Depeche Mode: "Policy of Truth"

The relationship equations spelled out in rock songs are usually simple, or simplistic— I want you and I can’t have you, or now that I have you all my problems are solved. Where issues of honesty are concerned, rock protagonists often engage in bravura demonstrations of machismo, a convention adopted from blues and soul songs; that issues of truth in human relationships are nuanced, that telling the truth all the time is an impossibility, is addressed infrequently. The lyrics that Martin Gore composed for Depeche Mode’s “Policy of Truth” are one of the few instances in the rock canon that treat “truth” as an exclusive issue; not related to a specifically mentioned and defined situation or conflict. As such, they come to a mature, if uncomfortable, conclusion— that you can’t tell the truth all the time. In fact, the “policy of truth” that the lyrics posit is experienced as a recipe for incessant discord. Among the song’s many quirks is that it is written in the second-person singular— it is addressed to a particular “you” without there being an “I” to balance it. This introduces a few possibilities into the song’s equations— that this is a protagonist objectifying him/herself, making an “I” a “you” (i.e. talking to him/herself); or that the implicit narrator, who is advising the protagonist, wants for some reason to remain concealed. The situation that necessitated the song is also concealed; the policy of truth that created the situation is the important thing. What is fascinating about the song is the manner in which it creates a guessing game; we try to imagine not only the situation at hand, but why it produces lies and what the lies are. The rhetorical point of the song is that lies are a necessity; but we, as audience, decide whether or not to be convinced by this anti-morality play. The one hint in the song that there may be a specific “I” to accompany the “you” is, in the first verse, “It’s just time to pay the price/ For not listening to advice.” Someone may have cast a Machiavellian spell on the protagonist on the necessity of deception— it has been unsuccessful. If it is the implied narrator, we next have to wonder if he/she is reliable or not. Unusually for a rock song, the larger issue, rather than the particular situation, is of greater importance— to what extent must human beings lie to maintain a state of equilibrium? The possibility is being investigated that there is always a lie quotient borne out in human relationships, and that “policies” must reflect this.

The big problem with truth-telling is one addressed by Machiavelli— that truth-telling effaces civility. The lyrics narrate, “Things could be so different now/ It used to be so civilized/ You will always wonder how/ It could’ve been if you’d only lied.” All this is a “consequence”; but grey areas open up around the opposite equation— isn’t some kind of integrity lost if lies are told? Machiavelli was, of course, in “The Prince,” writing about politics, not (necessarily) personal relationships; this narrative does not hint at political realities. The title of the song, however, does; and the fact that individuals adopt policies in personal relationships becomes significant. In politics, individuals cannot become too close— too many interests are being represented, too many decisions being negotiated. But the situation at hand in the song seems, clearly, like a relationship situation. What’s curious is that the tone Gore adopts is both more formalized and more sententious (and thus, stereotypically political) than most rock lyrics— “It’s too late to change events/ It’s time to face the consequence/ For delivering the proof/ In the policy of truth.” “Proof” has not only political but legal connotations; Gore goes all out to demonstrate the levels of distance in human relationships that necessitate lies and/or half-truths. Gore’s narrator seems to suggest that individuals should conduct themselves like states— that relationships should be dictated by policies, and that punishments are meted whenever intimacy is attempted. That’s what the issue is in most relationships— intimacy. Truths, even painful ones, create intimacy; lies create distances. That this narrator condones lies over truths, and, in fact, seems to find truth a subversive force, makes it clear that his reliability, to a mature sensibility, is hazy. Except that all these equations are hazy ones— as the narrator sings in the third verse, “Hide what you have to hide/ And tell what you have to tell.” In other words, it isn’t that you can’t tell any truth; you must be judicious enough to mix a certain amount of truthfulness (thus creating a certain amount of intimacy) with some distortion so that some semblance of civility can be maintained. Not only that: mixing intimate truths with distortions will get you what you want out of relationships. If people are states, then like states they must compromise. Negotiations can’t be slanted too much towards lies or truthfulness; everything depends on a delicate balance, and an absolute policy one way or the other (i.e. a “policy of truth”) will get you killed every time.

