Humanizing The Vacuum

An I Love Music poll, concluded today, polled the best Pet Shop Boys songs. Delighted that the results were as unpredictable as mine (the staggering quality of their B-sides is, as their compilation title quietly noted, an alternative history of the band), I posted mine here, complete with blurbs. I haven’t written about everything.

1.Why Don’t We Live Together (Please)

Its genius revealed itself to me a year short of my thirtieth birthday — the age at which Tennant-Lowe wrote it. What sounds like precosity at twenty-nine sounds like life at thirty-six: compromise, making do, accepting what can’t be changed. The rhythm lets us know these are not bad things. The euphoric racket of the last forty seconds is the most ironical gesture of their career.

2. Paninaro (B-side of “Suburbia”)

Armani Armani A-ah-ah-Armani. Another list song. This one has a soccer chant, big drums, and an octave-skipping synth line. If you don’t dance to this, you’re Neil Tennant.

3. Young Offender (Very)

This still applies.

4. What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Actually)

5. Two Divided by Zero (Please)

What cruising (down) your city’s main drag sounds like. The sleaziness is so wanton it’s endearing, like a nerd trying to impress the cool kids with how well he can hold his liquor. Sometimes I think this is the only Pet Shop Boys song you need own, so well does it encapsulate their approach.

6. Being Boring (Behaviour)

7. You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk (Nightlife)

The Merle Haggard of “Footlights” and “How Did You Find Me Here” could have covered this: drop the g’s and it’s Nashville.

8. The End of the World (Behaviour)

This deep Behaviour track epitomized “sophistication” as a high school junior: regarding high school coupledom with the detachment of an older man who understands its silliness but missed out on all of it at the time. For reasons unsaid. The sequencer line is among their deepest. Also note: Tennant’s electric guitar picking.

9. I Get Excited (You Get Excited Too) (B-side of “Heart”)

Truth in advertising!

10. Suburbia

11. Shopping

As responsible as “Opportunities” for solidifying the Pet’s reputation as what AllMusic calls with all sincerity “post-modern ironists,” it indicts and it celebrates. Imagine the loser in “Two Divided By Zero” as a wealthy arriviste.

12. Always On My Mind (single)

What struck me most about Willie Nelson’s version, which I heard years after the PSB’s, was its guilelessness, humility. Nelson’s courtly delivery evoked the parable of the prodigal son — a rake who’d wandered the word from sin to sin and returned chastened, ready for the rest of his life. I hear little humility in Tennant and Lowe’s version; the hi-NRG beats and orchestral synths thrust Tennant’s thoughtlessness in listeners’ faces. It’s the character in “It’s a Sin” months later, having decided that decadence was awesome. But he wants it all: he wants his partner to forgive him when he (inevitably) wanders off the reservation again. Tennant’s vocal here is extraordinary considering that anyone else would have gotten swamped by the arrangement. First he’s going nyah-nyah-nyah in his partner’s ear by switching from ascending to descending flat notes on the verses (“Maybe I-I-I-I didn’t treat y-o-u-u-u/Quite as G-O-O-D as I sh-ou-ou-ould…), then he rises to the challenge of those celestial synths on the chorus. He’s going to keep trying to become worthy of the attention lavished on him.

13. Se a Vida E (Bilingual)

14. Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) (Please)

Of course I prefer this to “West End Girls.”

15. Rent (Actually)

Greil Marcus’ question remains: did Tennant-Lowe write a melody for those lyrics or lyrics for that melody?

16. This Must Be The Place I Waited Years to Leave (Behaviour)

The marvel of Behaviour is how Tennant hovers in and out of his characters’ dramas. The intermingling of elements here — the orchestral synths, Johnny Marr’s echoing guitar, the nervous percussive loop, Tennant’s gingerly vocal — produces a narrative rich in suggestion.

