Welcome back music lovers!
Within a few days of this post we will reach the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The coverage we got in the US was probably minimal compared to what was going on in western Europe at the time, but the impression I got in 1988 and 1989 was that something very huge was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. So theme music is going to be from around this era. I will see if I can dig up some footage of Latvian tape jockeys of the era. That stuff was something else. In the meantime, in 1988, New Order issued a 1988 remix of its classic song Blue Monday:
In the meantime, I am extremely busy, and dealing with some chaos in my neighborhood. Long story. I’ll post as I can.
Bar is always open. So is the jukebox.
And let’s remember to tear down walls, rather than build them up.
I may have shared this before, but I think that given the amount of flux that existed during the late 1980s and into the 1990s as the Soviet Bloc was disintegrating, there was quite the cross-pollination of popular culture. In this case I will focus on the music. Tape jockeys were such a Soviet thing, and I admire the creativity involved in trying to figure out how to bring rave to eastern Europe without the equipment that we westerners would have taken for granted. Anyway, enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xuy0GAsnNQ
Here is the same crew in the Netherlands as part of what appears to be a documentary. I think I have shown this before. The last few years during Perestroika and as the Soviet Bloc was imploding were ones where there seemed to be unprecedented communication across both sides of the proverbial wall. Heck, I still loved seeing scene reports in Maximum RocknRoll from Eastern Europe – didn’t happen often, but it did happen. Obviously MRR was a punk zine, and these cats are clearly techno, but you can also see the same thing happening w/other scenes around that time. Cool stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbjqOHYRE60
I’ll have some drink recipes later, but first I’m sharing the video of the song I associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Right Here, Right Now by Jesus Jones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MznHdJReoeo
That’s the one I tend to most easily associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall as well. We knew that the world was changing.