Your own
personal
Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Your own
personal
Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who's there
Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer
Take second best
Put me to the test
Things on your chest
You need to confess
I will deliver
You know I'm a forgiverP
Reach out and touch faith
Reach out and touch faith
Your own
personal
Jesus...
Depeche Mode's song Personal Jesus, from their 1990 album Violator, has been interpreted in a variety of ways--from an assault on organized religion to an endorsement of Christianity--and lyricist Martin Gore thinks that's just fine. "He never explains the lyrics at all," says bandmate Andy Fletcher in Jonathan Miller's 2003 book Stripped: Depeche Mode. "I've heard about ten different interpretations of 'Personal Jesus' and that's what Martin really likes. . . The lyrics are very ambiguous, so although it could have been controversial, in fact it turned out not to be at all. Most people thought it was a pro-Christian anthem, which wasn't intended."
As its inclusion in these pages suggests, the inspiration for "Personal Jesus" came from a book, but it's not The New Testament, as one might think. According to Gore--who opened up about the song in an interview with Spin Magazine--the unlikely inspiration was Priscilla Beaulieu Presley's book Elvis and Me, written with Sandra Harmon and published in 1985, which chronicles her relationship with her late ex-husband, Elvis Presley. Gore told Spin:
It's a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care. It's about how Elvis was her man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships; how everybody's heart is like a god in some way. We play these god-like parts for people but no one is perfect, and that's not a very balanced view of someone is it?
In the book, Priscilla Presley writes of Elvis: "Over the years he became my father, husband, and very nearly God."
Stripped: Depeche Mode (Kindle Edition)
(Secondary Source).
http://theclassicsrock.blogspot.com/2010/07/personal-jesusdepeche-mode.html
Whenever we love as Jesus loved, we have been Jesus to someone.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the song goes, I've always thought it was about sex. Sex as spirituality / spirituality as sex was certainly not a new theme for Depeche Mode in 1990.