first round

(2) Nena, “99 Luftballons”
floated by
(15) Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight”
241-196
and will play in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/11/23.

Game Time Remaining

Janet Dale on “99 Luftballons”

Heute zieh' ich meine Runden
Seh' die Welt in Trümmern liegen
Hab' 'nen Luftballon gefunden
Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen

West Berlin, West Germany 1982

As the final strains of the Rolling Stone’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” died out, Carlo Karges watched bunches of colorful balloons released from the stage floating over the cheering crowd. He wondered what would happen if they “were blown over to the East” crossing the Wall both surrounding and dividing the city “and triggered paranoia there?”
This was the scene at Waldbühne, an amphitheater built for the 1936 Summer Olympics where all the men’s and women’s gymnastics events were held.
It went on to become the perfect place for live concerts beginning in the 1980s featuring acts like Bob Marley, Def Leppard, Queen, David Bowie, Elton John, Depeche Mode, Tina Turner, Peter Gabriel, as well as the Rolling Stones that particular June night.

This story as reported to The Spiegel is part of the lore of “99 Luftballons” the German-language hit by Nena that went to #1 on song charts in at least 8 countries. In the U.S., the song peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of March 3, 1984.
Guess what was #1 that week? “Jump” by Van Halen. And #3? “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper. Could it be anymore stacked? Sure. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was #4, but I digress.
Carlo Karges was the guitarist for the band, and he wrote the lyrics soon after attending the concert, while keyboardist Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen wrote the music. The new song was brought to lead singer Gabriele Susanne Kerner (the Nena of Nena) and it was added to their self-titled debut album and released in January 1983.

Cold War in Simple Terms

After World War II, the ongoing political rivalry and hostility between the United States (and its western bloc allies) and the Soviet Union (and its eastern bloc allies) was known as the Cold War.
Germany had been split into two with the Soviet Union controlling the eastern portion while the western portion was controlled by the U.S., Britain, and France. Because the pre-war capital city (Berlin) was located within the East, it too was divided the same way. East Berlin was controlled by the Soviet Union and West Berlin had sectors controlled by the U.S., Britain, and France.

In 1961, as tensions rose between the two powers, a physical barrier was constructed by the GDR which became known as the Berlin Wall. Not only did it divide the city, but it wrapped around the western-controlled sectors as well. Train lines, major and minor roads, woodlands, rivers, and lakes were also dissected.
Therefore, West Berlin effectively existed as a 185-square-mile island of about 2 million people floating in Soviet-controlled territory (East Germany).

Anatomy of Berlin Wall

Border
Outer strip
Concrete wall with rounded top
Anti-vehicle ditch
"Death strip" sand bank
Guard road
Lighting
Observation towers
Spikes or tank traps
Electrified fence with alarms
Inner wall
Restricted zone

Song Translated

In a recent article published in Forbes, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Haven explained: "People don't understand the irony of the song [“99 Luftballons”] when you juxtapose the peppy music with the actual lyrics." Matthew J. Schmidt went on to say the song is a protest song about the risk of a nuclear holocaust.
Even though there was an English version released (“99 Red Balloons”) it did not chart in the U.S. I don’t ever remember hearing this version until at least a decade later, and when I did—I knew it sounded “wrong.”
A new story line was added, the point of view was shifted, and the message of the song was lost in translation. My own thought translation of the original German lyrics goes something like this:

The audience is invited to listen to what could happen if 99 innocent balloons floating toward the “horizon” were mistaken for something else (like a UFO) by a “General” hellbent on confrontation.
A squadron of 99 jet planes might be sent to intercept the balloons. Then these balloons would be shot down by pilots pretending to be great warriors like “Captain Kirk.”
Citizens would be completely caught off-guard and afraid of what was happening so 99 War Ministers (who think they are smart) would, as a show of power, stupidly declare WAR!
Who would think this could happen due to 99 innocent balloons?
This action causes a 99-year war, the original generals and war ministers are gone and there are no winners.
Finally, as the world is lying in ruins, the speaker finds a balloon and reflects on what has happened.

The song is thematically similar to the 1983 American blockbuster film War Games, which features instead of balloons, a computer game of Global Thermonuclear War nearly sending the world into nuclear annihilation.

