The Irony and the Ecstasy: The Queer Aging of Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem in Electronic Dance Music
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 11(1): 30–52
ISSN 1947-5403 ©2019 Dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net
http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.03
The Irony and the Ecstasy:
The Queer Aging of Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem in Electronic Dance Music
Larissa Wodtke
University of Winnipeg (Canada)
Abstract
The English duo Pet Shop Boys and American group LCD Soundsystem are notable
for their representation as artists who entered and succeeded in the predominately
youthful market of popular music and the hedonistic aesthetic of electronic dance music
(EDM) at ages considered old for the industry: 32 for vocalists/lyricists Neil Tennant
(Pet Shop Boys) and James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem). Neither of these bands
makes straightforward EDM—Pet Shop Boys fall under pop and LCD Soundsystem
can be considered post-punk—but both are influenced by the New York City dance
scene of the late 70s and early 80s, and are characterized as ironic. I argue that Pet Shop
Boys and LCD Soundsystem are ironic because of their belated, knowing position in
a genre that privileges the infinite present and unproductive reproduction through
repetition. In light of Lee Edelman’s claim that irony is the queerest of rhetorical
devices, the ambivalence of Pet Shop Boys’ and LCD Soundsystem’s ostensible lack
of youth and the youthful temporality of their EDM aesthetic place them in a queer
tension between notions of immediate authenticity and the distance of age.
Keywords: aging, irony, temporality, LCD Soundsystem, Pet Shop Boys
Larissa Wodtke is the Coordinator for the Indigenous Academic Lead in Indigenous Affairs
and an affiliate of the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies at the University of Winnipeg. Her
research has been published in the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies; Under My
Thumb: The Songs That Hate Women and The Women That Love Them (2017); Crowdfunding the
Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society (2015) and Seriality and Texts for Young People:
The Compulsion to Repeat (2014). She co-wrote the book Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street
Preachers’ The Holy Bible (2017) with Rhian E. Jones and Daniel Lukes.
Feature Article
http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.03
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 31
“Neil said the other day he’s now a young old person.” (Tennant is 63).
“Yeah, I think I am,” says Tennant.
“Whereas I’m still an old young person,” says Lowe.
What’s the difference?
“I’m still like a child,” says Lowe. “A stroppy child.”
So Tennant can’t behave like that any more?
“He never did,” Lowe says. “Always the serious one” (Potton 2017).
thank fuck we were never skinny and young. or at least i wasn’t. that always happens
with bands… they aren’t fat when they come back, typically, just, i don’t know, thicker.
i was lucky to start this band kind of fat and old, so there’s no, like “look how YOUNG
they were!” shit to even find on the internet. i mean, we were younger and everything,
but we weren’t young, if you know what i mean (Murphy 2016).
The above quotes from English electronic pop music duo Pet Shop Boys (Neil Tennant
and Chris Lowe) and American dance-punk outfit LCD Soundsystem ( James Murphy)
demonstrate a queer, or at least non-normative, sense of temporality. In the interview
with Tennant and Lowe, they not only insist that they are simultaneously young and
old, but qualify these statements with the words “still” and “always”. Similarly, in his blog
post announcing the impending reunion of LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy remarks
that he and his bandmates were “younger”, but not “young”. In both cases, there is a sense
of remaining the same, but also simultaneously being and not-being. Pet Shop Boys and
LCD Soundsystem not only share this non-normative temporality, but also the label of
“ironic” from the media and critics (for Pet Shop Boys see Frith 1988; Garratt 1989; Price
2002; for LCD Soundsystem see Host 2005; Abebe 2010; Carlick 2017; Terry 2019). I
argue that their non-normative temporality in terms of age, along with their belated career
success—Neil Tennant and James Murphy were thirty-two years old when their bands
became famous—in a youth-oriented genre like electronic dance music creates this irony.
Neither of these bands is strictly electronic dance music—Pet Shop Boys are most often
considered a pop band, and LCD Soundsystem’s music references post-punk—but their
music relies on core elements of EDM (use of synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and
sequencers, repetition, looping, grooves) and often pays homage to the nascent dance music
scene of 70s and 80s New York City. The repetitive and looping features of EDM, as well
as its association with the alternative temporality of all-night clubbing environments, sit in
contrast to the linear, teleological time represented by growing older.
