Singing in tongues

Pet Shop Boys' Bilingual redeems their not-so-silly love songs

by Charles Taylor

Let's be superficial and pity the poor philosophers. Let's blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school-children. Let's savor the delight of the moment. Come and kiss me, darling, before your body rots, and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets.

-- Noel Coward, Private Lives

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. And what's wrong with that? Since their first hit, 1986's "West End Girls," Pet Shop Boys have been making some of the lushest, most swooning romantic dance pop on the planet. At the risk of sounding like one of the Americans whom Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe complained of in an interview with Jon Savage that appeared in the booklet of their B-sides collection Alternative ("What really gets to me is the way they talk about their music as if there were some intellectual content, or the lyrics are great, or something, whereas English music is disparaged for being simple"), I'd claim that Lowe and bandmate Neil Tennant, whose new Bilingual (Atlantic) has just come out, have been doing some of the wittiest, smartest, increasingly most moving work in any pop genre.

For 10 years now, the two have been illustrating what another gay British aesthete, Noel Coward, called "the potency of cheap music," only minus the condescension that description implies. "In pop, when you're being serious, you're expected to announce, `Hello, I'm now being serious,' " Tennant says in the current issue of Interview. "I believe that music can have a major disco rhythm in the background with swishing strings and all that, and you can still listen to it quite seriously." As pop fans, Pet Shop Boys are in love with the emotional shamelessness of pop music. As shrewd observers keyed into the way pop works as both business and music (Tennant was a writer for the Brit fan mag Smash Hits), they know better than to trust it. The tension in their music comes from the simultaneous desire to surrender to pop and to be on guard against it.

If American audiences think about Pet Shop Boys at all, it's probably as one of the dozens of synth-and-hair Brit bands who hit fast and evaporated even faster in the mid '80s. There's a tendency to identify the duo by "West End Girls," which, with its blurry, rainy-day rhythm, pegged them as distant and, with its Edmund Wilson reference ("from Lake Geneva to the Finland station"), as -- that dreaded word -- clever. They were clever, especially in the ironic follow-up, "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" (the title told the tale), and on their cover of "Always on My Mind" (top of the pops in the UK at Christmas 1987), which revealed the loutish selfishness Elvis Presley's version and Willie Nelson's had obscured.

But there was a subtle, tricky point being made as well. The world in which these songs were produced, Thatcher's Britain, had succeeded in reducing everything to a commodity. People and services were valued, or discarded, according to the gain they brought. ("There is no society," Thatcher said.) In that context, the disposability of pop music, one of the things Tennant and Lowe loved it for, became suspect, and the emotions the music gave fleeting voice to -- love, release, heartache -- became manufactured to capture a chunk of the marketplace, candidates for the junk heap alongside such Thatcher casualties as decency, compassion, and empathy. When Tennant sang, "I love you/You pay my rent," or "You always wanted a lover/I only wanted a job," he was, in his understated way (yet as ruthlessly as the punks had), revealing the basic emotional, moral, and political transactions of British society.

That deadpan approach meant all the emotion in the music was implicit. Feeling came to the fore on 1990's Behavior, a crisp, perfect autumn day of an album, in numbers like "To Face the Truth" and "Jealousy." Behavior was to Pet Shop Boys what Siren (on which Bryan Ferry revealed the "average man" behind his lounge-lizard persona) was to Roxy Music, a totting up of what, behind the irony, was held most dear.

"The years perfecting a stance of measured cool fade into insignificance" Neil Tennant sings at one point on Bilingual, an album of the most openly emotional music Pet Shop Boys have produced so far. The title, they claim, has to do with their love of Latin music, an influence that's felt most strongly on the tracks "Discotecca," "Bilingual," "Se a vida é" (with its wonderful sunny burst of horns), and "To Step Aside." There's another possibility, though, one belied by Tennant's opening claim, "I don't speak the language." Putting the ironic next to the heartfelt, Bilingual is the fullest expression yet of Pet Shop Boys' emotional vocabulary, containing some of their most ruminative songs and some of their most purely joyous. And something new has been added to the mix: the first, faint chill of age blowing through the darker songs, stirring up regrets and questions of how to face the future. The album's epigraph could be the poet Frank O'Hara's line, "Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous . . . but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth."

