(2) Nena, “99 Luftballons”
ended
(14) Talk Talk, “It’s My Life”
229-208
and will play in the elite 8

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 3/24/23.

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.

MARK WALLACE ON “IT'S MY LIFE”

It’s my life, it never ends

I’m a teenager when Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life” is released, and I am all potential. It’s everywhere in my life, this potential, and has been for some time. Like all the other fuck-ups in the world, my report cards often read, not working up to potential, or some variation of the same idea. This potential has chased me to high school—to try to outpace it, I’ve managed to graduate at the end of my junior year. My seventeenth birthday falls halfway through my first semester at college, and already things aren’t going very well, but I know I can get them back on track. I have potential, after all. There are still so many doors to choose from in the game show of life.
But of course life isn’t a game, I know that already, and by January 1984, when “It’s My Life” drops, the first of these doors is already closing: I’m on academic probation because I’ve been too busy to show up more than a few times for any of my classes (too busy getting drunk and doing speed), and I am in danger of being kicked out of school. Life may not be a game, but I am still gripped by my youthful immortality: From some perspectives (mine), it looks like I have all the time in the world to set things straight. I just haven’t yet figured out how. Keep trying. As the song says, “It’s my life, it never ends.”

Caught in the crowd, it never ends

Things are never as uncertain as when you’re starting out, and “It’s My Life,” Talk Talk’s single hit, is no exception. The track crashes into motion with an indistinct tangle of sound, as though all its notes and beats and melodies had been silently gathering, building pressure somewhere on the unhearable side of a potential energy barrier, and now, suddenly released, rush through helter-skelter in a little explosive spasm of noise before relaxing into the song, gradually unspooling themselves over the course of the next three minutes and fifty-two seconds in a wash of synth pads, electronic drums, Paul Webb’s great bass lines, and Mark Hollis’s liquid vocals.
The band’s early sound was caught between decades. Hollis’s baritone echoed no one so much as The Jam’s Paul Weller, though Talk Talk were never so bristly. The first two albums were flavored with a range of styles: You could glimpse the smoothed-out pop horizons of Duran Duran, and hear the dying echoes of Roxy Music, whose final album had dropped in 1982, the same year Talk Talk’s first album came out (and The Jam broke up). But Bryan Ferry’s awkward glam fantasticness belonged to last night’s dance floor. Duran Duran, on the other hand, with their era-defining objectification not just of girls on film but of themselves, looked resolutely to the future from the prow of a Scottish yacht, getting the party started for the bands who would sail in their wake.
Somehow stuck in the middle of all this was Talk Talk, whose vinyl debut had come a year after Duran Duran’s, and who opened for the Fab Five on several dates of their late-1981 tour. But while Talk Talk were unquestionably an 80s band, they certainly didn’t intend to follow where Duran Duran led. In the video for “It’s My Life,” Hollis stares straight into the camera without lip-synching, as though declaring that the industry machine would never put words in his mouth—not even if those words were his own. Talk Talk would walk their own road. They just hadn’t found their way to it yet.

Funny how I blind myself

“It’s My Life” is a song impossible not to misinterpret. It’s lyrical structure is so skeletal that it could be about any number of things. Because the video for it consisted mostly of wildlife footage, it is often understood as a protest song for animal rights. One of the most common takes is that it’s a song about a difficult or unrequited romantic relationship. It might also be a song about finding one’s way—about life. Put the emphasis on the possessive: It’s my life. Leave me alone.
As interesting, to me, is how the song does its job. “It’s My Life” makes its meaning not by stating it, but by dancing around that blind spot at the center of language, that place in which the inexpressible resides, at the center of that which is expressed. Its meaning seems to be missing, always hovering just outside the light, as though it would always remain potential, never quite fulfilled.
At the root of the word ”potential” is the idea of power, something potent. Potency. But it is power not yet unleashed, it is possibility unrealized. It’s about what could be, not what is. In that sense, potential also represents something missing: it is that which has not arrived yet, something that has not yet—and may never—come to pass.

I've asked myself, how much do you / Commit yourself?

As it turned out, I did not get things back on track in school. The only class I passed in my first year at college was piano. The administration, apparently, felt this was not a sound basis for a higher education, and I was asked to leave. Over the following years, more or less the same thing would happen at no less than four other schools. I’d enroll in classes, then stop going to most of them once I’d found the right excuse: alcoholism, depression, social anxiety, plain pretentious angst. I might stick it out for one class I was interested in—photography, for instance, or macroeconomics. But I felt no connection to school, nor to the people around me. Untethered as I was, perhaps it’s no wonder I always drifted away. What never occurred to me was the idea of school as an exercise in exploring what one might become, and how to get there. I just couldn’t stick around long enough to find out.
It seems clear, looking back, that alongside the alcoholism and depression and anxiety and angst, part of what was going on was a resolute digging in of heels, a desperate attempt to put off “real life” in whatever way I could. It was not responsibility I feared, though. It was becoming. It wasn’t settling down that put me off, it was narrowing down. It was the casting off of possibility, the shedding of potential, with all its beautiful multiplicity, in favor of certainty, which seemed so dull and unipolar.
Instead, I wanted to live in that inexpressible place in which I knew the most interesting meaning was made. I wanted everything to be possible always, to continue to be potential. Potential was power, and I was in love with the power of the unrealized, of the not yet real. Whatever lay beyond each of those open doors, if it was still just a dream, I could dream anything. It felt like there was great power in being able to choose which door to walk through. It felt like, once that choice was made, that power would be gone.