17. I’m Not Scared (Introspective or Eighth Wonder)

Pick which one you prefer: Eighth Wonder’s perky version, voiced by a kittenish Patsy Kensit, singing the French parts like a James Bond diva; or the epic one on the Boys’ own Introspective. Tennant, crooning over the rising and falling sequencer line, sounds plenty scared.

18. A Man Could Get Arrested (B-side of “West End Girls”)

I mentioned upthread that Alternative presented, well, an alternative history of the Boys’ career. The seven-inch version, recorded with a full band (“real bass and drums,” avers Chris Lowe), is as close as they got to sounding like 1985, but with a lyric so bizarre and a chord change so unexpected that the Boys could only have triumphed as a Scritti Politti-esque fluke.

19. Can You Forgive Her? (Very)

The most devastating indictment of the closet, and it needed a horn section and the most ebullient arrangement of the Boys’ career to register.

20. Do I Have To?

Immersive romantic melancholy, in which Tennant turns the title question into a mantra.

Thanks to Scott Woods for unearthing this conversation in which Neil Tennant and former colleagues discuss the former’s tenure as Smash Hits editor in the early eighties. Subjects discussed: beards as music, Bananarama, shopping, and one Chris Lowe visiting Tennant’s desk to dance beside the turntable.

To commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of a still unheralded debut, John Freeman gives Pet Shop Boys’ Please another listen. My own take from 2005. Before the video for “Domino Dancing,” before the imperial phase commemorated by the singles from Actually, I want to know how many fans who bought Please in 1986 knew the Boys were not Boys Don’t Cry or Sly Fox, both of whom made a fabulous hit but remain one hit wonders in America; whether these record buyers knew the Boys were Something Special.

Ned reminded me of an essay by Neil Tennant published in Details in the summer of ’92. Reading it at the time, I couldn’t finish it, repulsed by self-recognition. Now it’s a manifesto.

If not for hatred, I wouldn’t be doing what I do now. I became a pop star because I hated football at school. I hated that whole attitude of being one of the crowd. Becoming a pop star was my revenge. Revenge for being bad at football. For not being athletic. For being mocked.

That’s the thing about negative energy, about hatred. It can be positive. It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about. Sometimes you can only define yourself by what you hate. Hatred becomes an inspiration; it makes you think, “What I’m doing now I totally believe in, and I don’t care what other people say.” Guided by hatred, you don’t have to follow the herd.

I hate the way people all like the same things at the same time. I’ve never understood it. When people are told about Coke – “It’s the real thing” – they should think, “No, it’s a hideous soft drink that is fantastically unhealthy to drink, full of sugar that turns into glucose that turns into fat.” They should look around America and think, “God, there are so many fat people here! Why? Because they all eat hamburgers and drink cola.” And they should hate the people who represent that. They should hate Michael Jackson for trying to foist Pepsi onto them, to make them fat victims of their own society. They should hate more. Hate Pepsi, hate Coca-Cola, hate Michael Jackson. Hate George Bush. And think about the alternatives. That’s another good thing about hatred. It makes you think about the alternatives.

Of course, these days it’s more fashionable to be positive. I hate positivity. The problem with positivity is that it’s an attitude that’s decidedly about lying back, getting screwed, and accepting it. Happily. It’s totally apolitical. It’s very, very personal and one-on-one. It’s not about changing society, it’s about caring about yourself. In fact, it’s totally about ignoring one’s economic role in society, and so it works in favor of the system. Just look at work years of personal consciousness theories have given us: those icons of the status quo, George Bush and John Major.

Positivity is fundamentally middle-class. It’s about having the time, the space and the money to sort out where your head is at. Therapy is just another side of positivity. It’s a leisure activity, a luxury for people who don’t have any real cares. It’s new age selfishness, the new way of saying that charity begins at home.

And positivity makes the world stay the same. Hatred is the force that moves society along, for better or for worse. People aren’t driven by saying, “Oh wow, I’m at peace with myself.” They’re driven by their hatred of injustice, hatred of unfairness, of how power is used.

