Utility and Art, Satan and Paradise: Depeche Mode and Gustave Doré

 

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

Twenty five years ago this month, Depeche Mode was one of the biggest groups on the planet. Three men and one prop. Martin Gore, the pretty face and the songwriting talent, the man with the melodies and the ideas and the sometimes daft lyrics. Dave Gahan, the thug, the angel, the unbelievable voice, cold and controlled and icy, somehow vulnerable even in his strength. Alan Wilder, the musician, the arranger. Taking Gore’s chords and melodies and transforming them into a synthetic dance onslaught. Textures layered and melding together, the artificial alongside the organic, hook upon hook weaving through, implying and extending Gore’s harmonic structures. Fourth member Andy Fletcher? A non-musician mime that mutely stands on stage, ventrilloquizes, manages the band.

Nine years into their careers Depeche Mode embarked on a grueling 101-show international tour, in support of their album Music For the Masses. The tour culminated in a staggering show at the Rose Bowl, attended by more than 60,000 people.

The show was filmed by director D.A. Pennebaker for a documentary on the band and its fans, eventually released, along with an album of the performance, as Depeche Mode 101. (Pennebaker is probably best known for his Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, but it’s his David Bowie concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars that Depeche Mode 101 most resembles)

Prior to the concert footage, the documentary gives insight into some of the on-stage strangeness of the band, and of the group’s internal politics. Off-stage, singer Gahan comes across as loutish and arrogant. Songwriter Martin Gore disappears, even when he’s on screen. Fourth wheel and non-musician Fletcher briefly makes himself useful by describing the band. “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.” And musician/arranger Alan Wilder proves him right, with little fanfare, in a sequence shot from behind a bank of keyboards, as he casually describes how different sounds are split across the instruments, and how the live arrangements are split between himself, songwriter Martin Gore, and a tape machine.
 

dgahan101

 
On-stage, Gahan at least is transformed, his pre-gig bluster changing into some kind of strange, thrusting energy. Unrestrained by any instrument, he stalks the stage, he shouts between singing, his voice hoarse and unrestrained. And at other moments he seems lost and weak, until the hook rolls back around and he rises to and assaults the crowd again.

At the end of their set they and their tape machine launch into “Never Let Me Down Again.” They are to a man sweaty and weary looking. Between phrases you can see Gahan’s mouth working in closeup,his face tightening, spastic, body rebelling even while his voice is restrained. “I’m taking a ride with my best friend.” The music ominous, the melody almost literally monotonous, droning. “I hope he never lets me down again.” The lyrics are stupid, real “moon in June” stuff, but they’re set in such a strange context, and the delivery is so intense, that it begs consideration.

Like many of Depeche Mode’s most affecting songs, there’s a distance, and a loneliness and despairing of communication, of being heard, of hearing. This sung by a man throwing himself about the stage in a desperate attempt to reach the audience in front of him, while the man who wrote it sings harmonies from behind his keyboard.

Gahan stops, breaths, staggers, thrusts out his hips, yells wordlessly, an octave higher than the sung range of the song.

“Let me hear you,” he screams. “Let me hear you!”

Finally he steps out onto the thrust of the stage and starts gesturing to the audience, waving his hands from side to side. And the lights come up and for the first time the camera sees Gahan and the audience together, the towering mass of waving arms rising above him, in front of him, all around him.
 

Depeche Mode at the Rose Bowl

 
I get chills every time. It’s not just his confidence, the strutting and yelping, or the pulsing, looping chords. It’s an aesthetic reaction to him, to the whole scene, the beautiful lone figure thrust out over and surrounded by the massed crowds. It evokes the grand religious visions of Gustave Doré, particularly in his illustrations of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Of Satan, before the assembled cohort of angels, or looking out over Paradise.

Paradise0003Dore Satan overlooking paradise

Doré himself had a career not dissimilar to Depeche Mode. He was a prolific and tireless craftsman who was energetic and inventive, who relied on his collaborators, the engravers whose labors caused his pencil and wash drawings to take form in wood, to bring his work to its final form. (Like a band name represents a group of individuals, so we might think of “Gustave Doré” more accurately as a group of men, a kind of syndicate of illustrators and engravers, that shared their collective name with that of their founding member and progenitor.)

And like Depeche Mode, Doré was one of the most popular artists of his era; but critical acclaim eluded him. He was a good draftsman, critics sniffed. But. But. Was he just too well-known to be well-respected too? Or too well loved?

Not to mention the “illustrator” issue…

You see, the past two hundred years of aesthetic criticism have not been kind to function.

It’s why “craft” is a pejorative. It’s why design forms its own sub-category of visual art, related, somehow, to the field, like a second cousin once removed. It’s why soap operas and romance novels and video games and quilts and pottery and wood carvings and, hell, flower arrangement have been kept at an arm’s length from Art, an asterisk at best. Function implies craft. Function precludes intelligence, the demands of function displacing the desires of author.

Utility is at the heart of the critical attitude towards dance music.

Like pornography, you can evaluate dance music by the bluntest measures possible – it’s efficacy. Did you dance? Did other people dance? How many other people? How vigorously? The crassness of this measure tends to ward off deeper examination.

And that could be why Depeche Mode will likely remain a band well loved, but largely un-examined. Why some of the most interesting music made in the past four decades could be relegated to roller skate rinks and cut-out bins.

And when I squinted the world seemed rose-tinted
And angels appeared to descend
To my surprise with half closed eyes
Things looked even better than when they were opened

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Dreaming Small — “Rhinestone Cowboy”/”Deacon Blues”

Last week 78-year old singer Glen Campbell appeared in the news for the first time in a long while, for reasons personal rather than musical. Since then, I’ve had Campbell’s much-maligned “Rhinestone Cowboy” in constant rotation on my cranial radio. I thought it would be a good time to revisit the song and try to figure out why it is exactly I love it so much, and see if I can bring a little bit of the pathos of the subversive song back to its surface.

