Debateably the best song ever....
When I was a kid, my best friend and I spent hours lying on the floor listening to 99 Luftballons. Hours. We wouldn't listen to it in English, only the original German. We didn't give a shit about the rest of the album. It wasn't that good. I don't know why we decided to hate the English version...it was just as catchy. But no, we had to be purists. We might not know what that sexy German girl was singing about, but it was sexy and German, and that's how we wanted it. Besides, we assumed (wise beyond our years), nothing is ever as good once it's been Americanized. It was probably a bad translation. It probably didn't make any sense. Years later, stuck in rush hour traffic on a miserable day in a car with a broken tape deck, I switched the radio on and there it was, that pretty, poppy song...in English, of course, but I was desperate, so I left it on...and fell in love all over again. Turns out its this crazy well penned ballad about love and innocence lost in the face of mass hysteria, war mania, and full on Armageddon. Its dark and lyrical and heartbreakingly pretty, with exuberant little bursts of humor in the face of madness, and a dreamy, delicately Lovecraftian conclusion that leaves me breathless everytime. I want to animate it, its that good.
You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base bugs in the software
Flash the message, something's out there
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
99 red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky as 99 red balloons go by
99 Decision street
99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super flurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by
99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone's a super hero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
99 dreams I have had
In every one a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you, and let it go