Pet Shop Boys first gained popularity on the re-release of their best-known hit “West End
Girls” in 1986, in the middle of Thatcherite neoliberalism, and James Murphy released his
first single, “Losing My Edge”, as LCD Soundsystem in 2002, a time identified with post-
9/11 New York City and the rise of hipster culture. While Pet Shop Boys began their pop
Dancecult 11(1)32
music career as queer artists in the midst of the AIDS crisis, James Murphy had experiences
in a series of rock bands and as a DJ before co-founding the record label DFA Records
in 2001. To date, Pet Shop Boys have released thirteen studio albums, their latest being
Super in 2016, but have never regained the mass popularity of what Tennant refers to as
their “imperial phase” in the late 1980s. LCD Soundsystem released three studio albums—
arguably peaking with Sound of Silver in 2007, which is listed in Rolling Stone’s top thirty
EDM albums of all time and compared with Pet Shop Boys’ 1988 album Introspective
(Rolling Stone 2012)—before disbanding, an event that was documented in a film of their
farewell concert at Madison Square Garden in 2011, Shut Up and Play the Hits. Murphy
then announced the reunion of LCD Soundsystem in 2016, and subsequently released a
new album, American Dream, in 2017.
Though the context differs between Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem, they both
have worked within particularly singular visions throughout their careers, with the former
noting that “We just do what we do, and sometimes something comes along, like EDM,
and it seems we’re in the groove. Other times we’re working totally against it”, and the
latter claiming that success came through being “accidentally current” (Wood 2013; Jones
2014). However, most pertinent to my argument is the way both bands utilize narrative
and lyrics more than is typically expected in EDM, producing various subjectivities that
remain ambiguous about aging and temporality, and in effect, performing age through
language.1 This performativity, similarly to Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity,
works by exposing the gaps between reality and its construction through language,
and the impossibility of an original, pre-linguistic reality (1990). As cultural theorist
Claire Colebrook notes in her overview of irony, “We write and think belatedly, from a
textual condition we can neither master nor abandon” (2004: 110). In “The Rhetoric of
Temporality,” Paul De Man contrasts this distanced temporality of meaning in irony with
the more representational unity of meaning in Romantic symbolism, demonstrating that
the distance between signifier and signified in irony is both spatial and temporal. De Man
writes that irony “relates to its source only in terms of distance and difference and allows for
no end, for no totality” (1983: 222). In other words, there is no resolution to the tension
between unity and infinity on the one hand, and division and finiteness on the other.
In his study on irony and aging, gerontology scholar William L. Randall (2013) draws
upon Lars Tornstam’s term gerotranscendence, which defines a “stage of development . . . in
very late life especially in which the boundaries between Life and Death become increasingly
ambiguous, as do those between Self and Other, Past and Future” (1996: 171). Though
Randall uses gerotranscendence to argue that aging allows a person to better accommodate
contradiction and ambiguity, there is also an interesting corollary in the temporal and
subjective instability of gerotranscendence and the unfixity, or “oceanic feeling-tone” in
Freudian terms, of EDM. Just as aging prompts one to live one day at a time, or in the
“center of the moment” as Barbara Frey Waxman defines it, EDM is often associated with
an eternal present in losing oneself in dancing and the music, sometimes for days (1997:
135). In generating this non-teleological temporality, the repetitive beats and grooves in
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 33
EDM confound the idea of original and copy, much as irony reveals the impossibility of an
original and singular subjectivity.
There has been a variety of scholarship published on irony in music, including Katherine
L. Turner’s edited collection This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics and Popular Culture
(2015) and Lars Elleström’s Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music, and the
Visual Arts Ironically (2002). Scholars have also explored irony in various popular music
genres, such as new wave (e.g. Kronengold 2008; Cateforis 2011), rap and hip-hop (e.g.
