Depeche Mode... over

I don't mean that the band is over. what's left of them may churn out another album or two still. They're getting pretty old, but they're not dead, and who knows if they still feel the need to produce more songs, tour again, and grab more of what they can with their grabbing hands. They might well. I suspect that I'm done seeing them live, however. I really wish I'd seen them on the Masses Tour or even the Violator tour, but I didn't. I saw the Playing the Angel tour and the most recent Memento Mori tour. They were noticeably lower energy in the almost twenty years between those two tours, and their back catalog is getting more full of stuff that I have less interest in. 

I put all of their albums, and by albums I mean my "deluxe album" selections which includes b-sides and non-album singles from the same era (like "Shake the Disease" or "Martyr", etc.) and played their entire catalog, minus remixes, back to back to back. It took me the better part of two or three weeks to get through it all during my commutes back and forth to work, but to be fair, I was kind of sick last week and worked from home most of the week too. Still, it was a pretty big undertaking in terms of just listening to music. I committed to playing hundreds of tracks before I would make any changes in my play queue. I finished it late Saturday night, and was able to listen to something else, finally, on the way to church on Sunday. One of the things that I anticipated, of course, is that Depeche Mode "peaked" in 1987 with Music for the Masses, so I knew that the quality of the listen-through would be front-loaded. But I wanted to see what I thought of some of the later material after not really listening to it very recently or very much, and I did always think that their most recent album, Memento Mori was their best one since Playing the Angel at least, if not even further back.

I was a little surprised to find that I've concluded that I'm kind of over Depeche Mode. Maybe I finally grew up. Maybe I've just changed too much and they haven't, or that they've changed in ways that I can't follow. The older stuff I still enjoyed, but I wasn't as excited to go through all of those tracks as I expected to be. I feel like I'd rarely ever feel like listening to a whole album all the way through anymore; I'm at the point where I'm OK just cherry-picking tracks that I want to hear, and that's that. I certainly won't want to do their entire catalog like that, even if I do pick up an album or two here and there. The later albums weren't as bad as my memory made me fear them to be, but they were pretty forgettable, with the exception of a few stand-out tracks. Even Exciter wasn't that bad, and overall I mostly enjoyed it, but not enough that I'd be excited to do it again. No pun intended.

Spirit, which was already the worst, was even worse. It didn't sound terrible, but Martin Gore writing about political themes in 2017, where he's trying to chastise people for voting for Brexit and Donald Trump, was bad when it was released, and sounds absolutely cringy, out of touch and embarrassing today. At least in 2017, he was echoing a strong Establishment narrative about reality; today, that narrative has collapsed completely, and Martin Gore's political sensibilities sound like those of an arrogant, entitled thirteen year old. (Of course, as part of the resistance, such as it was, to that Establishment, I found that Martin Gore's anthems of Establishment narrative, ironically pretending like he was part of the resistance, was cringy, off-putting and made me angry right away. But now, it's to laugh at rather than be angry at. But it still doesn't make anything on that album sound any better; if anything, it sounds stupid beyond all reason after even just a few weeks of Trump in office, and similar movements all over the countries of Western civilization.)

Mostly what I discovered is that I'm kinda over Depeche Mode. I still like them. I still like a lot of their classic era tracks, from the middle to late 80s and even the early 90s. I even still like some of their stuff since then, although not as much. But to some degree, I identified as a Depeche Mode fan in terms of my musical taste, and well... I guess I no longer do, and this exercise made that clear. Depeche Mode are a couple of cranky old farts who never really grew up, and that's increasingly clear. I identified with them as a teenager, because they were geared towards speaking to issues that a teenager faces. It was the ultimate somewhat alienated teen anthem to listen to Depeche Mode for Gen-Xers. Even when it no longer applied to me because I wasn't an alienated teenager anymore, I could at least still empathize and understand that perspective. Now, however, it's starting to feel cringy and "stuck" in a paradigm and perspective that simply isn't appropriate for someone my age, much less someone their age; they're a good ten years older than me. 

I'm not sure if I feel sad to feel "over" Depeche Mode, or if it's just the acceptance of something that clearly already happened, and it just feels natural. What do I listen to instead?

Well, first off, I'm finding that I identify less with my taste in music than I did when I was younger. I still like music, and I still identify more generally with the 80s, as a consummate Gen-Xer. But I listen to music not to express my identity as much, but just to have something cool going on in the background while I'm doing other things. I like a lot of the 00s hard trance, early hardstyle and otherwise harder dance styles of EDM still, but I don't identify with that music, I just like it. I listen to a lot of synthwave, but again, that's not musically interesting enough to really hold my interest; I just like it as backing soundtracks to what's otherwise going on. Trying to listen to it to appreciate it for its musicality doesn't really work. I also like a lot of para-ambient stuff that evokes a mood for reading or for RPGs; the unofficial YouTube soundtracks of Cthulhu or D&D stuff. But again, musically it's not usually interesting enough to hold my interest for its own sake. 

I'm also finding that my appreciation for classical music has come to the foreground once again. I've always loved classical music, but I don't always listen to a lot of it day to day. Lately, I've found myself drawn to it more and more. And, of course, musically classical music offers quite a bit more than any kind of popular music anyway. I may yet find myself primarily a classical music fan before I die. Orchestral movie soundtracks, at their best, offer a portion of what classical offers, but again; musically it usually isn't as rich.

Unlike the Boomers, while I'll always like the pop music of my generation, I'm unlikely to try and make the narcissistic case that it's some kind of pop music gold standard, better than anything before or since. I identify with it because of my age cohort, and I don't expect any other age cohort to think my generation's pop music is the best. The Boomers never got that, and still try and tell us that the Beatles or Bob Dylan are the bestest music ever, which makes people of my generation and younger just push back even harder the more we hear that kind of nonsense. And if there's anything that generations younger than the boomers have learned, it's to to not be like the boomers.

EDIT: Although I wonder; probably a big part of the problem was trying to do the entire catalog all at once. If I did an album here and album there, and maybe even put it on repeat and listened to it two or three times before finishing, kinda like how I did when I was younger, the experience would probably have been significantly less tedious. 

In any case, I started doing some remix and cover version collections of my favorite tracks, starting with "Never Let Me Down Again", and I queued up all the versions of "But Not Tonight" that I have after that. Assuming I'm still in the mood after I near the end of that queue, I'll add "Enjoy the Silence" and "If You Want" and a few others after that.