Campbell himself was hardly a subversive figure. Although he’d started his career as a side-man and in-demand studio musician, by the close of the 60’s he’d successfully transitioned to the life of a popular country crooner, scoring hit after hit with the songs of other writers. His first major hit was a cash-in cover of Buffy Saint Marie’s pacifist anthem “Universal Soldier,” a song whose message the singer didn’t seem to exactly align himself with. “The people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung,” Campbell told an Albuquerque newspaper in an interview about the song. “If you don’t have enough guts to fight for your country, you’re not a man.” A few years later his hit-hunting would pay greater artistic dividends when he recorded a series of songs penned by songwriter and former music transcriber Jimmy Webb, including the semi-mystical, harmonically complex “Witchita Lineman.”

Several years and several albums later, Campbell first heard “Rhinestone Cowboy,” as performed by its author, singer Larry Weiss. It would prove to be the song that would define Campbell’s career.

Larry Weiss’ rough and tumble delivery gives the downbeat lyrics a rugged authenticity. “I’ve been walking these streets so long,” he intones with his intense baritone voice while acoustic guitars and a harpsichord chime away in the background.

Where hustle’s the name of the game
and nice guys get washed away
like the snow and the rain

And suddenly the melody rises yet again, Weiss’ voice intense and clipped.

There’s been a load of compromising
on the road to my horizon
and I’m gonna be where the lights are shining on me
Like a rhinestone cowboy!

Throughout the verse the chords have wandered away from the tonic, only to triumphantly return at the chorus, Weiss shouting the lyrics as the melody rises to the top of his range. He’s joined by a soaring unison string section that had only teasingly entered before, now intertwining with the vocal, playing with full intensity.

And what exactly are the compromises that have led him to dream of the life of a rodeo star? What kind of hustles exactly are we talking about here? There are few answers, and only a handful of clues, the chief of which is the intensity of Weiss’s delivery, and the painfully shallow dreams evident in the chorus. What is the great triumph, the wonderful victory on the horizon for the narrator?

Like a rhinestone cowboy
Ridin’ out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy
getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know
and offers comin’ over the phone

The horse and the rodeo is incidental, the details sketchy. The important part? People contacting him, caring about him, even people he doesn’t know. It’s a vision of a man who’s at the bottom, who’s highest aspirations are a glitter of the lowest kind.

In Campbell’s version the grit and drama is replaced with Campbell’s expertly employed voice, complete with almost operatic vibrato. The key has been raised a whole step to accommodate Campbell’s vocal range, and the string part squared off. Campbell’s version brings the song even closer to it’s second cousin, the 1966 Walker Brother’s hit “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” a song with which it shares a general rhythmical thrust and melodic arc. (Walker’s own operatic vocalizations, however, are almost painfully intense, elevating the lyrical nonsense to obsessive ode through his delivery alone).

So, is it possible that the “hustle” presented in “Rhinestone Cowboy” is that of an urban prostitute? The image itself was certainly in the air, thanks in part to 1969’s Academy-Award winning Midnight Cowboy. Even if the specifics aren’t divulged, the narrow dreams of the narrator make the likely options rather grim. The soaring chorus isn’t cheery; it’s the desperate dreamings of a man at the end of his options.

midnightcowboy

The narrative strategies at work in “Rhinestone Cowboy” appears again in a rather unlikely place, on the 1977 Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues,” written by Donald Fagan and Walter Becker.

At first glance the songs seem to have nothing in common, at least musically. “Deacon Blues” leads off with a series of shifting extended chords that finally settle into a recognizable but constantly modulating verse, the harmonization throughout almost mockingly complex, while the arrangement and instrumentation is as polished and ornate as the design of a bottle of scotch.

The lyrics of the verse, narrated in the first person, describe with slurred detail the ego-maniacal imaginings of a drunken man. Ejected from his regular nightclub, he staggers through the streets dreaming of his ultimate revenge, which arrives at the catchy, eminently singable chorus–

learn to work the saxophone
I’ll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
and die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
and I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

It’s surely one of the weirdest songs ever to be a success, novelty-level strangeness masquerading as smooth, pseudo-intellectual jazz. The great triumph of the narrator is the imagined life and fame of a saxophone player, a skill that the singer is so unfamiliar with that he can’t even find the right words for the job.

And once he’s learned to “work” his instrument of choice, it’s drinking and dying spectacularly that he dreams about, and the attendant attention and recognition that would surely follow. He’s undoubtedly a loser, and in his imaginings of what it’s like to be a winner, he’s exactly the same, but everyone loves him. His dream is the re-imagining of his own failures and vices as virtues instead.

The genius of the song is in the precise way that it inhabits its alcoholic narrator, and imagines him as he imagines himself, an “expanding man” whose greatness can only be greater once it is extinguished by death. The only missing components in this dream? A saxophone and a grandiose nickname.

An audience at a play or a film understands that every actor isn’t playing a role that reflects themselves. We sometimes extend this courtesy to novelists, and occasionally cartoonists as well; but when it comes to pop singers, audiences are often painfully literal. It’s why every singer dead before their time has their lyrics strip-mined for meaning and premonition, regardless of who authored the songs in question; it’s why every banal utterance is analyzed for autobiographical content.

Let us therefore embrace the brave; those willing to give voice to the little dreamers, those willing to be misunderstood.
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This is the first in a series of posts called Panoptisongs, focusing on pop songs.