(16) Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, “It Takes Two”
popped
(2) Nena, “99 Luftballons”
488-391
and is the 2023 march fadness 80s edition champion!
all hail the victor
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 4/1/23.
THE SITUATION THAT THE BASS IS IN: DAVID GRIFFITH ON “IT TAKES TWO” AND THE BIRTH OF THE AUTHOR
For the first 47 years of my life, I believed that Mike Ginyard, aka MC Rob Base, was celibate.
In 1988, when Base and his childhood friend DJ EZ Rock’s, single “It Takes Two” dropped, I was thirteen and did not know of anyone, besides, the adults in my life, and maybe Tanya, the hot as hell sixteen-year-old daughter of my paper route client, Mr. Yarbrough, who was having sex.
And so, every time I listened to “It Takes Two” in the basement of our split-level ranch in Decatur, IL, on my father’s capable system—Pioneer receiver with 5-band graphic equalizer, JVC CD player, with a hand-built 70s HeathKit turntable, and Pioneer speakers with 15 inch woofers—the line “...don’t smoke buddha can’t stand sex [sic], yes…” struck me funny.
The only people I knew that did not have sex on principle were the priests and nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, and I would come to find out years later that I was even wrong about that.
I was naive about a lot of things—was thirteen-years-old and living just off a cul-de-sac in the heart of the heart of the country in the Soybean Capital of the World—but especially sex and drugs. It wasn’t hard for me from context clues to understand that “buddha” was weed, but the syntax and flow of the line “don’t smoke buddha, can’t stand sess, yes” made it seem these were separate activities. Like, don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?
Thanks to Urban Dictionary, now I know that “sess” is short for sensimilla, a word that I actually did know (even back then) due to uncles who exposed me at a young age to CaddyShack:
“This is a hybrid,” groundskeeper Bill Murray lisps. “This is a cross of Bluegrass, Kentucky Bluegrass, Featherbed Bent, and Northern California Sinsemilla. The amazing stuff about this is that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezus…”
At thirteen I had yet to smoke (or drink) anything that would send me into an altered state, unless you count RC Cola, but I was discovering that music did something to me—for me.
I had been playing trombone since the 5th grade and had just that year joined the Mound Middle School jazz band, led by Mr. Jim Walker, a balding, spectacled clarinetist, who led a Dixieland group that played street festivals and wedding receptions. Somehow, amidst all the distractions of middle schoolers playing grabass, Mr. Walker taught us the rudiments of swing: “Doo-va-Doo-va-Doo-va-Doo-va,” he would drone, tapping his foot, and twirling his index finger, coaxing us forward into that new musical, alchemical idiom in which two eighth notes become a dotted eighth, sixteenth.
There are times even now, 35 years later, that I will spontaneously begin singing the melody to Glenn Miller’s “A String of Pearls” or Count Basie’s “Shiny Stockings,” big band standards that groove with a deceptively deep, almost tidal force.
And yet, for all my exposure to some of the swingingest, most danceable music ever written, dancing is not something I did. My family, nor any family I knew, did it. Maybe my dad would have a little too much Cold Duck on Christmas Eve and would get to bouncing around and twirling my mom, but that was it. We were Midwest Catholics (my mom was actually raised Seventh Day Adventist, a sect that frowns upon dancing) with no strong ethnic identity—some Irish, some Welsh, some German and Dutch—but not a high enough concentration of any of these to influence the food laid on the table, or our holiday rituals.
In the absence of these influences, I was a blank slate. I would lay on my back on the basement floor and listen to Zeppelin and Edgar Winter albums from my parents collection but also a stray Donald Byrd fusion album, and a completely whacked out Emerson, Lake, and Palmer album with a cover featuring battle tanks in the shape of armadillos; I sang in the choir at the Methodist church because that’s where many of my friends worshiped; I did a brief stint as a trombonist at our Our Lady of Lourdes because the music director discovered a Vatican II hymn that squarely ripped off Brubeck’s “Take Five” called “Sing of the Lord’s Goodness,” which was excruciating because all I could imagine while playing was the angelic, crystalline alto sax tone of Paul Desmond.
