
It went on to become the perfect place for live concerts beginning in the 1980s featuring acts like Bob Marley, Def Leppard, Queen, David Bowie, Elton John, Depeche Mode, Tina Turner, Peter Gabriel, as well as the Rolling Stones that particular June night.

This story as reported to The Spiegel is part of the lore of “99 Luftballons” the German-language hit by Nena that went to #1 on song charts in at least 8 countries. In the U.S., the song peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of March 3, 1984.
Guess what was #1 that week? “Jump” by Van Halen. And #3? “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper. Could it be anymore stacked? Sure. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was #4, but I digress.
Carlo Karges was the guitarist for the band, and he wrote the lyrics soon after attending the concert, while keyboardist Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen wrote the music. The new song was brought to lead singer Gabriele Susanne Kerner (the Nena of Nena) and it was added to their self-titled debut album and released in January 1983.

Cold War in Simple Terms

After World War II, the ongoing political rivalry and hostility between the United States (and its western bloc allies) and the Soviet Union (and its eastern bloc allies) was known as the Cold War.
Germany had been split into two with the Soviet Union controlling the eastern portion while the western portion was controlled by the U.S., Britain, and France. Because the pre-war capital city (Berlin) was located within the East, it too was divided the same way. East Berlin was controlled by the Soviet Union and West Berlin had sectors controlled by the U.S., Britain, and France.

In 1961, as tensions rose between the two powers, a physical barrier was constructed by the GDR which became known as the Berlin Wall. Not only did it divide the city, but it wrapped around the western-controlled sectors as well. Train lines, major and minor roads, woodlands, rivers, and lakes were also dissected.
Therefore, West Berlin effectively existed as a 185-square-mile island of about 2 million people floating in Soviet-controlled territory (East Germany).

Anatomy of Berlin Wall

Border
Outer strip
Concrete wall with rounded top
Anti-vehicle ditch
"Death strip" sand bank
Guard road
Lighting
Observation towers
Spikes or tank traps
Electrified fence with alarms
Inner wall
Restricted zone

Song Translated

In a recent article published in Forbes, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Haven explained: "People don't understand the irony of the song [“99 Luftballons”] when you juxtapose the peppy music with the actual lyrics." Matthew J. Schmidt went on to say the song is a protest song about the risk of a nuclear holocaust.
Even though there was an English version released (“99 Red Balloons”) it did not chart in the U.S. I don’t ever remember hearing this version until at least a decade later, and when I did—I knew it sounded “wrong.”
A new story line was added, the point of view was shifted, and the message of the song was lost in translation. My own thought translation of the original German lyrics goes something like this:

The audience is invited to listen to what could happen if 99 innocent balloons floating toward the “horizon” were mistaken for something else (like a UFO) by a “General” hellbent on confrontation.
A squadron of 99 jet planes might be sent to intercept the balloons. Then these balloons would be shot down by pilots pretending to be great warriors like “Captain Kirk.”
Citizens would be completely caught off-guard and afraid of what was happening so 99 War Ministers (who think they are smart) would, as a show of power, stupidly declare WAR!
Who would think this could happen due to 99 innocent balloons?
This action causes a 99-year war, the original generals and war ministers are gone and there are no winners.
Finally, as the world is lying in ruins, the speaker finds a balloon and reflects on what has happened.

The song is thematically similar to the 1983 American blockbuster film War Games, which features instead of balloons, a computer game of Global Thermonuclear War nearly sending the world into nuclear annihilation.

Paranoia

Carlo Karges did not overstate the paranoia of the time period. In the same Spiegel article he said, “…paranoia rules our lives…because whoever strikes first has the better cards.”
There have been flirtations with the threat of nuclear war (North Korea and the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and spy craft (Chinese Spy Balloon) over the past 5 years, which for those old enough to remember, harkens straight back to the Cold War dread of the 1980s.
You can hear this dread in “99 Luftballons” which almost begins like a fairytale as Nena sings (in German): “Do you have time to listen to a song I’d like to sing to you about 99 balloons floating toward the horizon and what could happen?”
Then the synth beat drops.
In the video Nena is fresh-faced with dark hair featuring Farrah Fawcett feathered sides and bangs teased toward the sky. She is wearing large dangling black heart earrings with a white skull & bones in the center, reminiscent of a DANGER! sign.

She walks through a desolate forest surrounded by landmines or maybe after an imagined nuclear fallout (this was 3 years before Chernobyl). There are colorful balloons on the ground and smoke bombs going off behind the band.
By the end, night falls in the forest and the smoke bombs are replaced by actual firebombs going off as the whole band continues to perform the song.

