A friend from Leipzig told me that her choir teacher, in middle school, would regularly make the class belt out Scorpions’ power ballad ‘Wind of Change’ while he held back tears of pride.
This would be a great story under any circumstances, but I’m particularly enamored with it given my latest obsession: the podcast WIND OF CHANGE from Patrick Radden Keefe. The series goes deep on a rumor Radden Keefe heard from a friend with connections in high places, positing that the song ‘Wind of Change’ was, in fact, written by the CIA and handed to the West German rock group as a way to expedite the end of the Cold War.
The podcast is so full of delicious details from what has become known as the Cultural Cold War that I found myself mostly unconcerned with the veracity of the initial claim, but, rather, enticed by the ambiguity of it all. Essentially, the case is laid out that there’s no reason something like this couldn’t happen. Radden Keefe gives us plenty of examples of how culture and political objectives get stuck together, mixed around, and become deeply difficult to separate when it’s all said and done.
Take, for instance, the CIA’s invisible relationship with Nina Simone. The podcast details how, in 1961, Simone performed in west Africa but never knew that the tour’s sponsoring organization, the American Society of African Culture, was government-funded. And in pushing American culture into Eastern Europe, it was an incremental approach. When it came to sending the first US band to the Soviet Union, government officials found themselves pitching groups to the Kremlin, cassettes in their briefcases. The initial ideas included the group America (too on the nose), The Doobie Brothers (morally tainted), with the final decision being the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who were deemed just inoffensive enough to get a foot in the door. They just beat out the Beach Boys—songs “about pretty girls and driving your own cars” simply weren’t terribly relatable.
Later on, a festival was organized in Moscow under the theme of ‘anti-drug and alcohol’ (nevermind that Ozzy Osbourne was a headliner). To set this one up, the organizer had to, apparently, fly to the Soviet Union weekly to work out the logistics. Rock ‘n roll and the bureaucracy are, it seems, not so disparate. (The same goes of movie magic; in the early stages of planning the film ‘Apocalypse Now,’ co-producer Gray Frederickson had a personal meeting with Ferdinand Marcos in Manila to secure the location, and even gained access to their military gear.)
The mythos of how popular art can spread is summed up well by Radden Keefe, saying, “We think of culture—or we want to think of culture—as organic and spontaneous, as purer than politics.” It’s really something to think about the geopolitical calculations conducted in grey, D.C. office buildings taking into consideration things like leather jackets and mullets. As popularity becomes ever-quantified by likes and engagement statistics, this saga seems almost quaint, if a little creepy. And, before I forget, stay tuned to the last episode to hear Scorpions lead singer Klaus Meine’s Hanover accent.