Paranoia

Carlo Karges did not overstate the paranoia of the time period. In the same Spiegel article he said, “…paranoia rules our lives…because whoever strikes first has the better cards.”
There have been flirtations with the threat of nuclear war (North Korea and the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and spy craft (Chinese Spy Balloon) over the past 5 years, which for those old enough to remember, harkens straight back to the Cold War dread of the 1980s.
You can hear this dread in “99 Luftballons” which almost begins like a fairytale as Nena sings (in German): “Do you have time to listen to a song I’d like to sing to you about 99 balloons floating toward the horizon and what could happen?”
Then the synth beat drops.
In the video Nena is fresh-faced with dark hair featuring Farrah Fawcett feathered sides and bangs teased toward the sky. She is wearing large dangling black heart earrings with a white skull & bones in the center, reminiscent of a DANGER! sign.

She walks through a desolate forest surrounded by landmines or maybe after an imagined nuclear fallout (this was 3 years before Chernobyl). There are colorful balloons on the ground and smoke bombs going off behind the band.
By the end, night falls in the forest and the smoke bombs are replaced by actual firebombs going off as the whole band continues to perform the song.

More Cold War Songs

“Heroes” David Bowie
“Crazy Train” Ozzy Osbourne
“1999” Prince
“2 Minutes to Midnight” Iron Maiden
“New Year’s Day” U2
“It’s a Mistake” Men at Work
“Two Tribes” Frankie Goes to Hollywood
“Hammer to Fall” Queen
“Forever Young” Alphaville
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” Tears for Fears
“Land of Confusion” Genesis
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” Billy Joel

West Berlin, West Germany 1985

The airplane banked so far to the left, the tops of buildings appeared in the tiny window, as if we were watching a tilted T.V. and I thought my whole family was going to fall into the city. Minutes later, our collective bodies bounced as the wheels hit the Tempelhof runway instead.
This is my memory of our arrival, approximately four years before the Wall would be torn down. Of course, 7-year-old me didn’t know or understand the geopolitics of it all at the time, it was just another place we were going to live because my father was an “Army man.”
My father, mother, baby sister, and I lived in the American sector at Marshallstrasse 5, adjacent to Clay headquarters and Truman Plaza, which featured a shopping center, movie theater, library, Burger King, and other small American shops sponsored by the US Department of Defense to supply soldiers and their families.
The walk to Thomas A. Roberts elementary school was less than 5 minutes. It’s one of the places I remember most during the 24-months my father was part of the Berlin Brigade. I also remember the Youth Activities (YA) Center where I played air hockey and the Cole Sports Center where I had gymnastics lessons.

Escape to the West

Even though the official purpose of the Berlin Wall (“Antifascistischer Schutzwall”) was to keep “Western fascists” or ideas from entering East Germany to undermine “the socialist state,” in reality it existed to keep East Germans from escaping to the West.
From August 1961 to November 1989 between 140 and 170 people were killed or died trying to get over, under, or around the Wall. But also during the same time period, more than 5,000 managed to escape across the border.
Less than a year after we arrived in the city, an East German dump truck weighed down with seven tons of gravel dodged gunfire from guards and smashed through four barriers at Checkpoint Charlie located less than a mile away from the Brandenburg Gate at the center of the city . Not only was the driver, his girlfriend, and their 8-month-old baby successful in making it to the West, but they were uninjured.
Their escape was called one of the “most spectacular” by police and their identities were withheld and under longstanding West German practice, the three were allowed to stay.

Games We Play

Behind our apartment building at Marshallstrasse 5 was a large area for children to play featuring a sandbox, wooden swing set, and a slide. The grass was well-maintained, and a smattering of native pines provided nice shade.
A few times I remember playing “war” against kids who lived in a nearby apartment building. My best friend Janessa and I would spend the morning gathering fallen pinecones, collecting them in the two-level wooden fort attached to the slide.
In the end, we would always end up having to surrender because we would run out of ammunition.
Janessa and I would also play “spies.” She would use her mother’s large accounting calculator and I would use my Speak & Math as “transmitters” We’d make up scenarios and then spend time watching and recording the “movements” of people going in and out of nearby buildings or cars leaving and returning to parking lots.
Even though our parents managed to keep what was happening all around us at a distance, obviously it filtered down in ways they never realized.

