“Turn your back on mother nature:
—Everybody wants to rule the world” (Tears for Fears)

Perhaps because I was born in the 90s and lived most of my life in Chile, I grew-up somewhat oblivious to the veiled but seemingly inescapable nuclear-doom that took over the 80s collective imaginary. In fact, every summer vacation, while I traveled with my family to the beach, we sang along Righeira’s Vamos a la Playa (We Go to the Beach)—it seemed like the perfect anthem for our touristy goal of lying under sun and skipping the salty waves: vamos a la playa oh, oh, oh, oh.

Sadly and ironically, I was unaware that the upbeat disco song by the Italian duo Righeira was about the after-effects of the atomic-bomb; their lyrics sounded hallucinogenic and surreal and therefore fun to vocalize: “let’s go to the beach/the bomb exploded/radiation gives you a tan with a tint of blue/the radioactive air ruffles your hair/the sea is finally clean/no more stinky fishes, only fluorescent water” (vamos a la playa, la bomba estalló/las radiaciones tuestan y matizan de azul/el viento radioactivo despeina los cabellos/al fin el mar es limpio/no más peces hediondos, sino agua fluorescentes). Moreover, and until yesterday, I ignored that back in the 80s the song occupied the third place on the West German charts (Klimke and Stapane120), and that it was one among the many pop-songs that addressed both the fear and the absurdity of a very possible nuclear war. How eerie it is to think now that the songs that cheered our beach-trips were also the political and aesthetic representations of a stance against nuclear-annihilation.

Although this musical scenario appears to be both ludicrous and grotesque, I believe it vividly represents the zeitgeist of the 80s, for the “artists cosmos” of that time —with all its surreal rhetoric— sought to counterbalance the “new American nuclear weapons” that had the power to “trigger nuclear doom, threatening to destroy the planet” (Klimke and Stapane 123). As the artists from 1982’s Peace Festival in Germany put it: their music festivals were a strong opposing force precisely because they combined “criticism and joy”, “opposition and fun”. One may be prone to sneer at their colorful idealism, however, if it were not for the strategic use of music and ironic criticism, the world of today might be nothing but space-dust.

I believe it was this restless spirit that Germany’s Green Party decided to embrace, thus moving away from conventional politics and exploiting, in a very strategic and organized way, the non-rational aspects that music and art had to offer. The artists from the Grüne Raupe declared: “we have to appeal to more than just bare [rational] understanding […] activism arises not only through insight into necessities but also through an inner emotion that is often triggered by sung and structured lyrics, by music and dance” (Klimke and Stapane 131). In fact, back in the 1960s The Beatles had already stood on that ground, for they mocked American nationalism and muddled the underlying binarism of good (U.S.) versus evil (U.S.S.R.) by singing from the perspective of someone that is glad to be back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.R! As the letters “u” and “s” morphed into the unexpected assemblage of “u-s-s-r”, the feeling of “being home” became foreign, obliging the listener to engage with a different affective setup. The Californian melody that accompanied the lyrics helped to accomplish the perceptive trick of blurring the lines between the “u-s” (pun intended) and the “other”, consequently denouncing the absurdity of such conflict/affair between nations.

In this sense, the Green Party and its playful engagement with the musical scene of the 80s reminds us of the “spontaneous anti-aesthetic” (Klimke and Stapane 132) that has the power to lift people from a state of stupefaction and defeat, and, through a language that is essentially performative, stir people’s imaginations—ultimately giving rise to a collective space that fosters alternative forms of futurity, in which “dying young” and “living forever”[1] have become the central axis of an uncertain and barren present. This was also the main goal of the Grüne Raupe’s artists: i.e. “to have uncompromising courage to tell the truth and to seek utopia; to be a politics with imagination” (129). It seems that the only effective weapons for fighting the silent and stable violence that wobbles under the nuclear-nonsense are the electric and surreal sounds that speak of/from fear and rage[2]. The medium is the message!

