Infinite Thought has just concluded a magnificent series of posts about her (or is it his? I think I once knew and have forgotten) recent trip to the US. Some of the most nuanced and non-barrow-pushing writing about the States that I’ve read in a long time.
“What I’ve got they used to call the blues”: and these days, they call it something else, but exactly what is an open question. One of the effects of the economy and understatement of Karen’s performance is that you’re not quite sure of the real extent of the misery the singer is feeling: it could be anything from mild ennui to clinical depression. But it’s not just the biographical fallacy that sways me more to the latter end of the spectrum (unfortunately, every single Carpenters song has to submit to being read as a coded harbinger of fate).
What makes this song one of the greatest ever about depression is the way its easy-listening template allows it to evoke numbness, boredom, anhedonia. An inability to feel is after all one of the main symptoms of depression, which ought to make litotes (rhetorical understatement) one of its master tropes…if it were, music in general would be a lot less lugubrious. Here, though, the sense that what’s being said is standing in for something darker even carries through to the supposedly hopeful middle eight, where, we are told, Karen is comforted by the thought of “the one who loves me”–has any such appeal ever sounded less convincing? It might just be that this is a weak part of the song, but given the sublime beauty of the rest of it I’m prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt here: we are going through the motions on purpose.
In a performance that relies on understatement, small gestures come to the fore: here it’s the slight vibrato on “hanging around”, the plangent harmonica melody, and the very odd, sudden mid-note sforzando on the very last word (”dowwwwwwwwwwwOWWWWWwwwwwwwwn”), an effect I’m unaware of having heard in any other pop song.
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The first PSB single I remember hearing was “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”–obviously something of a watershed because it introduced me to not only the Pet Shop Boys but also Dusty Springfield. (It was a few years later that I became a fully-fledged Dusty fan, but I guess “What Have I…?” planted a landmine that was waiting to be stepped on. A delightful land mine, of course.)
So it must have been somewhat after the fact that I first encountered their debut single. But “West End Girls” has subsequently gained a kind of aura for me that’s never quite been replicated in the rest of the PSBs’ career. It seems to me like the most coolly sophisticated pop song of all time. Part of that is to do with the spoken verses (you can’t quite call it “rapping”). Neil Tennant’s singing voice has never been a favourite of mine; fey, insubstantial male voices are a bit of a stumbling block for me in a way that the female equivalents (obviously) aren’t. But when he just talks in that posh accent with no downwardly-mobile pretensions whatsoever, it’s one of pop’s most refreshing disconnects.
Unlike “Billie Jean” where the lyrics seem to me completely beside the point, I really like the lyrics of “West End Girls”. But I like them in an impressionistic way, again I really have no idea what the song is “about”. East End boys and West End girls, I guess. So: desire across class boundaries? That makes it sound a bit too much like Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” though. Maybe it would be very obvious if I did what I never do and just sat down and read the lyrics properly, but to be honest I’d rather not know. “West End Girls” is just one of those euphonious phrases, like “the storming of the Winter Palace”, that is wonderful to contemplate in its own right.
The production, too, is a miraculous navigation of the murky waters of post-New Pop, managing to sound neither dessicated nor pandering in a gruesome White Soul kind of way. It just exists, geniunely unique and unrepeatable. The Pet Shop Boys released a more or less unrivalled string of superb singles following this, of course, but still, nothing quite as good.
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