Depeche Mode : Monument (German Edition)

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This is where we learn that Beethoven enjoyed a bump in popularity at one point due to Depeche Mode's inclusion of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata as a B-side, and where we learn that Daniel Myer -- who would go on to help found IDM titan Haujobb -- once bought a pair of "Dave Gahan-look-alike lederhosen. Perhaps you see a trend here: We get a look at Depeche Mode's complicated relationship with the two sides of the Berlin Wall. There's an interview with Depeche Mode's German label manager.

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There are chart notes that consistently use German charts to make their points. All of this feeds into the only potential problem someone might have with Monument: Specifically, Lange is German, Monument started out as a German tribute to Depeche Mode originally released in , and this expanded and translated edition retains the German-centric focus of the memorabilia and narratives found in the original, even as it chronicles the band right up through mid Monument includes all the albums, all the singles, everything any Depeche Mode fan could imagine.

It's nitpicky to say there's not enough focus on the US charts or say, on the Spanish exclusives. Still, Monument is as close to the ultimate comprehensive document of Depeche Mode's career thus far. Depeche Mode has been around long enough, they've seen enough, they've created enough that trying to document their entire career is a gargantuan task. It only makes sense that the results of attempting to undertake such a task would be housed in a gargantuan book.

Monument is everything it aspires to be, an impressive achievement and a fine gift for the Depeche Mode fan in your life. This is no scene or collective.

Depeche Mode: Monument | Dennis Burmeister, Sascha LangeAkashic Books

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Popmatters is wholly independently owned and operated. Related Articles Around the Web. Hollywood's Most Powerful Waif Well into her 30s, silent film star Mary Pickford was the waif-iest waif in film history, and the number of convincing variations she wrung on this theme is remarkable. The Allure of 'Mountain': The 20 Best Americana Albums of The rootsy releases of prove that Americana is and always has been experiencing a Rainbow Wave.

'Depeche Mode: Monument' Is Everything a Depeche Mode Fan Could Imagine

Kaz James Remixes Tall Heights' "The Deep End" premiere Australian producer Kaz James gives the song by the electro-folk outfit a deep house makeover, turning into a guaranteed floor-filler. The 70 Best Albums of The really personal nature of Monument only emerges in its final pages.

It might be expected that Burmeister, the collector, would be the obsessive fan, but he is in fact the ultimate dispassionate completist: I'm not their biggest fan who lives in a Depeche Mode museum I just thought that if I'm going to do it, I may as well do it properly. The touching vignette of Lange's parents bumping into Martin Gore in Budapest in , when Depeche Mode went behind the Iron Curtain for the first time, and getting an autograph and a hastily snapped photo for their son, both of which are reproduced in Monument , is a microcosm of the fandom of countless teenagers in the Eastern Bloc, and it is the book's exposure of that fandom in that geographical context that is its strongest element.

This was a yearning for material goods which were not available on the state-controlled East German market — posters, records, magazines — and that were the physical markers of allegiance to the Depeche Mode cult. Indeed, the emphasis here is on an unmet, aching demand among teenagers for the artefacts of material culture through which popular cults are lived out. Still, it is fascinating to learn that the hotbed of Depeche Mode fandom in the GDR was Dresden — a broadcasting blackout zone where the basin-like terrain meant that West German radio and TV, and the appearances of the band thereon, was out of reach — being starved of the object of obsession only served to fuel it.

The avid fandom of Lange and the completist's mentality of Burmeister may be seen as born of this starvation — like a 'waste not, want not' mentality enduring sixty years after the end of wartime rationing. Monument 's photos of eighties East German Depeche Mode fans posing as the band, standing in scrap yards in leather jackets and sunglasses some of these show a young Lange, although the captions do not let on are profound historical documents with a vivid sense of place. The authors comment that 'the grey industrial aesthetic' that had become a trademark for Depeche Mode by the late eighties was 'a daily reality for the average apprentice in an East German state-owned Kombinat The lucky ones who owned a rare, expensive Walkman could practically daydream that they were in a Depeche Mode video all day long.

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Stasi reports on the Depeche Mode fan clubs in Dresden, Zwickau, Leipzig and Karl-Marx-Stadt highlight that in issuing newsletters 'illegal publications' and holding fan parties 'unlawful assemblies' , fans drew the attention of the secret police as potential subversives and were subjected to surveillance and harassment. Here was a generation of young people living under state oppression. Their attitude to that oppression, however, is summed up by a newspaper cutting reporting a spate of megaphone thefts the cover artwork of the previous year's Music for the Masses made these propaganda tools highly desirable adornments for fans' bedrooms , and the photo of the riot police-issue leather braces requisitioned by Lange by unspecified means as a vital bit of Martin Gore-esque sartorial kit.

Here is the blithe stubbornness of youth in the face of any obstacle, where even the symbols of subjugation can be subverted and repurposed for liberation. The future, it turned out, belonged to this generation of German youth, but at the time nothing was guaranteed. When Depeche Mode announced their first gig in the GDR would take place on 7th March , astonishingly arranged under the auspices of the state-run youth movement, the Freie Deutsche Jugend, in an effort to appease the burning desire for Western Pop Music the state record label, Amiga, had already bowed to pressure and issued a Depeche Mode greatest hits album , 'no one believed there was going to be a second chance'.

Depeche Mode: Monument

As a result, Monument reveals anecdotally, tickets for the concert were painstakingly forged by hand, swapped for state-issue Trabi cars for which there was a year waiting list, or bought for the equivalent of six months' salary — for fans there was no question of giving up on the dream of seeing their idols live. Ultimately, the story of the Depeche Mode cult in the Eastern Bloc is a story of young people making their lives how they wanted them to be, however slim their hopes for the future and regardless of the plans the authorities had for them — arguably the essential drive of all youth subcultures.

How many more stories are there to be told about this unfathomable passion for a band from urban Essex and the power of Western Pop in the Eastern Bloc? The encyclopedic, picture-heavy approach of the bulk of Monument means that the promised shining of a light on the popular cultural import of the band remains a glimpse rather than a full exploration. Agata Pyzik's forthcoming Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Zero, promises some examination of the Depeche Mode cult in the Eastern Bloc, while Lange's previous work on youth resistance to the Nazi regime in his native Leipzig would bring a revealing perspective to a fuller published study of this phenomenon, but this remains a history yet to be outlined in full.

With the last German gig of the date Delta Machine Tour already having passed appropriately enough, this was in DM-obsessed Dresden , the tour has reached its end point, and the band will no doubt disappear for several years.