Year: 1986
Chart Position: #1
Last year's Worst Songs position: #41
This is the first former #1 Worst Song in this year's countdown, and I have to admit I'm always a little surprised that this song doesn't rank higher on a regular basis. Probably because listeners over the last twenty years have been frantically trying to remove "Amadeus" from their brains. If you have any tips on how to do this, please pass them along.
Historically, rock music has been about distancing itself from classical (Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" is the archetype) -- in the case of Austrian-born Falco, he wants to equate Mozart with rock and roll. It's not the worst anaolgy -- Mozart was known to be somewhat of a L'enfant terrible. Of course, being Falco, his attempt at analogy is clumsy at best, conjuring up both Johnny Rotten and Johnny B. Goode in the same verse:
He was the first punk ever to set foot on this earth
He was a genius from the day of his birth
He could play the piano like a ring and a bell
The last line is a weird paraphrase of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode": "He could play the guitar just like ringing a bell." You see, ringing a bell is easy and effortless -- unlike listening to this song.
Fun Fact: Win a bar bet with this one -- Falco is not a "one-hit wonder." He had a follow-up hit with "Vienna Calling."
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