That’s the hardest equation to be derived from “Policy of Truth”— that, in human relationship terms, there is no policy that can keep you safe from getting killed. This is true of states and of people— no one and nothing, no human or human construct, is or can be invulnerable. This song begins darkly, and stays dark. One of its ironies is that it is danceable, and remains a staple in many clubs. Either people don’t realize what they are dancing to, or they are willfully avoiding the import of these lyrics. The song, to be fair, is perky and upbeat for Depeche Mode; it grants its listeners the option of enjoying it just for its surface. But what actually happens in clubs? People gather to celebrate, socialize, and, as the saying goes, hook up. So the meta-irony is that people wind up living out these lyrics even as they ignore them. Club-kids often self-create from nothing; they invent personas based on clothes, tastes, postures, and social attitudes. Depeche Mode are often associated with what is known as a “Goth” sensibility. Goth subculture has to do with choosing the dark, bleak, and desolate; but, however bleak your posture and tastes may be, human craving for affection and acceptance remains. Questions of when to dissemble and when to relate honestly wouldn’t have the urgency they do in this piece if underneath there weren’t a sense of neediness, hunger. The other salient point that hasn’t been mentioned is the games people play, not with others but within their own consciousness. The repeated bridge makes this clear— “never again/ is what you swore/ the time before.” This heightens the realization for us, as audience, that there is, in fact, a situation at hand that is life or death. What the bridge alerts us to is how fast these situations can happen and how drastic they are. When something drastic happens rapidly, it becomes impossible to pull calculated moves; more often than not, you are forced to improvise. While you balance on the knife-edge, the moves you make are conditioned by both past and present conditions. But in-the-moment life situations have a drama built into them because humans can’t always control the moves they make, especially when something crucial is at stake. The music, which has waves of dread and unease beneath a fresh, upbeat surface, percolates in such a way that, by the time we hit the third verse, we feel the knife-edge of tension that the protagonist is experiencing.

The genius of the way in which Martin Gore constructed these lyrics is that they pull us into something without letting us go, while leaving the situation open-ended enough so that it is widely applicable; something everyone has been through. We leave the song not knowing what moves have been pulled or if the situation has been resolved. All-in-all, the song has the quality that all great rock songs (which, by the way, where Depeche Mode is concerned, might be something of a misnomer; they are not strictly “rock”) have; it changes slightly every time you hear it. You can fit yourself into it in any number of ways, contingent on where you happen to be in your life and how much truth consonance you think you have. What is so vital about “Policy of Truth” is that everyone has some kind of truth policy, but almost no one is honest about admitting what theirs’ happens to be. How many people would dare say anything other than that “I think I’m an honest person”? But truth policies change as contexts shift, and different people have varying levels of understanding of what truth is and what its’ value is. This song lays out a simple human issue in complex terms, and in such a way that it has been heard (and danced to) by millions. For this reason, Gore has created something useful on more than one level; though it remains unknown how many of us are actually able to think as we dance.

Adam Fieled, 2011

Neko Case: "The Needle Has Landed"

There aren’t too many rock songwriters who work effectively in “doubles.” A double is a word or phrase that can be construed as holding precisely two meanings. The idea of “doubles” and doubling is deceptively simple; a strong, well-executed double is rare. One obvious double in the rock canon is the Kinks “Waterloo Sunset,” wherein the title of the song precisely signifies both a sunset as a physical event and the sunset of the protagonist’s life. Neko Case’s “The Needle Has Landed” uses “needle” as, it seems, a precise double— it can refer to a needle used to inject heroin or the needle of an old-fashioned record player. Though neither of these significations is made overt in the lyrics, the two significations in tandem make the narrative of the song coalesce and cohere as no other interpretations can. Among the many things enumerated in the connection is the consonance between music (specifically American popular music) and drugs. But the song takes wing from its own ambiguities and maintains them, and it would be reductive and cheap to reduce them to one interpretation. I will start from my own interpretation of Case’s double. One vista the song opens up is how popular music relates to drugs; another is the kinds of social contexts that create these dynamics. The poignancy of this vista is one reason why the song’s evocations of loss, remorse, and personal mythology are so compelling.

The song is written from a first-person perspective. The “I” in the song is not quite what is called by poets the confessional “I”; the revelations contained in the song are about someone else. The suggestion (and it is never presented as more than a suggestion) is that this person (and it is insinuated that it is a male) died of a heroin overdose. It is also suggested that the protagonist of the song was unaware of the heroin abuse going on, and could’ve prevented this death— “if I knew then what’s so obvious now/ you’d still be here, baby.” What gives the song its interesting tensions is that there is a kind of intermixed love triangle; between the protagonist, the tragic musician/addict, and the town (Spanaway, Washington, mentioned by name in the lyrics) in which these dramas occur. Because there are two “yous” in the song (the addict and the inhabitants of Spanaway), the protagonist bifurcates her attention; and, importantly, the chorus of the song contains references to both. The scenario hinges on the fact that the people of Spanaway blame the protagonist for the addict’s death. The verses add the wrinkle that the occasion for the composition of the song is the protagonist’s return, after many years, to Spanaway. She is still coming to terms with the loss of her friend, and the manner in which she’s been made a scapegoat— “that’s why I never come back here/ that’s why they spit out my name/ your ex’s have clawed up the Bible/ trying to keep me away.” Both the protagonist and the addict have unwittingly and unwillingly been enmeshed in a conservative social context; women bestial and simple enough to “claw up the Bible” in an effort to mark off their territory. The addict instantly becomes a complex character— “needle” taken as a double for an old-fashioned turntable, signifies his musical interests. He is also caught between worlds— between the conservative populace of Spanaway, the protagonist (who presents herself as a kind of vagabond, ends up being “left at the Greyhound”), the desire to create (or even just “play”) and the compulsion to take solace from anguish in narcotics.