More Cold War Songs

“Heroes” David Bowie
“Crazy Train” Ozzy Osbourne
“1999” Prince
“2 Minutes to Midnight” Iron Maiden
“New Year’s Day” U2
“It’s a Mistake” Men at Work
“Two Tribes” Frankie Goes to Hollywood
“Hammer to Fall” Queen
“Forever Young” Alphaville
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” Tears for Fears
“Land of Confusion” Genesis
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” Billy Joel

West Berlin, West Germany 1985

The airplane banked so far to the left, the tops of buildings appeared in the tiny window, as if we were watching a tilted T.V. and I thought my whole family was going to fall into the city. Minutes later, our collective bodies bounced as the wheels hit the Tempelhof runway instead.
This is my memory of our arrival, approximately four years before the Wall would be torn down. Of course, 7-year-old me didn’t know or understand the geopolitics of it all at the time, it was just another place we were going to live because my father was an “Army man.”
My father, mother, baby sister, and I lived in the American sector at Marshallstrasse 5, adjacent to Clay headquarters and Truman Plaza, which featured a shopping center, movie theater, library, Burger King, and other small American shops sponsored by the US Department of Defense to supply soldiers and their families.
The walk to Thomas A. Roberts elementary school was less than 5 minutes. It’s one of the places I remember most during the 24-months my father was part of the Berlin Brigade. I also remember the Youth Activities (YA) Center where I played air hockey and the Cole Sports Center where I had gymnastics lessons.

Escape to the West

Even though the official purpose of the Berlin Wall (“Antifascistischer Schutzwall”) was to keep “Western fascists” or ideas from entering East Germany to undermine “the socialist state,” in reality it existed to keep East Germans from escaping to the West.
From August 1961 to November 1989 between 140 and 170 people were killed or died trying to get over, under, or around the Wall. But also during the same time period, more than 5,000 managed to escape across the border.
Less than a year after we arrived in the city, an East German dump truck weighed down with seven tons of gravel dodged gunfire from guards and smashed through four barriers at Checkpoint Charlie located less than a mile away from the Brandenburg Gate at the center of the city . Not only was the driver, his girlfriend, and their 8-month-old baby successful in making it to the West, but they were uninjured.
Their escape was called one of the “most spectacular” by police and their identities were withheld and under longstanding West German practice, the three were allowed to stay.

Games We Play

Behind our apartment building at Marshallstrasse 5 was a large area for children to play featuring a sandbox, wooden swing set, and a slide. The grass was well-maintained, and a smattering of native pines provided nice shade.
A few times I remember playing “war” against kids who lived in a nearby apartment building. My best friend Janessa and I would spend the morning gathering fallen pinecones, collecting them in the two-level wooden fort attached to the slide.
In the end, we would always end up having to surrender because we would run out of ammunition.
Janessa and I would also play “spies.” She would use her mother’s large accounting calculator and I would use my Speak & Math as “transmitters” We’d make up scenarios and then spend time watching and recording the “movements” of people going in and out of nearby buildings or cars leaving and returning to parking lots.
Even though our parents managed to keep what was happening all around us at a distance, obviously it filtered down in ways they never realized.

Reflections

At the end of 1987, my father was assigned to a new duty station, so we left West Berlin. Unlike our arrival, this time we drove. After all our paperwork was secured, we exited the city through Checkpoint Bravo and drove the 110-miles through East Germany to Checkpoint Alpha at the East/West (Inner) German Border.
I remember being in the backseat with a coloring book and crayons as our car went through the first checkpoint. East German guards in green uniforms looked into our car windows and possibly the trunk. I remember holding up a picture I was coloring so a guard could see it.
I have no memory of the actual drive or crossing the second checkpoint. I know stopping along the Autobahn was prohibited. Maybe I fell asleep while we listened to Armed Forces Network radio.
Recently my father asked if I remembered the spy who lived in our apartment building in Berlin.
No, of course not.
He went on to tell me about a man who would leave for weeks at a time, changing out the German license plate on his non-descript Volkswagen whenever he left.
My mind was blown, but maybe it shouldn’t have been. That’s just what it was like living in West Berlin during the Cold War—brushing against history, and not even realizing it.

The author in her military-furnished bedroom at Marshallstrasse 5 circa 1986. She is wearing a pink German sweatsuit and there is an East German cabbage-patch type doll on her desk. She has recently begun research on a memoir focusing on her time living in West Berlin during the Cold War.

BOB PROEHL ON “RELAX”

