WRITING ABOUT MUSIC IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Writing Project #1: Track-by-Track Annotated Playlist (70 points)
THE PET SHOP BOYS
An amazing electronic pop group composed of the genius of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, they have sold more than 100 million records worldwide. Their first five albums (“Please,” “Actually,” “Introspective,” “Behaviour,” and “Very”), listed as the most successful duo in UK. Their albums are named with one word, have collaborated with music artists including David Bowie, Elton John and Robbie Williams.
PLAYLIST:
- “West End Girls”, In a review of the album Please, Stephen Thomas Erlewine from Allmusiccalled the song “hypnotic”. The song was released in 1984 from the album “West End Girls”, the song’s lyrics were inspired T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, about class and inner city pressure, won best single at the Brit Awards. This song was reworked first produced in 1983 by Bobby Orlando who played most of the instruments, but then in 1984 it was released becoming a club hit in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ended their negotiations with Orlando in 1985 and signed with EMI with their new manager Tom Watkins.
link to hear song:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3j2NYZ8FKs&list=RDp3j2NYZ8FKs&start_radio=1&t=25
2. “Its a Sin”, Lead song from the second album Actually, singer Neil Tennant said “Having been brought up as a Catholic you thought everything was a sin”.
Ten of the most blasphemous pop songs, caused a lot of controversy based on his real-life experiences, and first songs to critique religion, writing this song was a way to rebel against Catholicism and criticizing the Church. The song was released in 1987 which reached number one on the UK singles chart for three weeks.
link to hear song:
3. “Opportunities (lets make lots of money) “, The lyric outline in Tennant’s words, “two losers”.
Was released in 1985. Neil Tennant commented to Mojo magazine August 2013: “It’s a simple message isn’t it? ‘I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money.” The song was influenced on Thatcherism which constitutes the conviction, economic, social and political style of the British Conservative Party by politician Margaret Thatcher, who was leader of her party from 1975 to 1990. And written from the perspective of a man who describes himself as being cerebral and literate, the main source of inspiration according to Tennant was the relationship between Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, so there’s also a fair amount of homoeroticism in there. Neil Tennant’s lyrics were written as a satire of Thatcherism and its embodiment in conspicuous consumption in the United Kingdom during the 1980s. The Pet Shop singer penned them after keyboardist Chris Lowe, asked him to make up a lyric based around the line “Let’s make lots of money”. They’d written the Thatcherite anthem but very difficult to think that there was a period before money culture, that was the changing moment. It was that period where suddenly one’s sensitive left-wing soul was shocked by everything being about money. Now the new generations have grown with this influence knowing nothing else but to spend and live around materialism.
link to hear song:
4. “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”, Allee Willis, who wrote this song with the Pet Shop Boys, told us what it’s about: “Someone who’s in this relationship that they know they shouldn’t be in”.
Was released in 1987, featured singer Dusty Springfield, it peaked at number 2 in the UK and also at number 2 on the Billboard and becoming the fourth top ten hit for Pet Shop Boys as well as the biggest hit of Springfield’s career in the US.
link to hear song:
5. “Domino Dancing”, Rolling Stone magazine calls the video “probably the most homoerotic pop video ever made.”
The video exemplified the mainstream exploitation of gay sex in the 80’s, most evident in Calvin Klein ads and feature films like Top Gun, Tennant remembers, “It entered the charts at number nine and I thought, ‘that’s that, then – it’s all over’. I knew then that our imperial phase of number one hits was over.” Was released in 1988 as the lead single from their third studio album Introspective. It reached number seven on the UK Singles chart and topped the charts in Finland, Poland and Spain. The song influenced by latin pop, But the most important thing about “Domino Dancing” is its video, which depicts a love triangle between two young men and one girl.
“Unfortunately, Domino Dancing was every bit as dishonest, titillating the straight world with images it could never acknowledge, then doubling the repression by keeping openly gay expression closeted.”
— Jim Farber, Rolling Stone
link to hear song:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik2YF05iX2w&list=RDp3j2NYZ8FKs&index=2
6. “Left To My Own Devices”, The b-side was “the sound of the atom splitting”, was released in 1988 as the second single from their third studio album, Introspective. It was also the first track of the album, it is their 9th best-selling hit. It became the first track that Pet Shop Boys recorded with an orchestra, arranged by Richard Niles. Since its release, it has become a staple of Pet Shop Boys live performances.
Neil Tennant explains the meaning of the track: “This person goes through life always doing what he wanted to do. I liked the idea of writing a really up pop song about being left alone. This song is a day in the life of someone, so it starts off with getting out of bed and being on the phone and drinking tea and all the rest of it, and it ends up with coming home. By this time I was making the words very exaggerated and camp, though writing a book and going on stage were both things I had wanted to do when I was young.”
link to hear song:
7. “Always On My Mind”, In 1987, the Pet Shop Boys performed a synthpop version of “Always on My Mind” on Love Me Tender, a television special on the ITV network in the UK. Commemorating the tenth anniversary of Presley’s death, the program featured various popular acts of the time performing cover versions of his hits. The Pet Shop Boys’ performance was so well-received that the duo decided to record the song and release it as a single. In November 2004, The Daily Telegraph newspaper placed the version at number two in a list of the fifty greatest cover versions of all time. In October 2014, a public poll compiled by the BBC saw the song voted the all-time best cover version. In the video for Pet Shop Boys’ version of “Always on My Mind”, Tennant and Lowe are seated in the front of a taxi cab, when an eccentric passenger gets in, played by notable British actor Joss Ackland. At the end of the song, he gets out of the car, which drives away.”
“Was released by Pet Shop Boys as a non-album single in late 1987, after being featured in the ITV “Love Me Tender” TV program commemorating the 10th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.”
link to hear song:
8. “Love Comes Quickly”, The second single from their 1986 album Please, written by Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe along with their producer Stephen Hague, this song is about how there is no escaping falling in love: “Love comes quickly whatever you do you can’t stop
falling.”
According to Neil, the meaning of the lyrics are simple:
“The whole song was about how you can suddenly fall in love with someone and you can’t help it. When you fall in love with someone, it’s totally disruptive. You’re having a comfortable life, and suddenly everything’s just turned upside down. All your priorities change. But the song is also saying that, after it’s happened, you suddenly realize you hadn’t really been alive at all.”
link to hear song:
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