Peter Gabriel – Games Without Frontiers

1980) The song’s title comes from a European game show, Jeux Sans Frontières, that featured teams competing for prizes while dressed in bizarre costumes. The British version of the show was called It’s a Knockout, a phrase that also appears in the song. The teams represented towns and cities from each country, so the games had an inevitable element of nationalism. While some games were simple races, others allowed one team to obstruct another. The lyrics are seen as a critique of nationalism and war, which the song portrays as essentially childish. The tag line of the song, “Games without frontiers, war without tears” is a comment on the sublimation of the rivalries within Europe, caused by centuries of war, in a meaningless game. The name Lin Tai Yu, which appears in the song, belongs to a character from the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber. Chiang Ching, another name mentioned, refers either to the wife of Chairman Mao and a leader of the Cultural Revolution or to Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, who was president of Taiwan at the time the song was written. Additionally, the end of the first verse refers to Hitler and Enrico Fermi: “Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Brit; Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it.” Hitler started World War II in Europe, while Fermi’s nuclear reactor enabled the nuclear weapons which ended the war in Japan. The album version of the song includes the line “Whistling tunes we piss on the goons in the …