As an eighties kid, synth pop has been pumping in my blood ever since that first day I turned on my MTV. There’s some debate as to who’s considered a synth pop band and who isn’t. For this September Music Twitter challenge – #SynthPopSeptember – I’m focusing more on what’s considered synth pop, not who. The songs I’m featuring on Mental Jukebox this month aren’t solely composed of synthesizers. There may be drums, bass, and dare I say, electric guitars. But each of these songs were picked because the synthesizer is core to its being.
When done right, the art of engineering paradoxical elements in a song can lead to something incredible. We’ve seen it occur from the post-punk days of Joy Division when Ian Curtis’ baritone vocals crawled underneath Peter Hook’s unusually high bass lines. Or several years later when The Smiths paired Marr’s jangly guitar riffs with Morrissey’s morbid commentary of misery. It happened again in 1990 with Pet Shop Boys’ fan favorite, “Being Boring”.
“Being Boring” is one of my favorite songs from the Pet Shop Boys catalog because of its paradoxical elements, fusing a majestic synthscape with Tenant’s mundane memoir of growing up. The track saw less commercial success than some of their bigger singles in the US, but it was laden with some of Lowe’s most pristine synth riffs and Tenant’s finest lyrics. The song is about a friend of Tenant’s who died of AIDS. It’s about the reflection and change in perspective we may have in hindsight. I consider Please, Actually, Introspective and Behaviour to be one of the finest synth pop album runs in history – and “Being Boring” is arguably their best song.
“We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends". And we were never holding back or worried that time would come to an end.”