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cubmike74 and hayseedplowboy's place last month around my birthday, I heard Galaxie digital radio service playing some 80s songs in the background and realized, after hearing two songs in a row about nuclear war, that this was a worryingly popular subgenre. Take one of these songs, Alphaville's elegiac "Forever Young."
I can also point to Duran Duran's immortal lyric "Don't say you're easy on me you're about as easy as a nuclear war" in their song "Is there something I should know?", or to the success in English and in German of Nena's famous "99 Luftballoons". In the 80s' index of nuclear war songs only touches upon the long, long list.
The 1980s were a tense time, granted. In an era when there were forty thousand Soviet nuclear warheads, Prince Edward Island is lucky to have survived, given that my home city of Charlottetown--a provincial capital, and site of an airport--would almost certainly targeted and that the very existence of CFB Summerside would doom the Island's second community. When your strategic warplans enable the massacre of almost half of the population of Prince Edward Island as a tertiary sideshow to the main depopulatory events, you know that you probably should go back to first principles.
No one did, though, not until it was almost too late. Take ABLE ARCHER 83. Hence, I suppose, the songs. I wonder: What were things like in Soviet-bloc popular music?
cubmike74 and hayseedplowboy's place last month around my birthday, I heard Galaxie digital radio service playing some 80s songs in the background and realized, after hearing two songs in a row about nuclear war, that this was a worryingly popular subgenre. Take one of these songs, Alphaville's elegiac "Forever Young."Let’s dance in style, lets dance for a while
Heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?
Let us die young or let us live forever
We don’t have the power but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music’s for the sad men
I can also point to Duran Duran's immortal lyric "Don't say you're easy on me you're about as easy as a nuclear war" in their song "Is there something I should know?", or to the success in English and in German of Nena's famous "99 Luftballoons". In the 80s' index of nuclear war songs only touches upon the long, long list.
The 1980s were a tense time, granted. In an era when there were forty thousand Soviet nuclear warheads, Prince Edward Island is lucky to have survived, given that my home city of Charlottetown--a provincial capital, and site of an airport--would almost certainly targeted and that the very existence of CFB Summerside would doom the Island's second community. When your strategic warplans enable the massacre of almost half of the population of Prince Edward Island as a tertiary sideshow to the main depopulatory events, you know that you probably should go back to first principles.
No one did, though, not until it was almost too late. Take ABLE ARCHER 83. Hence, I suppose, the songs. I wonder: What were things like in Soviet-bloc popular music?
