Treat Us Badly, Bobbelsche!

It seems that adoration has no bounds when it comes to the idolization of rock stars and singers. The more violent and abusive the star, the more the fans seem to love them.

When Jim Morrison abused an audience of thousands at a concert in Miami in 1969 by shouting, "You're all a bunch of f***ing slaves!" the cheers for the outrageous Doors frontman got even louder.

Less than a decade later, young punks in London would literally fight each other to get to the front of a Sex Pistols gig on the off chance of getting spat on by Johnny Rotten or having Sid Vicious break his bass over their heads.

Music genres such as rock and punk are fuelled by the chemistry between the simmering malevolence on stage and the unleashed mayhem in the crowd. The energy created by confrontational artists and willing victims is the stuff of legend. It is this type of sado-masochistic, love-hate relationship which separates the edgy from the cozy -- which is why you'll never get bottles of urine thrown on stage at a Take That concert.

Following in the footsteps of legends

But that could all change if housewives' favorite and teeny lust object Mark "Bobbelsche" Medlock gets his way. The latest winner of German talent show Deutschland Sucht den Superstar (DSDS) is already beginning to blur the boundaries between insipid pop poser and raging rock behemoth. And in the time-honored fashion, his fans are lapping up the abuse.

The R'n'B singer from Frankfurt owes his new-found fame to the thousands of dreamy and lusty teenage fans who voted by phone to award him the title of Germany's latest Superstar and yet, despite the fact that each vote cost his fans 50 cents per call, he doesn’t appear to be too humble.

Mark's proclamation to his fans that "I love you all so f***ing much" could quite easily be taken as an over-enthusiastic cry of thanks but referring to his audience as "a bunch of dirty bastards" requires deeper analysis to find the remotest appreciation of their efforts.

"Since I saw Mark for the first time, I can no longer imagine my life without him," wrote one fan on the superstar's Internet fan site. "I cry if I see him on the TV and am moved profoundly if I hear him talking."

Even when he’s spilling lines of profanities at the devoted? It seems so.

Abusive star "just being himself"

Christian Maier, the operator of the fan site, laughs off Mark's earthy attitude to his fans.

"He’s just a witty guy," Maier told German news magazine Spiegel. "When he calls us dirty bastards, it doesn't mean anything. It's just how he is."

Maier runs the fan site from Austria and he led the wave of thousands of Mark devotees calling in expensive votes from outside Germany.

"We were charged a lot more than those calling from Germany," he said. "But we kept calling. Hundreds and hundreds called all through the night to help Mark win."

Any words of thanks yet? It seems that the commitment of Austrian fans has been relayed to the new Superstar but he has yet to acknowledge them or even throw an insult in their direction. The fan site almost collapsed under the amount of supporters logging on during and after the final but neither an acknowledgement nor accusation of dubious parentage has come from the Bobbelsche's finely pursed lips.

"Above all, we long to hear from Mark and we hope that (DSDS judge) Dieter Bohlen can help him to become a star," said Maier, almost wistfully.

As Mark himself would probably say: Don't hold your breath, dirtbag.