It's the Cheese

Falco, RIP

By Josh Ozersky

One or another pop star drops off the planet every few months, and Falco, who hadn't even had a big hit since 1985's "Vienna Calling," hardly qualifes as a rock immortal. When the Austrian singer, whose real name was Johannes Hoelzel, died in a car accident two weeks ago, he wasn't much mourned in America. In Austria, thousands turned out for the funeral of the most popular pop star in the nation's history, but that news was mostly drowned out by Hermann Maier's slalom triumph

Even the Associated Press, which is usually above such stuff, had a little fun at the late singer's expense, in a piece on Falco's funeral. "Somewhat like Mozart," it began, "the Austrian pop star Falco lived in excess and died in disgrace." The story went on to describe the lapidary excesses of the dieter-sprocketish crowd, who the writer described as "wearing Falcoesque sunglasses on an overcast day." The piece ended poetically, with an old lady laying a rose on Falco's grave, and saying, "there was Mozart, Schubert, and Falco."

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?

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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