Jenkins 2015; Shryock 2015), electronic music and electroclash (e.g. Biddle 2004; Luvaas
2006; Madden 2011) and indie rock (e.g. Atchison 2011). Among these studies are differing
approaches: some focus on the verbal irony to be found in lyrical content, others look at
musical structure itself. Elleström supports the latter approach by arguing that if “music has
the capacity of ‘saying’ things that are ‘different’ from what words say, it must also have the
capacity of saying various things that are different from each other” (2002: 212). As Turner
remarks in her introduction to This is the Sound of Irony, “musical irony is not a unified theory
but a web of overlapping ideas, disciplines and treatments of dissemblage occurring within a
musical framework that investigates the ‘sound of irony’ and its inevitable companion, the
‘irony of sound’” (2015: 6). Since music is innately temporal, it lends itself to the inherent
spatio-temporal implications of irony:
The ironic subject does not just take part in the discourses and norms that are present;
she can ask whose norms these are and whether they are valid. Irony allows for
detachment and an ‘eternal’ point of view; the ironic self can question whether life
might not be otherwise, whether ‘we’ might create ourselves differently. Indeed, irony
detaches itself from any recognised ‘we’ in order to question and disrupt accepted
norms. Irony is provocative, disruptive, but also hierarchical—setting itself above
everyday life and opinion (Colebrook 2004: 122).
This simultaneous existence within the present and an externality from time itself allows
one to judge actions and beliefs while admitting one’s own complicity (Colebrook 2004:
120). In De Man’s view, language splits subjectivity and precludes an authenticity of an
original self. Therefore, irony is regarded as a knowing position, placed in a position above
or outside of the self, but also an ultimately unknowing one, in that there is no promise
of a future resolution of meaning or total understanding. These concerns between irony
and meaning, temporality, authenticity and knowingness are at play in both the music and
identity of Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem.
Music critics and scholars alike have read Pet Shop Boys and their music as ironic (e.g.
Hawkins 1997; Smith 2001; Hawkins 2002; Hughes 2012), or at the very least ambiguous
(e.g. Textor 1994; Maus 2001; Balfour 2002; Maus 2013), and much of this ambiguity
circulates around their queer sexuality. Pet Shop Boys themselves have acknowledged
this perception of them in songs like “Yesterday When I Was Mad”, when they lambaste
their critics by impersonating their passive aggressive description of Tennant and Lowe as
“Expressionless, such irony, although your voice is weak”. This perceived expressionlessness
Dancecult 11(1)34
and inauthenticity in Tennant’s vocal style is often read as ironic, and this is a feature he
shares with James Murphy whose “flat, disaffected style of singing gives the impression
that he’s above it all, not quite dissociating but capable of floating free from the scene”
(Hsu 2017). In studies on the ironic tone of voice (e.g. Kreuz and Roberts 1995; Rockwell
2000; Bryant and Fox Tree 2005), ironic vocal cues tend to be flat intonation, nasality
and slow tempo, and can sometimes be confused with deception, which I would argue is
a form of inauthenticity. The inauthenticity of Tennant and Murphy’s vocal style is shared
with electroclash artist Tiga, the subject of Stéphane Girard’s article “(Un)originality,
Hypertextuality and Identity in Tiga’s ‘Sunglasses at Night’” (2011). In this article, Girard
usefully connects the issue of authenticity with gender politics, contending that music, such
as pop and EDM, are often seen as less authentic because they are feminized, or in the case
of EDM, the gendered self is ambiguous or non-existent, a blurring that challenges the
naturalization of patriarchal, heteronormative authenticity. The blurring and doubleness of
meaning that often define irony have also been noted in Pet Shop Boys’ slippage between
artificiality and authenticity, and play with notions of high and low art (Smith 1995; Butler
2003). As Ian Balfour observes in his essay “Queen Theory: Notes on the Pet Shop Boys”,
there is an excessiveness to Pet Shop Boys’ simplicity; by using minimal language, they
open themselves up to multiple meanings. In other words, Pet Shop Boys’ meaning is more
fragmented and unresolved than unified, fitting into De Man’s temporality of irony.
Unlike Pet Shop Boys, LCD Soundsystem has not yet been taken up extensively in
scholarship however, music critics and journalists have been particularly interested in
the interplay of irony and sincerity in James Murphy’s music, especially in relation to
early twenty-first-century hipster culture.2 Ryan Leas, the only critic to have written a
monograph exclusively about LCD Soundsystem, writes that Murphy “would seem to
be at the pinnacle of the hipster generation’s supposed mode of existence, that ironic
detachment” (2016: 23).3 Leas also writes of the first time he saw Murphy perform and the
realization of his earlier misapprehension when having only heard his music: “he looked
old, already. Older than expected, at the very least” (2016: 18). This surprise around his
age, as well as the apparent incongruence of his age and the kind of music he creates,
highlights the other main focus of critical and journalistic attention. The subtitle of Jody
Rosen’s article for Slate succinctly combines both of these defining elements of Murphy’s
profile: “how a chubby ‘old’ guy became king of the hipsters” (2011). Murphy is ultimately
representative of old age and youth.
