GEN X REFLEX: SHOUT
The Song That Gave a Generation Permission to Use Its Voice
You hear it before anything else.
Those strange, metallic chimes hitting rhythmically.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Something is coming.
And then Tears for Fears gives you the instruction:
Shout.
I remember hearing “Shout” for the first time and not being entirely sure what was happening.
That wasn't unusual in those days.
Music was getting weird.
Rock and roll was splintering into all these little islands. Punk. Post-punk. New wave. Synth-pop. Electronic music. Alternative sounds that didn't always fit neatly into anything we had heard before. Guitars were still there, but suddenly they didn't have to carry the whole damn building.
There were synthesizers. Drum machines. Strange rhythms. Strange clothes. Strange videos.
It was glorious.
And I was a singer, which meant I listened to music a little differently. I listened to voices. I listened to arrangements. And I paid attention to the words.
“Shout” had bite.
The chorus didn't ask us to do anything.
It told us.
“Shout, shout, let it all out.”
Wait.
What?
The Protest Song Had Changed Clothes
Image: Tears For Fears. Source: Pitchfork
Looking back, I can hear something in “Shout” that I don't think I consciously understood when I first heard it.
Gen X didn't invent protest music.
We inherited it.
The generation before us had Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane and countless other musicians who demonstrated that popular music could do more than entertain. Songs could point toward war, injustice, inequality, political power and social systems and say:
Look at this.
Not every artist was doing that, of course. Our parents' record collections had plenty of love, sex, heartbreak, dancing and glorious nonsense in them too.
Just like ours.
We could have Tears for Fears telling us to question the world and Duran Duran being “Hungry Like the Wolf.”
Nobody was overthrowing the government in that video.
They were busy in Sri Lanka.
Priorities.
But the tradition of music challenging its listener hadn't disappeared.
The delivery system had changed.
By the time Tears for Fears reached us, punk had kicked holes in the walls. New wave was running wires through everything. Synthesizers and electronic percussion were creating sounds that didn't belong to our parents' musical world.
And instead of an acoustic guitar delivering a call to action, we got that enormous, pounding sound.
Shout.
Roland Orzabal has described the song in terms of protest and making your opinions known about the political and social things happening around you. That matters, because the resistance we heard in “Shout” wasn't something we invented forty years later. It was already inside the song.
Image: Roland Orzabal. Source: TMDB
But what an artist puts into a song and what a kid receives from it aren't always exactly the same thing.
Young Angel heard something else too.
Permission.
Open Your Eyes
Once you get beyond that gigantic chorus and actually listen to the verses, “Shout” starts presenting its case.
These are violent times.
You shouldn't have to surrender yourself to them.
There are people with narrow ideas about who you are and what you're supposed to become.
You don't have to perform for them.
You don't have to accept everything you're handed.
You don't have to pretend you're happy about it.
Look around.
See.
That's where I think Tears for Fears did something fascinating.
They weren't standing there waving flags and announcing that they had brought us A Very Important Political Message.
They put the questions inside an enormous pop song.
We could dance to it.
We could sing it.
We could watch it on MTV.
And somewhere underneath all of that, two guys were saying:
Pay attention.
Then they took it one step further.
Once your eyes are open, don't just stand there.
Use your voice.
Actually, no.
Don't speak.
Shout.
The Unofficial Gen X Rules
I've started noticing something as I've written these Gen X Reflex stories.
There are rules.
Not official rules. Nobody voted on these things. There is no Gen X governing body.
That would require us to attend meetings, and absolutely not.
But they're there.
Twisted Sister revealed:
WE'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT.
Depeche Mode helped me uncover one:
DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
Tears for Fears gives us another:
DON'T HOLD IT IN.
And this one is particularly funny because we are talking about Gen X.
We were not exactly the Emotional Disclosure Generation.
Many of us grew up being told to suck it up. Walk it off. Deal with it. Figure it out.
We had feelings.
Good Lord, did we have feelings.
We just weren't necessarily going to tell you about them.
That's why the wording of “Shout” feels so wonderfully appropriate in retrospect.
It doesn't tell us to talk it all out.
It says:
Let it all out.
Completely different instructions.
You can hear what I'm angry about.
I'll tell you what happened.
I'll tell you who did it.
I'll explain why it was stupid.
I may provide supporting documentation and several examples from 1987.
Then you ask:
“But how did that make you feel?”
Whoa.
Nobody said anything about that.
Tears for Fears understood the assignment.
No emotional deets required.
Just don't keep it in.
Shout.
And for a young singer, there was an even better loophole.
I didn't necessarily have to explain what I was feeling.
I could sing it.
Somebody else had already written the words.
All I had to do was open my mouth.
Then Came the Big Chair
And Tears for Fears wasn't finished with us.
Image: Tears For Fears, Songs From THe Big Chair album cover. Source: Spotify
Songs from the Big Chair arrived in 1985 and became their defining moment. “Shout.” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” “Head Over Heels.” “Mothers Talk.” Forty years later, the band's own anniversary edition still describes it as their defining album.
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” gave us another angle on the same conversation.
Power.
Control.
The people who want it.
The things we're willing to do to get it.
Curt Smith has described the song's themes as being about the desire for power, warfare and the misery that comes from it.
Image: Curt Smith. Source: IMDb
And once again, Tears for Fears didn't lecture us.
They made the damn thing beautiful.
That's part of what they were so good at.
There was serious stuff hiding inside music you wanted to hear again.
But then came the one that Singer Angel took home.
The Girl in the Library
“Head Over Heels.”
