They™, your honor

Ripping it up and starting again with Depeche Mode

A version of this post existed a month ago already. It was supposed to be a piece more in the vein of the Lou X one, but I decided not to post it because it was really bad from a moral standpoint. So back to the drawing board we go. Which is very funny to me because Depeche Mode's career seems entirely based on that, trial-and-error, or more exactly successive approximations. Vince Clarke leaves them, they start from square one again with Martin Gore as lead songwriter. Alan Wilder leaves them, they start kind-of-sort-of where they left off. Andy Fletcher dies, they finish up the record and it's actually good, which surprises many, myself included. Andy Fletcher's death, as terrible as it is to say out loud, was that extra push I needed to actually get my ass onto Depeche Mode for real and not just as vestigial remains of something my mom told me once when I was like five.

Rationally, I kind of just thought Depeche Mode were some run-of-the-mill synthpop band who nailed a couple songs here and there, and depending who you ask that might even be the case, so when I was 16 my initial reaction was something along the lines of "okay so aesthetically they're slightly edgier than Talk Talk, aka the renowned and incontestable pinnacle of '80s synthpop, that's cute, anyway back to The Colour of Spring" which in retrospect makes me want to slap myself across the face. And it's definitely not Talk Talk's fault, believe me, not one bad record except maybe The Party's Over but y'know, growing pains! The one thing I'll allow artists, but not myself. Until at one point my mom goes "hey, can you make me a CD for the car? I want Stairway to Heaven in it." For reference, my mom basically had no clue who the fuck Led Zeppelin were until my old band decided we actually were crazy enough to try playing Stairway to Heaven to an actual human audience — and for some reason my mom liked our version better. Damn, being sixteen and vaguely cute really lets you get away with some crazy shit. But yeah, I had seven minutes filled, alright - what do I fill the CD with? I knew that my mom is, usually, more aligned to my music tastes than my dad is (I think I actually showed my mom '90s Swans and System of a Down on two separate occasions, somehow not getting consequently, uh, retroactively aborted) and I knew my mom liked bands like Duran Duran and Depeche Mode back in the '80s, so what the fuck, let's google "depeche mode" and see what pulls up.

Take a wild guess what pulled up.

And ironically, even that didn't entirely stick the landing. I had this whole ass conversation with my friend R. about how Depeche Mode's production decisions were dated "but like in an iconic way and unintrusive" or some backwards ass shit, I don't even know, I guess I was trying to justify myself for not liking a fucking record as much as I expected (????) and into the mnemonic toilet it went. Until March 2023 rolls along and at A.'s birthday, on the Bluetooth boombox that A. never separates from, this plays:

And it was, again, cute, right. It's dated in a very endearing way that makes it somewhat compelling. And so was Strangelove, which for some reason felt like a natural next step to take from there, but nothing else came of it. I never went out and listened to the singles, minus some of the ones I'd known as a kid: in case you're wondering, they were Peace and Blasphemous Rumours, which are definitely not babby's first Depeche Mode songs. For some reason I still couldn't cut the same slack I'd been cutting for — again — Talk Talk, whom I still love dearly. Maybe it was just a question of time, or simply of just learning to get along with the fact that things age. For some reason it took me a good five to seven years to actually realize that, god damn!, I'd never listened to a full Depeche Mode album before. So since I'm a smartass and it has an edgy title, I started out on Black Celebration and it's good, don't get me wrong, but definitely not the best possible starting point for Depeche Mode I think? If you're looking for veritable bangers front-to-back maybe go for Violator, or Songs of Faith and Devotion if you're feeling like some extra zest. But whatever, I don't know what the fuck happened that day in the car. Anyway that's how I came across my favourite Depeche Mode song, which on my worst days still gets me if it catches me off guard.

And that's what made it click, for some fucking reason. Real talk — it barely gets any more stereotypically '80s than the single mix of this song, and yet here I am bopping my shit to the beat, genuinely rocked to my socks and in a frenzy. Add to that this interesting conversation I had with this friend of A.'s, a Russian girl who immediately charmed me with her wits and unique makeup game (on a different occasion she referred to a Soviet-era children's TV show called Приключения Буратино — "priklyucheniya Buratino", which translates to "The adventures of Buratino" — as a major inspiration point for her aesthetic choices). For a very peculiar coincidence, it turned out that most of the people at the party were of Eastern European descent to some degree, and when A Question of Time played literally every single one of these people popped up saying "damn, my mom loved Depeche Mode" and this here girl I was talking about told me that back in the '90s, I'm talking immediate post-USSR years, her mom once got detention because on a school trip to Belarus she skipped class to go buy Depeche Mode posters at a newspaper stand. So since I'm very normal about this kinda stuff, I obviously went back home and googled "depeche mode russia", which led me to this here Dazed article which in turn led me to depeche.ru, a small miracle of a Web 2.0 time capsule where a treasure trove of pictures taken by Russian and Eastern European fans of Depeche Mode from the mid-'80s all the way to 2006 — last update of the site so far.

