Song of the Day 5/24: Scorpions, “Wind of Change”
One consequence of the Trump presidency has been a recalibration of reality, and what is possible within its supposed confines, a condition that is not contained to matters relating to Trump.
I can think of no other explanation for the weirdest story of the month, a podcast series by Orwell prize-winning US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe that examines whether the West German metal band Scorpions’ power ballad “Wind of Change” was written by someone in the CIA.
Sounds crazy, right? But this is an outfit that wanted to kill Fidel Castro with a cigar, so it’s not impossible.
Keefe says he first heard rumors about this a decade ago, and it made a certain kind of sense.
“The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. Wind of Change was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Germany. It had this soft-power message that the intelligence service wanted to promote.”
The song appears on Scorpions’ 1990 “Crazy World” LP, their eleventh in a career highlighted by their hit “Rock Me Like a Hurricane.” German rock fans, witnessing the collapse of the Iron Curtain, quickly adopted it as an anthem of change. Miene says he wrote the song after the band co-headlined (with Ozzy Osbourne) the Moscow Music Peace Festival in August 1989.
The lyrics are clunky enough to have been written by anyone, CIA agent or German speaker, with a slippery grasp of American idioms.
The wind of change
Blows straight into the face of time
Like a storm wind that will ring the freedom bell
For peace of mind
Let your balalaika sing
What my guitar wants to say
I can’t reveal any spoilers because I don’t know any, but Miene, for his part, got a big kick out of his interview with Keefe. “I thought it was very amusing and I just cracked up laughing. It’s a very entertaining and really crazy story but like I said, it’s not true at all. Like you American guys would say, it’s fake news.”
