If you thought that Pet Shop Boys were the type of blokes who could be silenced with old age, you would seem to be forgetting that they’re of the Madonna stock (hear: “Sorry“). Having released their last full-length album, Super, in 2016–the year of our unholy Orange One’s election–one would do well to remember that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have also been suffering their own country’s plight as Brexit negotiations continue to grow more absurd with each passing day. Even so, that doesn’t mean they’ve lost sight of the primary present evil in the world, offering up “Give stupidity a chance” (gone are the days of even bothering to suggest, “Give Peace A Chance” as John and Yoko did) as the opening track to their new EP, pointedly titled Agenda.
And, speaking of pointed, the content of the brief, four-track record essentially almost rivals another freshly released album directed at a different white man altogether, “big dick” Pete Davidson. As we all can tell, however, the Orange One has but a flap of skin down there that no amount of money can remedy, hence his need to belittle women and ruin everyone else’s life. Though Tennant has been quoted as saying the song is about the “poor quality of political leadership in the modern world,” the digs at the Orange One are most overt with the lines, “Forget political correctness/Let’s talk man to man/Chicks are always up for it/You gotta grab whatever you can,” making reference to the “aphorism” no one will ever forget: “grab ’em by the pussy.”
In between, PSB sardonically mocks the Trump brand of “boys'” club leadership with, “We need a leader who knows that money means class/With an eye for a peach-perfect piece of ass/Not a total dumb-cluck/Just one of the guys/Let’s give stupidity a prize.” And so we have, clearly, the hoarded masses (primarily corporations) having made their brittle beds and now lying in them while sleeping with one eye open (the other they sacrificed to saving money on Lasik surgery because the U.S. health care system).
To follow on a similar note regarding the content-with-being-glazed-over modern society is “On social media.” Mocking the faux concern of people more interested in updating their latest banal life event, Tennant sings, “When you care about the issues of the day and check your facts on Wikipedia…” Addressing the trollish nature of people online–their eager willingness to express their repressed rage in ways they never would in real life–Tennant continues, “And sometimes you can fuel the debate by biting the hand that feeds ya/Expressing pure anonymous hate/When you’re on social media.”
With an album cover that ridicules this very phenomenon of how “democracy is losing its way and greed is getting greedier,” a wealthy-looking “influencer” type poses happily with a selfie stick in environs that look tantamount to the riches of Lana Del Rey’s remote beach house in the video for “High By the Beach.” And in these confusing Newspeak times, why not just “console yourself with a selfie or two and post them on social media.” So we have, and will continue to because–why the fuck not? Revolution and chaos is so eighteenth century anyway. We’ve seen it all before, so why not look at something we’re still interested in–the self–instead?
In keeping with the aspersions cast on present-day politics, “What are we going to do about the rich?” is also keeping in line with the cover art of Agenda, as well as the dangers of how easily people are prone to bouts of envy based on the manufactured lifestyles they see on Instagram (those aforementioned “influencers” being twenty-first century Jezebels without even the legitimate temptation of sex). And as the upper class, in a manner almost as offensive as Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, manage to profit off the backs of the little people, Pet Shop Boys sustain their scorn (delivered in distinctively sarcastic British fashion) by taunting, “They say democracy is simply very bad for business/While deploring student protests in the middle of Hong Kong/They insist that people have to work on zero contracts everywhere/So profit margins grow and shares are very strong/But one group that they never take to task/And one question that they never seem to ask is…what are we gonna do about the rich?” And yes, maybe it’s a question we should be asking ourselves as often as said rich ask, “What are we going to do about the poor?” (a.k.a. “are those gas chambers in Auschwitz still operable?”).
Ending on a gentler, softer note with “The forgotten child,” PSB gives us a tender track about how even children, once so effortlessly immune to the vagaries of political repression, have fallen prey to, well, migrant detention centers. To paint this allegorical portrait also representing democracy itself, Tennant laments, “She was our reason, our religion, our cause/Our best excuse for emergency laws/Invoked so often to explain and subdue/The forgotten child from whom we all grew.” But now, the leadership of “the future” has even managed to quell the most theoretically hopeful of all humans: the young.
With prejudice and subjugation at more insidious levels than ever, the State has effectively driven her away, sending her running for the hills. Or, as Tennant explains, “Child of our nation, our icon, our future/Gone from our records/I’m no computer/The times are brutal, borders are crossed/I think she took flight, and now we’re all lost.” Well, there’s certainly no arguing on that account. And though, even when looking back at their 1986 debut, Please, still addressing the long-standing PSB motifs of dark excess and decay (it was the 80s, after all), there is not quite the same playfulness in the contents of Agenda, the only agenda of the record being to depict, with barbed scathingness, just how irreversibly we’ve gone down the rabbit hole of idiocracy. And it’s just not as easy to dance away the sadness to as it might have been in ’86.