Taking Lee Edelman’s assertion that irony is the “queerest of rhetorical devices”, I argue
that, regardless of sexuality, Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem can be read as queer in
their relationship to heteronormative notions of aging and maturation (Edelman 2004:
23). In their studies of aging music fans in various genres, Andy Bennett (2013), Paul
Hodkinson (2011) and Jodie Taylor (2010) demonstrate that fans’ relationships to popular
music can be negotiated in different ways through the process of aging, including taking on
the role of mentor to younger fans in a particular scene, shifting the collective norms within
a subculture, and challenging heteronormative temporalities by continuing to expand along
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 35
with a music scene (Taylor 2010: 903-04; Hodkinson 2011: 278; Bennett 2013: 123-50).
However, Taylor’s work is most useful in its focus on specifically queer temporalities.
Discussing the “stretched-out adolescences of queer culture makers”, Judith Halberstam
calls this non-teleological refusal to grow into heteronormative adulthood an “epistemology
of youth” (2006: 3). Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman pushes against heteronormative time
to identify queer time as defined by “asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness,
compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback, hysteron-proteron, pause, prolepsis, repetition,
reversal, surprise”, and several of these features can be found in the work of Pet Shop Boys
and LCD Soundsystem (Freeman 2010: xxii). In many ways, these artists refuse to “grow
up” partly because their subjective time does not obtain with the time perceived as their
actual ages; they are simultaneously always late, frozen in the present, and infinitely open to
anteriority. Due to their already belated beginnings in a musical genre where the expectation
is youth, Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem perform non-normative aging and produce
irony, and they do this in two ways: through the verbal irony of their lyrics and vocals,
which indicate their knowingness and their ambiguous relation to age and temporality, and
through the ironic structure of their music, which uses the existing temporal characteristics
of electronic dance music whilst merging them with other genre conventions.
Belated Beginnings, the Eternal Present, and Im(Mortality):
Verbal Irony in Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem Lyrics
Neil: Well I was quite old when the first album came out. I was nearly 32.
Andrew Sullivan: Which as a pop star is ancient, right?
Neil: It’s insanely old. I was a sort of a formed person (Sullivan 2009).
“Dude, I was like 31, 32 when ‘Losing My Edge’ came out. It’s a very different thing
being able to withstand the pressure of being the cool guy on the NME Cool List –
when you’re 19, 22 it’s a very different thing” (Bidder 2009).
Due to their genre hybridity, Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem are not straightforward
electronic dance music, and one of the most prominent areas of difference is in their use
of lyrics and narrative. If EDM includes lyrics and vocals, they tend to be short, repetitious
and certainly not meaningful as narrative. In his book Unlocking the Groove, Mark J. Butler
makes the distinction between a song and a track, the former more common in describing
disco, classic house and garage—genres that feature prominent vocals and can be identified
as a complete unit more readily—and the latter used to label instrumental styles of EDM
with no discernible beginning or end, such as techno, drum and bass and hardcore (2006:
39, 41). By using the form of song rather than track, Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem
somewhat disrupt the expectations of the EDM genre whilst using lyrics to describe and
comment on temporality in dance and clubbing scenes in ambiguous ways.
