The Poetry of Tears For Fears

by Gary C. Devilles

I’ve been a literature teacher for quite some time and ever since I started teaching poetry or other genres I never failed to incorporate songs or popular culture in my pedagogy because primarily, I find a lot of artists or musicians poetic and that secondly, teaching literature through popular culture makes things more interesting for students such that they realize that the songs they enjoy are not far from the literary pieces they struggle to understand in terms of poetic devices or conventions.

One of my favorite artists is Tears for Fears. Back then when we were in high school we were captivated by their music and the strange dance maneuver of Roland Orzabal. Of course, I wasn’t really paying much attention to their lyrics then, probably because of my limitation and second I was more concerned with their melody. If it’s danceable, then most likely it’s good. The 80’s is the age of new wave and people were less concerned with poetics than body language. Now, of course we don’t dance as much. We are more comfortable listening to the 80’s music through our mp3s and iPods and this is when we begin to pay attention to what they were saying and try to make sense of what the songs meant for us then.

Consider Tears for Fears’ album, The Hurting, where almost all the songs in this compilation reflect the tedium, rebellion, and angst experienced in our youth. The first stanza of the song The Hurting sounds like a de profundis or a crying out loud of the soul who experiences pain from the depths of hell:

Is it an horrific dream/ am I sinking fast/could a person be so mean as to laugh and laugh/ On my own/ could you ease my load/ could you see my pain/ could you please explain the hurting/.

The persona here or the one perceived speaking in the song is asking these rhetorical questions addressed to someone who is probably not there since the line, on my own, explains explicitly his or her condition of isolation. In the Greek Tragedy this is called Agon (hence the word, agony, as a derivative of this Greek word agon), the articulation of character’s dilemma and problem. Alienation or isolation is one of the oldest problems articulated in drama and poetry and yet in this song we confront again this problem as though it is something new. This effect of seeing something old as new is known in poetry as defamiliarization, the effect of making the familiar unfamiliar. As one proceeds with the song, one learns that the pain is caused by one’s inability to communicate or understand other situation as articulated in the lines that goes:

Could you understand a child when he cries in pain/ could you give him all he needs/ or do you feel the same.

Such inability to communicate or failure to understand necessary leads to confusion with what one thinks and feels as the song continues with

All along you’ve been told you’re wrong when you felt it right/ and you’re left to fight the hurting.

The song actually ends powerfully with the resolution that fighting is futile and that acceptance of pain and suffering seems like a necessary process or stage that everyone goes through as the third stanza reveals that one has to feel pain and sorrow, touching pain and surrendering to it just like a child does. Perhaps the answer to the lingering problem of loneliness is not in being with someone since psychoanalyst Carl Jung once said that loneliness is not inimical to relationship. One can still feel alone even with others and the constant search for answers becomes the paramount condition of human existence. One asks questions because one continues to live.

Touch the hurt and don’t let go/ get in line with the things you know/ learn to cry like a baby / then the hurting won’t come back.

However, existential questions articulated in The Hurting become more critical in the song Mad World where the loneliness of persona is much more palpable and brought about by the inanity of lack of purpose and sense of direction. The French has a term for this kind of condition, which they call ennui and the ennui in this song is workaday world that seems caught in an endless circle of deceit:

Bright and early for their daily races/ going nowhere, going nowhere/ and their tears are filling up their glasses/ no expression, no expression/ hide my head and I want to drown my sorrow/ no tomorrow, no tomorrow.

This experience of tedium and ennui becomes more problematic as the song in the end reveals that such experience starts much early in life, when children are made to feel good and yet their teachers fail to understand what’s going on with them:

Made to feel the way that every child should/ sit and listen, sit and listen/ went to school and I was very nervous/ no one knew me, no one knew me/ hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson/ look right through me, look right through me.

If teacher-student relationship in grade school can be alienating, it is not surprising that almost all form of social filiations, lovers and even familial are not spared from this trauma and as such becomes the running theme almost in all songs in this compilation. Pale Shelter talks about one’s insecurity despite the provisions given to the persona, and in Ideas as Opiates, security in one’s beliefs becomes a comfortable excuse or relief when in fact admitting almost instinctively that belief is quite arbitrary:

And lies spread on lies/ we don’t care/ belief is our relief/ we don’t care.

One cannot even resort to memories as possible source of solace. If in TS Elliot’s Cats (became a musical and famous for the song Memory) one can invoke memory as the reason for being granted another life, for Tears for Fears memories fade and the scars still linger:

The more I talk/ the more I say/ the less you seem to hear/ I’m speechless in a most peculiar way/ your mind is weak/ your need is great/ and nothing is too dear/ for you to use to take the pain away/ memories fade.

This song may as well an echo of the song Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel in the late 70’s where the persona speaks to darkness as an old friend and sees people talking without listening. We cannot be certain whether Roland or Curt was influenced by the critical stance of the artists in the 70’s, but their songs in this album really captured what it meant to be alone, to live in a dog-eat-dog world, to suffer from the maddening crowd. Almost twenty five years ago, we were dancing to these tunes, couldn’t care less if they are saying something more. Now that we are beginning to feel the grip and extent of what they were saying, I wonder if we can still dance the way these songs were rendered before. Or shall we be forever be in an ironic situation as the song Start of the Breakdown tells us:

We love to laugh/ love to cry/ half-alive/ we love to go slow when we’re dancing for rain/ dry skin flakes where there’s ice in the vein/ and we love to cry/ half alive.

The song asks, is this the start of the breakdown. Can anyone provide an answer?