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rfmcdonaldI became a fan of the Mode relatively late in life, several years after seeing several of their early 1980s videos on a MuchMusic 80's music weekend and shortly after the release of 1997's Ultra. I tend not to be a fan of early 1980s Depeche Mode since the songs of Vince Clarke and the early songs of Martin Gore tend to be too saccharine-poppy for my taste, and the more rock-oriented 1990s output of the band leaves me a bit cold. The best Depeche Mode output, I think, came in the second half of the 1980s when the band perfected a certain attractive routine: multiple excellent official remixes, Anton Corbijn art film-cum-music videos, the crowded stadium concerts, and provocatively ambiguous lyrics (Martin Gore did say that "Behind the Wheel" was about learning how to drive not about S&M sex, but still).
1987's Music for the Masses Until recently, I saw 1990's Violator as the Mode's best album, and "Enjoy the Silence" as the Mode's best song. It still appeals to be tremendously with the desperate romanticism of its lyrics ("All I ever wanted/All I ever needed/Is here in my arms/Words are very unnecessary/They can only do harm") and with the play of Dave Gahan's resonant voice off against Gore's catchy and--perhaps--even funky instrumentals. Of late, I've found that song and its album too personal, addressed towards a second-person object. Music for the Masses is, as the album title suggests, an album aimed for the third-person audience, for a mass audience. Its songs are anthemic, crafted for performance in a rock stadium, for reception by large audiences.
"Never Let Me Down Again" is the highest-profile song off of Music for the Masses. It's a fantastic song, with its starting compressed guitar riff suddenly slamming into a huge-sounding percussion/keyboard/piano combination, anchored to a constantly repeated melodic hook, ever-building synth/orchestral parts at the song's end. Dave Gahan's vocals are particularly compelling here, evocatively melancholy and plaintive. And as always with the Mode's songs, there is the wonderfully vexing question of what "Never Let Me Down Again" is about, really.
There's enough textual evidence to suggest that "Never Let Me Down Again" is about a relationship; more, that it's about a fairly intimate relationship between two people marked by the singer's dependence on his partner ("He knows where he's taking me/Taking me where I want to be"), and that the relationship is marked equally by high expectations ("We're flying high/We're watching the world pass us by") and by a history of failures ("I hope he never lets me down again"). The Corbijn video goes into a abit more canonical detail, concentrating on a burned-out Gahan who drinks coffee with an old man then starts driving around a farmed countryside in a little car. Wandering about the fields until he collapses, Gahan's bandmates finally catch up to him and drag him away, but forget his shoes.
What is going on? Certainly there's a possible homoerotic reading of the text, with two lines in particular ("Promises me I'm as safe as houses/As long as I remember who's wearing the trousers") being particularly provocative. A straightforward reading of "Never Let Me Down Again" as a text about a gay relationship doesn't convince me, though: Those two lines are at best equivocal, certainly nothing is explicitly said, and I'm loathe to read "best friend" as a euphemism for lover. Sedgwick's theories of homosociality might be more relevant.
Like the male child's subconscious battle for his mother's (sexual) attention, the adult male similarly forms an erotic triangle with another male and another female. The status of women, therefore, "is deeply and inescapably inscribed in the structure even of relationships that seem to exclude women--even in male homosocial/homosexual relationships" (Sedgwick 25). A definition of patriarchy in terms of "relationships between men", that makes "the power relationships between men and women appear to be dependent on the power relationships between men and men" (Sedgwick 25), suggests that "large-scale social structures are congruent with the male-male-female erotic triangles" (Sedgwick 25). Sedgwick argues that "we can go further than that, to say that in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence" (Sedgwick 25). Here, Sedgwick is referring to the congruence between the literal patriarchal dominance of the father in the male child's family and the hegemonic patriarchal structure that determines relationships between adult men and women.
Inherent in this overriding patriarchal power structure, therefore, is a portrait of patriarchal heterosexuality that can best be discussed in terms of "one or another form of the traffic in women" (Sedgwick 25). That is, patriarchal heterosexuality can be defined as "the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men" (Sedgwick 26). Sedgwick quotes theorist Lévi-Strauss, who writes, "'The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners'" (qtd. in Sedgwick 26). Thus, Sedgwick continues, like Freud's "heterosexual" in Klein's aforementioned account, "normative man uses a woman as a conduit of a relationship in which the true partner is a man" (Sedgwick 26).
But then, if we apply theories of homosociality to "Never Let Me Down Again," one question arises: Where, or what, is the third party?
It might well be that North American fans of the Mode read too much into their lyrics, that "Never Let Me Down Again" really might be a song about a man singing about his closest friendship. Looking for evidence of homoeroticism or homosociality in "Never Let Me Down Again" might be as silly as reading "Behind the Wheel" as a text about sado-masochism. This tendency was briefly examined in a 1990 article in Spin magazine:
Even so, it is fun to parse these songs for their hidden meanings. One should just try to remember that this is popular music. It wouldn't do to get too carried away.
1987's Music for the Masses Until recently, I saw 1990's Violator as the Mode's best album, and "Enjoy the Silence" as the Mode's best song. It still appeals to be tremendously with the desperate romanticism of its lyrics ("All I ever wanted/All I ever needed/Is here in my arms/Words are very unnecessary/They can only do harm") and with the play of Dave Gahan's resonant voice off against Gore's catchy and--perhaps--even funky instrumentals. Of late, I've found that song and its album too personal, addressed towards a second-person object. Music for the Masses is, as the album title suggests, an album aimed for the third-person audience, for a mass audience. Its songs are anthemic, crafted for performance in a rock stadium, for reception by large audiences.