From Germany’s music-scene we have the examples of Nena’s 99 Luftballons and Alphaville’s Forever Young—both artists sing in a cheerful manner about the childish and obstinate games that have the power to obliterate our sense of ecological-wisdom[3] and ecological-safety. We can also find earlier examples from the English music-scene: Kate Bush’s 1980s hit Breathing depicts the invisible toxicity that permeates a mother’s womb and feeds radioactive particles to the fetus; in a world in which after the blast chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung, all living things seem to become tombs within the womb, or to perish before growth. Indeed, this reminds us of a home (a mother/a planet) that suddenly develops into a pool of toxic waste, thus devouring its own offspring in an attempt to defend herself from a fictitious enemy (an “other”, a “u-s-s-r”).

-Kate Bush dressed as a fetus inside a (plastic) womb-

The year before Kate Bush’s Breathing, Pink Floyd released the song Mother (1979), which also portrays the anxiety and the sense of loss that springs from war, deception, and threat. Its most striking image, I believe, comes from the lyrics that speak of a mother that promises protection, yet, as she attempts to keep her promise, she also implants the seed of fear and destruction in her son:

Hush now baby, baby, don’t you cry.
Mama’s gonna make all your nightmares come true.
Mama’s gonna put all her fears into you.
Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing.
She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing.
Mama’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
Ooh baby, ooh baby, ooh baby,
Of course mama’s gonna help build the wall.

This cannot but remind us of the sense of protection that an age of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy tries to sell us, and in which nations (such as America in the 80s) become abusive mothers, building walls and making all our nightmares come true. However, there is only one thing that this monstrous-mother might let you do: she might let you sing. When the senseless threat of a nuclear war has permeated every corner of our homes, pleas can only take the shape of music, of melodic tunes that escape the conventional-rational arguments of a politicized universe. And, it is precisely this tangential mode of representation that challenged the state of affairs imposed by a slow but omnipresent form of violence during the 80s —momentarily breaking the ruling Kūki[4] of the time. In Lefevre’s terms, one could argue that during the Cold War the live-in space built by musicians was the antidote to the conceived-space built by an omnipresent and hegemonic nuclear empire (Manabe 16). By being boisterous, grotesque, and bold, music sought to create both a second chance and a second space where fetuses could be safely nourished through a non-contaminated umbilical cord.

In a New York Times’ article (2016), a writer argues that in recent years Nena’s 99 Luftballons has taken on a second life within karaoke-bars, where it has become a song mostly sung by women: “there’s something about the sense of doom in that song that female karaoke singers seem to respond to”—I wonder how much of this has to do with a sense of restoration, or with a sense of western relief regarding the almost complete loss of that which we call “home”/“mother”.

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[1]Lyrics from Alphaville’s Forever Young.
[2]It is interesting to pause on the 80s aesthetic, for the musicians’ hairdos and garments make them look like the survivors of a nuclear bombing, i.e. all disheveled and covered by a combination of dark and neon colors.
[3]This was one of the Green Party’s ideological pillars.
[4]This is the Japanese concept for “atmosphere”: “a system of social, psychological, and political pressures requiring compliance with group norms” (Manabe 112).
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Works Cited:

__Klimke, Martin and Laura Stapane. “From Artists from Peace to the Green Caterpillar”. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fears, and the Cold War of the 1980s, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
__Manabe, Noriko. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Oxford University Press, 2015.
__Edwards, Gavin. Missed the ’80s? Nena, and ‘99 Luftballons,’ Alights Live in America. New York Times, Oct. 2, 2016.

Music Mentioned in the Blog-Post:

__Everybody Wants to Rules the World by Tears for Fears.
__Vamos a la Playa by Righeira.
__Back in the U.S.S.R. by The Beatles.
__Breathing by Kate Bush.
__Mother by Pink Floyd.
__99 Luftballons by Nena.
__Forever Young by Alphaville.

Images:
__1st image taken from Pink Floyd’s movie The Wall.
__2nd image taken from Kate Bush’s music-video Breathing.