Dancecult 11(1)36
Despite the fact that most Pet Shop Boys songs are structured like conventional pop
songs in terms of narrative and length, Ian Balfour notes that the “ideal Pet Shop Boys song
lasts forever. . . . there is something in the structure and syntax of a Pet Shop Boys tune that
suggests the song could—and probably should—‘go on and on forever’” (1991: 6). He argues
that this “pervasive preoccupation with infinity” is evident in the Pet Shop Boys’ “refrains
of truncated sentences that never end” (1991: 11). Balfour points to the implied ellipsis at
the end of several Pet Shop Boys’ lyrics: “you were always” from “Always on My Mind”; “you
can’t stop falling” from “Love Comes Quickly”; and “left to my own devices, I probably
would” from “Left to My Own Devices”. Balfour locates the queer temporality of Pet Shop
Boys music in their use of language: “vertiginous movement backward, forward, and back
again in time is supplemented by its eccentric grammar (‘We were never being boring,’ a
phrase that yokes together finitude and infinity)” (1991: 21). The elliptic structure works
with the ellipsis as device to produce both repetitive infinity and an active present even as
the lyric may negate itself by using past tenses. Simon Frith also comments on Tennant and
Lowe’s odd temporality, but instead sees their songs as a paradoxical combination of the
static and the anticipatory or belated. He contends that “it’s as if the spaces they occupy are
actually frozen moments in time, the moments just before and just after emotion” (Frith
1996: 8). This observation echoes comments made by Neil Tennant about the rationale
behind their promotional photographs: “we had the idea they should look like stills from
films: ‘something just happened’ or ‘something is about to happen’” (Heath 1990: 95).
Another example of this ambiguous temporality specifically related to age can be
found in “Young Offender” from Pet Shop Boys’ 1994 album Very, a song that recounts
the narrative of an older man’s attraction to a much younger one. The line “I’ve been a
teenager since before you were born” stands out because the use of the present perfect
complicates the meaning. Because the present perfect denotes an action done in the past
but continued in the present, the lyric can be read as the narrator’s simultaneous old age
and youth. It is knowingness, but also an expression of enduring hipness and relevance. This
ironic temporality can also be found in the “I was there” refrain in LCD Soundsystem’s
first single “Losing My Edge”. Murphy narrates his own increasing obsolescence in the face
of younger musicians and fans superseding him. His assertion of being present at multiple
milestones in popular music history, including “I was there in 1968/I was there at the first
Can show in Cologne”, are clearly meant to be temporally impossible because Murphy is
not old enough and it is unlikely anyone could have physically witnessed them all, but they
are also a metaphor for his knowingness and justification for his own music creation in a
scene that does not accept or expect his age. He manages to encapsulate the early history
of electronic dance music in a few lines, “I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with
Larry Levan/I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes/I woke up naked on
the beach in Ibiza in 1988”, and undercut the young hipsters he views as his usurpers by
accusing them of “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties”. At the same time,
it is clear that he also borrows nostalgia for times and places he himself only remembers
through mediation.
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 37
“Losing My Edge” brings attention to the ostensible queerness of the hipster figure in
terms of temporality and age. In his book The Sacred and the Profane: An Investigation of
Hipsters, Jake Kinzey questions “how long hipsters can ‘bend the stick’ between love of
nostalgia (and the infantile) and an equally strong desire for the aged . . . before it finally
breaks” (2012: 32). Kinzey attempts to understand this atypical temporality of the hipster
aesthetic through Susan Sontag’s notion of camp, writing that hipsters have a “detachment
from this reality, a refusal to be fully complicit with what is going on now. The hipster
attempts to preserve their individuality by negating the world around it” (2012: 49). This
detachment is then perceived as irony, and displays the breakdown of the adult-child binary
in the age of neoliberalism, which appears in genres and times besides hipster culture (see
Wodtke 2018). The same distancing and detachment can also be understood in relation
to De Man’s irony and the impossibility of truly engaging and understanding reality
through a world described and comprehended through language. In his book about LCD
Soundsystem’s second album Sound of Silver, Leas describes it as “the kind of album that
makes you feel like a badass kid at the same time as it makes you feel like a jaded adult”, and
this “ironic reference and . . . emotional resonance” is inflected by assumptions of age and
how it interacts with time (2016: 25, 30).
To further illustrate the ironic temporalities at work in Pet Shop Boys and LCD
Soundsystem lyrics, I will compare “Tonight is Forever” from Tennant and Lowe’s first
album Please with “Tonite” from LCD Soundsystem’s latest album, American Dream. In
Pet Shop Boys’ “Tonight is Forever”, Tennant sings of a dance floor encounter that appears
to be both ecstatic and static:
It will be like this forever
If we fall in love
Tonight is forever, tell me now you don’t disagree
Tonight is forever, open the door, you hold the key
Tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight
Tonight is the first night
We don’t need any more when we dance
I don’t think of the future tonight
The present temporality of “tonight” is juxtaposed with the infinite temporality of “forever”,
but implies futurity and linear time in the use of “the first night”. The narrator does not
think of the future even as one seems to be planned with additional nights following this
one. Another way of reading these lyrics is to see “tonight” as an idea or embodied feeling,
one in which the narrator and their love interest inhabit a subjective time at odds with
teleological time assumed to be elapsing in the external world, and indeed in the timeframe
of the song itself.
