June 2, 1990
- STAYED AT #1:1 Week
In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.
You should lie. That's the message. On "Policy Of Truth," one of their biggest hits, that is the wisdom that Depeche Mode wish to impart. I've probably heard "Policy Of Truth" hundreds of times over the decades, and I never really paused to consider the lyrics until I sat down to write this column today. Some Depeche Mode songs -- "Fly On The Windscreen," "Master And Servant," "Never Let Me Down Again" -- have lyrics that come right out and grab me. Most of the time, though, I think of Depeche Mode's lyrics as a small, inessential part of their overall vibe. The words are just the sounds that Dave Gahan makes with his mouth, which is why Depeche Mode can get away with occasional clunkiness, as on "People Are People." I have sung along to "Policy Of Truth" many times without pausing to consider what those words mean, but there it is: You should lie.
This is not hidden subtext. Depeche Mode approach the message of "Policy Of Truth" as if it's a manifesto. Martin Gore wrote the whole thing in the second person, with his bandmate Dave Gahan alternately taunting and lecturing us, the listeners. Gahan and Gore want us to know that our devotion to honesty will ruin our lives, if it hasn't already: "You'll see your problems multiplied/ If you continually decide/ To faithfully pursue/ The policy of truth."
On both sides of the Atlantic, the rock critics of the '80s and early '90s had a hard time taking Depeche Mode seriously, despite or maybe because of their ballooning popularity in America. To most of them, Depeche Mode were foppish synth guys, and their foppish-synth-guy status conferred a certain inescapable fakeness. Depeche Mode saw themselves being dismissed like that, and they bristled at it. But "Policy Of Truth" suggests an embrace of fakeness -- partly satirical, but probably not entirely -- that goes beyond their choice of instrumentation. On "Policy Of Truth," Depeche Mode are here to tell us the real, unvarnished truth about the stupidity of truth. To flip a phrase from one of the greatest writers in alt-rock history, they were so real about fakeness that it went beyond real.
In Depeche Mode 101, DA Pennebaker's extremely entertaining documentary about a sold-out 1988 DM show at the Rose Bowl, there's a striking moment where the band's American handlers sit backstage crowing about their good fortune: "We're getting a load of money. A lot of money, a load of money. Tons of money!" Pennebaker then cuts between Depeche Mode performing "Everything Counts" and stadium functionaries sorting through piles of cash.
Depeche Mode presumably didn't have the kind of creative control over 101 that their circa-now pop-star equivalents would've demanded, but it's still striking to see that kind of thing on the official record. I doubt that Depeche Mode would've objected even if they could. After all, it's all there in the "Everything Counts" lyrics: "The grabbing hands grab all they can/ Everything counts in large amounts." Depeche Mode never exclude themselves from that narrative. They were happy to let their hands grab all that they could. (That live version of "Everything Counts" became Depeche Mode's first hit on the newly instituted Billboard Modern Rock chart, peaking at #13.)
A few years after Depeche Mode hit a vertiginous new career peak with their 1990 album Violator, alternative rock became a massive cultural wave in young America. This stuff was presented, and usually received, as a real-deal reaction to the fluffy pop music that dominated the previous decade. By and large, the Seattle grunge bands seemed horrified at the idea of wealth and mass adulation, and that guarded flinchiness only added to their appeal. (Something similar happened in the rap music that didn't get played on modern rock radio, though the G-funk titans who populated that return-of-the-real discourse were way less conflicted about wanting to get paid.)
I'm speaking in giant sweeping generalities here, but that's the alt-rock story, right? Whether or not you were there, you have probably ingested and accepted some version of the "Nirvana killed hair metal" myth. It's simplistic, but there's some truth in there. So it's fascinating to consider that Depeche Mode, the grunge bands' predecessors in alt-rock stardom, were way less concerned about projecting authenticity. In fact, Depeche Mode were willing to sing about truth as a liability. Paradoxically enough, that makes "Policy Of Truth" sound more truthful than a whole lot of the supposedly-truthful stuff that followed. At least Depeche Mode were honest with themselves, and with us. On "Policy Of Truth," Dave Gahan sings that the truth will not set you free -- that instead you should "hide what you have to hide and tell what you have to tell." It's a lot like life.
A few weeks after Depeche Mode released "Policy Of Truth" as the third single from Violator, the album went platinum for the first time. (It ultimately sold three million copies in the US, making it by far the band's biggest commercial success.) "Enjoy The Silence," Depeche Mode's previous single, had been an unlikely mainstream crossover, and the band was already hatching big plans for the summer. In 1990, a night like that Rose Bowl gig captured in 101 would no longer be the exception. Instead, DM were playing stadiums and arenas every night, bringing grimy openers like Nitzer Ebb and the Jesus And Mary Chain to play for crowds of tens of thousands.
Violator is a miracle of an album, and really any of its tracks could've worked as singles. In 1990, Depeche Mode didn't even need to promote a song as a single to pop up on the Modern Rock chart. Deep cuts from Violator got enough radio play to place -- "Dangerous" at #13 in January, "Halo" at #21 in August. But I'm glad "Policy Of Truth" got a real push, since that's a banger among bangers. Depeche Mode and their Violator collaborators, producer Flood and mixer François Kevorkian, were wizards at stacking sounds on top of each other, building entire worlds out of beeps and hums and whooshes. "Policy Of Truth" is one of the best examples of that skill in the band's whole catalog.
