spamguy

In 7th grade (1997) I sneaked into Frau Bouska’s classroom at the end of her German 1B class, the 8th grader class. The room was dark, and every face was glued to the TV set up front. A man was dancing in place and singing. It made sense in theory, but it was in German and had the production values of a scaled back cable access TV channel, so it made my brain hurt.

‘What is this?’ I asked The Frau. She refused to tell me; for the answer, she said, I’d ‘have to wait ’til next year.’ It was clearly too special for 7th graders to appreciate.

Fast forward to 1998. She popped the PAL-to-NTSB-converted cassette in the VCR, and the secret was unwrapped. We were watching Falco music videos. To the unfamiliar, you probably know Falco best as the singer of ‘Rock Me Amadeus.’ To the girls, Falco was swoon-worthy and extremely sexy in his Miami Vice-style garb. To me, he became my favourite 1980s icon and one of mainland Europe’s finest pop musicians. As we watched the TV, everyone in the room agreed: we were watching a treasure.

‘Der Kommissar’ (imported to America by After The Fire) featured a music video so primitive, it wasn’t just filmed at the birth of the music video boom, it was music video’s premature baby, the result of snorting too many cocaine lines in discotheque bathrooms. It was a flagrant abuse of green screen technology. And for that, it was brilliant.

Today I compliment Frau Bouska for her decision to hold these videos only for advanced ages. Falco videos are fine wines intended to be aged. For a chaser, here’s the video to Rock Me Amadeus, which actually has production quality to it, likely because it had three more years of experience and development behind it than ‘Der Kommissar’: