INKTOBER 52 2024 Week #35: LOFT

“I don’t know, man. The first thing my Brain said when I saw the prompt ‘loft’ was that song ’99 Luftballoons’. I mentioned the prompt to my wife to see what she thought when hearing the word, and she also said ’99 Luftballoons’. So, here we are. I guess it sort of maybe relates to loft? Again, I don’t know.

I was motivated to do a little research about the song, since I barely remember it, and there’s kind of a fascinating story behind it. I guess Nena’s (the lead singer of the band) guitarist watched a mass of balloons float away at a concert in West Berlin. The mass shifted and changed shape as it drifted away, looking like some alien UFO. He wondered what would happen if it drifted over the border to East Berlin (this would have been the height of the Cold War in the 1980s). The whole thing inspired a narrative in song form about a similar incident that causes a military general to send up fighter jets to investigate. Finding nothing but balloons, the pilots decide to shoot them down, which worries neighboring nations and sparks a sort of apocalyptic, 99-year war. Apparently, the English version of the song (the original being German) has a different, though similar in spirit, narrative, and is called ’99 Red Balloons’, as opposed to the literal translation which apparently would be ’99 Air Balloons’ (according to the interwebs).

So, yeah. 99 Loftballoons, I guess.”

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