I loved that song.
And I pulled it.
It became one of the songs I chose to sing.
Of all the huge Tears for Fears songs from that period, that was mine.
And the video had something to do with it.
There was Roland Orzabal in a library, trying to get the attention of a woman and being wonderfully awkward about the whole thing. The Nigel Dick-directed video was deliberately lighter than the band's other videos and centered on that increasingly ridiculous library courtship.
I watched it and saw myself.
Nerdy.
Geeky.
Shy.
A girl who could absolutely be sitting in a library studying while secretly liking somebody somewhere in the distance and having no earthly idea what to do about it.
That was me.
And there was something else about Tears for Fears that mattered.
Look at them.
Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith weren't presented to us as these perfectly sculpted, impossibly beautiful rock gods who had descended from another planet.
They looked like...
guys.
Two guys.
Extraordinarily talented guys making extraordinary music, but there was something accessible about them.
MTV could give us fantasy. It was very good at fantasy.
But occasionally it also gave us a mirror.
“Head Over Heels” gave me one.
“Shout” had shown me the part of myself that needed permission to make noise.
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” looked outward at power and the strange world around us.
“Head Over Heels” looked back at the shy girl herself.
So Singer Angel took that one.
She could sing things she wasn't always brave enough to say.
And Then They Went Underwater
After Songs from the Big Chair, Tears for Fears seemed to sink just beneath the surface.
They toured. They were still there.
But there wasn't another new studio album.
And when you're young, four years is not four years.
Four years is an geological era.
Music changed.
We changed.
And apparently Tears for Fears did too.
Because when they finally surfaced again in 1989, they did not hand us Songs from the Big Chair Part II.
Oh no.
They opened a door and threw us straight through it.
The Seeds of Love
“Sowing the Seeds of Love” sounded like Tears for Fears had spent their missing years hanging out with the psychedelic Beatles.
And I mean that as the highest compliment.
The album The Seeds of Love arrived in September 1989 after a long and complicated production, expanding the band's sound through soul, jazz, organic instrumentation and unmistakably Beatlesque psychedelic pop.
Then there was the video.
My God, that video.
Flowers. Movement. Surreal images. Color. Things growing and transforming. It was a psychedelic trip made for the MTV generation.
But underneath all that beauty?
They were still talking to us.
“Sowing the Seeds of Love” was explicitly political. Orzabal wrote it during the period surrounding Margaret Thatcher's 1987 reelection, and he later regarded it as Tears for Fears' most overtly political song to that point. Curt Smith described the song as politics deliberately wrapped in humor.
There they were again.
The same guys who had told us to shout.
But something had changed.
They weren't simply telling us what to reject anymore.
They were talking about what we might grow.
Don't Just Love. Gestate Love.
That's what I hear in The Seeds of Love now.
Not simply love.
Gestate love.
Because a seed isn't the finished thing.
You plant it.
You give it what it needs.
You protect it.
You wait.
You allow something to develop that wasn't there before.
And after everything Tears for Fears themselves had gone through between those albums, there was something remarkable about their willingness to come back sounding so different.
They pivoted.
They could have tried to manufacture another “Shout.”
Another “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
Another Big Chair.
Instead, they grew.
And maybe that was another piece of permission they gave us without announcing it:
You are allowed to change.
First:
Open your eyes.
Then:
Use your voice.
Then:
Question power.
Then:
Be the awkward person in the library.
Then:
Change.
And finally:
Plant something better.
That's quite a journey for two guys we met through MTV.
They Didn't Have to Rule the World Forever
Tears for Fears continued making music after The Seeds of Love, although the story became complicated. Curt Smith left. Roland Orzabal continued recording under the Tears for Fears name. Eventually they reunited, and their official catalog today stretches from The Hurting and Songs from the Big Chair through The Seeds of Love, Elemental, Raoul and the Kings of Spain, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending and The Tipping Point.
They never again occupied quite the cultural space they did when Songs from the Big Chair seemed to be everywhere.
That's okay.
Very few musicians ever get a moment that big.
What matters is what remains after the moment passes.
And Tears for Fears left fingerprints.
Especially with “Shout.”
The song kept traveling.
Concrete Blonde performed it. Disturbed hauled it into the world of turn-of-the-millennium metal as “Shout 2000.” Other artists have continued reworking and sampling it across decades and genres.
Change the production.
Change the decade.
Change the voice.
Make it heavier.
Make it stranger.
The bones survive.
Because underneath all those magnificent '80s sounds is an instruction that doesn't require an expiration date.
Don't Hold It In
That's my Tears for Fears Reflex.
I hear those opening sounds and I'm back there.
Singer Angel listening.
Trying to understand what this strange music was doing.
Paying attention to the words.
And slowly discovering that music could give you things nobody else knew you needed.
A place to escape.
A place to belong.
A way to see yourself.
And sometimes...
permission.
Tears for Fears didn't ask us to explain everything we were carrying.
Thank God.
We were Gen X.
They would still be waiting.
They gave us something much more useful.
Let it out.
No explanation required.
No emotional debrief.
No deets.
Just those sounds.
That rhythm.
That voice.
And somewhere inside the Gen X nervous system, we still know exactly what comes next.
Don't hold it in.
Shout.
Sources
For the historical portions of this story, I drew from the official Tears for Fears site and catalog, including the band's Songs from the Big Chair anniversary material; contemporary and archival interviews with Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith concerning the political ideas behind their work; historical material on The Seeds of Love and “Sowing the Seeds of Love”; and documentation of later interpretations of “Shout.”
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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