We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions — Queen, 1977
Finding courage in the face of hate
This is part one in a series. The challenge was begun here by LB, and I was tagged by Leah J 🕊 on the breathtaking first installment of her interpretation. I don’t know yet if there will be 5 or 9 or 15 of these by the time I’m done (or how quickly I’ll get to them, as real life is crazy just at the moment). In the meantime, I’m hoping Mike Develle will be game to play along, and anyone else who is inspired by the idea.
Music can be a powerful emotional stimulant, and I expect most people have at least a handful of memories that were either made more poignant by music or which attached themselves to the music of the moment.
This particular story, for me, is one of those cases where both are true: the song made the moment, and forever after I can’t listen to it without this memory coming back to me.
It was the spring of 1981. I was 15. In the middle of an exchange month in Germany, the 20 or so American kids in the program took a side trip to Berlin and stayed in a youth hostel.
The first night we were there, we went out to a nightclub and ran smack into our first real taste of anti-Americanism.