But by far the biggest influence on my sense of musical possibilities was my neighbor, Chip. Chip was 4 years older, had Tony Hawk bangs, and a fake radio station, WPIG, in his basement.
WPIG was basically a podcast 30 years before podcasts were a thing. We had a whole crew of guest DJs: my younger brother would sometimes show up and be allowed to choose a few tracks, Chip’s girlfriend, who I would later date after Chip went off to college, appeared on mic a few times under the alter ego Lois Lane—even my friend Cory, whose voice and reporting now regularly appear on National Public Radio, had a cameo.
Each show took up the space of a 90 minute cassette. Most of the 90 minutes was music, but what made it different from your run of the mill 80s mixtape was that we would take turns introducing the tracks in our best, most sincere imitations of the slacker college radio DJs broadcasting from the local WJMU: And that was [long pause] 10,000 Maniacs [long pause] “About the Weather,” I would say in a high pubescent voice, trying desperately to sound world weary.
Every third or fourth song there would be a recap: You…just…heard INXS “Mediate,” the Beastie Boys “Brass Monkey” and [long pause] U2 “Bullet the Blue Sky…” There were segments where we read articles directly, verbatim from Rolling Stone or gave a run down of the Top 40 albums, but there were also skits and interviews with invented characters from the neighborhood, like the hard of hearing Granny Fudrucker, played by my brother, in a caterwauling dragged-up Terry Jones falsetto.
It was in the summer of 1988, in Chip’s basement, WPIG station headquarters, that I first heard “It Takes Two.” By that time, the song had already peaked. It spent 3 weeks in the top 40 beginning in mid-April and then spent 19 weeks slowly sliding down the top 100, but continued to hold steady on the dance charts through 1989, ascending as high as number 3. In 1989 Spin magazine ranked “It Takes Two” as the no. 1 single of all time. In 2021 Rolling Stone ranked “It Takes Two” no. 116 on its “Top 500 Best Songs of All Time.” Eventually, it would be certified Platinum many times over.
I didn’t know any of that at the time. I just knew it was unlike anything I’d heard before.
It’s one of those songs, like Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” or George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” or Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” where there’s a rhythmic tease, a few bars to set the tone; a little prelude to get your attention. But the first several bars of “It Takes Two”--a sample from the Galactic Force Band’s 1972 “Space Dust”--isn’t so much a tease as a pronouncement; it’s giving prelude to a grand space promenade; like you’re at a block party with hundreds of people: grills are smoking, the sun is beating down, everyone is out and looking good; everything and anything is possible, and then, out of nowhere a portal in the sky opens and this synth fanfare erupts, but not one of those soaring, medieval fanfares with piercing trumpets, but a bottom-heavy, descending line pulling you down, pulling you in like some kind of trance-inducing deep space transmission, like some kind of tractor beam; something you’ve heard and felt standing wedged between Galaga and Space Invaders in the crowded mall arcade. You just can’t place it. No one can. But before you can think a voice enters your consciousness, a voice that has been there since before time, waiting. The booming voice of god speaks the song into existence:
RIGHT ABOUT NOW…NOW…NOW
YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE POSSESSED[A platform bearing two men in tracksuits—deus ex machina style—lowers them to the stage]
BY THE SOUNDS OF MC ROB BASE
AND DJ EZ ROCK…ROCK…ROCK…HIT IT!
The basement was carpeted and had a low drop ceiling. At the far end, just outside the laundry room, was a tiled dance floor backed by a mirrored wall, so without even trying, the acoustics were bright without being muddy, like the school gyms where Chip and I would later DJ. The bass hummed in the tile and shimmied in the marbled mirrors, sending vibrations up through my feet, into my chest and teeth. It was a good, alive feeling.
And that was just the first 12 seconds of the song.
What follows is one of the most memorable downbeats in music history: a low frequency bass kick that cannot be produced on any actual acoustic instrument because it’s not a sample—a digital recording of an actual drummer playing an actual kick drum—but a completely synthetic sound created by the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The beat hits, then rumbles—sound engineers call it “decay.” Only the 808 has that specific kick and decay; a gauzy thud, like a heartbeat.
