Phoenix's performance at the closing ceremony of the 2024 Olympics on August 11, 2024, held in the band's home country, France, made me nostalgically revisit some of the videos from the Lisztomania Brat Pack Mashups series, an internet phenomenon in which music from the album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (2009) went viral with videos produced in several cities around the world. Each video showed a group of young people dancing to the rhythm of the song. Years later, one of these young women had the video she participated in used against her days before her inauguration as a congresswoman. However, the attempt to defame the then-elected candidate was unsuccessful. It is quite possible that she gained as many fans as the French band.
Lisztomania Brat Pack Mashups originated from a video posted on YouTube by a user called avoidantconsumer, in which scenes from 1980s teen movies, such as "Breakfast Club" and "Pretty in Pink", are mixed and set to the song "Lisztomania". From there, several videos around the world appeared with young people dancing to the Phoenix hit.
The term Brat Pack, which in Portuguese means something like a bunch of brats, was created in the 1980s by writer David Blum in New York Magazine to define the groups of young actors and actresses who starred in teen movies, a craze in that decade.
I confess that my favorite videos produced for "Lisztomania" are Brooklyn Brat Pack Mashup and Rio de Janeiro Brat Pack Mashup.
But I'm going to highlight the Boston University Brat Pack Mashup here.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
In early 2019, days before her inauguration to the US Congress, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was surprised by a 30-second video of her dancing on the rooftop of a building that was shared on social media. “Here is America's favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is...” was one of the captions that accompanied the video shared by conservatives in a dirty and crude attempt to upset the young congresswoman.
The images in this 30-second video were taken from the Boston University Brat Pack Mashup, made almost 10 years earlier.
Sandy Ocasio-Cortez, as she was known at Boston University, was one of the young people who had fun in the video recorded at the university. Well, she didn't let it get her down and shared a video of herself dancing outside her office on Capitol Hill at her inauguration.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez graduated in 2011 with a degree in economics and international relations.
Lisztomania
Lisztomania was a term coined by German writer Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) to describe the frenzy of fans of Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt (1811–1886) in response to his virtuosity on the piano. In the official music video for the song "Lisztomania", scenes show Phoenix visiting the Franz-Liszt-Museum in Germany.
Still in Germany, a choir in Berlin performed a beautiful version of the song.