Da Hofa
Da Hofa (High German Der Hofer ) is a song by the Austrian songwriter Wolfgang Ambros , with whom he became famous in 1971. The text for the song is written in the Viennese dialect by Joesi Prokopetz . The song was released in 1971 as a single on the Atom label, in 1972 on the LP "Everything else counts net more ..." by Amadeo and stayed at number 1 in the Austrian charts for eight weeks. Da Hofa polarized the country back then and is now considered to be trend-setting for the development of Austrian popular music. Da Hofa was chosen in 2020 by the pop culture magazine The Gap in the AustroTOP ranking as 3rd place of the “100 most important Austrian pop songs”.
The song is about the finding of an unknown dead person. The song describes how the horror of the people soon turns into a wild lynch mood . The focus is on the sentence: Da Hofa woa's, from the Zwanzgahaus, he looks so fabulous. (It was Hofer, from the Twentieth House, he looks so suspicious to me.) In the end, however, it turns out that Hofa is not the murderer, but rather the victim of the crime: ... the house master didn't do anything, she says: “Wos isn my lords? Tans ma the house peace ned stean! Because I know one thing for sure: That the corpse is there " (... if it weren't for the caretaker who says:" What is it, gentlemen? Don't disturb the peace of the house! Because one thing I know for sure: that the corpse of the Hofer is ")
The song is a subtle-critical commentary on the alleged “golden Viennese heart” in the tradition of Ödön von Horváth's play Tales from the Vienna Woods . The song is particularly significant as one of the fundamental works of Austropop .
An English language version of the song was published under the title Jones from No. 3 . This version was not interpreted by Ambros, but by Stuart Matthews. The Austrian music label Atom released it as a single with the B-side The Lurking Raper (English version of Ambros' song Sexualvarbrecha ). Jones from No. 3 appeared on CD in 1999 on the Ambros compilation Raritäten .
In the novel Rohstoff by the writer Jörg Fauser , published in 1984 , the song was mentioned on page 211 when the protagonist Harry Gelb, an unsuccessful writer and temporary night watchman, made a trip to Vienna, visited a friend there and entered the coffee house environment around the Café Hawelka is immersed.
Web links
- Lyrics ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- Da Hofa on austriancharts.at
Individual evidence
- ↑ AustroTOP - The 100 most important Austrian pop songs - page 26 from April 28th, 14th 2020, accessed on April 23rd, 2020 (German).
- ↑ Discogs