The great question that sooner or later faces all of pop music's truest romantics is how to translate the adolescent romanticism of pop into adulthood, or how to reconcile idealism with experience. That passage is perhaps made easier by the way pop, unlike rock, chooses the transcendence of romance over the magnesium flare of passion. I think that Tennant and Lowe realize that. They also realize that pop grows out of acknowledged everyday banalities, annoyances, and routines, and that its idealized sound -- and especially the swirling sound of dance music -- is meant to color those everyday details that occur in one memorable pop song after another: "When I get home to you/I know the things that you do/Will make me feel all right"; "Each morning I wake up/Before I put on my make-up/I say a little prayer for you"; "These are the days when you wish your bed was already made."

The lyrics of Bilingual offer deft sketches of urban life: "Go to work and take your calls/Hang the fruits of your labor on the walls," from "Red Letter Day"; "Such a cold winter/With scenes as slow as Pinter/Synchronize your watches/There's still time to kill," from "Up Against It"; "I'm doing what I do/To see me through/I'm going out/And carrying on as normal," from "Discotecca." They give way to images of romance, or at least its possibility, as a refuge from urban anonymity ("Like Christmas morning when you're a kid/Admit you love me and you always did," from "Red Letter Day"). In "Before," the album's gorgeous first single, where Tennant's high, ethereal vocal mixes with the whipped frosting sound of the synthesizers, he's as assured that romance is going to come his way as Buddy Holly ever was. But there's something very adult about the way he sings, "You find your love/Before it comes knocking at your door/Before you know for sure/This is what you were waiting for." The gift of those lines is the revelation that sometimes longed-for romantic deliverance waits among the very stuff you hope to be delivered from.

It's on the love songs that Tennant's self-described "thin little voice" really shines. I have no idea why his peculiarly English manner of speak-singing is so affecting. Perhaps because, without ever slighting his sophistication, it suggests the trembling adolescent inside the man. In its own way, Tennant's not-very-wide range has the brash confidence that the rudimentary guitar playing of the first punks did (especially when you consider what Tennant's voice would sound like against the polish of these songs if he couldn't pull off the vocals).

There's another thing, though, that I think makes these songs work. Familiar forms can become very fresh when people who have been excluded from them for years are suddenly given the chance to work in them. Now that it's possible to sing openly gay love songs, Tennant and Lowe go at their romantic numbers hoping to be worthy of the lineage of pop love songs. It's as if their biggest wish were to write something as good as "He's So Fine." Songs like Behavior's "Nervously," or this album's "It Always Comes As a Surprise" and "Se a vida é," have that kind of ebullient, heartbreaking simplicity. I don't want to reduce Pet Shop Boys to their sexual orientation. Their sophistication and sensibility is what makes these songs work. But the facts of artists' lives can bring their work an added dimension, and there's something undeniably moving and thrilling about hearing a gay man able to sing a line as simple as "You smile and I am rubbing my eyes/At a dream come true" with the joy that Tennant does here.

Such romance is not always uncomplicated. Ever since Behavior's "Being Boring," through Very's devastating cover version of the Village People's "Go West" and up to numbers on Bilingual like "The Survivors," with its line "Our heads bowed/At memorials/For other faces in the crowd," Pet Shop Boys have been pop's most articulate chroniclers of AIDS. Trying to capture what it means to be young and have the ongoing death of your contemporaries a common occurrence, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have approached the eloquence of the accounts of the young British who, returning to Oxford and Cambridge after WWI, encountered ghost towns.

The steady depletion of those familiar faces in the crowd is the subtext of Bilingual; it's the knowledge that the party can end at any moment. At the album's start, in "Discotecca," with Tennant asking "Hay una discotecca por aquí?", the party feels like a habit grown weary with age and repetition, more a refuge than a celebration. On the last track, "Saturday Night Forever," Tennant says, "Don't tell me, I know/That it's not gonna last," and that simple acknowledgment, in the midst of as pure a disco number as any performer has done since the '70s, feels like a renewed commitment to the promises of pop. On Bilingual, Pet Shop Boys say that in the face of age and death and encroaching regret, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.