The Death Of The Underground
Somewhere in South Gate, 1988
I was never much of a Depeche Mode kid. My teenage ears leaned toward the wiry punk of the Minutemen, the jagged, surreal punk-rock of the Pixies, or the alt-surf paganism of Jane’s Addiction. My sister, two years older, was the devoted DM fan in the family. She had the patience to sit with their albums, memorize the lyrics, and—most importantly—make me mixtapes - late ’80s/early ’90s time capsules I still remember.
Being a little brother meant my role wasn’t so much to appreciate her taste as to occasionally torment her. She may argue that the torment was more constant than occasional. Nevertheless, I still recall, with an embarrassing amount of glee, one of her most crushing adolescent disappointments.
A boy had asked her to the Depeche Mode concert at the Rose Bowl—yes, that Rose Bowl show, the one that would later become Depeche Mode 101, immortalized by D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, and David Dawkins. At the time, I didn’t know it would become a landmark moment in music history; to me, it was just another night out.
She was desperate to go—desperate enough to come to me, her 14-year-old, self-appointed cultural authority, and ask if Mom would let her. I laughed. “Of course not!” Our mother, a no-nonsense Mexican matriarch, didn’t need more than a single glare to kill such dreams.
Still, my sister mustered the courage to ask, and Mom’s answer was a swift, unequivocal NO. Things get interesting at this point. My sister never told the boy she couldn’t go. Maybe she thought a face-to-face meeting would melt Mom’s resolve. Maybe she was just hanging on to the dream. Her own Burden of Dreams.
The day of the concert, a limo pulled up outside our house, much to our surprise. Yes, a limo! Through the living room window, I saw the boy step out, dressed sharp, smiling like the night ahead belonged to him. It might have been my imagination, but I swear there was a corsage involved. My sister, already in tears, faced Mom’s wrath and final decree.
“Go tell that boy you are not going,” Mom said in her sternest Spanish.
What followed could’ve been a scene from a silent film: the boy’s face collapsing in real time as my sister told him she couldn’t go—but in my memory, it unspools in slow motion like film—his smile draining, the long trudge back to the limo where his friends and their dates waited as his own dream faded. I’m sure his friends rallied around him, then moved on attending to their still intact teenage romances. I watched all this unfold, shamefully entertained. To my credit, I left my sister alone the rest of the night—though the temptation to twist the knife was strong. More than once I crept toward her room, ready to gloat, but the soft glow beneath her door unsettled me. Against my instincts, it stirred a strange flicker of empathy.
She recovered, of course. No lasting grudge against Mom. And if you’re feeling bad for her, she ended up going to the first Lollapalooza in ’91, where she saw Jane’s Addiction in their prime, plus Siouxsie Sioux, Nine Inch Nails, and the Butthole Surfers among others. Not a bad consolation prize.
The Point of No Return
It wasn’t until the live album and the Depeche Mode 101 documentary came out the following year, 1989, that something shifted in my understanding of DM. Hearing the Rose Bowl tracks on the radio made me realize the show’s significance and power. Watching the film again recently, I finally understand its place in the cultural timeline.
It wasn’t just a concert—it was the hinge between the ’80s underground and the alternative explosion that would crest with Nirvana’s popularity. It was a time when the underground or alternative culture could exist freely: free of corporate interest, free of popular opinion. DM belonged alongside the trailblazing acts of the time: Jane’s Addiction, The Pixies, The Butthole Surfers, even R.E.M.—bands shaping a new landscape and sound.
As Martin Gore and Dave Gahan walked onto the stage and began Behind the Wheel, there’s a look between them, a moment captured perfectly on film. They become aware of the size of the crowd, the enormity of the moment, and the delight and shock is palpable. The crowd’s love, devotion, and energy form a symbiotic, almost religious connection with the band. It elevates the show from great to legendary.
