Falco – A Mad And Exhalted Genius

By 2000 everyone will be bored to death.

Falco (1957-1998)

Ask most Americans and other English-speaking people, and they will tell you that Falco is the German one-hit-wonder with that “Amadeus” song. Dance music and rap freaks among them may also remember “Der Kommissar” and Falco’s legacy as one godfather of white rap. But that’s about it. First of all, Falco is Austrian and not German, which is a very important distinction. Germans admiringly talk about the ‘Wiener Schmäh’ that he possesses, a unique Viennese charm and wit that is nowhere to be found in Germany.

Falco was depressed when “Rock Me Amadeus” peaked in the US charts, knowing that he could never repeat this success. But also because he was aware of that he could make a fortune in America, but would never be fully understood and perceived as the great artist that he is in the foreign country. “I often had the opportunity to go to America. I didn’t do it because the best thing about the American flag is the red, white and red stripes” Red, white and red stripes is the Austrian flag.

Falco’s legacy gets lost in translation. Just like the artist Serge Gainsbourg cannot be understood by listening to Melody Nelson only and without examining his overall language, poetry and cultural contexts, the phenomenon Falco can also not be explained within anglo-saxon pop-cultural frames that are sparing out very specific Viennese aspects of his music and poetry. Falco was not only a genius musician, but he delivered his innovative songs in heavy Viennese, the Austro-Bavarian dialect of Vienna. English-speaking people didn’t bother to realize this, and for Germans it was unfamiliar and outrageous- but miraculously it worked.

Falco was the only survivor of his mother’s triplet pregnancy and finally born as Johann “Hans” Hölzel into a working-class district of Vienna in 1957. His early biography reads like an artist cliché: Hansi loved singing already as a toddler, he got a piano from his parents for his fourth birthday, and when he was five years old, the Vienna Music Academy certified him an absolute pitch. He was expelled from a Catholic school, dropped out of both his apprenticeship as an insurance salesman and the Vienna Conservatory of Music in order to become ‘a real musician’. He joined Anarcho-punk bands in the ever vibrant and unique Viennese scene of baroque avant garde before he took off as a solo artist in 1982.

Invading the mind-numbing conservative German bourgeoise and monotony of the 80s, there was suddenly this beautiful young man with mischievous charm, who behind his winning smile most intelligently mocked society and never took himself too seriously, although his musical productions were groundbreaking and more than once reminiscent of Bowie. In his videos and live performances Falco would display an unseen exalted body language and eccentric singing style that we all wanted to copy- he was an absolute idol, cool and fun and subversive.

Falco was a poet, an innovator and linker of elements of international language. He was the missing link between pop and avant-garde, successfully moving between hit-machine and experimental artist, between local slang and Esperanto. Falco is forever the progressive accomplice of youth, one who exposed false morals and dystopian conditions in society. He lived his love for drugs openly and without any depressed attitude, immortalizing them in many of his lyrics. After a paternity test revealed that he was not the biological father of his 7-year old daughter, Falco moved to the Dominican Republic, where his car collided with a bus after a cocaine and alcohol fueled night out in the disco. Falco was just 40 when he died in 1999.

This playlist includes some of his greatest songs and is an attempt to explain this great artist’s extremely cool swag and legacy to the non-German-speaking world.

by Saliha Enzenauer

Drahdiwaberl – Mad Cat Sadie (1979)

Falco was closely tied to the Viennese underground scene and its unique melange of music, burlesque, performance art, political satire and the celebration of anarchy and chaos. Before his solo career, he was part of the avantgarde rock theatre Hallucination Company, then played the bass with Drahdiwaberl, a political Austrian cult band without taboos. The anarcho-punks first became known for the fact that they were banned from every venue they ever played. “Mad Cat Sadie” is one of their more tame songs, a beautiful and wicked song with a Devo-style interplay in its middle part. The young Falco looks like a 80s soft-porn beau with his fluffy hair, shirt unbuttoned to the chest, and orgastic power-rock moves during the saxophone solo. His clean-cut looks always would contrast Falco’s underground roots, which can lead to a distorted perception of his person and artistry, especially for non-German audiences. Falco has never given up the nihilistic stance in his life (“Neo nothing, post of all“) – on the contrary, he has smuggled it into the charts and mainstream.

