Tear Me Down

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“Tear Me Down”
Song by John Cameron Mitchell
Album Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Album
Released 1999
Genre Rock
Cast recording
Length 3:48
Label Atlantic
Writer Stephen Trask
Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Album track listing
“Tear Me Down”
(1)		 "The Origin of Love"
(2)


Tear Me Down is a song from the off-Broadway musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and subsequent film. It was composed by Stephen Trask, and performed by the characters Hedwig (John Cameron Mitchell) and Yitzhak (Miriam Shor). It is the show's opening number. It contains a spoken section alluding to the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 12, 1961 and its fall on November 9, 1989.

[edit] Meaning

Tear Me Down introduces Hedwig as a person who has been, just like her home town of Berlin, "split in two". Most obviously she is part-male and part-female, but as the song progresses, we see that she is also a cross between conqueror and victim ("Enemies and adversaries, they try and tear me down"); spirituality and repugnance ("I rose ... like Lazarus" and "decorate me with blood, graffiti and spit"); accessibilty and imprisonment ("Ain't much of a difference between a bridge and a wall").

Notably, Hedwig is compared to the divide between Communist East Germany and democratic West Germany. Her personal crisis stems from the disparity between these two states and her inability to reconcile them, much as she cannot reconcile her new body ("I rose from off the doctor's slab").

[edit] References

  • Like Lazarus from the pit - Lazarus is a Bible figure who was raised from the dead by Jesus.

[edit] Other versions

  • The song was covered by the rock artist Meat Loaf on his 2003 album Couldn't Have Said It Better, adapting some of the lyrics (notably the spoken section about the Berlin Wall) so that the song is instead about Texas and Meat Loaf's own life. (Trask, who composed the music for Hedwig, was much influenced by Meat Loaf's albums when he was growing up. A deleted scene on the Hedwig DVD acknowledges the debt in a roundabout way, as we overhear Hedwig's manager Phyllis Stein (Andrea Martin) arguing about the band's sound on the phone: "MEAT LOAF..?! Bowie!")
  • In the same year, the band Spoon covered the song, with Stephen Colbert reciting the spoken part originally performed by Miriam Shor, for a charity tribute album called Wig in a Box, released by Off Records.