AIDS and Mourning in Three Songs by the Pet Shop Boys

Fred E. Maus

Department of Music

University of Virginia

During the late 80s and early 90s, well-established British and US pop musicians - Madonna, Tori Amos, Lou Reed, James Taylor, among others - recorded individual songs about AIDS.  But only the English synth-pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, among musicians who achieved mainstream success, offered a sustained, multifaceted meditation on the epidemic.  This is not surprising, because their work, more broadly, was a thoughtful, if somewhat inexplicit, consideration of first-world, particularly English, gay urban life; and their period of greatest productivity and visibility, the decade from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, was the period of the most destructive impact of AIDS on that community.

Walter Hughes, in his essay on disco, “Empire of the Beat,” wrote brilliantly about the pervasive awareness of AIDS in the Pet Shop Boys’ songs.  Accepting his general account, my paper focuses more specifically on a group of three songs of mourning: “It Couldn’t Happen Here,” “Being Boring,” and “Dreaming of the Queen.”  These rich, fascinating songs have not received sustained critical discussion, though their standing as classic articulations of mourning is well-established among fans and within gay communities.  Hughes did not focus on these songs; Nabeel Zuberi touches on them, effectively but briefly, in his discussion of the Pet Shop Boys and English identity.  With varying means and emphases, all three songs work to consolidate a collective narrative of hope, during the 1970s, followed by traumatic disappointment.  They are concerned more with the narrative and affective consolidation of a community than with individualized mourning and death. 

In discussing these songs, I articulate and address the following complex issues: the lack of full specificity about AIDS in the lyrics, which leaves the songs semi-closeted, though assured of communicating to their primary audience of people closely affected by the AIDS epidemic; their unusual musical language, harmonically complex and oblique in ways characteristic of classical music; their opulent gorgeousness, unusual in relation to more severe conventions of musical mourning; the links they establish between loss and ambivalent guilt; the specificity of their national and temporal references. 

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