When the world looks bleak,
one clings to the feeling of hope, longing for a better future, celebrating events that spark hope, desiring peace and yearning for the good. Songs are sung about hope, hope for a better future for ourselves or our children, peace, progress, prosperity and harmony.
Wind of Change
Scorpions
“Wind of Change” is sung by “The Scorpions”, a German rock-metal band who grew up in West Berlin. The song topped singles charts in Europe and is one of the best selling songs of all time. It hit many top charts globally and was released in multiple languages.
The video that accompanies the song is filled with cold war imagery, and peppered with other “paradigm shifting” events, some notable ones including the “Tank Man” of Tienanmen Square, The 1990 democracy protest marches in Moscow, and the celebration and teardown of the Berlin Wall.
The “Magic of the moment” that the band felt
when the band performed in Moscow in August 1989 at the Moscow Music Peace Festival at the Lenin Stadium inspired the writing of the song. The band was surprised at how much the USSR had changed progressively from their tour in Leningrad in 1988 to the tour in Moscow in 1989, from a bleak outlook to one filled with hope, where even the soldiers put on guard for their performance took of their hats and coats to rejoice in the music.
“Wind of Change” was released in 1990 to celebrate glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War. It refers to the resultant Soviet reform “Glasnost and perestroika”, the Soviet “openness” policy that was chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev that increased openness and transparency in the Soviet government, allowing citizens to publicly discuss issues of the governmental systems.
The song describes the “glasnost” reform as “the wind of change”, and walking down the Moskva River that runs through Moscow to Gorky Park, the prominent central park of the capital. “The future’s in the air” anticipates the future which is about to happen with the freedom given with the glasnost reforms, as it “blows with the wind of change”.
The reforms are perceived as a “storm that will ring the freedom bell” and encourages the people of the soviet union to voice their thoughts and freedoms by “letting their balalaika sing what my guitar wants to say”, the balalaika being a traditional Russian stringed musical instrument.
“The world is closing in” refers to the relative closeness in terms of friendliness, how the USSR and the US are now closer together on friendly terms. The band marvels at how anyone would have ever thought that “we would be so close, like brothers.”
“Distant memories are buried in the past forever.” Hopes that past history and aggression can be put behind as the world walks towards a future.The band initially meant it about forgetting the events of WWII, since they were a german band, but it is perceived more generally as letting bygones be bygones, and can be seen as the soviets and americans making amends.
To quote Schenker, the band’s founder and guitarist. “Winds of Change'' is a song about peace. “It’s a song about the desire for people all over the world to live in peace together.” The motif of “children of tomorrow share their dreams/dream away” points to the hope and future of the new generation, breaking away from the bleakness felt during the era of the Cold War.