It's my life, don't you forget

If Talk Talk were suspended between past and future, their trajectory was exactly opposite that of a band like Simple Minds, whose most interesting, exploratory work was arguably behind them by the time of their first chart success. That band’s “Promised You a Miracle” dropped in April 1982—the same week Talk Talk’s eponymous, pop-inflected single off its first album was released. If “Talk Talk” wouldn’t go on to be Talk Talk’s biggest hit, it was certainly their danciest tune, their most recognizably “pop” number.
But while bands like Duran Duran, Simple Minds, Pet Shop Boys, and others narrowed in on their sounds, opting for what seemed like increasing certainty, Hollis seemed to want to open things up. “It’s My Life,” from Talk Talk’s second album, already encompasses more, from the weird synth birdcalls of the opening bars to the plaintive vocal lines and the indirection of the lyrics. Even the song’s structure is more complex, building from a mid-tempo verse to a more urgent pre-chorus and then—with a rapid-fire flourish of Lee Harris’s hexagonal Simmons electronic drums—to a chorus that rings large with synth pads and Hollis’s cryptic yawp, at once sad and eternally hopeful: It’s my life, don’t you forget / Caught in the crowd, it never ends.
It’s My Life isn’t the greatest mid-80s New Wave synthpop album, though it did have its moments of brilliance. As an angsty teen, it was hard to argue with “Tomorrow Started,” for instance, which declared, With time you’ll endlessly arrive / Outside of use / With just tomorrow starting. (And with time, the words still occasionally ring true.) The album’s textures are sophisticated, its sounds standing out or even clashing, rather than smoothed over into a unified color field, like so much of the music of the era. The piano solo in “Call in the Night Boy” sidles up to David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane,” but ultimately slinks away too soon. The intro to “Such a Shame” was tantalizing, even titillating, and could have led to anything at all—leaving one slightly let down when the song, solid as it is, finally arrived, as though this force that felt about to explode suddenly changed its mind and reeled itself in.
There’s a lot of tension in It’s My Life. Hollis is still finding his way, but he’s hampered by his own understanding that the music industry would prefer simple hooks and scantily clad models mud-wrestling. Something’s missing, but it’s only the emptiness of great potential: There’s something that hasn’t yet arrived for Talk Talk, some looming transformation you can hear in the music but which has not yet—and may never—come to pass. The songs are decent, some even great, but the album is more a compilation of interesting musical moves than a bare and honest vision that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. That vision is clearly taking shape, though, and throughout the album, you can hear Hollis straining to reach some other music, unable to stay in New Wave’s increasingly guardrailed musical lane.

One half won’t do

It takes many people quite a long time to find their way. Some of us never really do. I tried, for many years, to fulfill my potential. I waited for that looming transformation to take place, and found myself, as I did, becoming many things.
One discovery: there is room for a lot of becoming in a life, whether in pursuit of one’s potential, or in flight from it.
Here are some things I became, or tried to become, or tried to avoid becoming, along the way, including, early on:

Paperboy, age eleven.
Raker of leaves and mower of lawns, and, later, Landscape Maintenance Engineer (i.e., gardener).
High school graduate.
College dropout.
Used bookstore clerk. I am a writer, after all.

Later, in this order:

Alcoholic.
Aspiring novelist.
Accidental financial journalist.
Globetrotting financial journalist.
Managing editor.
Sober alcoholic.
Globetrotting freelance magazine journalist, publishing in all the places I had always dreamed of publishing.
Unemployed magazine journalist, publishing nowhere.
Deliverer of paint.
Financial Services Marketing Engineer, a post that entailed standing behind a table all day in the hot sun at Coney Island, handing out brochures for a bank that was just opening its first branches in New York, where I was living at the time. Yes, the thing I dreaded happened: I tried to hand a brochure to a friend who happened to be passing. Achieved: The mortification of the flesh.

And at various times:

Blogger.
Columnist.
Co-author.
Talking head.
Husband.
Ex-husband.
Startup CEO.
Product guy.
Marketing guy.
Failed entrepreneur.
Husband again.
Stepfather.
Father.
Changer of diapers and singer of songs.
Business consultant. Whatever that means.
College graduate. I never did get that BA. But I managed to convince a top-shelf MFA program to admit me on the strength of my journalism experience, and, thirty-seven years after graduating from high school, I finally received a college degree.
Teacher of writing.
Nonprofit director.
Chicken farmer.
Essayist.

