"Lovesong" And "Enjoy The Silence": Music For Depressed Guys With Girlfriends

Back in college, my former co-blogger Yoggoth and I used to have a term we would employ to describe certain acts whose music we enjoyed despite not really feeling like we belonged in those acts' target audience. The term was "Music for guys with girlfriends" - the two of us clearly being, and forever destined to be, "guys without girlfriends." For instance, we both agreed that, despite their respective artistic merits, Frank Sinatra, Van Morrison, Bob Marley, Prince, and Pearl Jam were obviously "music for guys with girlfriends." They were music for men who took the presence of attractive women in their lives for granted. One day, while discussing certain prominent alternative acts from the '80s, I proceeded to riff on this term. I said to Yoggoth, "You know what the Cure and Depeche Mode are?" "What?" "Music for depressed guys with girlfriends."

See, if you were actually depressed, you would be listening to something more like Nick Drake, or Joy Division, or Elliott Smith, or Sly & the Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On, or Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers. That is music that is actually depressing. The Cure and Depeche Mode? They're music for guys who want to think that their lives are really depressing, when in all likelihood, 99% of the human race probably would love to have the "problems" those guys have. The Cure and Depeche Mode were for comfortable suburban teens who never bothered to make the effort to discover the truly depressing stuff.

Because despite their ostensibly gloomy trappings, "Lovesong" and "Enjoy the Silence" are, as far as I can tell, essentially two songs about guys with girlfriends singing about how awesome their girlfriends are.

Let's back up a bit. Here's how you know that '80s British alternative rock, by 1990, had finally crashed into the mainstream. Back then, I didn't know my Robert Smith from my Smiths (or even my Robert Smith from my Mark E. Smith), and yet even I, the least "alternative" ten-year-old in existence, knew these two songs. I did not know the names of the artists responsible for these two songs, nor did I care. But I knew them like I knew "Love Shack" and "She Drives Me Crazy." They were ubiquitous patches in the quilt that was Herbert Walker Memories. We're not talking "Blue Monday" or "How Soon Is Now?" here - British alternative songs that everyone claims to have been listening to in the '80s even though I personally do not remember ever hearing them in the '80s. I mean, I couldn't have given two shits about British alternative rock, and yet if even I heard these two songs, that should tell you something about how big they were. You might say they were the tips of two very mascara-smeared icebergs.

Another thought: although I enjoy both Disintegration and Violator quite a bit, they are on my list of "Albums With An Obvious Opening Track That Don't Feature The Obvious Opening Track As The Opening Track." It's quite an impressive list. For instance, how much more would I like Thriller if the opening track were "Billie Jean" instead of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," or Physical Graffiti if the opening track were "Kashmir" instead of "Custard Pie," or Achtung Baby if the opening track were "Mysterious Ways" instead of "Zoo Station," or Sublime if the opening track were "What I Got" instead of "Garden Grove"? Conversely, there are certain albums I probably wouldn't enjoy quite as much if they didn't start with such an unequivocal bang. What if Mellow Gold didn't kick off with "Loser," or Elvis's first album with "Blue Suede Shoes," or Face Value with "In The Air Tonight," or Bridge Over Troubled Water with ... "Bridge Over Troubled Water"? I feel like an album can weather a few rough patches if it's got a winner at the top, but the converse is not so true. You better not fuck up the choice of opening track, is what I'm saying. "But wait," you respond, "The Cure and Depeche Mode had no way of knowing that 'Lovesong' and 'Enjoy the Silence' were going to be the biggest singles from their respective albums, so how could they have known to put them first?" But see, I know they were the biggest singles from the album, and so it's perfectly clear to me, in retrospect, that they should have been placed first. Great bands have to predict the future, OK? I'm sure some 17-year-old Arizona teenager dressed in her finest Hot Topic couture is bristling at my flippant dismissals of "Plainsong" and "World In My Eyes," but hey, it's the internet and I can say what I want.

Those who declare Disintegration a "classic album" do not bother me, but I find the praise a bit puzzling. I wish I found all the songs as diverse and energetic as "Lovesong," "Fascination Street," and "Lullaby." I feel like there are 1) too many songs on the album; 2) too many songs that feature the same tempo; 3) too many songs with minimal chord changes; 4) too many songs with synths imitating strings. But it's all listenable, when you're in that "My parents need to stop flipping through my diary" sort of mood.

Yet "Lovesong" sports the compact, catchy, jangling glory I seek. No seven minutes of moody atmospheric noodling here. On the contrary, it's like the Cure doing late '60s L.A. sunshine pop. There's an organ straight out of Ray Manzarek's worst peyote trip, an omnipresent tambourine that Michelle Phillips would've been proud to shake, and a piercing, distorted guitar riff that Neil Young might have laid down in a stoned stupor, not remembering the next morning that he'd even played it. Other highlights: the synth so successfully imitating strings that, for most of my life, I simply assumed they were strings; the extra guitar part around 2:15 that, though electric, almost carries a "flamenco" feel. I mean hell, if this song hadn't been a giant US hit, then no Cure song would have been.



