In this article, I look at the hidden meanings in Depeche Mode's Enjoy The Silence video.

Holy shit! They’re over saturating YouTube with shitty ads. I love YouTube, I’m actually getting ready to get a YouTube tattoo on my eyelid, so I can always have a sweet reminder of my favorite website, oh boy oh boy. I recently came across something that almost brought a tear to my eye, seriously. I’m being dead ass serious here folks when I tell you that I saw something that shook me to the bone. It was a music video, not just any music video, but an amazingly cryptic and mesmerizing video that made me instantly identify with what the creators were trying to convey, I heard the message loud and clear and it’s my God given duty to spread the word about this hidden gem.

So, I bet you’re wondering, what fucking video is Garrett talking about? The “Shoes” video? “Chocolate Rain?” No, it’s not fucking Shoes or Chocolate Rain, however, they are pretty badass, this video is by a band called “Depeche Mode” and the song is called “Enjoy the Silence”. I’m sure you’ve heard a cover or two, as a matter of fact, let me show you how I was introduced to the song. Have you ever heard of the band HIM? I love em, I don’t care if you do, or don’t love em, I love them a lot and although their last album sucked ass, the new album “Venus Doom” is pretty amazing, so they’re forgiven. They did a sweet cover of the song, which you can check out here.

HIM-Enjoy The Silence

This is old school HIM, probably in the Greatest Lovesongs Vol 666 days, if you’re not familiar with Ville Valo’s voice, then you probably won’t like this version of the song, I think it’s great. This was the first time I’d ever listen to anything from Depeche Mode, but a lot of my favorite bands had done Depeche Mode covers. Placebo covered “I Feel You”, both Johnny Cash and Marilyn Manson covered “Personal Jesus”.

This leads me to Depeche Mode’s original video for “Enjoy The Silence”.

This video/song combination are great on so many levels, let me break it down for you. First, lets start with the songs lyrics, I don’t know what they mean for sure, so I’m going to tell you what the mean to me.

Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
Painful to me
Pierce right through me
Cant you understand
Oh my little girl

Enjoy the silence

It makes me think of a painful relationship, where other people will try to stop you or discourage you and you taking great offense from those words. Kind of like a crazy love affair with heroin, where everyone is telling you you’re an idiot and you should stop before you kill yourself and you’re just like “You don’t think I know this shit will kill me?” It hurts but you’re addicted, trapped in a bad situation with a huge audience having several things to say, how do you break free of this shit?

So, what do you do? Write a song about it, trying to convey the message that this great horrible addiction is bringing you joy, and any harsh thing people have to say is just bringing you down even more so, tell them to shut the fuck up and let you kill yourself in peace.

In the end, the words just slip away into oblivion, and you’re free to enjoy being alone and high on heroin.

That’s pretty amazing. But that’s also just my opinion, I didn’t write the song, for all I know the song could be about Jesus’s love. What did Martin Gore write the song about? David Gahan? Think about it.

The beginning has the band just, meanmuggin the camera, looking so tough in leather jackets. It’s kind of like the band is standing up against naysayers like “we’re still here, dammit!”

But then the rest of the band starts to disappear and David Gahan is alone amidst the evil darkness. What’s in this darkness? Who knows…. Who knows. Also, there are the brief shots of multicolored roses against multicolored backgrounds, my favorite is the black rose against the blue background, interesting color combination if you ask me.

Dave Gahan roams the world dressed as a king, while carrying a folding chair. Every so often he stops at some amazing view ranging from mountains to oceans, and sits for a little while, then moves on, looking for another view, and another, and another, until he ends up in some snowy, cold place. This is notable for two reasons, the first being, that those shots of Gahan walking around are pretty damn amazing, artistically.

The second reason is more hidden, to me the whole video symbolizes being famous and successful, when Violator came out, Depeche Mode was huge. They were putting out great albums and selling out huge venues and all seemed well, but Dave Gahan had kind of a drug problem, which got so bad that in ’96, six years after this video came out, Gahan overdosed on a heroin-cocaine speedball. Damn, I hate speedballs, they’re just so…evil. Why do drug addicts even decide to mess with those, they’re just asking for trouble because coke and heroin together are the most dangerous combination of all.

The video, with all it’s roam the world goodness tells a story. That story being, Gahan as the king or being a rockstar, having fame and fortune and access to everything he could ever want. He gets to travel all over the world, performing, doing whatever, seeing all these beautiful sights. However, he doesn’t stay at any of the views for too long, he just keeps moving. To me that symbolizes not being satisfied by any of this cool shit you have access to.

You’re the king, rich and famous, going wherever you want, doing your thing and yet you’re still not happy. That scares me, it gets me thinking about my goals and everything and suddenly, I realized, after I achieved my goals, what then? Would I be satisfied? What if I wasn’t only unsatisfied, but unhappy to? How the hell do you fix that? I certainly don’t know. Hopefully years down the line when I’m a wiser man, I’ll have better answers to these questions I ask myself.

It seems that Maybe David Gahan and Depeche Mode were once in that very same place, but you never know. Some say the video is inspired by “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exup