Running time

5:03 Minutes

Time of origin and release

2000 (time of origin and release on the album "The Return Of The Mother" by Nina Hagen)

Music, lyrics and production

Music: Nina Hagen, Zeus B. Held
Lyrics: Falco, Nina Hagen
Producer: Nina Hagen, Ingo Krauss

About the song

Around two years after Falco’s death, Nina Hagen, who had met Falco personally in the mid-1990s, produced a sampling song in which she used excerpts from Falco interviews in a track written by her and Zeus B. Held. For the “Mother of Punk,” who was born in East Berlin, this posthumous collaboration with Falco seemed to be more than just a commercially exploitable publicity stunt: she often spoke of a spiritual connection to Falco – a claim that she made in a wonderfully bizarre way in an interview with Wiener magazine in 2000: “First Falco came to me in a dream, that was really great, he was a real rascal and in an incredibly good mood, so I thought to myself, he’s doing well over there. I once met Falco in a nightclub in Vienna. He was an incredibly cute. I had extraterrestrial sex with him in the dream, of course. Our love is so great, you don’t need to say anything else. And it is very important to maintain contact with otherworldly and extraterrestrial beings.”

Even in the real world, Nina Hagen and Falco had some things in common: both were internationally successful, both sang predominantly in German,had an exalted lifestyle and a love of controversy can be found in the lives of both artists. A few years later, in 2005, Nina Hagen performed Falco’s song Ganz Wien at the opening of the Wiener Festwochen at the Rathausplatz in Vienna. Hagen’s version lives from her very own interpretation and you can tell she was happy to perform this number live on this occasion .

In contrast to other songs that were released after Falco’s death (by the Bollands, by Dolezal&Rossacher, by various record labels), you can tell that this sampling song was done with a lot of love and respect. At the same time, it is not a pathetic, glorifying number; Nina Hagen incorporates both humor and her own Berlin bluntness into the work.

Musically, the song is carried by a strong drum beat; in the background you can only hear occasional additional instrumentation. An Indian-like melody subtly runs through the track. The structural structure is also interesting: it is only after around three and a half minutes that you hear the refrain for the first time („Eine Seele ist immer da, wo eine Seele hingehört, geht nie verloren, wird nie zerstört“). Until the end of the song, the refrain is repeated in a tantra-like manner, triggering an almost trance-like state.

Lyrically, Nina Hagen outlines her emotional connection to Falco in several dimensions: She addresses the influence of the music industry on sensitive artists' souls, which she also sees very critically, and the difficulties of being a pop star („Ich kenne das Szenario, nichts Unmenschliches ist mir fremd, my friend. Diese Industrie ist die reinste Onanie, man leckt und schleckt, es schmeckt wie Dreck, nix wie weg!“, „Dieser Beruf ist alles aber nicht bequem, ganz schön insane, but who’s to blame, what’s the name of the game? Gott sei Dank auf das bisschen Stolz“). Against this background, in one verse she compares Falco directly to Kurt Cobain, the singer of the American grunge band Nirvana, for whom, among other things, the circumstances surrounding his superstardom ultimately led to his tragically early death.

Hagen also sings about Falco’s life and his problems: „Überdosis Alkohol, so viel Koks und Kohle, wir stoßen auf dich an, zum Wohle. So viele Leben, so viele Krater, so viel Sterben, wer war denn nun der Vater? So viele Scherben“. In these lines, Hagen refers not only to Mutter, Der Mann Mit Dem Koks Ist Da, but also to the fact that Falco was not the father of the girl he had assumed for years to be his daughter.

Ultimately, the theme of the song revolves around the otherworldly, death. Here, Nina Hagen elegantly interweaves her diverse religious views with Falco’s death. „Ich vermiss dich, du bist jetzt ein Licht, hast so ein liebes Gesicht. Hast du dir schon vergeben? Kennst du jetzt dein ganzes Leben? Und kommst du bald mal wieder, bist Popstar und machst Volkslieder, du Lieber?“. The term “Volkslieder” refers to an interview excerpt used as a sample in the song, in which Falco speaks of “Kunst fürs Volk, durchs Volk” – a strangely funny allusion to socialist ideas. After that the number becomes more and more transcendental: „Ohne dich ist uns jetzt klar, was nicht ist aber mal war, alle müssen sterben, vielleicht sogar ich. Ja, Falco, ich weiß, so einfach geht das nicht“, „The way is the goal and the soul went exit“, „Tao, Falco, Tao. Total peace”.

Ultimately, Hinduism is added to Confucianism when Hagen sings „Shanti, Falco. Andere Dimension, ahnen können wir es schon. Da wo du bist, bei den Göttern, da glaubt ja keiner dran von den ganzen Spöttern. Aber ich weiß es, war ja auch schon da. Aber seit du plötzlich weg bist, wurde es mir erst so richtig klar. Falco, Mensch sein, eine Seele haben, (…) das ist einfach wunderbar“. Then the refrain begins, repeating like a prayer wheel until the end.

Falco’s voice in the samples fits Nina Hagen’s text sometimes more, sometimes less, but overall the overall picture is funny and harmonious. On the one hand, Falco speaks (in his strange English) about wanting to be successful again („I want to get my audience again cause I am too lonely without them. We’re back to the roots”), on the other hand, it’s about sexuality („Wie die Hasen“) and about the (musical-creative or general) search for meaning („I am searching for my way“). The text mixing works well when the Falco samples refer directly to Nina Hagen’s lyrics („Wo war ich jetzt? Jetzt bin ich weg“) and thus achieve an additional level of meaning. The humor is also not neglected when the song uses the Falco words „Nudelsuppe“ and „Nudelpuppe“ completely incoherently. Where these two words come from and in what context Falco used them remains unclear, but the sexual connotation of “Nudelpuppe” is unmistakable (in vulgar Viennese the term “Nudel” stands for the male genitals). The song ends with Falco’s words „Der Film geht aus“.

The sample „Falco sitzt da oben und lacht sich kaputt über uns“ comes from an interview with August Paterno, an Austrian television chaplain; the sentence was uttered in an ORF broadcast shortly after Falco’s death.

The song was not released as a single, but can be found as an album number on Nina Hagen’s LP “The Return Of The Mother”, released in 2000.

Nina Hagen’s sampling song is a classic example of how tracks of this type can be made original, respectful, unpathetic and humorous. Hagen chooses topics that interest her in Falco on the one hand and in her own world on the other, brings them together in a successful way and creates a song that has its own significance. Precisely because she uses the Falco samples not just as a means to a (commercial) end, but as an equal counterpart to her lyrical ideas, something personal and independent emerges. The song is also musically convincing, Hagen chooses a contemporary and unique approach, the sound sounds modern and belongs to the artist’s sound universe.

This makes this posthumous sampling collaboration very pleasantly different from other projects of this kind, such as the ones by the Bollands. There is also a lot more love and connection in this song – the complete opposite would probably be the sampling songs that were created years later as part of the album Sterben Um Zu Leben.

Nina Hagen’s sampling duet is clearly and by far at the top of such projects in terms of quality. You notice her inner connection to Falco and the song works on both a lyrical and musical level. It’s a shame that these two artists never collaborated during their lifetime; the result would certainly have been more appealing and interesting than Falco’s duets with Désirée Nosbusch (Kann Es Liebe Sein?) and Brigitte Nielsen (Body Next To Body).