The video finds Robert Smith re-enacting a deleted scene from The Dark Crystal, crouching among an array of sexy stalagmites, the light rendering his skin the same hue of blue as his shirt; I guess you could say he was feeling rather "blue" in this video (*cough*). I love how, in the opening shot, as the camera pans downward, we initially see what appears to be a particularly thick patch of moss in the left-hand corner, or perhaps a thorny black bush? But no - after a few more tantalizing seconds, this strange blob of twigs reveals itself to merely be ... Robert Smith's hair!

The casual listener and viewer might be forgiven for assuming, based on Smith's mopey delivery and the so-called expression (or lack thereof) on his face, that the song is a howl of psychological despair, but nope. "Whenever I'm alone with you/You make me feel like I am home again." "However far away, I will always love you." This isn't depressing at all! According to Wikipedia, "Robert Smith originally wrote the song for his long-time girlfriend and then fiancée, Mary, as a wedding present." Music for depressed guys with girlfriends? More like music for depressed guys with fiancées.

Then there's "Enjoy the Silence." "All I ever wanted, all I ever needed/Is here in my arms"? Not depressing! (Unless he's singing about a blow-up doll a la Bryan Ferry.) Of course, a synth-pop song can still be great even if it's not depressing. I suppose no song is "perfect," but if there's any way "Enjoy the Silence" could have been improved, I'd like to know exactly how, mister. Right off the bat, it commences with a bouncy, see-saw rhythm that implores the listener to gently tap toes. Notice how it employs the same "synth that kinda sounds like a human singing 'Aah'" effect previously utilized in Cutting Crew's "I Just Died In Your Arms," although I would say to more menacing, artistically credible effect. And let's not forget the gently-plucked guitar figure smothered in more delay than an Amtrak schedule.

"Enjoy the Silence" is one sneaky little slice of gloom, for while appearing to repeat its basic motifs, a closer listen reveals continuous shifts from beginning to end, so that one's attention never flags. There's the initial two-chord vamp that kicks off the song and which returns every now and again, almost like it's the song's default "resting position" (it makes me think of a video game character that simply jogs in place, waiting for the touch of the joystick to bring it to life again). Then there's the verse melody, which isn't quite the chorus melody and isn't quite the two-chord vamp either, but I'll be damned if it isn't all tonally related somehow (where's a musicologist when you need one?).

But what Depeche Mode brought that their peers sometimes forgot were the BEATS. Depeche Mode's beats hit hard. They had force. Their hooks were catchy, but they never neglected the pure physical side of the music. I doubt that many Depeche Mode fans listened to hip-hop, but Depeche Mode themselves were surely following all the trends in rap, house, techno, ambient, etc. They brought the funk. And they knew how to pace themselves. The beat sounds plenty hard enough at the start of the track, and continues at that volume all the way through the first verse, but once the chorus hits, the beat suddenly grows twice as loud and hits twice as hard. I also love the little "breakdown" section after the first chorus, as if the song is saying, "Hold on buddy, let me recharge myself ... all right, ready to go!" Then on the second chorus, they add this bass-heavy "laser beam" sound that flies at your ears from both stereo channels, like you're listening to the track in the womb. I swear to God (who, based on a blasphemous rumor, I've heard has a a sick sense of humor) - Depeche Mode took every little trick they'd ever learned in their entire recording career, from the Vince Clarke years on down, and poured it all into this brooding little monster.

(Side note: I'm not as puzzled by those who praise Violator as a "classic" album, which I find more consistent, more uniform, and more mood-sustaining than Disintegration, but it's also shorter, so that helps. Still, I have this nagging sensation that it wasn't optimally sequenced. They threw all the strongest songs in the middle! Who does that? The album appears to build and build all the way up to ... "Blue Dress" and "Clean"? We're not exactly talking "Brain Damage/Eclipse" here. Still, if that cute goth guy ignored me in Physics class all day, I would totally put this on when I got home.)



Although I'm all in favor of grainy shots of Dave Gahan trudging through Alpine meadows and Scandinavian fjords, the best part of the video has to be the brief black-and-white shots of the band standing in the "silence" while wearing leather jackets and looking sexily glum. Just from the artsy-fartsy combination of slow motion footage interspersed with subliminal flashes of rose stalks alone, I could have guessed that the director had an "ijn" somewhere in his name without knowing anything else about him. (But yes, I know who Anton Corbijn is.)

One more memory involving me and a co-blogger. At the tail end of high school, I found myself riding in a car one day with a young Herr Zrbo (yes, we go back that far), and when "Enjoy the Silence" came on the radio, he proceeded to enter into a mildly harmless rant which went something along the lines of "Oh God, fucking Depeche Mode, this is that song for all those stupid couples who feel like 'No one understands us!' and 'Everyone just hates us 'cause we're so in love!' Gimme a break." I probably laughed and concurred in agreement, but, honestly, I kinda liked the song myself. The irony here is that the person in that car who complained the most about "Enjoy the Silence" is now married with offspring, whereas I am the one sitting on my ass blogging about music for depressed guys with girlfriends. Maybe I should have complained more when I had the chance.