Depeche Mode - Strangers | dmremix.pro

Depeche Mode Strangers

demoderus

Well-known member
Administrator
Strangers
[CPC/Bravado/Omnibus Press, 1990. Words: Paul Morley.]
strangers_1.jpg
 

demoderus

Well-known member
Administrator
'STRANGERS' INTRODUCTION
[CPC/Bravado/Omnibus Press, 1990. Words: Paul Morley.]
Do not read this introduction to the 1990 collection of Anton Corbijn photographs while sober. Anyone expecting a standard piece describing the band will be disappointed: the author adopts a surreal and almost mystical tone as he aims to recreate the effect of Depeche Mode music. Some people will be left cold by both the content and the Whitman-esque style. Mode devotees, on the other hand, will be nodding in silent understanding...
"And this is why these 4 friends are so loved, they can make us feel so alert, they can make us feel that we're not alone as strangers in a strange place, we're all set apart and we're all in it together and ain't that weird."

'STRANGERS' INTRODUCTION

Strangely enough, I don't know where to begin. I know just where to end, and if I manage to begin then you'll soon see that I'm telling the truth, but the funny thing is...I don't know where on earth to begin. (One of the choices that I face is: do I begin from the heart, or is it all in the mind?) I know exactly where to end this loving essay on the music making beat cunning time travelling sound taming word perfect 4 friends who think up out of nowhere noise and feeling that goes with a multiple combination of rhythms that goes with lyrics that say things about sanity, sin, fascination, the mind and the body in a way that is both 1/2 hearted and HIGHLY energetic...but where do I begin?

I'm going to end it, and I know this much is true, so that the essay stops as beautifully and completely as any one of the songs that these 4 friends have made up out of their lives, so that the silence, the space, the emptiness that follows feels as satisfying and as supernatural as it always seems to after you've listened to any one of the songs that these 4 friends dream up. That's all I have to do, represent the ways that these 4 friends appeared to have evolved as entertainers, say the right things in just the right way at just the right time, define how all at once these 4 friends are subdued and conspicuous, straight and insane, dark and thoughtful, light and fantastic. That's all I have to do. Tell the quiet truth as it appears to me every time I see, hear and think how these 4 friends appear to be. All I have to do is tell a short story of radical strangeness and commercial success, all I have to do is explain how these 4 friends travelled through the pop song from immaturity to maturity, how they managed to sort themselves out and set themselves up as subtle entertainers with a weird wit and an integrity beyond corruption, and perhaps mention why they all have short hair cuts. All I have to do is...begin.

Before I begin, and you know that I'll have to sooner or later, perhaps I should say some things about any one of the songs that these 4 friends make up for themselves and anyone else who has the intelligence to be interested. A song about the dishevelment of the mind, or tenderness, produced by these 4 friends after a lifetime of preparation might be said to come into being, to live, because of a stranger than fact superimposition of virtue and resolution, stillness and loneliness, desperation and accident. This song, a world of illusion, a magic spell, could then be interpreted in a 101 ways. There are those who might see this song as some kind of mirror of their daily lives, a welcome, next to mystical intrusion into the imagination. I've always felt that there are those who develop a sort of fetish for the way any one of these songs forms a mysterious circuit between a person and a computer, and become addicted to the untypical special effects and defiant dream-sounds. Some people might simply feel that a song dreamt up by these 4 friends is attractive because it is fresh and eccentric and assembled with the essence of care. Many people probably like these songs without paying much attention to the whys and whats and the language and the antic exactitude and the sudden sweet directness and the swoops and starts of rhythm...

