Falco – Jeanny
#quotefromthe80s
Jeanny, quit livin' on dreams
Jeanny, life is not what it seems
Such a lonely little girl in a cold, cold world
There's someone who needs you
#Falco #Jeanny
A 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. 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. 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. 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.
Musically, it’s a great song. Slow, intense, full of strength, accurate in detail. 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.
The text apparently speaks of a love story, but of sick love. 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. 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.
It is now clear: poor Jeanny was the victim of a maniac, and unfortunately of a murderer. 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.
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. Several associations, especially in the German-speaking countries, asked for the censorship, which took place in East Germany. 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”.
Falco merely commented that the song was indeed about the reflections of a stalker, but that it didn’t justify his actions. 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. Moreover, the song also had a series of sequels, in Falco’s production. 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. 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. 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.
The video, in reality, is by no means trivial and must be analyzed in detail. First of all, Falco called the great Russell Mulcahy to direct the video. 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. The very first scene shows us the Bates Motel sign, a reference to the motel where Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was set. The first scenes are in black and white and are set in a tunnel that cinephiles of a generation ago will recognize, because in that same tunnel took place a scene from the film The Third Man, based on the novel by Graham Greene. Falco has an F written in chalk on his trench, which recalls a film by Fritz Lang of 1931, in which a blind man identifies a murderer by marking him with an M written in chalk (and M was also the title of the film).
The news piece probably referred to the story of Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer who killed women, often strangling them with their bras. At the time of this song Jack was in prison. Falco could not know it, but in the early 1990s Unterweger was rehabilitated and released and for a period he also became a character on German-language television. After a few months, however, he resumed killing women, was again captured and convicted, and hanged himself in prison in 1994.
The video helps us to imagine the whole story: the girl who goes to a dance club, her eyes frightened at the sight of the stranger, Falco fleeing and hiding in the darkness, and then the police searches, and the girl in the iconography of the deceased. The end of the video shows us the killer trapped in a straitjacket inside a psychiatric hospital cell. But his obsession appears next to him: Jeanny, very young and beautiful, provocative and seductive as he probably saw her in his sick fantasies. Jeanny was played in the video by Theresa Guggenberger, a fifteen-year-old girl who was studying dance in Viennese theater schools. Despite the peculiarity of the role and also the controversy that followed, Theresa lived the experience with detachment and maturity, and she agreed to play Jeanny also in the sequel Coming Home (Jeanny Part II, One Year Later). Today Theresa works as an actress mainly in Austria.
Jeanny is perhaps one of the most beautiful Falco’s songs, certainly it is the most complex. Falco, an absolute genius, was not the guy who left anything to chance, and certainly had deliberately decided to write this song aware of all the controversy that would follow. Jeanny remains an important song in Falco’s career and in music of the 80s, and it was most likely the moved thought of a musical genius for the memory of all the Jeannies.
Falco on Wikipedia
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