2 Good Ones and a Bad One

Having always been strangely moved by The Scorpions' "Winds of Change," and having grouped it together in my mind with Jesus Jones' "Right Here, Right Now," I was particularly delighted by this short piece from Hua Hsu. It also touches on the amazingly awful Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire," which a late night discussion among my own friends once nominated as crappiest popular song ever.

It was impossible to misread Meine’s teleology: “The world is closing in / And did you ever think / That we could be so close, like brothers?” The previous November, the Scorpions had witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now it was time for the Soviet Union to implode, the secret mission of glasnost fulfilled. To Meine and his woolly comrades, it was the natural order of things—“The wind of change blows straight / Into the face of time.” Matthias Jabs followed with a lengthy guitar solo, a more direct expression of what freedom sounded like. The future was in the air, and Meine could feel it everywhere. By sheer coincidence, the Soviet Union collapsed the very next year, in August 1991.

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