Reflections

At the end of 1987, my father was assigned to a new duty station, so we left West Berlin. Unlike our arrival, this time we drove. After all our paperwork was secured, we exited the city through Checkpoint Bravo and drove the 110-miles through East Germany to Checkpoint Alpha at the East/West (Inner) German Border.
I remember being in the backseat with a coloring book and crayons as our car went through the first checkpoint. East German guards in green uniforms looked into our car windows and possibly the trunk. I remember holding up a picture I was coloring so a guard could see it.
I have no memory of the actual drive or crossing the second checkpoint. I know stopping along the Autobahn was prohibited. Maybe I fell asleep while we listened to Armed Forces Network radio.
Recently my father asked if I remembered the spy who lived in our apartment building in Berlin.
No, of course not.
He went on to tell me about a man who would leave for weeks at a time, changing out the German license plate on his non-descript Volkswagen whenever he left.
My mind was blown, but maybe it shouldn’t have been. That’s just what it was like living in West Berlin during the Cold War—brushing against history, and not even realizing it.

The author in her military-furnished bedroom at Marshallstrasse 5 circa 1986. She is wearing a pink German sweatsuit and there is an East German cabbage-patch type doll on her desk. She has recently begun research on a memoir focusing on her time living in West Berlin during the Cold War.

steph brown on “Rapper’s Delight”

Have you ever went over a friend's house to eat
And the food just ain't no good?
I mean the macaroni's soggy, the peas are mushed,
And the chicken tastes like wood?
So you try to play it off like you think you can
By saying that you're full
And then your friend says, "Mama, he's just being polite.
He ain't finished, uh-uh, that's bull!"
So your heart starts pumpin' and you think of a lie
And you say that you already ate
And your friend says, "Man, there's plenty of food."
So he piles some more on your plate.
While the stinky food's steamin', your mind starts to dreamin'
Of the moment it's time to leave
And then you look at your plate and your chicken's slowly rottin'
Into something that looks like cheese.
Oh so you say, "That's it, I gotta leave this place.
I don't care what these people think.
I'm just sittin' here makin' myself nauseous
With this ugly food that stinks."
So you bust out the door while it's still closed
Still sick from the food you ate
And then you run to the store for quick relief
From a bottle of Kaopectate.
—Rapper’s Delight, 9:30-10:21

That’s it. Those 51 seconds are the argument for the greatness of “Rapper’s Delight.”
I could tell you that this song represents a watershed moment in the history of American music, the moment when hip hop crossed over into the top forty for the first time, and that that tells us something profound about American culture, about popular aesthetics, about the evolution of our shared history and sensibilities. [1] But if you’ve made it through this tortuously-cadenced verse that describes trying to hork down “chicken slowly rottin’/into something that looks like cheese” [2] and concludes by rhyming “food you ate” with “Kaopectate,” and your hand isn’t drifting towards the “vote Sugarhill Gang” button, I may have already lost you.
This verse is also the moment in which the song becomes a metaphor for the experience of listening to this song: in 2023, submitting to the entirety of “Rapper’s Delight” feels like nothing so much as 14 minutes and 38 seconds of being forcibly fed an overlarge serving of dried-out chicken. White meat only.

The hip hop community was like ‘What the…who the fuck is that? Like who the fuck is that? What is this shit? What are they doing to our art form? You know what I mean, it’s like, this is the first introduction they’re gonna get to, like, what we do, to what we’ve been doing for like seven years?’ —Grandmaster Caz, interview in Hip-Hop Evolution
We hated it. That was the worst piece of shit stupid ass song that every-fuckin-body liked, and then people would come to us and say ‘you know, y’all need to make a record like that’ and we’d be like ‘Well how we going to make a piece of shit like that?’ —Melle Mel, interview in Hip-Hop Evolution

