Everything about the musical style of "Modern Talking"

The Composer/Producer

Dieter Bohlen is the chief mind behind "Modern Talking" songs, as well as many other projects.
Having come from a non-musical background and as a self-taught musician/producer, Dieter Bohlen has indeed accomplished a lot and now he is almost the "constant" judge of all German talent-related reality TV shows.

However, after analyzing almost all Dieter Bohlen's compositions, the only word that crosses one's mind is "simplicity" combined with "rigid adherence to song structure" in such a way that sometimes it makes all songs look the same.

Having said that, one can not and should not ignore the fact that music is "lawless" and the world of opportunities and possibilities in music is endless so this should not be interpreted as a "criticism"; maybe quite the opposite, you could actually consider it a positive point because it takes a lot to write as many songs as he has based on the very basic basics of music theory.

Song Structure

Genre-wise at a broad level, Modern Talking's music can be categorized as dance-pop or Euro-pop but if one looks at it with more details and scrutiny, the 80's Modern Talking could be well categorized under Italo-disco and Euro-disco. After 1998, Modern Talking can be mostly categorized under Eurodance for which they are known, despite presenting American-style ballads.

Almost all the songs of Modern Talking follow the typical verse-chorus form and most of the times, they have 2 choruses (one in high-pitch), except for ballads and songs like "Time is on my side", "Avec Toi", "I'm not guilty", "Anything is possible", "We take the chance" and some more.  

 The following figure shows an example of how a typical Modern Talking song looks like.

Hints:

• In many cases the introduction, sections 2 and 3 are chord-compatible. It means that Modern Talking has a highly-modular style and different parts of a song can be performed on the rhythm of the other parts (e.g. in "Cheri Cheri lady" almost all the sections except the introduction are chord-compatible, based on Am,Em,Dm and G chord sequence while the introduction is based on Am,F and G chords).The same as "Don't take away my heartt" on C-Em-F and G. 

• Sections 2-1 and 2-2 are complete mirrors of each of other. They are the most important sections in the lyric because the title of the song and also the main idea of the song are mentioned in them. For each song on this website, the chords of this section have been listed as "Main Chords" in the description of each song.

• Sections 3-1 and 3-2 are also complete mirrors of each other. The title is mentioned here too. This section is performed by high pitch. Almost in all of the cases these sections are chord-compatible with Section 2-1 and 2-2. There are few exceptions for this state (e.g. "Sexy sexy lover", "Atlantis is calling ((S.O.S for love)", "Fly to the moon", "China in her eyes", "S.M.S. to my heart" and some more). Almost in all of the ballads these two sections are omitted since there were no high-pitch choruses in the ballads. There are also some dance songs with this characteristic (e.g. "Time is on my side", "Avec Toi", "I'm not guilty", "Anything is possible", "We take the chance" and some more).

• Sections 1 and 4 are compatible in notes, chords, the style of the rhymes and also the number of the syllables in the sentences of the lyrics. Note that in many cases the meaning is more important than keeping the same number of the syllables. This is normally handled by changing the time duration of the notes in the music and it is acceptable to some extent. Because of the compatibility in the chords, these two sections should be also in correspondence in the content and also in the feeling of the words. As an example you can see this structure in the lyric of "When the sky rained firee" from the Victory album:

• In some cases at the starting point of section 4, many of the instruments in the rhythm are omitted while the rhythm returns to it's normal form at the starting point of the 2nd division of section 4 ( You can check this in "Time is on my side", "I'm not guilty", "Angie's Heart (version 1998)" and "Should I, would I, Could I").

• Almost all of the Modern Talking songs focus on the positive side of LOVE in the content. There are only a few songs that are focused on sport-related theme (e.g.  "We take the chance", "Win the race" and "Ready for the victory") or a half-negative side of love (e.g. "Never fall in love again", "Girl out of my dreams", "Crying in the night" (of course if you consider it as a Modern Talking song)).

Chords

Normally, as usual verse-chorus form would imply, the verse and choruses are repeated at least once during a typical Modern Talking song and corresponding segments or modules are "chord" and "mood" compatible.

In almost all Modern Talking songs, each phrase (i.e. verse segment, chorus and high-pitch chorus) ends  with a typical and common cadence (mostly ending to E or G), except for "Cherie Cherie Lady" and "Everybody needs somebody" whose verses are ending to Em as 2 exceptions.

Dieter Bohlen has been strictly loyal to some of his chord sequences almost all of which are easy and common triads (except Dm7 in "I will follow you", "We take the chance", "Rouge Et Noir" and "Superstar" and  G11 in the melody and chorus of "Brother Louei").
The following table lists some of the most commonly-used chords by Dieter Bohlen in his productions for Modern Talking.

The Lyrics

From the viewpoint of a native English speaker, the lyrics of Modern Talking songs look as "easy and cheesy" as any other European-made pop music may look like and even sometimes the few grammatical mistakes actually "hurt" the listener.

But wait! Is it bad? Obviously NOT. Such style of music has its own class of lyrics which may look quite bizarre to a native speaker because of exaggerated dependency on romance, which sometimes can make the songs look even "gay", and excessive simplicity with either unusual or very usual rhyme selections but at the end of the day, it's just another type of music.
At least, they have had the courage to have lyrics in their songs and not make 1-word, 1-phrase or 1-sentence songs.