Sunday, March 20, 2022

Sunday Music: 99 Luftballoons

Auf Deutsch.

Ach! Diese lederhose!

Oder Englisch. 

Fresh and ubiquitous in 1983, Overtaken By Events by 1989, and dragged back into relevancy now, kicking and screaming, by morons and lunatics on both sides who don't remember what kind of fire they're playing with. Too spot on?
 


10 comments:

  1. I was doing nuclear targeting studies for one of my professors (and later for a friend of mine who did studies for one of the war colleges)when the original came out in 1983, and I was also a Dr. Demento fan.
    I liked the parody 99 Dead Baboons better than the original; I found this version on youtube:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9Lt1rwj6R8
    Did you know that the Great Salt Lake would be a very good target for "dirty" Russian ICBMs? All those radiated salts soaring into the atmosphere would make for interesting weather for most of the eastern side of the Rockies, and emptying the Plains states as those salt particles have to come down somewhere...

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  2. great song!

    same idiots, now as then, who think they've got CONTROL of things...

    moderately-related reference?

    https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/18/putin-destined-to-hang-or-drown/

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  3. As the Bob & Tom Harry Caray quipped, "What the hell is a 'luftballoon' anyway?!"

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  4. This song came out a couple of years before I was monitoring Air Defense Systems in the Far East.

    Occasionally we had a WX balloon from nation X catch the Jet Stream and cross into the radar coverage of nation Y.

    The speed of the radar target looked like a jet aircraft and caused nation Y to get all excited and up it's alert status.

    Which caused nation Z to do the same. With the possibility of the pilots of nations Y and Z getting sporty with each other.

    This song ran through my head every time this happened.

    A side note: back when all I had was a turntable and a tape deck, I made an extended version of this piece: Started with German, at the break at 3:12 switched to the English version, then back to German at the break to finish up.

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  5. Grimly topical.

    If the proverbial balloons do go up, in line with that song I wish you

    Auf Wiedersehen Kumpel

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  6. I had wondered when this song would make a reappearance. I have been expecting it for some weeks now.

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  7. Had a question from Alia S. Wilder this weekend, "Why don't we put in a no-fly zone" and the response was pretty simple, "nuclear war". It's a fire we don't want to play with.

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  8. @TB,
    Actually, I would've been fine leaving it in the vault for another 50 years, as nothing but a sad relic of stupider times.
    But it's 1983 all over again, so...

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  9. Original German came out about the same time as Spliff's "Duett Komplett" which arguably has a better earworm riff and made about as much sense.

    That is until you saw Nena, who was a whole lot better on the eyes than groups like that Spliff, Trio or D.A.F.

    All part of the West German "Neue Deutsche Welle" new wave movement.

    Good fun!

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  10. Aesop - I can honestly say I never expected to see this as a reality again in my lifetime - yet here we are and if I do not miss my guess, we will be here for a while.

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