Very. A blog about Pet Shop Boys.

Is there a more singable chorus in the Pet Shop Boys catalogue than that of “Suburbia”? My vote is a firm “No.” It’s the sort of melody that gets stuck in your head so that you’re stuck in the self-check registers at the grocery, murmuring “Let’s take a ride and run with the dogs tonight…”

It’s probably the earliest Pet Shop Boys I remember being stunned by - it’s pop and singable to be sure, but it’s an incredibly busy song as well. In addition to the drums (of which there’s two distinct percussion lines), bass line, piano line, synthesizers, and vocal, there’s a plethora of samples layered on top - barking dogs, machine guns, crashing cars, klaxons blaring. It’s a big-sounding record, the sort of thing that says “There may be only two of us, but we’re quite good at making a racket on our own.”

The single, released in September 1986, is a completely re-recorded version of the more-sedate track that appears on Please. “It’s a hard lyric, soft tune. That was our idea - to write disco music with un-disco lyrics,” states Tennant in the liner notes for the re-released version of the album. Inspired by Penelope Spheeris’s film of the same name, the lyrics to “Suburbia” cover a common English fictional trope: the idea that society in the burbs is actually more perverse than the city people are trying to escape. The riot taking place in the song starts from sheer boredom more than anything else, and the combination of dark lyrics and a happy melody underscores the simultaneous euphoria and despair that defined Thatcher’s England.

This idea of “disco music with un-disco lyrics” is one of those things that continues attracts me to the music of Pet Shop Boys. In America, I’m sure they’ll be forever regarded as “camp¹,” but that’s not surprising - as I discussed in my overview of “Opportunities,” the Stateside pop audience doesn’t quite get it when an artist does something that requires any thought, and the collision of nihilism and dancebeats was probably more confusing than interesting to them. Evidence of this is probably in the numbers: while the song hit #8 on the UK pop charts, it only reached 70th on the Billboard Top 100th and 46 on the Dance chart.

Favorite Versions:
“Suburbia (The Full Horror)” is available on Disco and I love all nine minutes of it. It sounds more like a Frankie-era Trevor Horn production than Julian Mendelsohn, with a spoken word bit, a ton of extra dog sounds, a few extra car crashes, and about a dozen builds. The 7″ version featured here is basically that version cut down for radio play. Ahh, pop excess.

¹Dan Hopper from the ordinarily-quite-entertaining BestWeekEver.tv blog recently described Discography as a bad album he liked. This ignores two facts: the first being that it’s not at all bad, especially compared to his other selections, and that it’s not an album, but a compilation. For some reason, the latter bothers me more than the former.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Song Commentary.