Dancecult 11(1)38
James Murphy could be referring to a song like “Tonight is Forever” in his song “Tonite”:
Everybody’s singing the same song
It goes “tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight”
I never realized these artists thought so much about dying
. . .
And all the hits are saying the same thing
There’s only tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight
Then life is finite
But shit, it feels like forever
It feels like forever
. . .
You’re missing a party that you’ll never get over
You hate the idea that you’re wasting your youth
That you stood in the background oh until you got older
But that’s all lies
That’s all lies
Even as he equates the trope of “tonight” in popular music as a reminder of mortality, he
maintains that it feels like forever. This statement could be understood in different ways:
life goes on too long and aging is tiring, and life can feel infinite when one is in the middle
of a dance music experience of the kind that makes sense of a “tonight” refrain. In fact,
the music backing this song sounds like the very music Murphy is dissecting. The frantic
sense of time slipping away and youth being wasted is negated as lies. The implication is
that there will be more “tonights” much like the “first night” in “Tonight is Forever”. Aging
both happens and does not happen. Furthermore, Murphy playfully references Adorno’s
negative dialectics in the line, “I’m offering you a chance to get even/But oh, you know very
well the dialect of negation”, perhaps offering his own version of unresolved processes, and
condemnation of linearity and progress. The music video for “Tonite” compounds the sense
of infinite repetition by featuring Murphy walking along the perimeter of a rotating circular
stage as the rest of the band plays in the centre. Once again, the supposed knowingness of
age sits alongside an eternal present of sameness, two sides of the same coin.
Tennant and Lowe are representative of this duality, too. In his 1988 article about Pet
Shop Boys for the Village Voice, Simon Frith writes,
I enjoy Morrissey’s over-the-top gesture of refusal—no sex! no sales! no fun!—but I’m
too old to take it seriously, which is why, for me, Pet Shop Boys have a more profound
point to make. . . . At their best the Pets capture that sense of psychic space, that
anticipatory tingling moment just before the money changes hands, when we know
that this will be the record, the shirt, the dance, the sex to change our lives, and they
share the knowledge that the moment has already gone, the choice is made, our lives
remain the same (Frith, 1988: 9).
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 39
By contrasting Morrissey and Pet Shop Boys in this passage, Frith implies that Morrissey’s
music is too idealistic in a young person’s way, whereas Pet Shop Boys are capable of both
capturing the affective charge of futurity without ever reaching a unified resolution; they
are effectively remaining in stasis rather than progressing, and this way of being is held in
tension with the conventional forward motion of heteronormative maturation. In Chris
Heath’s book Literally, Tennant states, “I’ve always tried to write about adult concerns in
pop music” (1990: 147). The implication is that pop music is generally not about what are
considered adult concerns, but that Pet Shop Boys provide a double perspective through
their simultaneous occupation of different temporalities, an ironic “double perspective that
invokes two incongruous worlds: the possibility of could or should be, glimpsed in the
face of what is” (Clift 1999: 539). For example, Pet Shop Boys’ song “Why Don’t We Live
Together” acknowledges the doubleness of this conventional milestone of heteronormative
maturity, “I may not always love you/you may not care/but if we should live together/
there’s something we could share”. Similarly, on “Saturday Night Forever” from Bilingual
they invoke the infinity of tonight, but Tennant adds, “I know/that it’s not gonna last”.