When I'm listening to any of their songs, when I'm watching them on a screen or a stage or looking into their clowning, calming videos, I can think, at times, for a time, that their combination of electric beat, love, an inside world, the outside world and a need to move is one of the very best representations of the way the 20th century has just appeared to be. I may be biased and on their side, but I just can't help believing that hearing a song fantasy by these 4 friends is as good a way of knowing something of the image and meaning of the times as anything thought up by Andy Warhol, David Lynch, Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Mann. A pop art song attack nervously playing into life and made up by these 4 friends using electricity and experience can be one of the best ways invented of describing some of what it is to be living more than ever in the future, in the 20th century, where everything changes at a moments notice and nothing is as it was from minute to minute and being alive gets to be like a flash-back flash forward flash of strangeness and as ordinary as hell.

What do you believe? You might be thinking that I shouldn't take it all so seriously, that it's just pop music, a commercial exchange, a bunch of slick commercial tricks, that these 4 friends are just salesmen and you shouldn't really be talking of the love and the fear of the unknown and holy images and consolation...I just can't help it: I don't know where to begin, but I could go on forever. I can take this pop thing and the way that these 4 friends take this pop thing and make it the next best thing to a dream, I can take this so seriously that it's funny. So if someone said to me that any song sold by these 4 friends was nothing but a crude, simplistic jamming together of nursery rhyme melody, freak obsessions and manipulative rhythm, I would tell them that they have no ear for detail, no eye for wonder, no love of life and no sense of adventure. If they then asked me to explain why I feel so certain that all this is more than just 'fun' and games, well, there would be so much for me to say, so many reasons for my feeling that these songs are ghostly, scientific, black, white and vaguely significant, that I wouldn't know where to begin.

I do remember, though, being at a concert given by these 4 friends, and having a great time there and now feeling right at the dead centre between waking up and going to sleep and dead set at a place right there between the sub conscious and the conscious: and I remember thinking deep to myself as the 4 friends played together like they were completely in love with the future that one day I had to write about this experience, when I felt so good and so free and so alive. I felt so good it was funny. Perhaps, as I talk about it now, it was kind of embarrassing: but of course, it wasn't, and it isn't. What happened at that fluent flashy fictional show is what happens with all the best art and entertainment: all at once, to repeat, and then again, trapped in between the fluke and inevitability of life, you both find yourself and lose yourself, all at once, and you find a kind of model pleasure, a pure moment where everything makes sense and nothing is clear and you catch a sight of a strange new 'you', emptied, thoughtless, taken, disappeared...and then brand new and restored and ready for the strangest things and even the world. Suddenly, you're dancing. You're thinking. You're certain. You're not sure. You're comfortable. For a wonderful moment.

All this is very moving, very thoughtful and very funny. But it doesn't help me to begin to think how I can begin this honest essay, which in turn doesn't help you. So I hope you don't mind if I make straight for the end of this essay. Forget about the beginning and the middle, you know why we're here, in this book, thinking about our favourite things and all that, you know what you hear in their music, you don't need any more history. You might as well take it for granted that when I hear a song made up by these 4 friends aroused inside me are the strongest feelings of the unreality and ephemerality of the world. Let's hit the end.

So at the end of this essay I just want to say that with these 4 friends, you can see and hear how friendly they are, and yet they are strangers to each other, and to us...and yet, and this is why pop music is so powerful and has achieved such influence, and this is why these 4 friends are so loved, they can make us feel so alert, they can make us feel that we're not alone as strangers in a strange place, we're all set apart and we're all in it together and ain't that weird.

These 4 friends who are for all sorts of simple and complicated reasons a pop group, who are even for reasons beyond their control pop stars, who are in a surreal way businessmen, in a real way actors, and in the end and in the beginning show offs. These 4 friends who we know and see and hear as Depeche Mode. That is how I will end this essay. This is Depeche Mode and truth to tell they are a disturbing, irresistible, unlikely pop group, more than that believe it or not they create something practically original, and if I were asked to write an essay that described the phenomena, explained the music, analysed their introspection and self-possession, read good and significant things into them, interpreted their dazed and glowing point of view, well, I just wouldn't know where to begin. So, strangely enough,

THIS IS DEPECHE MODE.
 
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