The beautiful thing about Depeche Mode is exactly this: the fact that they aren't afraid of being endearing and even vulnerable to an extent. It's hard to think of a rock act as big as Depeche Mode are that's able to pull that stuff with aplomb: Springsteen, maybe? I'm not expecting Metallica, Green Day or Kid Rock to ever put out anything that competes with Nebraska — or even Born to Run, just to be fair to everyone involved. And it cracks me the fuck up that someone would think that Springsteen is anywhere close to the hard-rock-minded hard-headed bastard that his fans on average are: which admittedly is a very wooden and unfortunate way of tying together Depeche Mode and Springsteen, but they were for me. Nebraska and Songs of Faith and Devotion came to me almost simultaneously, as the result of a musical discovery that saw me navigating a moment of true crisis, a moment where once again the answer was: ignore the noise. Rip it up and start again. And that third verse on Atlantic City very gracefully paired up with a track like Walking in My Shoes because they are unapologetic in their presentation, direct and deceptively raw — all qualities that all rockers like to pretend they have, but that very few people are able to properly handle, let alone effectively weaponise. They hide nothing, and yet find a specific, unique perspective on feelings that at some point bite any and everyone of us. It's insane to me that the most blue-collar of all the classic rockers, the one guy who never really lost touch with what he represents and stands for, and what some people still derogatorily refer to as "a synthpop band" managed to stumble upon such similarly expressive aesthetic markers at similarly crucial moments in their respective careers. And both things mean the world to all fans involved, because they remain in touch, they know themselves and who's coming to the shows — which warrants a constant stream of new people. "What you see is what you get" is not about repetitiveness: like it was meant to be for Sonic the Hedgehog, it may be a statement of intent and transparency, something simultaneously simpler and deeper than shallowness can ever allow for.

(On an unrelated note, I would literally kill for Springsteen's Butterscotch Blonde Telecaster, and while I perfectly know that's the most basic possible Telecaster color and literally any other American-made Butterscotch Blonde Fender Telecaster would potentially have the same aesthetic and practical functions as Springsteen's, it's a bit like that Borges story where he meets himself but forty years younger: sure, it's the same, but ever so slightly different in a way that feels a bit uncomfortable or counterfeit. Telecasters are great guitars. Rationally speaking if I had the money I would probably go with something with humbuckers on, but fuck me, that twang is something else.)

Necessarily, this entails the ability to pick up the pieces no matter what gets thrown your way, and rearrange them at the best of your abilities. And it's hard. Legitimately speaking, I don't think neither of the parties involved (including, possibly as the biggest offender, Sonic the Hedgehog) really did it every single time. But putting away our necessarily partial perspective as listeners who are not in the band, does it ultimately matter? Martin Gore's divorce produced a track like Precious, which in the context of any other band would probably have been met with some backlash of the "they've-gone-soft" variety; and yet Playing the Angel is widely regarded as one of their late-era records, because the ability to honestly process emotion was always part of Depeche Mode's vocabulary and tricks of the trade. It's what makes a song like The Things You Said fly, especially in the 101 concert movie. During the film, there's an extreme close-up on a kid with puffy cheeks, messy bangs, clear eyes and a tooth gap singing the most teenaged fucking bullshit ever and still, it flies, because Martin Gore's lyricism — while maybe not as elaborate as Tom Waits*', sure — hits the spot. It's not its simplicity as much as it is some form of universality, perhaps.

Case in point: the latest Depeche Mode record, which came out in March 2023, is called Memento Mori, and apparently the title was chosen before Andy Fletcher's untimely passing. There's a song on it called Always You and it's a very passionate and heartfelt elegy to passing time, and a paean to things that stay. It's easy to think it's a love song of sorts: it literally says "my love" as a constant refrain in verses, so I guess it is, what the fuck can I say guys?, but there are many things that you can love, and many ways that you can love. It doesn't try to be "hip" and "cool", it doesn't sound old-man-yells-at-cloud contrived, it does its thing and gives no fucks and as such it sticks the landing. A little honesty and conviction go a really long way.

*If there had to be a third act with irremovable cred, that's absolutely my man Tom Waits, but that gets a bit more on the intellectual side of things and requires a little bit of irony and suspension of disbelief I'd argue. He deserves his own post, in short.