The Sugarhill Gang should win this tournament because this song is simultaneously crucial to the trajectory of 40 years of hip hop and popular music more broadly and because it could only ever be a one hit wonder. It is in its essence a one hit wonder, and more importantly it deserves that fate. Had Sugarhill Gang ever again hit the Hot 100, it would have irreversibly unbalanced some cosmic scale.
“Rapper’s Delight” appeared in the fall of 1979, and in early January of 1980 it hit #37 on the Billboard Hot 100, securing its future place in this tournament by a mere five days. Its place in music history is cemented by its status as the first rap record to cross over to radio, as well as the first to chart. It’s also notable that despite a shorter radio release, the song got radio play in its 14-minute-plus entirety. And if you know anything about the song beyond “ho-tel, mo-tel, Holiday Innnnnn,” it’s probably the anecdote about Sugarhill Gang being made up of three guys—Big Bank Hank, Master Gee, and Wonder Mike—who weren’t experienced rappers, who had never performed together, who were pulled from a pizzeria, thrown in a studio, and cut the entire track in a single take, in a bid to be the first to monetize the emerging sound of the South Bronx for a mainstream audience.
It worked.
At least in part. “Rapper’s Delight” showed that rap could sell—it remains the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. It destroyed 70s rappers’ belief that the unit in which rap was best appreciated was the nightlong party, or failing that, the 90-minute cassette. The question, for those rappers, was not how such a long single track could succeed commercially, it was how anyone could get at rap’s complexities in such a short slice.
But decades later, the indignation of Bronx-based rappers Grandmaster Caz and Melle Mel remains palpable. Hip Hop Evolution is worth watching for Caz intoning “who the fuck is that?” alone. But “What are they doing to our art form?” is the better question for my purposes, and in this moment, Caz’s horror is real. Sugarhill Gang were, in the words of hip hop historian Jeff Chang, “rap amateurs, a no-name group using partly stolen rhymes—the very definition of a group with no style.” If style emerges organically through the process of integrating separate personalities into a coherent whole, it is unsurprising that “Rapper’s Delight” sounds like an assemblage of disparate parts scattered over a Chic sample. [3]
Hip hop works by working the break beats, or breaks—the moments between verses in which most of a song’s vocals and instruments drop out, leaving a percussion line that emphasizes the ongoing rhythm. DJs carefully cultivated and guarded their archive of breaks, going so far as to soak their labels off their records to prevent other DJs from identifying them and stealing their breaks. [4] DJs reputations were made by their skill, but also by their catalogs. Laying down vocals over a studio band rather than over a DJ mixing removed the DJ, and his archive, from the production process. Demoting the DJ and his on-the-spot mix of breaks made the MC’s work easier, and paved the way for the dominance of rapper-producers in later decades. It led to the homogenization of studio rap’s sound, at least temporarily. The DJ’s curated archive of breaks let him introduce contingency not only into the timing of the performance, but also into the material it incorporates, generating an unpredictable sonic environment to which the MC had to creatively adapt. All this changed in the studio at Sugar Hill Records. Sugar Hill’s use of a band instead of a DJ, as Loran Kajikawa notes, gave Sugarhill Gang the “stability and symmetry” of a verse structure that was “strictly regularized…to rap over.” Ideally, this would give an MC the ability to introduce narrative and stylistic complexity in their lyrics. Lyrically, what Sugarhill Gang did with that structure on “Rapper’s Delight” was negligible.[5] The casual misogyny is casual, and “leave” rhymes with “cheese.”
This brings us to the woman who is, by some accounts, the villain of the piece: Sylvia Robinson, the Sugar Hill Records producer who put the group together after hearing Lovebug Starski rap and failing to persuade him to record what he was doing for commercial release. Robinson stepped into hip hop’s path and undeniably set rap on a new trajectory. (Whether you thought that was a good thing may have come down to whether or not she owed you money.) Robinson made rap a moneymaker, but she also fundamentally changed the power dynamics that had given it its previous form. Pre-Sugar Hill, the DJ drove rap from his position behind the turntable. Sylvia wrested that control in the direction of MCs and producers. This fundamental alteration to rap’s structure is Sugarhill Gang’s primary contribution to the genre’s history.
Of course, there’s a version of this story that finds in Robinson a profoundly sympathetic young female musician trying to make a career in the 50s and 60s, who as the talented head of a celebrated independent label in the late 70s and 80s was never quite given her due as an influential rap producer, because of her gender and Sugar Hill Records’ sketchy business practices. There’s the story of Robinson producing Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message, which in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s visit to, and horrified flight from, the South Bronx in 1980 became the first rap album to carry a serious political critique. This essay isn’t that story. Reading Sylvia through “Rapper’s Delight” only ends one way, even though we might want to accept The Message as her penance, if we were the ones in charge of adjudicating such things. We’re not. Exit Sylvia.
The commercial success of the studio band format on “Rappers’ Delight” ensured that the DJ’s ear for the more eclectic breaks would be sidelined in the studio recording process. Some people also point to the moment of this success as the “death of hip hop.” If pre-1979 hip hop DJs had the musical appetite of an omnivorous beast with the gut PH of a turkey vulture, then “Rapper’s Delight” envisioned a hip hop culture that was just eating the same dry chicken, over and over for as long as the money lasts.
Maybe you think I’m being unfair. It’s probably true that I’m underplaying how much fun the Sugarhill Gang demonstrably had in live performances of this song. While writing this essay, I talked to Liz Lindau, an ethnomusicologist and professor who teaches “Rapper’s Delight” in her popular music history class at Cal State Long Beach. She tells me that her students see humor as one of the continuities between this track and contemporary rap, and that one thing the song implicitly did was allow radio rap to be funny, even goofy. To quote her description of the song, “There’s a groove, it repeats, I don’t know. But ‘Wet Ass Pussy’ is funny.” It might be true that I can’t hear this track at this distance without hearing it across Illmatic, across “Fight the Power,” “Fuck tha Police,” or “C.R.E.A.M.,” Lauryn Hill’s “Lost Ones” or even The Message—across all the history that this song, you might argue, made possible. To that I’d say: if Big Bank Hank was looking to be judged with scrupulous fairness, he should have cut the line “I can bust you out with my super sperm.”
Hip hop died before I was born, but of course, hip hop will never die. Even “Rapper’s Delight” couldn’t kill it.