Der Kommissar (The Inspector – 1982)

In 1982, 25-year-old Falco’s debut single became a global hit. “Der Kommissar” was in the charts in 27 countries, often at number one. Falco’s reaction was laconic and charming: “Platinum today, sheet metal tomorrow, today they kiss your feet and tomorrow not even the dog will look at you.”

Rumor has it that more money was spent on cocaine than in the video itself. It is true that the funky rap is also about drug consumption, but more than that, it’s about authorities and the frustrating unbalance of power when dealing with them: “He has the strength and we are small and stupid / And this frustration makes us mute,” one line translates. Falco clarified in a TV interview in 1982: “Everyone has their inspector. The student has the teacher, the teacher has the director, and so on…”

Einzelhaft (Solitary Confinement – 1982)

The last song on Falco’s debut album is one of his most underrated ones. It is a song about the apocalyptic loneliness of modern life, musically somewhere between Joy Division’s world weariness, Kraftwerk, and David Bowie’s Low. Falco’s detached lines are prophetic visions of a surveillance state with citizens that have long given up on themselves, a self-centered, cruel, cold, uniform, and lonely society. With minimalistic lyrics, Falco sketches out a full, gloomy picture of the present: the cold neon world of an affluent society in which nobody feels responsible for the other anymore, a society in which nobody seems to need the other- only isolation connects people with one another.

Falco compares modern life with solitary confinement, a life in which there is only self-reference and one that will forever be trapped in a sad monotony- there is no hope for improvement. Emotions disturb this world (“Love kills the heart / Ban on speaking”), TV is the people’s new opium (“On cold channels / Illusion of free choice”), you live in proximity to millions of other people and yet you are alone. Stronger individualization and the increase of single households as new norm- Falco compares this inhuman way of life literally with solitary confinement in prisons, a life with “doors made of steel“. Man no longer lives here, he rather just vegetates contrary to his nature until he dies without having really lived.
Falco gives an interesting, ambiguous warning: “You die without living / Your sins will never be forgiven“, referring to the necessary legend of an original sin that is crucial for making us accept this form of life as a punishment, but also showing what epic sin modern people are committing on human existence and life itself.

(click here to listen to Peter Kruder’s remix)

Auf der Flucht (On the Run – 1982)

Falco’s song about his experiences in West Berlin in the mid-1970s and about students fleeing from water cannons and tear gas during the political protests of the time. It is one of Falco’s best songs and deals with one of his main themes: the lived apocalypse which is permanent and to which the individual in such a society adapts. The song kicks in hunted and stressed, with sounds of heavy breathing over which the melody gets louder and louder, in the background distorted guitars scream over a disco beat. There is no classic song structure and no separation of verse and chorus, everything drills and drives together until the song ends with exhausted breathing again.
Falco described the song as a piece about the political situation in West Berlin in 1968 and about youth’s desire to protest. The song is an unpathetic and direct narrative about the futility of youth revolts, implemented without frills and impulsively, and the hypocritical and suggestive exclamation of victory by law enforcement over the revolutionary hope of the youth. There is no longer any real protest, everything is empty and lost, postmodern disillusionment and personal hedonism settles in.

Everything seems fine,
empty squares everywhere
The protests had come to an end
The winner is the tax
…
Old values are here to be enjoyed
Look where all that money is going
Throw the troublemakers out
and restore the opera house…

Law and order got restored almost by itself,
Because the strong hand wins
Keeps the neo-conservative fairy tale world together
And the looters are caught.

(click here to see an early punk version & video of the song)
(click here for the Carl Craig remix)

Ganz Wien (ist heut auf Heroin) (All of Vienna (… is high on heroin today- 1982)

Falco’s music has one immediate effect: it makes you want to take cocaine. The musician never hid his lifelong love for drugs and particularly alcohol and cocaine, the two substances he never quit taking. “Ganz Wien” was a commentary to growing use of hard drugs in Vienna in the 80s. Initially written for his early Anarcho-punk band Drahdiwaberl, Falco released the song on his first solo album in 1982. It is a smoldering and sedate vision of a city that is on drugs in its entirety, a non-moralizing utopian syringe-wonderland.

