Jun 6, 2019
The Album: Depeche Mode: Violator (1990)
By the time Depeche Mode released Violator in 1990, they had
already become one of the giants of the modern rock world but
Violator took the group to new heights of global success. Dark and
moody yet intimately dance-able, the group and their album marked a
height of synth-pop’s growth across the 1980s, a zenith that would
soon be eclipsed by the on-rush of grunge and competing forms of
so-called “alternative” rock.
Violator was the pick of guest Hua Hsu, staff writer at the New
Yorker and English professor at Vassar College. For him, Violator
was part of a soundscape of growing up in the Bay Area, least of
all as an Asian American. As he and Oliver (flying solo this week)
discuss, modern rock became a soundtrack for a generation of Asian
American youth, at least those growing up in West Coast suburbs for
whom songs centered on alienation and otherness felt all too
familiar. Besides, as Hsu notes, we all had piano lessons so a
music built around synthesizers was an easy sell.
More on Hua Hsu
More on Violator
Show Tracklisting (all songs from Violator unless indicated otherwise):
Here is the Spotify playlist of as many songs as we can find there
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