And then, we all know what happens next, a funky, janky, clattering Mardis Gras march of synth snare, hi-hat, and clap track:
Whoo! Yeah! Whoo! Yeah!
It takes two to make a thing go right
It takes two to make it outta sight
I didn’t know it at the time, but these few bars snatched from Lynn Collins’ 1972 feminist funk-soul hit “Think (About it)'' is one the most famous and most sampled breakbeats in all of hip-hop. It’s hard to hear, but down there underneath all that synth is Jabo Starks, the drummer for the JBs, James Brown, the Godfather of Soul’s, backing band
Starks’ meticulous 8-on-the-floor style isn't showy. He was known for holding it down so others could be free. JB bassist Boostie Collins and trombonist Fred Wesley have both said as much. “I could just blow free,” Wesley said in one interview. Starks’ impeccable groove-making allowed others to not just be fully themselves, but the confidence to transcend their limits.
Which is exactly what Rob Base does when he finally begins to rhyme:
I wanna rock right now
I'm Rob Base and I came to get down
I'm not internationally known
But I'm known to rock the microphoneBecause I get stoopid, I mean outrageous
Stay away from me if you're contagious
'Cause I'm the winner, no, I'm not the loser
To be an M.C. is what I choose 'aLadies love me, girls adore me
I mean even the ones who never saw me
Like the way that I rhyme at a show
The reason why, man, I don't knowSo let's go, 'cause
It takes two to make a thing go right
It takes two to make it outta sight
The circumstances in which I first encountered “It Takes Two” are comically different from the circumstances in which the song was created: Decatur, IL, a sprawling prairie city (47 sq. miles), population 94,000; Central Harlem, over 100,000 people crammed into 1.4 square miles. But what was similar is that the late 80s was a time when everyone was learning how to copy, sample, and remix. I didn’t own turntables or a mixer, like DJ EZ Rock, or even any LPs of my own, but I had a dual cassette deck hooked up to a CD player and a brick of blank Maxell tapes, a VCR and a closet full of Kodak brand VHS tapes with bright orangey yellow labels. I made mixtapes for friends and, later, girlfriends. I learned to program our VCR so that I could record episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which came on every Saturday night at midnight on the local PBS station.
For a school project on Romeo and Juliet, my buddy Joe and I figured a way to connect two VCRs together to create what we considered to be masterpiece of video art, in which we intercut video of our classmates performing scenes from the play with clips from Yo! MTV Raps and Python-esque interludes in which we referenced inside jokes from Late Night with David Letterman.
When we weren’t making fake radio shows we were taking Polaroids of ourselves skateboarding and then cobbling them together into a handmade zine, employing the photocopier in the business office of the local Kmart, where Chip’s dad was the manager. There we taped the Polaroids to pieces of paper, captioned the images with a Sharpie and then laid them against the warm glass, a process that turned the washed out color photos into grainy gray-scale tableaux depicting me and my brother and Chip ollying off curbs and leaping from (unseen) stacks of landscaping ties to create the impression of catching massive air, a la the Tom Petty “Free Fallin’” video.
This is all to say that I grew up making copies of things, sampling things, then stitching them together with other things. But I did not grow up dancing.
There was a lot of chin out head nodding, eyebrow raising, and maybe some slight up and down shoulder action, and toe tapping, but otherwise the arms, legs, and hips did not get involved. Dancing always seemed so risky, so deeply personal—so visible. The copying and sampling and stitching and dubbing was out of sight—all anyone saw was the finished product. They didn’t see me sitting in my parents basement late at night obsessing over the sequence of songs, worrying whether the selections were too bald, my emotions and intentions too easy to spot.
This all changed with “It Takes Two.” Prior to that summer, the big hip-hop hits weren’t things you could even play at the Mound Middle School dances. I mean, there was LL’s “Going Back to Cali” and Kool Moe Dee’s “Wild Wild West,” songs you could hear on the radio, songs that even our teachers would admit to knowing, but we all knew the real stuff wasn’t for public consumption. I’m talking NWA, 2 Live Crew, Too-Short, Ice-T, Slick Rick, even Public Enemy was seen as too political.
