Rock Me Amadeus

There's some debate as to whether Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" was released in 1985 or 1986, but I seem to remember it being when I was young, so I'm guessing 1985.  Not that there is a big difference, but for me the difference was between age 10 and 11, and this video and song scared the daylights out of me.  For that very reason, I'm guessing I was only 10 when it came out.  At that age, I was just on the cusp of being scared or not scared of things like freaky synthesized pop.  That plus the crazy rainbow wig in the video just threw me over the edge in terms of fright.  Listening to the song today, I think the synthesized ostinato may have contributed subconsciously as well.

It's kind of ironic that I would be afraid of something that would become such an integral part of my life.  At that age, I had just started playing clarinet.  Who would have thought that I would grow-up to become a professional musician, playing Mozart K.191 and 622 over and over and over...  I love Mozart's music, don't get me wrong -- all of it.  His chamber wind music, wind concertos, operas, symphonies -- they are all the foundation from which we learn much of what we need to know as classical musicians.  Anyway, back to the tune.  So, my older brother loved this song and could recite the spoken part verbatim.  He said that was how he remembered all the important dates in Mozart's life.  As for me, well, I had those dates ingrained in my head after many years of music schooling.  Now that I listen to the song again, I realize that that may be the only part we could recite, because the rest of the lyrics are kind of an English-German hybrid.  Of course, we get the gist of it all, and we can certainly understand the chorus and other repeated lines -- "Baby, baby do it to me, rock me, baby, baby do it to me, rock me..."  "Ooooh -- rock me, Amedeus..."  Kind of silly and tongue-in-cheek for sure.  Oddly enough, I never saw the movie, but I will put that on my to-do list!  There are two videos that I found rather interesting -- the movie version and the extended American mix.  They are very different, so I am including them both.  The extended one is certainly, well, you'll see.  Good thing I was so young when this came out and completely unaware of any of the stuff in the extended mix video.  Wow.  Enjoy!