Scorpions' "Still Loving You" and "Wind of Change" as historical documentation

Scorpions

The audience for popular music frequently assumes that the songs heard on the radio or downloaded from iTunes are predominantly a form of personal expression on the part of the artist, and that song lyrics may express the most raw form of autobiography (such as the recent Grammy-winning success of "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse, who turns up in tabloids to demonstrate that she practices what she preaches) but they do not express any political or historical content. But the example of the Scorpions -- who come from Germany but work within a largely American-derived idiom of heavy metal power ballads -- proves that the lyrical content of popular song can also provide a sort of historical documentation. I would argue that by comparing two of the Scorpion's most successful songs to date -- "Still Loving You" from their 1984 album Love at First Sting, and "Wind of Change" from their 1990 album Crazy World -- can offer us a view of popular song lyrics that actually acknowledges a deeper engagement with contemporary culture, while at the same time managing to preserve their status as songs within the tradition of first-person autobiographical expression found in so many love ballads or anthems of personal rebellion or liberation. "Still Loving You" is a conventional love ballad, which dramatizes a situation described by Rudolf Schencker -- the Scorpions' founder and co-author with the band's vocalist Klaus Meine of the song -- as "the story of a love affair" in which the singer is trying to reconnect with his estranged lover. Whereas "Wind of Change" offers the remarkable example of a rock song which takes as its explicit subject the massive historical importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, the year before the song's initial album release. But I think a closer examination of the two songs may prove that they are more similar than one might otherwise suspect.

"Still Loving You" does not follow the most conventional template for a popular song: it hardly matches the "verse chorus verse" structure with an interposed vocal or musical bridge that characterizes so many pop hits of the past half-century from the Beatles' "I wanna hold your hand" to Train's "Hey Soul Sister." The Scorpions, rather than varying their musical structure with an interpolated bridge, follow a repetitive template of the same musical verse sequence repeated over and over: unusually the song even seems to pause for moments of silence after the end of one of these sequences, and finds its musical variation in the increasingly florid overlay of guitar riffs that layer themselves over Meine's impassioned vocalization. This is a perfectly valid structure for a rock song -- "Welcome to Paradise" by Green Day or "Miss World" by Hole also lack a vocal bridge -- but it is also a song structure that harkens back to a songwriting model that predates rock and roll. Given the Scorpions' German origins, we might even liken it to the structure of the famous "Moritat" from Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper of 1928, which would later become a pop jazz hit in 1950s America when translated as "Mack the Knife." The 1928 song follows a precisely similar musical structure to "Mack the Knife," with a simple verse repeated over and over, but finding its variation either in the singer's own improvised changes to the melody or with the introduction of more complicated and overwhelming accompaniment of new instruments in the track's background. What makes "Still Loving You" different from an earlier style of balladeering is the intensity of Meine's performance, which matches the dogged determination expressed in the lyrics from the songs opening:

Time, it needs time

To win back your love again

I'll win your love, I'll win your love

Love, only love

Can bring back your love someday

I'll win your love, I'll win your love (Scorpions, 1984)

The first-person lyrics express a fierce determination to win back the love of this estranged partner. By the end of the song, the speaker's single-minded intensity has not altered in the least, but the song has introduced the notion of empathy and the admission of wrongdoing:

If we'd go again

All the way from the start

I would try to change

The things that killed our love

Yes, I've hurt your pride, and I know

What you've been through

You should give me a chance

This can't be the end

I'm still loving you

I'm still loving you, I need your love

Soldiers passing by Listening to the wind of change (Scorpions, 1990)

"Moskva" is, of course, the way that Moscow is pronounced in Russian, and Gorky Park is a central feature of Moscow's urban landscape, second in familiarity only to the Kremlin. But by the second verse, Meine has seized upon the emotional content that would connect German and Russian alike in a sense of wonder at the swiftness of historical events unfolding, managing to overcome the historic hostility between the two nationalities and any resentment of the long partition of Germany by Soviet control of the eastern part of the country:

The world is closing in Did you ever think

That we could be so close, like brothers

The future's in the air

I can feel it everywhere

Blowing with the wind of change (Scorpions, 1990)

The closeness that the singer seeks with his love in "Still Loving You" is here the unexpected feeling of being "so close, like brothers" between Soviet and German citizen, and to some extent the erotic reunification of the first song is now enlarged into a metaphor for German reunifcation. But the sense of being a casual bystander is enforced by the most unusual musical element of the song, which is Meine's insistence on whistling as part of the instrumentation. It serves the function that a harmonica serves in a Dylan song -- an indication of the musical options available to the poorest of people who cannot afford a guitar -- but at the same time it also makes one aware of the fact that whistling is produced by a propulsion of air between the lips. The whistling sound is, itself, like a little version of the "wind of change" itself.

But it is worth noting that the structural similarity between the two songs may not be entirely accidental. "Still Loving You" may seem like a conventionally erotic power ballad, yet the climax of its lyrics -- or the moment where the bridge normally occurs -- instead offers us the following:

If we'd go again

All the way from the start

I would try to change

The things that killed our love

Your pride has built a wall, so strong

That I can't get through

Is there really no chance

To start once again

I'm loving you

Can we really fail to hear an echo of their hit from six years later in the image of "pride" that has "built a wall, so strong / that I can't get through"? If we imagine the earlier song as being also about the situation of the German partition -- along the lines of another German pop anthem that would cross over into chart-making popularity in translation, Nena's 1983 hit "99 Luftballons," re-recorded in English in the same year of "Still Loving You" as "99 Red Balloons" -- then it becomes clear that the Scorpions were always using the power ballad to talk about the situation of Germany itself.