What struck me most, watching 101, was the contrast. In the early part of the tour, DM grinds out shows across the Midwest and the South, playing mid-size venues that feel closer to the circuit of punk and indie bands than to global pop stars. Sweaty gymnasiums, flat stages, awkward lighting—every applause hard-earned. There’s a purity to it, almost innocent in the way they’re still building momentum, still carrying traces of DIY gumption. They’re not yet sure how big they can get, or if they’ll ever break past cult status.
That’s what makes the Rose Bowl so dramatic. A show most people thought would never sell out suddenly becomes historic in more ways than one. From the grind of small halls to a stadium of 60,000, the underground proves itself profitable in a single night. Everything changes.
For me, that change is wrapped up in my sister’s story. She had the golden ticket—an invitation to that very show—but she never made it past our front door. Mom’s “NO” closed it down, and the limo outside drove off without her. At the time, it felt like ordinary parental authority. Looking back, it feels symbolic: she stood right at the threshold of history, and the door slammed shut.
Watching 101 now, what also strikes me is the people. How they dressed, talked, and carried themselves. I think of the 101 kids in their thrift-store jackets, asymmetrical haircuts, oversized black coats, and unapologetically high-waisted blue jeans. That’s what I picture when I think of the early ’90s—not grunge, not a flannel tied at the waist, but that strange, stylish, pre-Nirvana underground that burned bright before the mainstream caught on. The fact that people only think of grunge and flannel when thinking of the ’90s always irks me for some reason.
That’s the thing about decades: cultural seams rarely align with the calendar. The real “’90s” ran from ’88 to ’92. ’88 has more in common with ’92 than with ’87, just as 1998 feels closer to 2002 than to the year before. We live in cultural eras, not tidy blocks of ten.
Beyond the Music & Fashion
In Coming of Age at the End of History, Camille de Toledo argues that after Nirvana, a true underground art or music movement became impossible. Once corporations recognized the revenue potential of anything “alternative,” they moved in, packaged it, and drained it dry. Each cycle became faster, each co-optation more precise, until no movement could grow outside the market’s reach. No revolution. No rebellion. Just neatly distressed Che Guevara T-shirts from your local Urban Outfitters.
De Toledo places the tipping point in 1993. I’d argue it came sooner. The opening salvo was Depeche Mode at the Rose Bowl: the night the underground proved its scale and profitability. By the time Lollapalooza rolled through a few years later, the ending was already written. And when Nevermind arrived, it wasn’t the birth of alternative nation —it was the finished product, the late ’80s underground polished and repackaged for mass consumption.
This is what Depeche Mode 101 captures toward the end of the film: the moment commerce overtakes art. A sequence where a group of men and women sit around a table, counting the night’s earnings. Stacks of cash, careful tallies. This is for a band still considered underground, a fringe group of electro trailblazers. Pennebaker cuts between the money and the music, art and commerce braided together in real time. I doubt he and his team were thinking five years ahead, but in hindsight, the foreshadowing is unmistakable. Somewhere in that room, the industry may have realized: if Depeche Mode could fill a stadium, what other “alternative” acts might do the same? When they perform Everything Counts—knowing what I know now—it’s almost bittersweet, heartbreaking.
The 101 kids even talk about this: money and art, selling out, staying true, not becoming a cog in the machine. Dave Gahan mentions it himself: “I was happy stocking shelves”—and the bigger they got, the less happy he felt. I don’t know if young artists wrestle with this today. Art and commerce are so intertwined, social media serving as the industry’s tool to anesthetize us all.
Not by malice, but by the natural gravity of capitalism, the underground was mapped, measured, and monetized. In that sense, DM were pioneers and unwitting participants in its demise. The beginning of the end. The Death Of The Underground.
Somewhere in Long Beach, 2025
Weeks after rewatching 101, I was at my sister’s house for a family gathering. I asked how she felt about missing out on history. She rolled her eyes and laughed—mostly at the absurdity that she had been grounded while the 101 kids, mostly fresh out of high school, roamed unchaperoned across the continent with their heroes.
Later, I asked Mom about it. She didn’t remember. After a pause, she said softly:
“I should have let her go. She’s always been such a good kid.”