„He’s walking the street, not saying where he’s heading
His head full of heavy metal and his liver is done for
His veins are open and smell of formalin
All that doesn’t give him any grief, cause he’s in Vienna
All of Vienna – is on heroin today
All of Vienna – is playing around with Quaalude
All of Vienna – Vienna, Vienna is also reaching for cocaine – especially during the Ball Season
You see the whole of Vienna, Vienna, Vienna – is so wonderfully wasted, wasted, wasted
Cocaine and codeine, heroin and Quaalude make us gone, gone, gone…

Junge Römer ( “Young Romans”- 1984)

Falco is effortlessly mashing up 3 languages, Austrian, English & Italian, to lay out the bloodline of decadence from Circus Maximus to the 80’s cocaine age. “Junge Römer” is an empowerment of young, beautiful men in full juice and an ode to Roman decadence, „Never stop this old erosion fantastic voyage“. It all sounds like a hybrid of Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” and “Let’s Dance”, actually it sounds like an entire Bowie compilation. Except for that it is unlikely that Bowie would have hinted at incest so casually and gleefully towards the end of the song. Reliably macabre, punk Falco is stuffing the euphoria you just felt right back in your throat and makes you feel dirty.

“Young romans – dance differently from the others
They love their sisters more, more than the rest of the world“

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urw-iutHw5E&ob=av2e

Jeanny (1985)

“Jeanny” comes along in the innocent guise of a power-ballad, but it’s one of the most psychopathic songs of all time. Method actor Falco slips into the role of a rapist and killer, who is having a sick dialogue with his kidnapped victim in the forest. Falco’s mad intonation and the cinematic psychopathy of the lyrics are sending shivers down your spine, with the power-chorus coming to a dry and macabre conclusion: “Jeanny, quit livin’ on dreams”.
Jeanny was a massive hit that topped the charts in many European countries, and millions of fans are still shouting out the chorus passionately, full-heartedly jamming to this sinister song as if it was “November Rain”.

As a song sponsored by this special Austrian monstrosity à la Josephine Mutzenbacher, Josef Fritzl, and Natascha Kampusch, “Jeanny” sparked a big controversy when it was released. Morality guards, women’s rights activists, and culture apostles saw the video as a blunt depiction of drastic violence against women. Many broadcasters refused to play it because various women’s initiatives protested it: in their opinion, the song glorified violence and rape. In Eastern Germany it was also banned in discos. Of course, all of this just meant that “Jeanny” became the best-selling single of 1986 with 2.5 million copies sold. Eminem must have studied this song closely before penning his hit “Stan“and sparking the same controversy with his song and video 15 years later.

Crime Time (1986)

A hidden gem. Falco shows his lyrical brilliance with a genius Raymond Chandler storyline set in a Broadway revue number. As for his vocal delivery, it’s cool as cool can get: Falco is deliciously stretching keywords of American culture (“downtawwwn”) as if they were a toothpick in his mouth, all culminating in exalted chorus- slogans (“Kill To Survive!” “Bullets and Pain!“)- a brilliant distillation and loving parody of the laconic American sex & crime culture and its narrative characteristics.

Lost Angeles, sometime on Wednesday late in the evening
It was one of these evenings in downtown,
not much of the glitz of Rodeo Drive was left over
Rather, it seemed like the stress of the day that tormented the air
was considering which of two men it should suffocate first

One man was Bill A. Hemingway, his friends called him Philosopher,
the other man- was me
The Philosopher and I sat in his apartment,
close to the black-and-white occupied blocks near Central Avenue

There was little that was extraordinary about Hemingway
when you could ignore his hands and his smile.
The movement of his hands described a moth to which the day seemed too long.
You could almost like his smile as long as you had the chance to do it alive

Now Hemingway smiled,
Because his Gloria had sent me to him,
in order to clear up a very private problem.
I was the private problem,
and his 38 Automatic
was aimed right at my solar plexus.

Rock Me Amadeus (1985)

Falco’s homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is not only the most successful pop song by an Austrian artist but also the only song in German language that has made it to number 1 on the US Billboard and UK charts. Falco describes Mozart as a punk, mentions his debts and his love for women, calls him a superstar and a rock idol (not exactly expressions that were previously associated with Mozart), and emphasizes how popular and exalted his compatriot was. The song thus transports a mini life story of Mozart into the present, assuming that Mozart would have become rock and pop star in the 20th century – statements that were a scandalous border-crossing in the mid-1980s, where a strict and conservative distinction between “serious music” and “light music” was made in Germany.

After his American record company ordered new mixes because they were bored with the perfect original “Gold Mix”, Falco smuggled a subtle “Fuck Me Amadeus” into most of these mixes. The spirit never dies!

by Saliha Enzenauer