Rock Me, Amadeus

I don't know why, but there's something fresh and earnest about 80's music... which I kind of have as a sort of faded soundtrack in my mind. While I can no longer listen to Dead Spin's "You Spin Me Right Round, Baby"...without a slight evil grin and a little cringing--- and never could without thinking of those nails in the video---I like a manicure as much as the next person (although I am currently keeping nails groomed and perhaps truncated after some nutrition-issue-induced breakage.) but that's too much!

Among the songs purposefully added to my list of "Instant Smile Makers", is Falco's Rock Me Amadeus. For the record, Austria is a country. It shares a language, albeit not a dialect, with Germany. But the English lyrics are:

1st set after the oh so well known stacatto-harmony reiteration of the titular lyrics:

He was a Punker
And he lived in the big city
It was Vienna, was Vienna
Where he did everything
He had debts, for he drank
But all the women loved him
And each one shouted:
Come on and rock me Amadeus


Title lyrics, then:


He was Superstar
He was popular
He was so exalted
Because he had flair
He was a virtuose
Was a rock idol
And everyone shouted:
Come on and rock me Amadeus

Title lyrics:
then:

It was around 1780

And it was in Vienna

No plastic money anymore

The banks against him

From which his debts came

It was common knowledge

He was a women's man

Women loved his punk

Amadeus Amadeus, Amadeus

Amadeus Amadeus, Amadeus

Amadeus Amadeus, oh oh oh Amadeus

Come and rock me Amadeus...

Baby baby do it to me rock me

Baby baby do it to me rock me

Baby baby do it to me rock me

Yes yes yes

Baby baby do it to me rock me

Baby baby do it to me rock me

Baby baby do it to me rock me

Also, there was a time where the rainbow fright wig terrified me far more than the fact that there was a man delivering all these lyrics in a stacatto. 

Then there's the rather evocative and provocative Taco, who also mixed in bits of White Christmas, among others. And had people a little perturbed by adding black face minstrel dancers, which would have been fine in Irving Berlin's day but now cause a bit of a fright and a lot of flap in ours. I still keep waiting for a Young-Frankenstein-era Peter Boyle to deliver his version of "Puttin' on the ritz!" and becoming upset by stage pyrotechnics.




I still wonder what it says, however, that in my "happy songs", is a song in German about the beginnings of World War III due to government mistaking the joy of two young people, and their release of 99 balloons for the beginnings of nuclear war.  I don't analyze. I enjoy.



It's all over, and I'm standing pretty, in that dust that was a city. If I could find a souvenir, just to prove the world was here... here it is, a red balloon... I think of you... and let it go.