Conversations in my house

[feuervogel]

I tweeted about this last week and meant to elaborate here, but I forgot.

Scene: last Wednesday, I'd come home from tai chi class, changed, and flopped on the couch with my phone to catch up on the twitter I'd missed. Ben's at the other end, and he starts talking about this trailer he downloaded on his PS3 for Call of Duty: Black Ops. (He wont get the game; he just likes trailers.)

Ben: Is there some famous music video from the 80s where two guys are standing on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, then start rocking out on guitars?

Me: Huh?

Ben: I downloaded this trailer for Call of Duty, and it HAS to be a reference to something, because it looks that way.

Me: Maybe I'd recognize it if I saw it?

Ben: [fires up the PS3 and the TV, starts playing this video]

Me (before the rating box has even left the screen): That's the Scorpions' "Wind of Change," dumbass. (laughing)

I would like to point out that at NO point did he mention that this trailer had an actual pop song in the background, as opposed to commissioned video game music. There may have also been a digression at one point about how it wouldn't have been logistically possible for people to stand on opposite sides of the wall at that time, given the death strip on the eastern side. (Though when the song was released in 1990, it would have been, in some areas.)

ETA: This is the video I'm a lot more familiar with. And now I know why the one I had bookmarked vanished. Guess what you'll be seeing again on 9 November.

Comments

[acari]

That's the Scorpions' "Wind of Change," dumbass.

Oh god I hate that song so much. SO MUCH.

[feuervogel]

Why's that? Other than it being a cheesy power ballad.

[acari]

I hate the song for itself (I have an actual physical reaction to the whistling I hate it so much *g*) and I find the band super aggravating. I think it's a combination of initial dislike and unending, grating overexposure. Every year around 9. November the main guy is sitting in some talkshow being very earnest about how they helped bring down the Wall by playing on Red Square. At least when Hasselhoff's doing that it's funny.

Ack, so much hate.

[feuervogel]

Seriously? Dude, rock music didn't end communism... smh.

When that song came out, I was still in my hair metal phase, so that's my excuse ;) I moved on to "alternative," for whatever that meant in 1992. NIN, Depeche Mode, uh... Violent Femmes... yeah, sort of a reversal there.

[acari]

Yeah, I get that playing in Moskow was special and the song does indeed capture a certain something in the air around that time, but it gets so tiring hearing it again and again and again. I'd rather listen to Westernhagen's 'Freiheit' or GDR bands from that time.

Let's not talk about what I was listening to in 1992.

[feuervogel]

I can imagine. AFAIK, American radio doesn't play it anymore, unless it's like "classic" rock (dammit, why is my teenage music "classic" now?) or something. I don't listen to the radio, except NPR, and then only when I'm driving.

Tell me more about these Wende-era GDR bands and where I can find them on the internet, please. Are there any punk bands among them?

[anacoluthon.livejournal.com]

That's hilarious.
Since I don't know that song, I think if I heard it in a game trailer I wouldn't be sure if it was an existing song or if the game company had just hired someone to write a big-hair power ballad. With flamethrowing guitar-guns.

[feuervogel]

It was all over the radio and MTV in 1990-91! (That explains why Ben didn't know it; he only discovered 80s pop culture in 1997.) The guy wrote it in response to the fall of the Wall and the Soviet Union.

I'm always reminded any time I think about the Scorpions of this guy Jens I met in Marburg, who was a long-haired metal fan and a chem major in the year above me I think. One day at lunch, he did an imitation of them on an MTV commercial or something, in English with an outrageous German accent, "This is Rudolf Schenker, and we are the Scorpions" or something like that. Good times.

PS: founding member Michael Schenker and his Flying V might be a little familiar.

[kirin]

I wouldn't normally have bothered downloading a Black Ops DLC trailer, but this one said it was about the Berlin Wall, so I figured it might be relevant to someone's interests. ;)