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If you haven’t been living under a virtual rock, surely you’ve had a run-in with the Gary Jules version of the song Mad World - his famous rendition features an empty instrumental, featuring only an ostinato on piano and guitar as he mournfully sings of the surrounding depressive environment. The song was featured prominently on the Gears of War commercial along with a movie (the exact title escapes my mind).

Quite a few of my friends were rather obsessed with this song when it first gained recognition on the Net and in popular culture. Apparently the depressive and empty instrumental, combined with the dark lyrics, is something to be admired. I agree that Gary Jules’s interpretation is hauntingly beautiful (especually with the resonation present as he sings “mad world…”), but I would also like to present to you a version that, in my opinion, far surpasses Jules’s repetitive lamentation.

This, my friends, is the original 1982 rendition of Mad World as sung by Tears for Fears. This particular video combines the song with an excellent animation series Paranoia Agent, which deals with - you guessed it - paranoia, depression, manic disease, and all of the complex social emotions that are present in our every day world. It is one of the most disturbing series I have ever seen, simply because it is so -real- that it constantly haunts your thoughts to know the world around you is plagued with many of the same conditions.

But moving away from the video itself, we focus on the song. As you can hear, the original was more of a dance tunes with lots of beats and synth. Putting aside the fact that I generally have a bias towards liking anything in the dance genre (especially those with beats and synth, coincidentially…), the reason why I believe Tears for Fears’s version trumps Gary Jules’s any day is simple: I believe Tears for Fears did a much better job at interpreting the underlying meaning of the song in a very complex fashion.

Gary Jules took a very depressive side of the song and amplified it; in his interpretation, he probably chose to focus on the blank and bleak surroundings of someone who felt trapped by his environment. In doing so, he utilizes the repetition in the instrumental to express the same feelings of constant despair in society’s victims. While this is certainly an accurate representation of the emotions of the song (”no expression, no expression…”) I think it’s almost a little too -obvious-. Anyone who can understand English knows that the song is about how depressive and twisted society can be; I don’t need the music to spell that out for me as well. The song gets so repetitive, in fact, that it turns into a one-dimensional, one-way path. The beginning of the song sounds the same as the end. I have not developed any complex emotions or gotten anything out of the song after 3 minutes of listening; I have not felt that the song enhanced my perception of the problems presented within, and I haven’t seen a new facet of depression that I haven’t already (the dark and bleak “no tomorrow” feeling).

Tears for Fears’s rendition is a contradiction in itself, and that is what makes it so complex and thus so enjoyable to listen to. It starts out pretty repetitive, but as the song continues on, more beats and synth are added in, verse by verse and chorus by chorus. This creates a certain kind of chaotic tension, parallelling the trapped and suffocated feeling of those subject to society’s twisted problems. As day after day goes on, they feel caught up in the insensitive undercurrent of life, just as the song accelerates in instrumental, propelling you along at a rather fast pace (at least, compared to Jules’s). As a result, the words of the song as they fly by seem almost cheerful at first; it is only after a few listens that you understand that - like the darker side of society you only find after being submerged into it - the underlying principle of this song is wicked, cruel, and dark. The happy dance tune parallels the happy mask that members of society have to force themselves to put on (”bright and early for the daily races, going nowhere”) to hide their true paranoia and depression. The singer of Tears for Fears also puts a lot more emotion into his singing - it is a feeling of frustration, of pent-up anger waiting to burst out, of anxiety and confusion. Compared to Gary Jules’s monotonous lamentation, the original singer really brings out the feeling of being trapped by society.

tl;dr version: I simply believe that the meaning of the song is far more multifaceted than simply “The world is a bleak place” (as Gary Jules interpreted it). This interpretation is very one-dimensional, very “duh” factor, and very stereotypically depressive - I’ve heard enough downtempo emo songs; I want something that makes me think, something that is more complex and shows more than just the conventional meaning of “depressed”. Thus, I favour Tears for Fears’s interpretation of having to put on a mask to protect and convince oneself that the dark/twisted side of society doesn’t exist, even as one is completely trapped - whether consciously or not - and caught up in the insensitive current of life. I personally find this interpretation more easily connectable to, that it sheds more light on the problems prevalent in society that are ignored or censored to seem as if we live in a happy-go-lucky world.. because as we all know, we don’t.

Rather, it’s a very, very mad world.