Just A Dream, by Nena, is playing on the iPod. I like the songs on the 99 Luftballons album; not just the one hit, but she really didn’t get any airplay (in the U.S., anyway) after 99 Luftballons (the song).
Was Gabriele Kerner’s (Nena’s) career in English-speaking countries really derailed because of she was a small-town girl who didn’t know she needed to shave her armpits for audiences in other countries?
Uh, what?
I remember when “99 Luftballons” was on the radio and MTV, and later when she put out the English-language version “99 Red Balloons”. But I don’t remember ever hearing anything about the singer herself; certainly not about her armpits. She seemed to be one of the rare artists who catches lightning in a bottle in the Anglosphere with a foreign-language song, then disappears back into her own language community, a la Psy, Los Del Rio (“Macarena”) and O-Zone (“Dragostea Din Tea”).
When you see a one-hit wonder, don’t ask why their other songs weren’t hits. Ask why that one was. After all, the vast majority of artists are zero-hit wonders.
From The Guardian
Of all the European stars mistakenly thought of as one-hit wonders by the rest of the world, Nena might be able to claim the most cause for grievance. Britain was apparently more interested in her armpits than in follow-up songs to 99 Red Balloons
From the same article:
[B]ut she is closing in on 30 years at the top of the German charts. Helping make the Neue Deutsche Welle sound a major commercial force, songs like the brilliant Nur Geträumt and Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann fizzed with an irrepressible energy.
It doesn’t sound like she’s a one-hit wonder; it’s just that people in English-speaking countries only heard that one song, and I got the impression that the reason we only heard the one song is because she didn’t shave her armpits.
The album is certainly good. Would she have had more hits if she’d shaved her pits?
If you want the hits, shave the pits! -Johnny Cochrane’s lesser known saying.
All I know is, when she was on MTV with her luftballoons, her atavistic underarms really caught attention. I still thought she was cute, and if she wanted me as her groupie, I wouldn’t have objected.
But it’s hard for foreign language songs to get traction. Plus, it was the novelty of the hit being in German that caught attention. It actually isn’t that good, even in German, and far worse with that horrible English language version. Very “poppy”, kind of simplistic.
I would say her looks helped, rather than hindered, her appeal. Thank god and MTV, if I hadn’t seen her cuteness, I might never have got into the song. I learned German just so I could understand the lyrics.
Didn’t stop Patti Smith.
Well, yes, she had many hits in Germany. But different languages are different markets, and there’s very little relation between what will be hits between them. For some reason, one of her songs caught on in the Anglosphere, when ordinarily, one would expect zero of them to catch on.
How many hits has David Hasselhoff had in the US? Pretty sure he hasn’t shaved his pits. Perhaps he shaved his chest?
Pit hair? That’s what we’re basing her career on?
Actually, if you want to be shallow and judge people just on their appearance, she had a rebellious Patti Smith biker jacket look going on…
“Society isn’t going to tell me where to shave” would’ve bolstered that style rather than being a negative.
I can’t think of a single young German or Swiss woman who did shave their pits back then …[cogitating]… yeah, my experience is 100% underarm hair. And they were still popular (with the guys at least, in my limited experience).
My experience is anecdotal, but by the time 99 Luftballons came out, most early 20s females in Germany were shaving. Older German women were definitely more likely to have hair, but while Nena wasn’t unique, we did consider her an outlier.
Well, I missed the whole armpit hair kerfluffle, apparently. I vaguely remember the video for “99 Luftballons” as her wandering around a burned-out battleground in a black leather jacket; I don’t remember even seeing her arms, let alone her pits.
Mrs. SMV hates the song, but I kinda liked it - it was catchy and had a good sound - but not enough to make me seek out any more of her music. But if you want to know why she didn’t have a big career in the Anglosphere, I imagine it has more to do with her language than her armpits.
We recently had a thread about popular UK artists that never really landed in the US aside from maybe one hit. And there wasn’t even a language barrier there. Being popular in another language and having a single hit elsewhere is still quite a feat.
I thought her accent made that version kind of charming. Everyone’s a sewerhero
I missed the whole armpit hair stuff myself. Maybe I was too young to care. Anyway, my guess why she wasn’t bigger here was simply because she was a German singer. The English version of the song was … not the greatest, but I like the German language one. I mean, Falco had like a zillion and a half hits out in Austria – here he had “Rock Me Amadeus” and, to a much lesser extent “Vienna Calling.” (Though a cover of his “Der Kommisar” did chart well for After the Fire.) It’s just difficult for non-US acts to hit it huge in the US, especially outside the Anglosphere.
I was a big MTV fan back in the 80s and this is the very first time I’m hearing anything about Nena’s armpit hair.
The Guardian article specifically says the hair was a problem in Britain. From everything I’ve read the British rock press is even weirder than the rock press elsewhere, which is 99 kinds of weird. You’d need a Brit of a certain age to answer this because I’m betting the rest of the “English-speaking countries” have no idea this ever happened.
Next up: The Guardian reveals the real reason why The Singing Nun didn’t have a whole string of hits after “Dominique”.
Maybe they’re hoping this type of “journalism” will bring in more money than their incessant appeals for donations.
I disagree. I translated the lyrics back then, and they were schwer. I thought the English lyrics were inane. Compare:
English:
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
Versus German (translated):
Ninety-nine War Ministers
Matchstick and gas cannisters
Saw themselves as cunning people
Already scented the fat prey
Shouting, “War!” and wanting power
Man, who would have thought
That it will come to this one day
Uberfan of Nena here… Looking back through their early discography, I think they simply suffered from the sophomore slump. Their follow up album was ok, but had the feel of being a compilation of outtakes and b-sides of the previous session. Their next couple were even weaker, good enough for German language sales but nothing with the same breakthrough appeal. There are gems on those early followups, but a lot of low quality filler as well.
She was just a one hit wonder with limited appeal to non-German-speaking Anglophones.
I recall no discussion whatsoever of her armpits. Maybe that’s a weird British thing.
This.
We already knew that Eastern European women usually didn’t shave their underarms, at that time at least, because of the Olympics and other sports programs.