Pet Shop Boys end their 2014 record Electric with “Vocal”, a song that seems to
comment on the preceding music on Electric, and more generally on Pet Shop Boys and
their temporal position:
I like the people, I like the song
This is my kind of music
They play it all night long
I like the singer, he’s lonely and strange
Every track has a vocal, and that makes a change
And everything about tonight feels right and so young
And anything I wanna say out loud will be sung
Once again, they evoke “tonight” as a representative of the oceanic feeling-tone of electronic
dance music, a feeling that comprises both “loss (of differences between self and others, of
time and space, of words, images and the senses)” and “gain (of unity, of timelessness and
eternity, of control, joy, contact and ineffability)” (Malbon 1999: 108). At the same time
that it revels in an eternal youth and borderless temporality, the song also acknowledges
difference through self-referentiality. Put differently, the song title, “Vocal”, and the lines “I
like the singer, he’s lonely and strange/Every track has a vocal, and that makes a change” could
be read as describing music like that of Pet Shop Boys; Tennant’s vocals are often interpreted
as lonely and strange. Moreover, Pet Shop Boys remain an outlier in current electronic dance
music in that they often use vocals in a conventional narrative song structure, an element
that is associated with early dance music and an older audience. The trackiness of several
of the songs on the rest of Electric (“Axis”, “Shouting in the Evening” and “Bolshy”) are not
typical of Pet Shop Boys and emphasize the pull between their contemporaneity and their
different “kind of music”.
Dancecult 11(1)40
For LCD Soundsystem, there is a similar merging of various temporalities, or as José
Esteban Muñoz describes this convergence, “ecstasy” (2009: 189). Their Sound of Silver
album, which according to Leas is “an album built for and off of youth”, emphasizes this
distanced, unresolvable temporality (2016: 45). For example, the titular song consists only
of the following verse chanted multiple times:
Sound of Silver talk to me
Makes you want to feel like a teenager
Until you remember the feelings of
A real live emotional teenager
Then you think again
The fact that the entire song repeats these five lines over and over again over an EDM
background creates an inescapable loop that obfuscates meaning. There is a yearning to
return to the past and feel like a younger person, but also a reluctance to experience the
reality; at the same time, the line “Then you think again” refuses to resolve. The narrator
of the song thinks again again, creating an ambivalence over feeling like a teenager and not
feeling like one. Just as Pet Shop Boys’ ellipses and ambiguity produce a “syntactic open-
endedness . . . co-existing with the structural infinity of the extended and extendable mix”,
the lyrics of “Sound of Silver” fuse with the relentless beat of the music to create a similar
structural infinity without linear progress and a stable subjectivity (Balfour 1991: 11). Like
Pet Shop Boys, LCD Soundsystem produces the type of irony that “comprises a series of
disruptive acts that shatters the illusion of an organic, linear time and repeatedly forces
one back to a blind present” (Adlington 1997: 30). The knowing position of Pet Shop
Boys and LCD Soundsystem’s age distances them from youth even as their repetition and
oceanic feeling-tone holds them in an endless present. However, if Pet Shop Boys and LCD
Soundsystem’s lyrical open-endedness is part of their unpredictability, as Balfour argues,
then how does this reconcile with the predictable, repetitive yet accumulative beat of their
electronic dance music?
Repetition, Non-Productive Reproduction, and the Groove:
Structural Irony in Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem Music
Chris Lowe: There’s too much information for your brain to assimilate . . . ‘Cause
dance music’s not about that, is it? Dance music’s about repetition. This was just that
(“Track by Track: Pet Shop Boys and Stuart Price on Electric”).
James Murphy: That’s where I think meaning is . . . I mean, anything that’s resolvable
is boring, musically. And if it’s too chaotic, you don’t feel tension, it’s chaos
(Chinen 2007).