The sounds on "Policy Of Truth" heave and twinkle. The song is built on a neckbreaker riff that churns with slow electronic precision. Much of the time, it's hard to tell what's making the sounds. There's some guitar in there, and some horn, probably. But those sounds aren't presented unencumbered. Instead, they're sampled, layered, and manipulated for maximum impact. When the funky sax riff kicks in after the chorus, it doesn't serve the same function as funky sax riffs on past generations of rock and pop songs. Instead, that riff has a sleazy, squirming, percussive impact. It briefly rises up out of the murk and then disappears back in, much like the screaming guitar chords and ominous bass notes and mechanistic snare-splats.
There's a hint of blues-rock in the "Policy Of Truth" groove, just as there's more than a hint of rockabilly in the "Personal Jesus" groove. But it's blues-rock fed through primitive computer modems and transformed into something else altogether. The sound is vast and sinister and all-encompassing -- a fitting stage for Dave Gahan to deeply intone his dark advice, like a cartoon devil on your shoulder.
Thinking back now, I don't think I've ever given Martin Gore enough credit for his lyrics. I knew that he had great riffs, great vocal melodies, and great hair, but I didn't give his pen game its due respect. "Policy Of Truth" presents an entire worldview -- one that presumably resonated in the George H.W. Bush 1990 zone and that still makes a fucked-up kind of sense today.
"Policy Of Truth" starts with the assumption that "you," the song's subject, have made some kind of unwisely honest disclosure that you wish you could take back now: "You had something to hide/ You should have hidden it, shouldn't you?/ Now, you're not satisfied/ With what you're being put through." You ignored some key advice when you were younger, deciding to live your life by this policy of truth, and it has fucked you over again and again. Every past truthtelling lingers in your memory as a tantalizing hypothetical: "You will always wonder how it could have been if you'd only lied."
Throughout the song, Dave Gahan savors the taste of every word, and of every hesitation between words. There's predatory I-told-you-so satisfaction in his slithery baritone. He glides over the synthesizer swamp, leering and insinuating -- the implication being that he, Dave Gahan, would never be foolish and idealistic to bother with all that honesty. On the bridge, the refrain -- "never again is what you swore the time before" -- makes truth sound like a dark addiction that you can't shake. It's a mistake you make again and again.
"Policy Of Truth" works as a slick little inversion of the clichés that we always hear. Honesty, Depeche Mode tell us, is not the best policy. Instead, it's a good way to ruin your life. Because of the skeezy-horny vibe that Depeche Mode bring to just about everything, there's some implied infidelity in "Policy Of Truth," but it doesn't have to be that. Dave Gahan could be telling baby George Washington to lie about cutting down that cherry tree, and the effect would be the same.
The "Policy Of Truth" video, from regular Depeche Mode collaborator Anton Corbijn, mostly lets go of narrative. There's some stuff about Dave Gahan and a girl, so maybe the implication is that he's singing "Policy Of Truth" to himself, that he's the one who ruined things through honesty. Mostly, though, it's Depeche Mode, shot in grainy black-and-white and neon-noir color, creeping through New York, looking perilously cool and slightly dangerous. There's a bit of a Cruising leather-bar vibe to the clip's aesthetic, which I suppose hints at a whole different kind of self-preservation through withholding truth.
"Policy Of Truth" wasn't as big a crossover smash as "Enjoy The Silence," its immediate predecessor, and it doesn't have nearly as many streams today. But "Policy Of Truth" was a legit crossover hit that went far beyond alt-rock radio. On the Hot 100, "Policy Of Truth" eventually slid up to #15 -- one spot higher than it went on the British singles chart. As far as I can tell, that's the only time that a Depeche Mode single was a bigger hit in the US than the UK, which only goes to illustrate that unlikely moment when middle America embraced these guys.
"Policy Of Truth" wasn't the last single on Violator. Depeche Mode followed that one with the great album opener "World In My Eyes," which still had enough juice to reach #17 on the Modern Rock chart and #52 on the Hot 100. Depeche Mode took some time off after they finished with the Violator album cycle, and when they came back with their next album, the American alt-rock zeitgeist had changed in some radical ways. But Depeche Mode changed, too, and they still had a very serious audience over here. We'll see them in this column again.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BEATS: The KLF, the British rave prankster-theorists who became even-more-unlikely pop stars, only ever released three official remixes of other artists' tracks, and one of them was for "Policy Of Truth." Here's "Policy Of Truth (Trancentral Mix)":
(The KLF's only Modern Rock chart hit, the 1992 version of "Justified And Ancient" with Tammy Wynette, peaked at #21.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's the surprisingly rockin' "Policy Of Truth" cover that one-hit wonders Dishwalla contributed to the 1998 Depeche Mode tribute compilation For The Masses:
(Dishwalla's one hit will eventually appear in this column.)
BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Trapt, the right-wing post-grunge culture warriors who posted themselves into permanent punchline status, released their own rockin' "Policy Of Truth" cover in 2012. Here, enjoy:
(Trapt will also, God help me, eventually appear in this column.)
