Saturday’s Theme Music

The wind of change is blowing outside my window. It’s probably just circulation caused by atmospheric pressures.

It’s Saturday, if you’re still keeping tabs, February 4, 2023. Ashlandia’s first sun viewing came around 7:21 this morning. Hard to pinpoint it with the obfuscating clouds gathering. Looks like rain but the air temp is a comfy 48 F with a high of 54 F being dealt to us. The world’s inevitable turning will bring sunset to us at 5:29 this evening.

The matter of change is still on my mind after a series of fascinating dreams. Well, they fascinated me. Anyway, Bob Dylan is singing in the morning mental music stream but so is Buffalo Springfield. The latter’s song is “For What It’s Worth”. Written back in the mid-sixties in response to riots in Los Angeles, CA, it’s often used as an anti-war song. But the song was about hippies and change, with the old guard deciding to crack down. A curfew was established. Any child under the age of 21 was not allowed out in that area of rioting.

There’s a lot to unload from all those basics. First on my mind was that those under 21 were restricted, not being treated as adults, in a time when eighteen-year-olds were being drafted for Vietnam. Seems like a bit of hypocrisy, doesn’t it? That sort of hypocrisy still circulates, with people in the military not authorized to buy alcohol in some states because they’re too young. Not too young to be armed and trained to kill and defend everyone else, but certainly too young to buy alcohol. Likewise, young women in some states can be raped and forced to give birth. They’re too young to marry and age is often cited as a reason for denying young people choices and rights, and yet, these girls are expected to have children.

Today’s theme music gravitates toward more recent events, the collapse of the USSR. “Wing of Change” by the Scorpions was written in response to what they were witnessing. Some thought the Berlin Wall would never come down, and that the United States and Soviet Union would locked in a nuclear standoff until one of them pulled the trigger. Now here we are, thirty years later, wondering if Russia, born from the rubble of the USSR, will be the nation to launch nukes.

Change is fascinating. It doesn’t follow neat lines and can often feel chaotic. Some people, whether it’s drugs, abortion rights, or using nukes and gun rights, view life and change through a tremendously narrow lens. Little change is welcomed in their world.

Anyway, that’s the song which The Neurons introduced as today’s theme music, “Wind of Change” by the Scorpions from 1991 to observe the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the ‘Iron Curtain’. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the band changed their lyrics in concert.

“To sing ‘Wind of Change’ as we have always sung it, that’s not something I could imagine any more,” vocalist Klaus Meine told Die Zeit. “It simply isn’t right to romanticize Russia.”

When performing “Wind Of Change” during Scorpions’ 2022 tour, Meine sings:

Now listen to my heart
It says Ukraine
Waiting for the wind to change

Stay positive and make the most of your Saturday. I’m beginning with coffee, black, fresh, and hot. Here’s the music. Cheers

Today’s Theme Music

This song hit the scene in nineteen eighty-four.

Remember that year, with portends of George Orwell’s prescient novel hanging over us, fueling worries about privacy and government spying? “There are laws against that,” people say, smirking. “It could never happen to us. We’re America. We’re a democracy. It’s the Soviet Union and those totalitarian states like it that should worry.” The U.S.S.R.’s collapse a few years later seemed to vindicate our innate American superiority. We’d won; the communists had lost. Yes, we were so silly to be worried.

Into this era came a German group with a hard-rocking message: “Here I am, rock you like a hurricane.” I didn’t know much about the Scorpions before “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” I knew of them, but little more.

I thought of them today because of my stormy dream. The dream rocked me like a hurricane with its unceasing gloominess and desperation until its climax. I didn’t awaken afraid, but thoughtful. Thinking of the dream, I remembered this song, and its use in Dave Eggers’ novel. Odd, how the mind works, with everything connected and nothing terminated, but spreading and sprawling into new connections.

But with that, I think about the weather again. One difficulty in modeling weather is the planet’s complexity and dynamics. Everything is connected, but tracing the source back to the wings that began the storm can be tricky.

So it is with thinking.

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