Charisma Kommando
There will never be another Falco
In today’s data-obsessed world - in which every tiny thing is quantified and commodified, every advantage is ruthlessly sought out and exploited, every narrative is endlessly spun out and resold - it feels like milestones and records have become meaningless.
Taylor Swift has probably become the first female artist over the age of 30 who is a Sagittarius to hit number one on the album charts during a full moon. Runners have futuristic sci-fi shoes which allow them to finish marathons in two hours. Some YouTuber you’ve never heard of has made more money for a fake boxing match than you will earn in your life.
But some records are so legendary that they will remain safely unbroken for all eternity. No basketball player will ever top Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game, for example. And no-one will ever beat Falco’s record of being the only German-language act to hit the number-one spot on the US charts.
The song in question is of course the 1986 hit Rock Me Amadeus. Millennial kids like myself will immediately associate it with Troy McClure’s Planet of the Apes musical Dr. Zaius from golden-age The Simpsons. For a long time I mistakenly believed it was the title song from the fictionalised Mozart blockbuster Amadeus, which actually came out two years previously. It seems that oversized baroque wigs were to the mid 1980s what cowboy hats are to 2024.
English-language audiences could be forgiven for writing off Falco as a novelty one-hit wonder. They would be very mistaken. Amadeus may have been his only major success in the Anglosphere, but Falco was a revolutionary, Bowie-like figure in German pop music.
Falco, real name Johann “Hans” Hölzel, was born in Vienna in 1957, two years after the post-war foundation of today’s Republic of Austria. Vienna back then was an old-fashioned and eccentric city which did its best to pretend that the 20th century had never happened. The atmosphere was stuffy and anachronistic, with social life centred around formal balls and classical music.
By Falco’s teenage years in the 1970s, the city had a bit more of an edge about it, as the permissive social attitudes of the post-1968 generations made their mark, but German-language pop was defined by cheesy Schlager music, while the underground was all about hairy jam bands trying to drag out the hippy golden years. The young Hölzel played in a few bands, but he never seemed to quite fit in.
While his beardy bandmates fiddled earnestly with their instruments, the clean cut and sharply-dressed bass-player, with something of the classic Hollywood icon about him - a look he adopted following his military service - seemed to magnetically draw in the spotlight.
The musical tides in the German-speaking world were changing too. The hippy, proggy Krautrock era was being swept away by the fresh sounds and looks of punk and Neue Deutsche Welle. The stage was set for Hans Hölzel to step up from a supporting role and become the main character.
While he was bassist for the band Drahdiwaberl, Falco wrote and sung his first song, Ganz Wien, a gritty yet playful take on drug culture in Vienna. The song was banned from the airwaves by Austria’s public broadcaster ORF, and duly became an underground hit. Falco’s appearances in the spotlight to perform the song were starting to attract the attention of label guys, and he was soon offered a solo deal.
His stage name came from a dashing East German Olympic ski jumper called Falko Weissflog. The change in spelling to a c was a nod to the ancient Roman general Quintus Pompeius Falco, and Falco’s on-stage persona had the appropriate dose of grandeur, pomp and arrogance. The ancient Romans and their decline from splendour was a recurring fascination for Falco, who identified heavily with the decadent movement in literature and the arts.
Falco’s creative boldness and propensity for risk-taking was demonstrated on his breakthrough hit, Der Kommissar, which gave Falco the eternal honour of being the first German-language artist to release a hip-hop track. Inspired by the fresh sounds coming out of New York, Falco dropped bars on the verse like a Viennese Grandmaster Flash. This rap-inspired vocal style would remain a defining characteristic throughout his career, as well as an ability to switch seamlessly back and forth between German and English, which is now the norm for young people in the German-speaking countries but was far from a given back in the early 80s.
Falco was ahead of his time in lots of ways, and who can capture the Zeitgeist better than someone from the future? Falco was a sonic adventurer, with his finger on the pulse of the times, always ready to embrace emerging sounds and new technologies; in the early 80s he was making hip-hop, by the middle of the decade glossy pop-rock, he was rapping over house grooves in the early 90s and then going all-out techno by his final album in 1998.
Not many artists can pull off multiple reinventions, but Falco had a special kind of charisma and charm about him. He was the embodiment of Wiener Schmäh: Viennese patter if you will, a mixture of colourful dialect, foppish charm and dark humour. This made him a guaranteed hit on German late-night talk shows. But he wasn’t a frivolous showbiz figure, far from it. What stands out most from his interviews is not his mischievous smile or his peerless style, but rather his eloquence, his mordant intellect and his fascination with big ideas.
There are few who captured the exuberance and unease of the 80s quite like Falco; he was after all well placed to do so from his perch in Middle-Europe. Although all eyes looked to Berlin, Vienna was also a major pressure point in the Cold War. The second largest city in the German-speaking world was - like its northern counterpart - also an encircled outpost of the west, with the Iron Curtain drawn over the Visegrad and Balkan neighbours the Habsburgs once reigned over. His music is permeated with a thrill about the wall being torn down, but laced with unease about the victory lap of a vapid capitalism powered by the hedonic treadmill of entertainment and dopamine rushes.
If you watch old interviews and read his lyrics, Falco often appears like a Cassandra figure; in a 1993 chat with a journalist, he perfectly calls Russia’s slide into authoritarianism and eventual invasion in Ukraine; the hilarious song Cyberlove from his final album unpacks the incursion of technology into the intimate sphere with a skit on AI girlfriends; his 1990 album Data de Groove takes a postmodern copy-and-paste approach to songwriting which sounds like something a malfunctioning beta version of ChatGPT would spew up.
Like superhero movies teach us, the comic-book persona can become a trap for the person behind the mask. Falco’s artistic obsession with decadence was sadly reflected back in his personal life. Unsurprisingly, carrying the expectation to always have the sharpest quip in every room you enter while working in the music business in the 80s turned out to be a pretty surefire way to fuel a serious coke habit. A messy personal life also made him easy fodder for the tabloid press.
Falco could never follow up on the stratospheric success of Rock Me Amadeus and its associated album, Falco 3. His subsequent releases have plenty of idiosyncratic charm, but lack the crossover pizzazz of his commercial peak, with sales a disappointment everywhere but Austria.
By the mid 90s, he had washed up in the Dominican Republic: “It snows there, but differently,” as he put it during an appearance on the sofa of German late-night stalwart Harald Schmidt. On 6 February 1998, with his final album set for release, Falco’s Mitsubishi Pajero collided with a bus on the road linking the towns of Villa Montellano and Puerto Plata. He died from serious injuries, aged 40.
The title song of his final album Out of the Dark contains the line "...muss ich denn sterben, um zu leben?" ("...do I have to die in order to live?"), which many interpreted as a form of cryptic suicide note. In any case, the posthumously released album shot to the top of the charts as Austria mourned its most beloved son.
Falco’s unrivalled star quality and tragic party-life arc have captivated future generations. One of the most dubious yet affirming marks of his continuing influence are the numerous references to Falco by Deutschrap artists. In 2018, a largely terrible compilation tribute album by various artists was released to mark 20 years of his passing. Vienna pop artist Bibiza released an excellent indie-sleaze album last year, Wiener Schickeria, which owes a very heavy debt to Falco’s cocaine-fuelled hedonism and silver tongue. But he certainly won’t be making it to number one on the US charts anytime soon. There will never be another quite like Falco.