Ooh, rock me Amadeus."
Every time the wispy female voice croons those four words to the tinny synthesizer backbeat, I scramble like Pavlov's dog. Kiewit's brainchild beckons. Falco's 1985 hit song firing from my Macintosh means one thing -- new BlitzMail.
Making twenty or thirty-odd appearances in my Dartmouth day, Falco holds a special place in my heart that no Corey Hart or Rick Springfield could ever replace. His greatest hits CD is a staple of my collection, and although I can't sing along with his German lyrics, I regularly bop to "Der Kommissar," "Jeanny" and other songs I'd be impressed if you recognized. With the aid of VH1's "Pop-Up Video," I tracked his retreat from pop stardom to the Dominican Republic, where he died last Sunday in a car crash.
It struck me at once as tragic. Falco's death would be a news blurb at most. All of Europe would keep on wearing black, but scarcely one pair of black pleather pants would be for him.
In another sense, however, I felt no loss. Austrian-born Johann Something, has-been glam icon Falco, was as real as the liquid plastic slicking his hair. A cartoon-like bad boy, Falco's death felt a bit like a Smurf massacre years after their Saturday morning stint ended. If his 1991 album "Data de Groove" was any indication, Falco's music was not destined for a comeback. He lived for a decade as a glossy synthpop memory -- and now he lives only in that glorious decade, the 1980s.
A smile just crept on the face of anyone who knows me. I adore the '80s. I can sing just about any pop song from the decade, and if you ever saw a girl in skintight flowered denim at Sigma Nu's Early Eighties party, that was me. I pine for the days when tacky was acceptable, and rainbow eyeshadow expanded beyond the eyebrows. I was Cyndi Lauper every Halloween for eight years and an MTV addict since 1981.
Nostalgia is a funny thing.
I am now sitting on the Eurostar train in the Channel Tunnel halfway between England and France, between matriculation and Commencement, between arriving in London and returning to Newark. Southern England whizzed by as I perched on this window seat and reflections seized me -- not the literal face staring back, but the idea that this ongoing collegiate episode of our lives is the stuff of memories. We'll go to parties as thirty-somethings and sigh, "oh dear, remember when we used to dance to Puff Daddy back in college?" If cheesy '80s pop is any indication, what you do now will be inflated in years to come as a legend in your own mind. I feel an overriding obligation to try and fix this journey in my mind for posterity -- to convince myself that the French countryside I'm staring at looks more different from Pennsylvania than I think. And really, I'd like to take a nap. From my room in London, I often walk to Baker Street, home to Sherlock Holmes. But I only go there to buy milk. In drawing the coloring book of my time abroad will things like this be the pencil sketch that gets erased?
There's a line from Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" that, paraphrased, says, "use the past only how it makes you happy." I know that dreaming of a colorful shiny happy world of '80s music was hardly my actual experience. "Rock Me Amadeus" is a great song, but I was only eight when it came out. I simply did not have the wild punk-rocker lifestyle I'd like to imagine. And yet Falco singing on my blitz makes me happy, just as some day most of us will have some shred of Dartmouth in our world, and it will probably come to signify something completely apart from what it is now -- scrawling lecture notes, treasuring any shred of sleep and stressing far too much.
There is a fine line between dwelling on the past and using it as a source of enjoyment. At age 40, Falco continued to write cheesy synthesizer pop, barely marketable in 1984, much less in the 99-cent bin of a West Leb strip mall record store where I found it. Falco's musical decline shows us that while you can listen to Katrina and the Waves on your headphones, you can't wear tube socks and jelly bracelets to board meetings. Time marches on for the Smurfs, Jem and the Holograms and the Snorks. Only the Cartoon Network can save them now. But there's no harm in smiling over whatever it was that once made you happy. Now isn't as good as it will be, but I'll always have Paris ...
