Driving home last night (or, I guess, this morning) I heard a BBC radio interview with Brent Mann, author of 99 Red Balloons and 100 Other All-Time Great One-Hit Wonders.
I sat down prepared to write a plea for what I thought was a glaring need in the world of music: a punk-rock cover version of Nena's classic 1980s hit. Somebody, I thought, needs to break down and rebuild that song the way the Ramones cut to the giddy heart of the Beach Boys "Do You Wanna Dance?" or the way Sid Vicious reinvented and reinvigorated "My Way."
The song's theme — an innocent romantic gesture unwittingly unleashing the apocalypse — seems apt for an angrier rendering. And it's tempo changes seem destined for a mosh pit. Somebody, I figured, needed to double the tempo, turn up the volume and fuzz up the guitars.
As it turns out, somebody already did. Lots of somebodies already did. And I am thus forced to confront the ugly truth that a younger, cooler person would probably already have heard, say, Goldfinger's or 7 Second's version of this song and would have known that it has become something of a favorite cover tune for just this sort of band. ("I am old, I am old. I shall wear my trousers rolled.") The upside: lots of cool new MP3s.
The plethora of cover versions shouldn't be a surprise. The song's tale of an over-eager war machine scurrying to respond to imagined threats seems timelier now than it did even in 1984.
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