Whenever there's some political fuckery happening in the world the lyrics of this song pop into my head so here's an acoustic fingerstyle version of 99 Love Balloons (Luftballoons) by Nena!
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
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine 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
When ninety-nine red balloons go by
99 Decision Street
Ninety-nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super-scurry
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 ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine knights of the air
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a superhero
Everyone's a "Captain Kirk"
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine dreams I have had
In every one, a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standin' 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...
If you want to learn it the chords are D Em G A in a loop.
Mandela effect with Bjork
This part of the post is going to get kind of weird. I remember a cover of this song by Bjork and looked around to find it and can't anywhere! I found an old forum post asking if Bjork did a cover (everyone said no...) and I found some tweets from radio stations saying currently streaming: 99 Red Balloons by Bjork and the Sugarcubes, and also an old blog post saying people have confused Nena and Bjork.
Here's the thing, I am sure I have this track on an old hard drive somewhere, @vachemorte remembers it too. I have always been a big fan of Bjork so I have a hard time believing that the song was mislabelled and it wasn't her. Does anyone else remember this, did it exist? Has it been memory holed? HELP!
all the links from twitter and google about this song lead to 404/error pages...
To follow on twitter, personal account, Alien Art Hive Community account <3
PURE GOLD
Well done Julia, This is one of my favorite songs, first time I heard it on a movie, I heard different versions of it, one of them was also a punk band called Goldfinger.
Thanks for this beautiful acoustic cover π
TY this song is such a classic and always gets stuck in my head LOL
As I am not an advanced fanboy of Bjork (love her, but other names make my top) I cant give a light to the question; I'd rely on community consensus about it.
Tho, several possibilities are possible, we could speculate about...
But I dont want to speculate, just to share my piece of story like yours. I am a huge fan of Amon Tobin's '4 tonn mantiss' video (and the actual track ofc too). And (hehe) as I dont rely on streaming services and prefer to keep everything at hand at my PC, I do have both audio and video files. A while ago I wanted to share this track in my Amon Tobin #ttt post and - voyla! - suddenly... internet does not know such a track, looks like only Bonobo remix is out there, but where is the original ttrack?.. iTunes, spotify, Youtube know nothing about it, the tracklist of the corresponding LP in year 2024 seems a bit adjusted.
Ok, long story short, the solution to this riddle is simple: we don't have exactly a cancel culture here, but one of its mechanisms: a total cleansing of the information space. It allows
usthem to make already existing, material things - become never-existing. If we, the bearers of knowledge, die, where the newcomers will get knowledge about it?.. No idea. Digital archeology may become a tricly thing to do.And the reason for cleaning the world wide web from this track to the point of banality is stupid and simple.... who said 'money'? exactly, that's right. The track used a sample from some shitty song, whose releasing label probably almost drowned in its own drool, looking at Amon Tobin's royalties, and presented him with an exorbitant bill for using the sample. After he refused to pay, the track received a lifetime ban and cold storage. Sad. Although the track can still be obtained relatively easily, it cannot be removed from material CD releases, but seeing the video for the song may turn out to be an impossible mission - unless the community helps. I couldn't find any of Amon Tobin's early (gorgeous!) videos in decent video quality...
I wish the case with this BjΓΆrk track is not the same.
I am quite sure we had the mp3 on an old hard drive so we will look. You might be right that it was a copyright thing or something else that made the song disappear, so frustrating though! Fr we need to try to keep hard copies of everything it's scary how quickly it could just disappear π
Absolutely. Otherwise they beat us in this brave < sarkasm > shiny digital world. π
It is possible that this version was taken out of circulation for some reason. I think the lyrics are a beautiful reference to flying, to freedom, it's beautiful! Very good interpretation!π€
I suppose it's possible, I'm on the case π΅οΈ
I thought it was BjΓΆrkβs version of β99 Red Balloonsβ, but it didnβt sound how I remembered. Turns out, the German version β99 Luftballonsβ was what Iβd been thinking of all along. Maybe you remember this version too? It sounds closer to BjΓΆrk.
ππΆ
Yes the original German is 99 luft balloons but they also released an English version and there are a bunch of covers too. I guess if I manage to dig out my hard drive I will find the answer lol
Keep us updated :)