Skip to main content

Rock Me Amadeus


A few years back, I brought my vinyl collection home from my mother's as we had purchased a record player and as a result, I collect records again and listen to music. It was strange, but with the transition to digital, I started listening to podcasts and completely stopped listening to music. In fact, I purchased maybe one new album per year over the last couple of decades. Bringing home the music I collected in my early teen years was eye opening. I still loved it and still love music. Is it the format? I remember the controversy over the switch to CDs somehow changing the music listening experience, but it seemed irrelevant at the time. Was it due to life changes? No clue, but I am listening to music again and loving it.

I didn't manage to find all of my collection at my mother's house. I remember having a small stack of 45s that I don't know what happened to. Among them was the first record I remember purchasing, Rock Me Amadeus by FALCO. Pictured is the 45 found at Goodwill for $0.99. And I still really enjoy that song. One side A is the US release of the song, but the B-side has the more informative Canadian version of the song that includes informative facts about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 

The strangest thing about it is that I would have told you I was probably in 4th or maybe 5th grade when I bought it. Turns I had to have been in 6th grade as Rock Me Amadeus was on the US billboard charts in March 1986. This discovery seriously messes with my head as I was positive this was the first pop song I fell in love with, but People are People (Summer 1985), Shout (Summer 1985), and The Reflex (June 1984) all pre-date Falco. So it appears I cannot trust anything that I KNOW to be FACT! 

The most surprising thing about revisiting FALCO today is my enjoyment of the music. Is is just pure nostalgia or is it kinda good? Nate assures me it isn't good. But doing a search for any kind of critical reception, I only found one review of the LP FALCO 3 and it was positive giving it 4 1/2 on allmusic.com. 

Regardless of whether or not FALCO is regarded as good music, it is obvious that my taste in music was formed in 6th grade and hasn't strayed too far from what I liked then. I LOVE 1980s new wave / synth pop! I stopped listening to this genre by high school, but now I find that I'm primarily collecting UK & European synth pop. And I've picked up more FALCO, too. 



 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My attempt at Filmspotting's Top 5 List

I just finished listening to Filmspotting podcast, episode #296, and I've been inspired to begin a small project. My concept of great cinema has changed now that I live in a place with so many choices. When I lived in Anchorage, I primarily saw movies at the local Art House, Capri Cinema. Rand, being an out gay man, tended to show a lot of GLBT cinema as well as the better known independent/art house films. The years I lived in Columbia, I watched more mainstream film and really, just about everything that came to town that sounded at all interesting. But in Seattle, the choices are overwhelming by comparison. Sometimes I'll see a classic film, or a film with a lot of buzz, and there are a lot of foreign language films, because of the wide variety of cinema I have access to, I am now a very devoted fan of Asian cinema. The filmmakers in Hong Kong, Korea, China, Japan, Thailand are incredible. And this isn't at all limited to the genre films that have made Asian film
2 comments
Read more

Horror?

From Blogger I apparently have no clue what a horror movie is. Or at least, when the challenge rolls around and I take the leap and attempt to watch 31 horror movies, I suddenly feel as if I have no idea what that means. There are times when it is obvious that a movie is horror; Friday the 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre . Once I dive into the challenge, I begin to question whether the movies I'm seeing really count. This year, I've seen Buried, Carrie, Clean, Shaven, Nosferatu (1922), Scanners, Sisters , and I sell the Dead . Nate protested Sisters, saying DePalma's movie about a pair of disturbed Siamese twins isn't a horror movie. And he has a point, but how is one supposed to choose movies without having seen them before to really know whether they are horror? Especially since I'm only using the challenge to catch up on movies that I should see because they are classics and to re-watch a few others that need to be revisited. But picking the
2 comments
Read more

Girls who are boys, who like boys to be girls...

Where does one begin? Peaches Does Herself is a German concert movie of Peaches. Written by, Directed by and starring Peaches. But how does one describe this experience? Normally, I skip the Face the Music program of films at SIFF each year, but Peaches Does Herself was described as the queerest film in the festival. As it turns out, I knew exactly one Peaches song prior and still know little to nothing about her, but it didn't matter. I enjoyed the music and most of all, I loved her persona. Her sexuality was on display and was not only unapologetic, but read as loud as if it were a billboard with "fuck normalcy and judgement, this is who I am" in bright pink neon. To give an overall impression of the film, I've decided just to lay out what happens along with stills. I suspect that is the best I can do for readers to decide whether this is something they should seek out. The film begins in Peaches' bedroom and after the dancers climb through a giant vu
Post a Comment
Read more