[BRIEF NOTE] "Being Boring," again
Aug. 23rd, 2010 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldJoe. My. God. announced that today is the twentieth anniversary of the Pet Shop Boys song "Being Boring", a fantastic song that was the subject of a [MUSIC] post almost exactly one year ago. The Bruce Weber black-and-white music video is great, but the live Jools Holland performance video below is more than good enough to be embedded.
The Guardian's music blogger, Stephen Emms, recently called "Being Boring" the "perfect pop song".
Joe, for his part, observes that the song's sadly very relevant in the era of AIDS. In fact, "Being Boring" belongs to a sort of thematic trilogy relating to a friend of Neil Tennant's who died of AIDS, the first song "It Couldn't Happen Here" relating to the friend's belief that the HIV/AIDS epidemic wouldn't hit Britain, the final B-side "Your Funny Uncle" relating the funeral. It's the sign of a great work of art that it can also speak beyond whatever circumstances initially inspired it.
The Guardian's music blogger, Stephen Emms, recently called "Being Boring" the "perfect pop song".
In the panoramic lyrical sweep from the 1920s to the 70s and, finally, the 90s, Being Boring really is about everything: innocence and experience, ambition and self-realisation ("I never dreamt that I would get to be/The creature that I always hoped to be"), love and (AIDs-related) loss ("All the people I was kissing/Some are here, some are missing"), friendship, nostalgia, ennui and, of course, defiance ("We had too much time to find for ourselves"). Tennant's plaintive vocal style only adds to the pathos. And it's all infused with the glamour and spirit of writer Zelda Fitzgerald (whose 1922 essay, Eulogy on the Flapper, contained the song's ideological kernel: "She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.")
Greatest single ever, you ask, really? Aren't we dealing with something intangible here? Yes, but if art exists, as the writer Annie Dillard argues, "to make the stone stony", what could be stonier? Being Boring has followed me through my own teenage parties, student days, fumbled relationships and drunken evenings. In the summer it feels nostalgic, rose-tinted; in the winter it's a sun-beam, a cause for celebration. "I remember dancing to this," says one of the hundreds of comments on YouTube, "and I'd get tears in my eyes thinking of all the friends and lovers I've lost, where my life has gone and where it ended up." In short, does another song evoke, so perfectly, the sigh of experience with the hope of living?
Joe, for his part, observes that the song's sadly very relevant in the era of AIDS. In fact, "Being Boring" belongs to a sort of thematic trilogy relating to a friend of Neil Tennant's who died of AIDS, the first song "It Couldn't Happen Here" relating to the friend's belief that the HIV/AIDS epidemic wouldn't hit Britain, the final B-side "Your Funny Uncle" relating the funeral. It's the sign of a great work of art that it can also speak beyond whatever circumstances initially inspired it.