What does it mean to deserve to be a one-hit wonder?
Strangely enough, as I’m writing and thinking and living inside the 14 minutes of this song, it’s a few lines from the early 20th-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats that return out of nowhere to illuminate the essential nature of “Rapper’s Delight,” and by extension, The Sugarhill Gang, for me. At the end of his poem “No Second Troy,” after ruminating on an aging Helen of Troy’s diminished capacity for destruction, the poet looks at Helen and asks:

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

It’s the “being what she is” that matters here: the Sugarhill Gang weren’t built to be a group, let alone a crew or a gang. They were a conjuncture, a technology through which some of the forms of hip hop culture, shorn of its soul and style, could enter the mainstream. This is clear in how people talk about them: no one is ever going to try to argue for their technical skill or collaborative artistry. It’s why listening to them now feels vaguely embarrassing, why you feel more than a little embarrassment for them. It’s why they could never have been anything but a one-hit wonder. They had been designed to perform a particular function, and having completed that function, there was nothing left for them to do. [6]
What could they have done, being what they were? Was there another Bronx for them to burn?

[1] I actually don’t know a lot about these things, which I suppose makes my decision to write this essay presumptuous. My attempt to convey the context for this song relies on a lot of recent reading, most notably Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005) and Loren Kajikawa’s Sounding Race in Rap Songs (2015), as well as the Drunk History episode about the song that, at a slim six minutes, somehow clocks in at less than half length of the song itself.

[2] An Escher-ish image that I cannot, despite repeated attempts, actually picture.

[3] The extensive history of litigation around “Rapper’s Delight” includes Chic, whose 1979 song “Good Times” was the source of the initially-uncredited sample over which much of the song was built.

[4] Rap legend DJ Cool Herc’s father, who had run a sound system back in Kingston, referred to soaking off the labels as “Jamaican style” DJing: “Hide the name of your records because that’s how you get your rep. That’s how you get your clientele. You don’t want the same people to have your same record down the block.” (Quoted in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.)

[5] And, notoriously, mostly lifted from Grandmaster Caz’s cast-off notebooks.

[6] Even if it took them multiple albums to realize it, including a 1999 children’s album, Jump on It! Clocking in at 5:06, “Kid’s Rapper’s Delight” is, true to form, the longest track on Jump on It! It substitutes a verse about how “I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast/But we're like hot butter on your breakfast toast” for the chicken dinner verse. This is probably a sound artistic decision.

Steph Brown’s desire that a Smithsonian Anthology of Rap and Hip-Hop exist outweighed her embarrassment at backing a Smithsonian Anthology of Rap and Hip-Hop kickstarter. She is a professor (professional) and rock climber (very amateur) in Tucson, Arizona.