And other things besides.

Convince myself / It's my life

The thing about becoming is, it happens when you aren’t looking, and takes you places you never thought you’d go.
There’s a way in which Talk Talk started from the finish line and ran the race backward. If it took some time for Simple Minds to coalesce into the emo synthpop powerhouse they were destined to become, it took Talk Talk a few years to let go of their most polished sound and achieve a kind of reverse apotheosis, becoming not more focused but more diffuse.
Potential is like a vacuum; it seems to be our nature to try to fill it in, to seek something to take up all that blank space, so we can move along knowing we fit comfortably into this box or that, our shape held snuggly by whatever uniform we’ve donned: clerk, writer, musician, exec, punk, teacher, rebel, dad. But Mark Hollis led Talk Talk on a different route. Instead of filling in the emptiness of Talk Talk’s potential, Hollis embraced it. Talk Talk’s fourth album, Spirit of Eden, rejects the very project of becoming. Largely improvised, and recorded in near darkness with instruments and equipment manufactured mostly in the early 60s, Spirit of Eden is like nothing the band had recorded before, and in fact resembles little that any rock band had recorded in the past. The songs are ethereal, nearly ambient, and loose to the point of being almost unstructured, like little through-composed masterpieces that nonetheless continue to reverberate somewhere deep within you, long after the album has ended. Hollis’s big, gentle voice has become a kind of keening croon—it’s still round and liquid, filled with midrange EQ, but it’s more haunting now, and you can hear the improvisation, as though Hollis is channeling the spirit of eden itself, never quite sure when the next lyric will emerge, or what its words might be. Talk Talk’s potential, fulfilled or unfulfilled, is no longer a question. This is music that sheds all expectation and judgement, and is merely and eternally itself, always now. The album didn’t stake out new ground for pop music as much as it vacated the territory altogether—so much so that it has come to be regarded as a foundational work in the still sadly marginal genre known as “post-rock.”
Because there was no potential Spirit of Eden was trying to live up to, no external yardstick it judged itself against, the album accomplished another remarkable trick: it recognized its listeners for who and what they were. Just as Spirit of Eden was no more or less than itself, you had the feeling, listening to it, that there was no need to be more or less than whatever you were at the moment—a shattering revelation, especially if you found it difficult to navigate the mid-1980s, an era of Reaganite rebukes, tension over “political correctness,” the War on Drugs, so-called “family values,” AIDS and the country’s reaction to it, and incipient accomplishment culture. Hell, it’s a shattering revelation today: that there is no potential to fulfill, nothing you need to become, no one you need to be who you aren’t yet. The doors might be open or they might be closed, it doesn’t matter. It’s your life.

If I could buy my reasoning, I'd pay to lose

Talk Talk were one of those rare bands that produced a body of work, and, seemingly satisfied, simply stopped. After Spirit of Eden, the band recorded 1991’s Laughing Stock, which sounded notes of an ethereal, almost otherworldly torch song jazz. The songs gestured suggestively, but never quite made contact, and some of the album’s effects felt self-conscious—it struggled to match Eden’s improvisational apotheosis. Hollis released an eponymous solo album in 1998—very personal, very wandering clarinet—after which, Talk Talk was never heard from again, almost literally: very few interviews with Hollis or his bandmates exist; journalists, biographers, and documentary filmmakers (as well as essayists) have had to content themselves for the most part with speculation. Many people now know Talk Talk primarily through the baffling and uninspired cover of “It’s My Life” that No Doubt recorded for their 2003 singles album. That’s a shame.
Hollis’s few comments about his retirement seem to point to the fact that family life and fatherhood were more important to him than being part of a music industry he never really fit into. He lived in London for two decades after his solo album came out, and then for a couple of years in a small town near England’s south coast, where he died of cancer in 2019, age 64.
One wonders about the path from Top 40 to art music to solitude. Did Hollis feel he’d fulfilled his potential, and simply wanted to be left alone? Or was he still seeking something, in the silence he once said was so important to him? Perhaps he managed to find his way back to that place where all the doors are open, that place in which all things are possible. I am much older now than I was when I was trying to figure out which door was the right one for me. Back then, potential shouted over every transom, a cacophony I could neither untangle nor navigate by, so loud it echoed in my ears always, haunting me. “It’s My Life” was the sound of that potential, the sound of limitless possibility, both thrilling and terrifying at once. It was a song that said anything was possible, but especially: leave me alone to figure it out. It’s my life, don’t you forget.
Things are quieter now. Past a certain age, the voices stop calling; a lot of doors look closed—a lot of doors are closed. Besides, one doesn’t look beyond those thresholds much, anymore. Now the limitlessness is much closer to home. A different kind of threshold starts to draw into view. In certain lights, the room you’re in contains no less than everything—just as Talk Talk’s music did. On some days, though, you become aware there’s something missing. All it is is that thing you were trying to escape: the sound of potential, of power, of life. The struggle now is to grasp it. It’s enough to just hang on, stay where you are.