Mad About Mad World

Screenshot from the video game Gears of War. The game's trailer has revived interest in the Tears for Fears song Mad World. (IGN.com)

Great pop songs can achieve ubiquity in different ways. Some, like My Girl, Billie Jean or Crazy in Love, are immediate hits, their inherent splendour reinforced (or tested) by constant radio play. Others take a longer, more circuitous route to our memory banks — by dint of a shrewd cover version, soundtracks and the viral nature of the internet.

One such song is Mad World, currently heard in the melancholic trailer for the videogame Gears of War. During the ad, a gunman walks through the smouldering rubble of a decimated city. In the background is Gary Jules’s song, a cross between R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts and Erik Satie’s much-used piano classic, Trois Gymnopédies. Mad World is a haunting piece of music, at once delicate and powerful — so powerful, in fact, that it manages to turn an ad for a blood-spattered third-person shooter into one of the most stirring montages of the year.

Mad World is experiencing a moment — its third, actually. Written by Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears, the song first appeared on the British band’s 1983 album, The Hurting. It became a moderate hit, scaling to No. 3 on the U.K. charts. In 2001, film composer Michael Andrews was toiling on the score to Donnie Darko, a brooding, surreal family drama set in the early ’80s. In the heat of inspiration, he and Jules, a longtime friend, decided to revisit Mad World. Stripping the song of its ’80s trappings — wheezy faux-brass synths, stadium-sized drums — they achieved that rare thing: a cover song that outclasses the original. Not only was it note-perfect for Donnie Darko’s chilling finale, the new version became a worldwide hit. Since the Donnie Darko soundtrack, Mad World has been heard on television’s Smallville, Third Watch, Judging Amy and several episodes of Without a Trace.

Of course, it’s not the first song to enjoy a second life as a radically reconfigured cover. The examples are legion: UB40’s Red Red Wine (first recorded by Neil Diamond), the Black Crowes’ Hard to Handle (Otis Redding), Quiet Riot’s Come on Feel the Noize (Slade), et cetera, et cetera. And if you need an example of the marketing power of movies, just look at what Trainspotting did for Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life. The junkie ode has since been used to sell Cadillacs and Royal Caribbean cruises.

Mad World also demonstrates how web users can help make a song omnipresent — and not just by bigging it up on their blogs. Once again, the broadcasting site YouTube demonstrates its sway. The Gears of War ad has inspired a number of copycat trailers: home-made pastiches for games such as Final Fantasy VII and Halo, Japanese cartoon series Sailor Moon and Naruto, countless personal videos as well as a sobering slide show of our, um, mad world.

Like so many Internet threads, the array of amateur Mad World videos shows how easily an inspired idea — e.g. the Gears of War trailer — can become utterly schlocky. But even the most ham-fisted DIY video has helped, in its own way, to confirm Mad World’s place in the pop music pantheon.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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