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Holofernes on »Aurélie«: »Lives in Brussels«
Photo: Jens Kalaene / picture alliance / Jens Kalaene / dpa-Zentralbild / dpa
Pop music often revolves around love, heartbreak - and sometimes, often in connection with love and heartbreak, around mysterious strangers: there is Eileen from the song "Come On Eileen" by the English band Dexys Midnight Runners.
Eileen, who is arguably not a childhood friend of singer Kevin Rowland
was, as he once said, but perhaps "composed", as he once said to the Guardian, a "mixture".
How much poetry and how much truth there is in Rowland's statements remains open.
Eileen joins a list of names that have been dropped in pop and rock history and have also contributed to the mystification of the respective music.
Eric Clapton sang "Layla".
The song was based on an old oriental love story and was inspired by Pattie Boyd, then still the wife of Clapton's friend George Harrison, a declaration of love of the mysterious kind.
It is similar with Jimi Hendrix '"Foxy Lady", which was probably inspired by his girlfriend in the mid-1960s, Lithofayne Pridgon, who died a few months ago.
And there is "Common People" by Pulp, about which there was speculation a few years ago whether it might refer to Danae Stratou, the wife of Gianis Varoufakis.
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In Germany, in addition to Eileen and maybe Alice (“Who the fuck is Alice?”), A female first name might come to mind: “Aurélie, it never works like that,” we-are-hero singer Judith Holofernes sang eight years ago, “you expect far too much, the Germans flirt very subtly «.
Who is this Aurélie, whose accent is "without question very charming" and who is also silently "recognized as wonderful"?
On Twitter, Holofernes now apparently gave an insight into their current life, a user of the social network had inquired.
"Aurélie," she wrote, "lives in Brussels with my German friend (my fellow student at the time) whom she met three weeks after I wrote the song."
Here, too, fiction and truth are close together, Holofernes did not answer who Aurélie really is with her tweet.
Luckily.
Because: Sure, there are enough names in pop music that allude quite clearly to very specific people.
Those who devote themselves less to the mystical than to the mythization of certain people: "So long, Marianne," sang Leonard Cohen, inspired by his muse Marianne Ihlen.
And you don't really have to write anything about "The Ballad of John and Yoko" except the title.
In other real name mentions more recently, it is sometimes less about such big terms as myth or mystification. It's about dissolving: Alone on the controversial album »Jung, brutal, gutaussehend 3« by rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang, for example, more than 30 names of thrown people are mentioned. But there is also dissent in the pop-rock area, albeit a little more diplomatically: "Ackermann, Merkel, Jan Fleischhauer, Voldemort," the group Von Wegen Lisbeth had in one song. "Nice people when you dance."
In pop, however, the most beautiful are still the unknowns (not only because they are less often addressed in the text).
And »Aurélie« isn't an explicit song either.
Much more diffuse, although it becomes clear that Aurélie's hair is »sea and wheat«.
Which is beautiful.
And it's nice if it stays that way - which Holofernes probably also recognized.
Because maybe questions about who Aurélie, Alice, Eileen really were should just go unanswered.
Maybe these songs should stay what they are.
Projection surfaces, with a lot of white space.
Brief odes to the beautifully unknown.
