The very first scene shows us the Bates Motel sign, a reference to the motel where Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was set. He had already directed the videos of all the great hits of the early 80s: the great songs of Duran Duran such as The Reflex and The Wild Boys, and then Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler, Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, and many others. First of all, Falco called the great Russell Mulcahy to direct the video. The video, in reality, is by no means trivial and must be analyzed in detail. Apart from Coming Home, none of these songs were successful, and they belong to the period of the decline of Falco’s career and life. We remember Bar Minor 7/11 (Jeanny Dry), in which the y is one of the many wording jokes between English and German in which Falco was a master, Where Are You Now? (Jeanny Part III), and The Spirit Never Dies (Jeanny Final), released eleven years after the death of the Viennese genius. In fact, in the album Emotional that will come out in 1986, we will find the song Coming Home (Jeanny Part II, One Year Later), and we will later find other songs that are difficult to arrange chronologically, because the order in which they were released in the various albums it different from the order in which they were written. Moreover, the song also had a series of sequels, in Falco’s production. In any case, the song reached the top of the charts in West Germany, Austria (where Falco was obviously the undisputed ruler of the hit parade), Switzerland and also in Holland, homeland of the Bolland brothers. In West Germany, however, the song was not censored but many radio and television broadcasters refused to broadcast it, and the symbol of this protest was Thomas Gottschalk, one of the most famous TV and radio presenters, who openly called it junk, calling it Falco “a Viennese sausage producing rubbish” and defining the video as “scenes from a latrine”.įalco merely commented that the song was indeed about the reflections of a stalker, but that it didn’t justify his actions. Several associations, especially in the German-speaking countries, asked for the censorship, which took place in East Germany. The song was obviously heavily criticized because it seemed to defend or at least give voice to the psychology of a rapist and murderer, perhaps justifying it. In fact, the last verse is the news of a television news, read by the German speaker Wilhelm Wieber, which tells us about a nineteen-year-old girl, who has been missing for two weeks now, with the police not excluding the chances of a crime. It is now clear: poor Jeanny was the victim of a maniac, and unfortunately of a murderer. In the second verse, however, the perspective changes and becomes more macabre: after remembering a sentence of the girl who tries to escape, the protagonist begins to scream his delirium: everyone knows that from today we will always be together, I hear them, they come to get you but they will not find you, no one will find you, you are with me. A man remembers a few moments of his story with Jeanny, an escape out of a wood, a nervous moment in which the girl loses a shoe. The text apparently speaks of a love story, but of sick love. The choir with the added voices of the Bolland brothers is in English and helps to make the song ready for international markets, while the verses are in German, and this perhaps helped the song, because if it had been all in English it would probably have generated even more tensions. Slow, intense, full of strength, accurate in detail. At the end of September he had released Vienna Calling, another international success, and on December 23 it is the turn of the third single from the album Falco 3, exactly the controversial Jeanny. At that time Falco’s career was probably at the peak of popularity: after having reached international success at the end of 1981 with Der Kommissar, the release of Rock Me Amadeus in the spring of 1985 had absolutely consecrated him as the main performer of the 80’s singing in a language different from English. The author was one of the greatest musical geniuses of the 80s, but also one of the most controversial personalities, protagonist of excesses and brilliant ideas. Such a lonely little girl in a cold, cold worldĪ few days before Christmas 1985, a song came out and it was not at all a Christmas song on the contrary, it was destined to cause much discussion, and it happened to be boycotted in several countries.
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