That’s as true for pop music as it is for politics. I always feel the reason so much music comes out of Britain is because there’s so much hatred. You see or hear something and grow envious. Whereas if your positive reaction is, “Wow, that’s great,” you just sit back and think how great it is and you don’t do anything. You relax.

Luckily, I’ve never been a very relaxed person. When I look at pop music, I immediately hate things. I look at singers who say they are taking two years off to work for charity when, in fact, they’ll spend two years working on their album, and I hate them. Right now I really hate performers who make a big deal out of playing benefits and donating the proceeds from the sales of their records to charities. They could give plenty of money to charities and not tell anyone, but instead, they cash in on the fact. That’s not charity, it’s marketing. It’s about selling albums under the guise of a moral imperative. They say they’re trying to raise consciousness, as if being a celebrity gives them power and endows them with the answers to the world’s problems. But really they just want to be seen as heroes. I think it’s breathtakingly cynical and I hate it.

Another thing I hate, and another inspiration for what the Pet Shop Boys do, is the way people misunderstand pop culture. It annoys me that after more than twenty-five years, Top of the Pops, Britain’s most important pop-music TV program, changed the rules so that you have to sing live. Why? Because the people in control are the kind of conservatives who think that in the ‘60s, everything was much more talented than they are now. It’s all about Rolling Stone rock culture, which is essentially a fear of the new. Rolling Stone’s idea of a musician is Jerry Garcia, from the 60s. Look at all the ‘new’ artists – Curtis Stigers, Michael Bolton, Lenny Kravitz – all of them living in the past. I think you have to live in the future. Or at least in the present.

The Pet Shop Boys have always hated most of the prevailing attitudes and tried to do the opposite. Our hatred of what other people do has always helped us redefine our actions. To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing. When people hear Chris and me talking, they’re sometimes shocked by how negative we are. We’re constantly critical of everything, including ourselves. But I come from a generation that liked its artists to say what was wrong with our lives. I retain the old-fashioned belief that pop music is meant to be a challenge to society as well as an affirmation of it. And so I consider it my duty to hate things.

Find the issue, by the way: the best features magazine of the early nineties.

Another superb piece by Tom at FreakyTrigger on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always On My Mind,” the Christmas Number One of 1987 in England, where these things matter. What struck me most about Willie Nelson’s version, which I heard years after the PSB’s, was its guilelessness, humility. Nelson’s courtly delivery evoked the parable of the prodigal son — a rake who’d wandered the word from sin to sin and returned chastened, ready for the rest of his life. I hear little humility in Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s version; the hi-NRG beats and orchestral synths thrust Tennant’s thoughtlessness in listeners’ faces. It’s the character in “It’s a Sin” months later, having decided that decadence was awesome.  But he wants it all: he wants his partner to forgive him when he (inevitably) wanders off the reservation again. Tennant’s vocal here is extraordinary considering that anyone else would have gotten swamped by the arrangement. First he’s going nyah-nyah-nyah in his partner’s ear by switching from ascending to descending flat notes on the verses (“Maybe I-I-I-I didn’t treat y-o-u-u-u/Quite as G-O-O-D as I sh-ou-ou-ould…), then he rises to the challenge of those celestial synths on the chorus. He’s going to keep trying to become worthy of the attention lavished on him. In the comments section of Tom’s post, “punctum” nails perhaps Tennant’s greatest moment, which takes place as the song fades: “Tennant, strolling out of sight at the far end of the horizon, turning back briefly and saying, `Maybe I didn’t love you.’”

I’ve always taken this song for granted because it’s so perfect, as near an approximation of what makes (made?) the Pet Shop Boys special. Also, “Always On My Mind” encapsulates what makes homosexual love songs singular and, to others, exotic; you just don’t hear this tension between distance and immersion in heterosexual ones. What a lovable rogue Tennant plays here. It’s clear from his vocal why the relationship persists: caddishness as wit. “Always On My Mind” makes a fitting elegy for the end of the Pet Shop Boys’ American chart glory; at Number Four, this almost matched the chart peak of Nelson’s version.