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Ha ha ha. A little sport at Falco's expense. What looks
funny when done by Germans, however, is often taken for granted in our
own
cultural stalag. Americans of a certain age are more guilty than anyone
of
shamelessly elevating unworthies to past master status, and their
motives are
no less drenched in weltshmertz.
The connection between "world pain" in the kraut-romantic sense and the
mourning of bad rock stars may seem tenuous, but the psychology is rock
solid. There is security and cheer and reassurance in cheesy pop culture
-- once
it is safely in the past. This is the central secret pleasure of the
generation that went to high school when
Falco had his moment in the
sun.
Everybody knows this, and all the jeremiads in the New York Times
Magazine
and elsewhere about the shallow self-referentiality of contemporary
culture
-- where everything is a spinoff, and narrative is dead -- reflect an older
generation's dismay with a well established status quo. No one is
seriously
calling for an Art for the 21st century. No one is calling for Art at all.
Nor, for that matter, is anyone interested in the various ironic
commentaries occasionally offered in its place, or works of art that
acknowledge "where's it at" today, as with a Beck, or a David Foster
Wallace, or like sophisticates.
Speed Racer. George of the Jungle. Curious George. The candy logos
on
rave t-shirts. Planet of the Apes. The Breakfast Club. It is precisely
these unenlightened and therefore innocuous materials which make up the
diet
of so many would-be sophisticates. Even the masses are infatuated
with 80s faux-nostalgia, in the
form of the Adam Sandler vehicle The Wedding
Singer, and VH-1's "Big 80s" video series. So where, then, does anyone get
off patronizing Falco?
![[austria]](img/falco.gif)
If anything, I suspect, Falco doesn't enjoy the same affection as bad
bands
like Flock of Seagulls or Men at Work because he was too hip, too aware,
too
much like the cheese-eaters themselves. Falco's immortal video for "Rock
Me
Amadeus" is often described as "campy" (for example by the AP writer)
and
camp is the opposite of cheese -- a knowing excess, an embrace of
baroque,
over-the-top styles by jaded types. Cheese is what a character in Time
Bandits called "the ravages of intelligence" and so allows breathing
room for
its admirers, who like to feel enlightened themselves, but only at
someone
else's expense.
When I think of Falco, suavely mugging in his crooners tux,
surrounded by
austrian bikers, or the courtesans of "Vienna Calling," I am filled with a
heady ardor, affection for him hopelessly intertwined with memories of a
younger, better self affixed innocently in front of a schoolnight television.
This uneasy memory is far more comforting if one can look back in
condescension -- if you can claim to have come so far, and be so much smarter
now. "What were we thinking?" fin-de-siecle thirty-year olds say to each
other, in their own best interests.
This, I think, finally explains why Falco hasn't been mourned. The dead
are praised as a way of making the living feel better, and they are admired
only insofar as the living can thereby identify themselves and their tastes.
In the case of MTV-era nostalgia, this is purely negative, a way of
reassuring ourselves how much smarter we are now that we have traded in Men
at Work for Chumbawumba.
Falco, as the Beck
of
the Kraftwerk set, offers no such comforts. You can neither look down
on
him, nor remember fondly his music from your prom. He remains a reminder of how
short a distance we've come, and how impoverished we are to be picking
through the MTV junk heap looking for things to look down on. But I like
Falco a lot,
and I remember him fondly, even if he was an equal.
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