[MUSIC] Pet Shop Boys, "Being Boring"
Aug. 13th, 2009 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonald"Being Boring", the second single off of the Pet Shop Boys 1990 album Behaviour has inspired a fanatical fan base. It's the only song that I know of which has an extensive 10 Years of Being Boring fan site for instance. The right kind of minor European hit can be vital nearly twenty years after its first release.
A quiet song, "Being Boring" is drenched in a quiet, somewhat sad, nostalgia. The Rossetti translation of Villon's famous line, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?", work perfectly.
My teenage years were never spent being boring, but were instead spent depressed and afraid. Still, 29 is the new 19 (right?), and my life has progressed to the point where I can really understand the sense of happy nostalgia re: the joys of the past, regarding the sort of energy and drive that makes my life worthwhile." [I]f youre not careful/You'll have nothing left and nothing to care for"? Please.
Tennant and Lowe thinks this will all come to the end, as adulthood approaches and things start to fade. "Being Boring", as it turns out, is the middle song in a trilogy relating to a friend of Neil Tennant's who died of AIDS, the first song "It Couldn't Happen Here" relating to his belief that the HIV/AIDS epidemic wouldn't hit Britain, the final B-side "Your Funny Uncle" recounting the funeral.
Still, "I never dreamt that I would get to be/The creature that I always meant to be" may be the most hopeful couplet I've ever heard. Memento mori, sure, but before that we all live. We all surely have to walk through at least one door!
A quiet song, "Being Boring" is drenched in a quiet, somewhat sad, nostalgia. The Rossetti translation of Villon's famous line, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?", work perfectly.
I came across a cache of old photos
And invitations to teenage parties
Dress in white one said, with quotations
From someone's wife, a famous writer
In the nineteen-twenties
When you're young you find inspiration
In anyone who's ever gone
And opened up a closing door
She said: we were never feeling bored
My teenage years were never spent being boring, but were instead spent depressed and afraid. Still, 29 is the new 19 (right?), and my life has progressed to the point where I can really understand the sense of happy nostalgia re: the joys of the past, regarding the sort of energy and drive that makes my life worthwhile." [I]f youre not careful/You'll have nothing left and nothing to care for"? Please.
Tennant and Lowe thinks this will all come to the end, as adulthood approaches and things start to fade. "Being Boring", as it turns out, is the middle song in a trilogy relating to a friend of Neil Tennant's who died of AIDS, the first song "It Couldn't Happen Here" relating to his belief that the HIV/AIDS epidemic wouldn't hit Britain, the final B-side "Your Funny Uncle" recounting the funeral.
Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
Youd be sitting somewhere here with me
Still, "I never dreamt that I would get to be/The creature that I always meant to be" may be the most hopeful couplet I've ever heard. Memento mori, sure, but before that we all live. We all surely have to walk through at least one door!