"Never Let Me Down Again" is the highest-profile song off of Music for the Masses. It's a fantastic song, with its starting compressed guitar riff suddenly slamming into a huge-sounding percussion/keyboard/piano combination, anchored to a constantly repeated melodic hook, ever-building synth/orchestral parts at the song's end. Dave Gahan's vocals are particularly compelling here, evocatively melancholy and plaintive. And as always with the Mode's songs, there is the wonderfully vexing question of what "Never Let Me Down Again" is about, really.
I'm taking a ride
With my best friend
I hope he never lets me down again
He knows where he's taking me
Taking me where I want to be
I'm taking a ride
With my best friend
We're flying high
We're watching the world pass us by
Never want to come down
Never want to put my feet back down
On the ground
I’m taking a ride
With my best friend
I hope he never lets me down again
Promises me I'm as safe as houses
As long as I remember who's wearing the trousers
I hope he never lets me down again
Never let me down
See the stars they're shining bright
Everything’s alright tonight
There's enough textual evidence to suggest that "Never Let Me Down Again" is about a relationship; more, that it's about a fairly intimate relationship between two people marked by the singer's dependence on his partner ("He knows where he's taking me/Taking me where I want to be"), and that the relationship is marked equally by high expectations ("We're flying high/We're watching the world pass us by") and by a history of failures ("I hope he never lets me down again"). The Corbijn video goes into a abit more canonical detail, concentrating on a burned-out Gahan who drinks coffee with an old man then starts driving around a farmed countryside in a little car. Wandering about the fields until he collapses, Gahan's bandmates finally catch up to him and drag him away, but forget his shoes.
What is going on? Certainly there's a possible homoerotic reading of the text, with two lines in particular ("Promises me I'm as safe as houses/As long as I remember who's wearing the trousers") being particularly provocative. A straightforward reading of "Never Let Me Down Again" as a text about a gay relationship doesn't convince me, though: Those two lines are at best equivocal, certainly nothing is explicitly said, and I'm loathe to read "best friend" as a euphemism for lover. Sedgwick's theories of homosociality might be more relevant.
Like the male child's subconscious battle for his mother's (sexual) attention, the adult male similarly forms an erotic triangle with another male and another female. The status of women, therefore, "is deeply and inescapably inscribed in the structure even of relationships that seem to exclude women--even in male homosocial/homosexual relationships" (Sedgwick 25). A definition of patriarchy in terms of "relationships between men", that makes "the power relationships between men and women appear to be dependent on the power relationships between men and men" (Sedgwick 25), suggests that "large-scale social structures are congruent with the male-male-female erotic triangles" (Sedgwick 25). Sedgwick argues that "we can go further than that, to say that in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence" (Sedgwick 25). Here, Sedgwick is referring to the congruence between the literal patriarchal dominance of the father in the male child's family and the hegemonic patriarchal structure that determines relationships between adult men and women.
Inherent in this overriding patriarchal power structure, therefore, is a portrait of patriarchal heterosexuality that can best be discussed in terms of "one or another form of the traffic in women" (Sedgwick 25). That is, patriarchal heterosexuality can be defined as "the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men" (Sedgwick 26). Sedgwick quotes theorist Lévi-Strauss, who writes, "'The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners'" (qtd. in Sedgwick 26). Thus, Sedgwick continues, like Freud's "heterosexual" in Klein's aforementioned account, "normative man uses a woman as a conduit of a relationship in which the true partner is a man" (Sedgwick 26).
But then, if we apply theories of homosociality to "Never Let Me Down Again," one question arises: Where, or what, is the third party?
It might well be that North American fans of the Mode read too much into their lyrics, that "Never Let Me Down Again" really might be a song about a man singing about his closest friendship. Looking for evidence of homoeroticism or homosociality in "Never Let Me Down Again" might be as silly as reading "Behind the Wheel" as a text about sado-masochism. This tendency was briefly examined in a 1990 article in Spin magazine:
"It's real existential music," says Ken Patronis, a 28-year-old fan who works as a biostatistician at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Ken bought Speak & Spell at a time when he was also buying Bauhaus, early New Order and early Cure. But those bands have either parted ways or let him down. "I don't really listen to the Cure anymore and New Order's doing music for 'America's Most Wanted.' That kind of says it all. But with Depeche Mode, I know that I'll probably like whatever they put out. I guess I'm more prone to understand a song about feeling socially detached than your average Joe Blow. The band doesn't' hit you over the head with this macho stance that so many pop bands have."
Which may be ne reason Depeche were originally lumped in with openly gay groups like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys. It's a characterization that bothers the band. "I've never understood this misconception about us being homoerotic," says Andy, looking as straight as they come, in jeans, sweater and businesslike hornrimmed glasses. "What about all those American heavy metal bands that wear tight leather, all this makeup and teased out hair? How come that's not considered gay? Maybe it's not our look, it's our lyrics. Are they too sensitive for the American male? You can't be sensitive and straight at the same time?"
"There's a great tenderness and sadness to our music sometimes, and I know this is going to sound like a stereotype, but gays in general seem to be more open and receptive to these types of lyrics," Martin says. In fact, when the band first started out, a considerable portion of their fans were drawn from the gay club scene. This is no longer the case, as, in many ways, the band has come out of the closet, shedding more and more of their mystery with each new album.
Even so, it is fun to parse these songs for their hidden meanings. One should just try to remember that this is popular music. It wouldn't do to get too carried away.
