Well, not new now… It came out in 2002.
Original video/version
New video/version
Original version: Gotta love those '80s clothes! And the hair. Actually, Nena’s hair looks pretty good, even 25 years on. Not like a lot of '80s styles, which really look overdone. The early '80s was ‘my time’ for music. I loved the New Wave. And I liked this song in particular; first just because I like the way it sounds, and also because I could speak some German at the time and I liked the lyrics. (The German lyrics are much better than the English ones.)
New version: What’s the adjective I want? The tune has changed. It’s more… dreamy? It sounds very much like a lot of songs by female artists in the early-2000s. But I like it. Not as much as the original, but my musical tastes are eclectic and didn’t end in with the '80s. I can dig it. The video though doesn’t make sense…
The story in a nutshell: A couple of kids buy some toy balloons and let them go. They’re picked up on radar and a general sends interceptors to check them out and give the alarm if they’re UFOs. Now, the fighter pilots are a bunch of jocks. That, as the song says, it what starts the ‘fireworks’ – the pilots firing on the balloons. The neighbouring countries didn’t know what was going on, and they felt angemacht. I asked a German woman back in the '80s what angemacht meant, and she said ‘if you’re making something and you put one thing in with another, that’s angemacht.’ But in context I came to the conclusion that the colloquial meaning was ‘being messed with’, ‘being put upon’, or ‘being screwed over’. Defense Ministers are calling for war and grasping for power. They can already see the booty from war profiteering. So war comes. After 99 years of war there are no victors. The world lies in rubble. The narrator (the girl who set loose the balloons – miraculously still alive after a century) trudges in her circuit. She finds a balloon, thinks of her (presumably dead) boyfriend, and lets it go.
The video for the new version of the song takes place at a beach. There’s no indication of any wars going on. No images that match the story. And there are a lot of missing lines. These lines (pardon my translation) are missing:
*99 Fighter pilots
Each one was a greater warrior
Saw themselves as Captain Kirk
That’s what caused the big fireworks
The neighbours had no idea
And felt themselves ill-used
So everyone shot at a horizon
of 99 toy balloons
99 War Ministers
Matches and gas cans
Saw them selves as sly people
They could already see the fat booty
Shouting ‘War!’ and wanting power
Man, who would have thought
That when ‘The Big one’ finally came
It would be because of 99 toy balloons?*
So the new version has the kids buying balloons, the Air Force sending up interceptors, and then a wasteland after 99 years of war with no explanation of how it came about. It doesn’t have the anger caused by the Cold War paranoia and escalating defence budgets. Without the middle verses the story is incomplete. It lacks context. Seen that way it seems to be a case of ‘Hey, let’s make a few Marks off of this old ditty.’ Still, just as ear candy, I like it.
And after five children and at 41 or 42 when the video was made, Nena still looks hot.
