Oppenheimer Songs: Here’s the Atomic Armageddon Playlist

“And in this modern world, where these gentlemen have a button that, if they want to do shit to us,” Jorge González sardonically reflected in dad dad dad the latest single from Garbage Culture (1987).

At that time, the famous red button which to press from the West or the Soviet bloc product of the Cold War would destroy the planet beyond repair, was the greatest commonplace in popular music of the 80s. The vast majority took it very seriously. For others, it was cause for celebration and fantasy. Here the tests.

Johnson and Michael Righeira were not brothers as they claimed, but met while studying in Turin in the late 1970s. In the spring of 1983 they published Let’s go to the beach with the production of La Bionda, also Italian, those of One for you, one for me (1978). Righeira established a danceable synth pop hit, which sold three million copies in Europe alone, later repeating the success with I have no money . Let’s go to the beach projected the post-mushroom atomic coil wryly:

“Let’s go to the beach

The bomb exploded

The radiations toast

And they are tinged with blue (…)

Let’s go to the beach

all with hats

radioactive wind

Ruffle hair”

Another synth pop classic and one of the emblems of Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark , which lends itself to misleading interpretations. “Some…thought it was a coded message that we were gay,” singer/songwriter Andy McCluskey told Songfacts.

Despite the direct allusions to the Hiroshima nuclear attack, such as the reference to when the bomb exploded in the Japanese city on August 6, 1945 – 8:15 am – the theme of the song was much more cheesy. “We were WWII aircraft enthusiasts. The most famous and influential individual bomber was the Enola Gay. An obvious choice for us.”

The British The Fixx, among the best designers of the New Wave, has had great success in the United Stateswhile on the island the craze for his material is full of excellent singles such as One thing leads to another, Are we ourselves?, Secret separation And saved by zerowas more discreet.

red sky he was referring to the arms pacts between the reactionary governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Any similarity between this classic and In the city of fury (1988) by Soda Stereo is no coincidence.

It is a case where it is most memorable video than the song itself, despite being an incredible 80s hit Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which made pop history thanks to this explosive ode to synthesizers and programming titled Relax.

Singer Holly Johnson is a reporter covering a fight between US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko, the last of the Hermetic Hierarchs before Mikhail Gorbachev’s overture. two tribes brought home the famous Ivor Novello Award which honors singer-songwriters and composers in England, to Johnson, bassist Mark O’Toole and drummer Peter Gill.

German Nena guitarist Carlo Karges attended a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin in 1982. At the climax of the show, they released balloons and the musician paid attention to those landing in the area of ​​the wall, which had separated the city since 1961.

Karges envisioned a reaction from the east, which would in turn provoke a response from the western sector, triggering a catastrophic incident. He wrote the letter combining another fact.

In 1973, students in Las Vegas launched 99 foil balloons attached to a red sparkler. With the music of keyboardist Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, they succeeded an unforgettable marvel in German.

An atypical classic in the iron maiden which does not bear the signature of leader Steve Harris, but of guitarist Adrian Smith and singer Bruce Dickinson . 2 minutes before midnight studies nuclear war as a game between the powerful embodied by industry and politics, where the costs are paid by the people, as well as the morbidity that war causes, between horror and fascination.

The title refers to the Doomsday Clock, an instance created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago researchers involved in the Manhattan Project. Doomsday clock sets how close humanity is to “a global catastrophe caused by artificial technologies” .

The maximum alerts occurred in 1953 when the United States and the USSR tested hydrogen bombs, then in 1984 and finally this year due to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. We are 90 seconds from midnight, the highest voltage on record.

This Australian Men at work single contained in the album Job (1983), is composed from the perspective of a mid-ranking officer in the Western armed forces, anxious to know whether his subordinates should go to war. Written by vocalist/guitarist Colin Hay, it was the band’s last international hit.

Video like most of those made by the quintet, flirts with satire and humor with more intention than result.

“A strange dust settles on your hands”, sings Morrissey on his second solo hit After suedein a nod to the radioactive fallout mentioned in the apocalyptic novel on the beach (1957) by Nevil Shute, British-Australian writer, aeronautical engineer and military officer.

The song was composed by producer Stephen Street (Morrissey doesn’t master any instruments other than his vocals) and was originally pitched to the Smiths. The lyrics are set in an off-season spa, the tranquility of which evokes the typical calm and boring atmosphere of a Sunday. Armageddon appears as a solution to boredom:

In the coastal town

that they forgot to bomb

Come, come, come, nuclear bomb”

As soon as he closed the door of The Police, the band with which he had dominated the world in the first half of the 80s, Sting’s plans were big. . for this song from his first album Dream of the blue turtles (1985), he intended to record with the Leningrad State Orchestra, ultimately impossible due to the restrictions and apprehensions of the Iron Curtain, the concept forged by Winston Churchill in 1946, which described the ideological and geographical division of the planet after the Second World War.

Sting felt it was time to forget the politicians in the context of the Cold War and find out for himself who the Russians were “to make sure and confirm that they are human beings, and not sub-robot cretins (…)”.

The British star alludes to the father of the atomic bomb in the lyrics – ‘Oppenheimer’s deadly toy’ – as the music speeds up the central melody of Romance by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev . Sting, who, thanks to a friend in New York, watched Russian television in the mid-1980s, was intrigued that children’s shows were often “caring and sweet.” “I suddenly felt the need to state the obvious in the face of all this rhetoric: Russians love their children like we do.”

The 80s were synonymous with new wave and electronica for Canada’s progressive masters. They devoted titles to the nuclear threat like Remote early warning And Between the wheelswhile the end of the cold war and the consequences of the fall of real socialisms were discussed in Heresy.

manhattan project it alludes to both the process that led to the United States leading the atomic race and its subsequent development with several industrialized nations building a nuclear arsenal.

Other an amazing shot Courtesy of British post-punk band Modern English whose story describes a couple who end up melting in the middle of copulation, the product of a nuclear explosion.

“I saw the world crashing around your face,” intones singer Robbie Grey, who from this piece and on the suggestion of producer Hugh Jones, learned to sing before shouting.