Day 41 (April 29): Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus

DEPECHE MODE - Violator - Amazon.com Music
As we touched on with "Cum on Feel the Noize", songs with multiple versions are hard. It's fine when it's "Hurt" (Johnny Cash's cover 4 lyf) or "All Along the Watchtower" (Jimi Hendrix fancam? I'm very socially maladjusted), but when there's more than two? Hoo boy.

That's why "Personal Jesus" is such a source of stress to me. Clearly, the idea of having your own wee iJesus by your side is a timeless subject which appeals to many, which is why so many have covered it. There's all the covers, and then the remixes, too. It is a towering edifice of grandeur.

The Personal Jesus expanded universe is a Lovecraftian deity that towers above mortal perception, which makes it hard to pick out a singular take from it. Which one is definitive? Is there such a thing in this case? Shall we just submit to the glorious will of "Personal Jesus"?

In times of stress, I tend to pick the easy option. That's why today's song of the day is the Depeche Mode version from their 1990 album Violator aka the original one. Fine, Marilyn Manson's and Def Leppard's have cool guitar and Johnny Cash's is all wistful and shit, but you can't go wrong with "a little Depeche". I don't know. I'm only mildly familiar with their work? I just made that quote up. It's probably nothing.

Sheesh. This is a stressful subject.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Month 2: Bright Eyes - At The Bottom of Everything

Image
It's May 19, 2020, and it has been two months since I started this song-diary-cum-blog-cum-something-I'll-think-of-later. It's day 58 of the UK-wide lockdown, though we're now staying alert rather than staying home and I'm pretty sure I saw eight guys who weren't part of the same family playing basketball in the park yesterday, which doesn't seem right. Today's post comes from you in the middle of my final exam week, which is a strange time to be writing a daily blog. Honestly, though exams are still a gigantic fart in an elevator, I'm mildly grateful that something is happening to make a week feel different at all. Next month will come to you from the endless morass of post-degree-in-a-pandemic uncertainty, and while I look forward to watching nothing but Star Wars: The Clone Wars all day along, I don't look forward to that bit. It's at this point that I should point out that my degree ends in three days. It's kind of a whole thing,
Read more

Day 58 (May 16): Public Enemy - Harder Than You Think

Image
It's a shame when a song gets boxed in as an advertising thing. It kind of squeezes the life out of them; artistic achievement reduced to corporate ones and zeroes, the actual meaning of the song dissolving into a catchy jingle. On the other hand... Look, there he goes, defending capitalism again. Well, hold on one second. Sometimes, songs being jinglefied for popular consumption on TV is good and interesting, actually. Sometimes it recommends music to an audience who would absolutely not think of otherwise consuming it. Sometimes it's just curiously weird. Such is today's song of the day, "Harder Than You Think" from Public Enemy's 2007 mouthful How Do You Sell a Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul? . For reasons I'm actually very happy keeping a fun mystery, this song is now best known in Britain as the main jingle for the coverage of the 2012 Paralympics. None of the actual lyrics were ever used, so audiences could happily be fooled into t
Read more

Month 1: Murray Gold - The Shepherd's Boy

Image
It's April 19, 2020, and it has been one month since I started this Frankenstein's monster of a song- diary-blog experiment. It's day 28 of the UK-wide lockdown, with no perceptible end in sight. During this month, this blog has accidentally become my main source of how I can tell human time. You might have noticed that the days are increasingly congealing into a gigantic mulch that are impossible to tell apart, after all. Days of the week? Ha. Everything is Sunday is Monday is Thursday but definitely never Saturday now. Dates? Don't be ridiculous. Months are just about possible to keep straight, but don't be trying to actually distinguish where we are in that big blob of time. There is the golden times of Before Corona, there is the endless Now, and there is After Corona, a theoretical future both close and far, depending on which government exit strategy leaks you read. Moving forward or progressing in the endless Now seems basically impossible, because every da
Read more