Produced by ; written by
Epic 04108 1983 Billboard # 2
200. FALCO, "Rock Me Amadeus"
Produced by ; written by
A & M 2821 1986 Billboard # 1
Maybe it was MTV (which took American pop stars a bit by surprise),
maybe it was the decadent phase of the Cold War, but the 1980s was probably the peak of Europop in the United States. In widely circulated English versions, one of these singles made the top of the charts, the other almost did, but both songs also got a fair amount of stateside airplay in their original versions. Originally, both songs were cut, not in German, but in a breathlessly wonderful Deutschlish patois that spat American culture back across the Atlantic in that sweet love-hate manner that elder European nations tend to adopt when regarding their bratty younger sibling.They may have hated our politics back then (heck, many of us hated "our" politics back then),
but they loved our music. In the early 1980s, just as white Englishmen were much less self-conscious about singing soul than their American counterparts, white Germans were much less self-conscious about attempting rap. As all these words spewed out of their mouths, Nena and Falco both charmed their Anglophone listeners in part because they seemed to have no idea how precariously they teetered on the brink of parody. In both cases, I think speaking in German helped: everything sounds just a little bit more hardedged when you're bringing those blended consonants up from the back of the throat.
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