There’s a story that at some point after Diana Ross recorded “I’m Coming Out,” somebody told her what the song was about. Thus informed, Diana went to the song’s writers and asked why they were trying to ruin her career.
They weren’t. But they’d noticed Diana had a massive gay following, and they thought that they—two straight dudes and Diana Ross—could give the LGBTQ+ community an anthem equivalent to James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
Which, you know, they pretty much did.
Lady Diana got her head and her heart right. She embraced the song’s importance to her fans. It didn’t hurt that the song sold huge to everyone, queer or straight.
But think about Diana Ross in that moment of unknowing. Think of all the listeners right there with her, in that same space, blissfully unaware of what it was—and who it was—they were listening to.
There’s plenty of pop music that thrives in that space. The zone of plausibly deniability where an unsavvy listener believes those boys in the Village People are “just good friends.” So what does it mean when a pop act breaks out of that space, becomes undeniably legible as queer.
“Relax” was a creeper up the charts. It didn’t hit big in the UK until Frankie Goes to Hollywood played Top of the Pops, months after its initial release. Then one day, a BBC DJ looked at the album cover for the single. He read the lyrics on the back. And he pulled the album off the turntable mid-song.
The next day, the BBC banned “Relax” from the airwaves.
The next week, “Relax” hit number one.
I think it’s important to know that Frankie Goes to Hollywood came out of the Liverpool punk scene. Thinking of them as punks—working class punks, not art school punks—makes the band make sense, makes their brief and confrontational bout of fame make sense.
Because “Relax” could have lived comfortably in that zone of unknowing and plausible deniability. For a lot of people, it did. This is 1984. My dad bought us Boy George and Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers. It was wild times.
It is clearly and undeniably a song about fucking. You would have to twist yourself into absolute knots to think it was a song about just, you know, relaxing. My dad, notably, did not buy us Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
But if you looked even an inch beyond the song itself, the song became undeniably about gay sex. And the ones who made that conclusion unavoidable were the band themselves. They took out ads in the UK music press that read “ALL THE NICE BOYS LOVE SEA MEN.” That said Frankie Goes Hollywood was going to make Duran Duran lick shit off their boots and make Public Image Limited seem like men of good will. Public Image Limited. Johnny Rotten’s post-Pistols band. Frankie Goes to Hollywood told those washed-up punkers to fuck off with the airbrushed New Wave boys while Frankie gave blowjob instructions.
And the video. Keep in mind MTV is just a baby at this point, and no one knew what worked and what didn’t in a music video. More than half of the “Karma Chameleon” video is people waiting for a steamboat in Mississippi in 1870. Why do they specify that it’s Mississippi in 1870? I have no idea. They had no idea. Best strategy was to throw a random animal into the mix, like the chimp in the library in the video for “Head Over Heels.”
Were there masterpieces? Sure, probably? Did the overwhelming bulk of videos look like someone’s college theater department got a budget and some drugs? Yes, definitely.
In this arena where nothing make sense, how do you decide what’s off limits? Early MTV had a vague “We know it when we see it” policy, and they rarely brought the ban hammer down, but the “Relax” video went too far. It’s easy now to see why: the video takes place at what is obviously a gay S&M club and—ahem—climaxes when a Roman emperor removes his toga and ejaculates on the crowd below him. It also features an adorable baby tiger, so possibly that was a mitigating factor. We, the savvy contemporary audience, see leather daddies, but come back around with me to Diana Ross in the place of unknowing. Travel with me to the suburbs circa 1984 and couldn’t those just be nice boys dressing up like Marlon Brando in The Wild One? Or like Freddie Mercury in the “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” video? Yes, our deniability grows less and less plausible. But Freddie never got banned for prancing around in his leathers. He and Queen got the axe when they dressed in housewife drag and sang “I Want to Break Free,” the same year MTV refused to “Relax.”
So what to do with a number one hit that is undeniably, unavoidably a song about gay sex—I say “undeniably” but one cannot imagine that every dude who bought a FRANKIE SAY RELAX tee-shirt knew what he was advertising.
You ask for it to be repackaged, like “Relax” was by Brian de Palma when he used the song in Body Double and shot a new video for the boys at MTV. Now singer Holly Johnson is an impish guide, giving off Joel Grey in Cabaret vibes as he leads a sweater-sporting suburbanite into a very hetero sex club. Straight couples bump and grind, and the Frankie boys Rear Window footage of Body Double through telescopes, mugging shock and titillation for the camera as they watch what passes for racy among the eighties straights. At the climactic moment, it’s unambiguously water that splashes over a lady waiting for it, a nod to a moment in Flashdance that was touted as pure sex but is in fact pure commerce.
More important, you make sure that new package is single serving. The one hit wonder is a commodity, alienated from its producer. One hit wonder bands are not artists because artists make albums and albums are for straight white dudes. Never mind that Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome produced three more hit singles in the UK. Never mind that the album takes on sex, politics, religion, that it’s weird and sprawling and danceable and whipsmart and edgy.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood and “Relax” threatened to make something visible that was considered best hidden. They pushed so far that a confrontation seemed inevitable, but in the end, it was only a few minutes on the radio—maybe more on the dance floor, maybe the extended mix, “12 inches that must be taken, always”—and then back into plausible deniability, into the moment and the space of unknowing.

Bob Proehl is the author of the novels The Nobody People and A Hundred Thousand Worlds, a big audiobook thing with dragons coming out later this year, and a super secret thing he's not allowed to talk about yet. He writes about music and film and true crime for the Disgraceland, Badlands, and History Listen podcasts. You can find him at bobproehl.com and on Twitter @bobproehl, assuming Twitter still exists.