If you wanted to listen to any of that you had to know someone who could drive—an older brother or sister, or a neighbor, and then you could catch a track or two while catching a ride home from school, take in lyrical scenes and situations that my white, Midwestern, thirteen-year old self had never even dreamed.
But in the end, the lyrics weren’t the thing that stuck with me—it was the beats and the bass pulsing through my back, rattling the windshield and trunk lid. This wasn’t the Bronx, where hip-hop and Rob Base were born, or Harlem where he moved in 4th grade, met DJ EZ Rock, and first heard the Crash Crew playing at block parties, this was Montgomery Hills, Decatur, IL, a quiet warren of hilly, curving streets punctuated by cul-de-sacs. There were no block parties, no one used their porches or stoops for anything more than pumpkins and rustic benches that no one ever sat on. No, the music was confined to basements and cars—stereos that were only played loud when parents weren’t home, kicker boxes locked inside the trunks of Honda hatchbacks, volume turned down when we rounded the corner into the neighborhood.
“It Takes Two” was an exception. It played well with others, and not plays well with others in a palatable Fresh Prince way, but in a way that brought generations together. I remember my mom, a Baby Boomer, who came up with the Mamas and the Papas, James Taylor, and the Moody Blues, coming down into the basement, catching the beat, bobbing her head, and half joking, half not, shouting along with the “Whoo! Yeah!” break.
At the time I didn’t know where that sample came from, but I have to believe that my mom, who graduated from college in the early 70s would have known Lynn Collins’ “Think (About it).” Maybe she recognized it, maybe she didn’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters was that it made her move, made her shout.
Flash-forward a few years to post-football game dances in the galleria of Stephen Decatur High School, and “It Takes Two” became the great leveler of the dance floor. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just the cheerleaders and the pom squad out there doing “Da Butt” or “The Percolator” which required a startling, cold-sweat inducing level of coordination and ass-moving. Rob Base had come to democratize the breakdown. When he commanded us, on the count of three, to “1, 2, 3…Get loose now!” We all listened. It became something we could all do—we needed to do—a welcome release from the 1-2, 1-2 foot shifting of slow dancing to “Running to Stand Still” or Sinead’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
The popularity of “It Takes Two” shouldn’t be so much of a mystery, and it definitely shouldn’t be seen as a fluke, or a fad. What Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock did was tap into the very essence of hip-hop itself: Only fifteen years earlier, August 11, 1973 in the Community Room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc, an eighteen-year old immigrant from Jamaica did something no one else had done before. He’d been watching the crowds at dance parties, and noticed what got people on the floor were the breakbeats, the funky, groovy instrumental sections between choruses. So, DJ Kool Herc, using two turntables, like the disco DJs in Manhattan (to keep an uninterrupted flow of music going), began mixing together just the breakbeats: a break from James Brown’s “Give it Up or Turnit Loose'' would slide into “Bongo Rock” by the Incredible Bongo Band, then back to Brown, and then over to Babe Ruth’s flamenco guitar inspired “The Mexican.” The result? A dance party where the DJ kept the audience guessing, finding more and more unexpected combinations of rhythms, and flavors, and genres, which led to more people on the dance floor and, eventually, later, a method of laying down a rhythmic foundation for MCs to rap over. Herc called this the “Merry-Go-Round.”
“It Takes Two” doubles down on the “Merry-Go-Round” technique, looping Lynn Collins’ “Think” (“Whoo! Yeah!”) break over and over and over throughout the track, then layering on top an 808 confection: A deep bass hit on the one and a clap track pattern that is a direct rip-off of the 1984 disco sensation “Set it Off” by Strafe, a beat that all but obscures Jabo Starks’ snare and hi-hat, so while you can’t hear it, you can feel it down there.
