[MUSIC] Pet Shop Boys, "Go West"
May. 12th, 2008 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe first track on the Pet Shop Boys' 1993 album Very is "Can You Forgive Her?", a synthpop song written in a sneaky-sounding 6/8 time that is addressed to a young man who--as Tennant and Lowe have it--not only dances to disco and doesn't like rock, but also has some "youthful follies" and dreams of "changing teams." The song does hit a bit close to home, but it's a well-composed song and who am I to knock a chanson bien faite for being painfully true to life?
The last track on Very, the Pet Shop Boys' cover of "Go West", is entirely different. I can only stand to listen to a couple of minutes before I have to skip to another track, or do a quick search for another YouTube video.
My objections all lie outside of the song. The Village People's original version was released in 1979, a celebration of San Francisco's gay scene, an arena for social liberalization and personal freedom that had appeared almost overnight in the decade after Stonewall. A few years later, scientists determined that in a 1978 cohort of gay and bisexual men, 4.5% were infected with HIV, long before the fatal starbursts of the epidemic began to appear. It was absurd that people continents away could be infected with an obscure virus transmitted against the odds by a minor primate species, but it did manage to happen, and here we all are, and there we all were.
This version of "Go West" was born in the AIDS moment. The Pet Shop Boys first performed the song at an AIDS fundraising benefit, and after "Go West" is a hidden extra song that, as noted here, widely taken asw a dedication to a man believed to be Lowe's lover, himself dying of AIDS. Let's not forget that the song's title and chorus can be read not only as an invocation of the joys of west-coast North America, but as a reference to heading into the west.
In the era of HAART, all that wouldn't be especially germane to my life but for the fact that I know quite a few people who have been marked by that almost irrecoverably lethal phase of the epidemic, infected and survivors and bystanders alike. I've finished researching that period in the library: I've got my Randy Shilts and my Ann Silversides and my Edward Hooper and too many others to name here all under my belt. I've just not raised the issue with them, or allowed the issue to be raised by them, at all. Best not to disturb, I think, long-buried pains, or at least best not to be blamed for the disturbances so as to not think about it so as not to bother about it.
I used to think that I remained incurious on this subject because I was polite. Lately, I've lately been thinking it's because I'm a bit of a coward. Whatever's going on, I don't think that I want to associated with the song very much at all. Call that another act of cowardice.
The last track on Very, the Pet Shop Boys' cover of "Go West", is entirely different. I can only stand to listen to a couple of minutes before I have to skip to another track, or do a quick search for another YouTube video.
My objections all lie outside of the song. The Village People's original version was released in 1979, a celebration of San Francisco's gay scene, an arena for social liberalization and personal freedom that had appeared almost overnight in the decade after Stonewall. A few years later, scientists determined that in a 1978 cohort of gay and bisexual men, 4.5% were infected with HIV, long before the fatal starbursts of the epidemic began to appear. It was absurd that people continents away could be infected with an obscure virus transmitted against the odds by a minor primate species, but it did manage to happen, and here we all are, and there we all were.
This version of "Go West" was born in the AIDS moment. The Pet Shop Boys first performed the song at an AIDS fundraising benefit, and after "Go West" is a hidden extra song that, as noted here, widely taken asw a dedication to a man believed to be Lowe's lover, himself dying of AIDS. Let's not forget that the song's title and chorus can be read not only as an invocation of the joys of west-coast North America, but as a reference to heading into the west.
In the era of HAART, all that wouldn't be especially germane to my life but for the fact that I know quite a few people who have been marked by that almost irrecoverably lethal phase of the epidemic, infected and survivors and bystanders alike. I've finished researching that period in the library: I've got my Randy Shilts and my Ann Silversides and my Edward Hooper and too many others to name here all under my belt. I've just not raised the issue with them, or allowed the issue to be raised by them, at all. Best not to disturb, I think, long-buried pains, or at least best not to be blamed for the disturbances so as to not think about it so as not to bother about it.
I used to think that I remained incurious on this subject because I was polite. Lately, I've lately been thinking it's because I'm a bit of a coward. Whatever's going on, I don't think that I want to associated with the song very much at all. Call that another act of cowardice.