The worlds the protagonist is caught between are time worlds— the past and the present, being rootless and being rooted. Where all the worlds converge is in the addict’s death— we sense that both parties, the protagonist and the people of Spanaway, believe that the death could’ve been prevented if the other weren’t present. That both Spanaway and the rootless protagonist are represented as being “poor” is also significant— the mise en scene of the addict’s downfall involves deprivation rather than decadence, poverty rather than affluence. The intriguing ambiguity presents itself— why didn’t the protagonist notice the addict’s addiction? Was she just too young and/or naïve? The time worlds of the song measure the distance between innocence and experience; possibly between youth and adulthood. We also never learn if the populace of Spanaway either know of or understand the situation before the death occurs. The tragic conclusion that can be drawn from these factors is that no one really confronted the addict’s compulsion until he was dead. It then became (as the narrative is followed through) a kind of race— for the protagonist to stay as far away from Spanaway as possible, and for the populace to scapegoat the protagonist. But for all that the populace are naïve, the protagonist associates them with militaristic images— “carbon planes” and an “air force base.” What would a young musician with self-destructive tendencies do in such a place? Why is he staying there to begin with? Small-town America often eats its young; individuals cannot grow in too-restrictive contexts. The song becomes, among other things, a critique of small-town America, and Spanaway a synecdoche.

As unlikely as it might seem, there is a third signification for “needle.” The Needle is an actual, physical monument in Seattle. For a good seven years, from roughly 1987-1994, Seattle served as the epicenter of independent (indie) rock music; the media called it “grunge.” That the “needle has landed” in Spanaway could be taken to signify that young musicians in the area had become infested with Seattle fever. Uneducated youths in small-town America often get stuck in dead-end jobs and blue-collar existences— rock music serves as both a creative outlet and a way out. Because heroin was, unfortunately, the popular drug of choice in Seattle at its peak, there is a chance the tragic addict/musician in the song was only using heroin to imitate his heroes in Seattle. His reasons for resorting to the needle may have been as complex as his entire character— not just to ape his Seattle heroes, but to express solidarity with them; to escape from the oppressive cloudiness of the Pacific Northwest; to rebel against the confines of a conservative milieu; and to transcend a subjectivity that experiences itself as thwarted. The genius loci of Seattle at the time demanded some level of conformity; the tragedy is that a willing participant in Spanaway could only conform from a distance. That the protagonist stands accused of being a corrupting influence could be taken to mean that, rightly or wrongly, she represents to the town the fast-living decadence of an urban environment. The tension between rural and urban America is explored here, in such a way as to suggest that small-town and urban values are corrosive on different levels. The two principle characters in the song are caught in this corrosive mesh on both sides— the result is death. But this protagonist clings to her essential sense of kindness and decency— that she both regrets this death and could’ve prevented it had she been less naïve. The tension in the love triangle is never resolved— who loved the addict more, the protagonist or the people (especially the “exes”) of Spanaway? We are aware that we are only hearing one side of a three-sided story. A circle has been opened that can never be closed; no final, even-handed account of this story can ever exist. Yet it is hard not to notice the earnest, sincere quality of the protagonist; nothing she says seems underhanded, everything is tinged with depth and compassion. As such, it is easy both to believe her story and to take her credibility for granted.

This song is many-faceted, and repeated listenings reveal further levels of starkness. Musically, the piece is spare, and produced so that the backing track serves Case’s voice and the lyrics. The piece has the “noir” quality that Case has become famous for; not unlike the sound produced by someone like Chris Isaak (a similar sense of “rootsiness,” many traces of Americana, although, as in the case of The Band, Case has Canadian roots), but with greater depth and lyrical substance. Because Case is considered largely a cult artist, and this is an album track, it hasn’t heretofore been that widely heard; but I would like to argue that the understated shrewdness of the piece makes it as formidable a contender for some kind of permanence as anything written in rock in the last twenty years.

Adam Fieled, 2011