Which is what makes “It Takes Two” so singular, so itself, a classic, not some gimmick. If you really listen you can hear and feel all its antecedents; all the layers of rhythm. You can hear the whistle of the drum major summoning the band in the Mardi Gras parade. You can hear the hi hat and snare of Jabo Starks, who grew up in Alabama listening to the loose but military style of the Mardi Gras parade drummers. You can hear the tambourine from the original Lynn Collins track, and on top of that—doubling it— the ricocheting high hat and clap track of Strafe; all these generations, motivations, and situations of sound on stage at once.
In other words, what makes “It Takes Two” so infectious, so readily, irresistibly danceable, is that it’s basically a five minute long Frankenstein’s monster of a breakbeat.
Again, I say this all as though I knew it then back in the summer of 1988. All I knew was what it did to me; how it made me move my shoulders from side to side; how it put a hitch in my hips; what the bass did to the air around our bodies.
But there’s more.
In a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone—four years after DJ EZ Rock’s death—Rob Base revealed that the creation of “It Takes Two” took place over the course of one night in a studio in Englewood, NJ, right across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. They didn’t have an album yet or a record deal, so their manager told them: “Yo, we need to get in the studio, knock out a song or whatever.”
And so they did.
They started listening to records, throwing around ideas, eventually putting on Ultimate Breaks & Beats Volume 16, the latest installment in a series of albums put out by Bronx DJ “Breakbeak Lou” Flores for use by other DJs, in which he compiles jazz, funk, and rock tracks with especially tasty, groovy, funky, or original sounds and beats. Side one of volume 16 features tracks by the Commodores and Marvin Gaye. Side two, as luck would have it, features Lyn Collins’ “Think” followed directly by the Galactic Force Band’s “Space Dust.”
Rob Base told Rolling Stone: “Basically, it’s just like, it was right there. The hit was right there in our face. And we just took it.”
If there is a spirit to every age, then that might just be the spirit of the late 80s:
It was right there, and we just took it.
That fall, my 8th grade year, Chip started a DJ business. Not exactly his business partner, I was enlisted to help schlep equipment and page CDs and cassettes. I only really remember one gig: a dance at John’s Hill Middle School, and those memories are vague and dark: a steamy gym, the smell of Drakkar Noir, Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” and Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” But what I remember clearly is the moment when I pressed play on the CD player and that godly voice filled the room: “Right about now…” There were screams followed by dozens of tweens in pegged jeans sprinting from the dark edges of the gym onto the dance floor. Up until then I had been a spectator, but at that moment I became hooked on the power of making others move their bodies.
Now, nearly thirty-five summers later, I am clearing the fog from the bathroom mirror and preparing to shave my face. “It Takes Two” is blaring from the iPhone on the back of the toilet tank.
As I lather my face, I begin to move and rap along, “...my name’s Rob, the last name Base, yeah, and on the mic I’m known to the freshest…” and as I bring the razor down my jaw I think of Chip. I haven’t seen him since—I have to think really hard on this—the summer of 1996 or 97, but we’re Facebook friends, so I know he's out in Portland and a DJ.
I’m thinking of him because last night as I was writing I wondered if he had any of our old WPIG tapes—I have one, but can’t find it anywhere—a casualty of so many moves.
And so I messaged him on Facebook:
Hey, working on this thing about “It Takes Two” and WPIG…You have any of those tapes still? And to my surprise, he responds: Have to take a look.
A few minutes go by and a photo pops up in the chat box. It’s Chip’s hand holding a vinyl copy of “It Takes Two.”
A few more minutes go by. Chip writes back: Damn. I think any tapes that old got melted in my apartment fire in Decatur in the 90s…
I return to the keyboard and re-read all that I’ve written. I am having that spectator feeling again. All these words and sounds are just sitting there on the page pointing to something, pulling me toward something: a desire to be both in my body and loose of it.
I get up from the table, walk to the stereo, and push play on the CD player:
RIGHT ABOUT NOW…NOW…NOW…
I turn the volume up as loud as I can stand it. My old speakers crackle a bit, but then settle in.
YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE POSSESSED…
I’m looking for that exact frequency.
BY THE SOUNDS OF…MC ROB BASE…AND
I want to feel it again for the first time—in my feet, my chest, and teeth.
DJ EZ ROCK...ROCK…ROCK…
HIT IT!
Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull).
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.