In terms of sound, both Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem notably recall the New York
City dance scene eclecticism of the late 70s and early 80s. Their music sonically references
clubs like the Paradise Garage, Mudd Club, Area, Danceteria and the Funhouse, which
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 41
played a mix of new wave, post-punk, hip-hop, motorik, early house and techno, disco,
punk and funk; Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force would be played in the same
set as Yazoo and Inner Life, and Gang of Four would be spun alongside Kraftwerk and
Kurtis Blow.4 This was the scene from which New Order and Madonna gathered inspiration
in the 80s, leading to a fertile cross-pollination between New York and Manchester via
Factory Records and their Hacienda night club. Tennant and Lowe have spoken about
their preference for this era of clubbing in New York (see Robinson 2013; International
Music Summit 2016), first recorded music in New York with Hi-NRG producer Bobby
Orlando and eventually played at the Hacienda in 1992 (Hook 2009: 245). Furthermore,
they have acknowledged the influence of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and
Afrika Bambaataa on their breakthrough hit “West End Girls”, and their band name alludes
to the Peech Boys, a New York City dance music group that included Paradise Garage’s
Larry Levan (Heath 1990: 108; Nika 2010; International Music Summit 2016). The New
York-Manchester dance scene also became an obvious reference point for James Murphy’s
DFA record label in the early 00s. Many of the bands that Murphy mentions in “Losing My
Edge”, including PiL, The Normal and Mantronix, were played in New York clubs during
the early 80s. In fact, the hybridity that defines Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem’s
approach to EDM is rooted in the genre-agnostic dance music scene of this time.5
The period is documented, and to some extent romanticized, by Tim Lawrence in
his books Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979
(2003) and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983 (2016). Part of
this idealization is linked to the scene’s ambivalence towards categories of age. Lawrence
describes the polymorphous child-like atmosphere, which acted as “the perfect milieu for
experimental regression . . . and the sheer density of bodies accelerated the transformation
from autonomous adult to child-like dancer” (2003: 25). Cultural critic Tavia Nyong’o
uses Freud’s concept of the oceanic feeling-tone to describe disco, and its association with a
sensual, polymorphous existence that breaks down the borders between the subject and the
outside world (2008: 105). Tennant makes a point of connecting Pet Shop Boys’ creativity
with childness: “I think it’s really important to stay connected to that childish, playful
element to making music. Some people cut themselves off from that when they become a
‘grown up’… and when you do that, you generally cut yourself off from your own creativity”
(Rachel 2013).
Furthermore, EDM evokes childness in its use of repetition, which is often associated
with childlike behaviour and regression (Adlington 1997: 12; Garcia 2005: 1.1). Though
this repetition could be interpreted as the “sound of the unobtainable, time turned back
on itself in an eternal loop”, it can also be heard as an unresolvable dialectic between
linear and vertical rhythmic development, which Hawkins describes as “oppositional”, or
what I suggest is ironic (Frith 1988: 8; Hawkins 2003: 97). This sense of both linear and
vertical progression within the ostensible stasis of a repetitious loop can be seen in James
Murphy’s description of his song “All My Friends”, which was inspired by Joy Division’s
“Transmission”. He describes “Transmission” as “the same thing the whole way through,
Dancecult 11(1)42
and without any kind of embarrassing rockist gesture. It starts off so gentle, and becomes so
fucking overwhelming. By the time he’s going, ‘Dance, dance, dance to the radio,’ your head’s
exploding. And I wanted to see if I could make a song without people playing together. Just
do it all myself by doing it in layers” (Harris 2017). This account begs one of the main
questions in relation to EDM structure: “when will it change next, and how will it remain
the same?” (Garcia 2005: 6.2). The music seemingly expands in two different dimensions
at once whilst in an endless present of monotonous rhythm. On the other hand, Pet Shop
Boys often curtail formal development to emphasize non-linear trajectories. For example,
in his article about Pet Shop Boys’ cover versions, Mark Butler argues that their cover of
U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” alters the musical structure of the original to
inhibit the growth of the song, starting in a brash manner rather than building to it (2003).
This flattening of climax, or arrested development, markedly works in a contrary way to “All
My Friends”, but in both cases the ground of the music overwhelms, but doesn’t obliterate,
the figure, a posited characteristic of rave music (Tagg 1994). Tennant and Lowe, and
Murphy use ground to create a queer repetition and reproduction without futurity, or an
irreconcilable future. In this sense, their temporal irony becomes a “series of disruptive acts
that shatters the illusion of an organic, linear time and repeatedly forces one back to a blind
present” (Adlington 1997: 30). At the same time, there is a “desire to be in the groove, at
least in terms of audio verisimilitude”, which also allows them to “depart from the present”
(Hawkins 2016: 39).
Notwithstanding the temporal ambiguity and strangeness of their lyrics, as well as their
manipulation of linear and vertical sonic dimensions, Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem
both keep precise rhythms, not the more nuanced grooves of other dance music outside out
of EDM, such as funk and soul; there is not a leaning into or away from the beat. In his
2013 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, James Murphy expresses his preference for being on
top of the beat. Notably, this is a repetitious, visceral affect that captivated him as a child;
he describes it as “this relentless kind of nodding thing, like this hypnotizing thing. I was
always really entranced when things were really hypnotizing. I used to listen to humming
machines, anything that was kind of repetitive and loopy . . .” (Gross 2010). In 2011 the
music website Pitchfork produced an annotated discography of LCD Soundsystem’s work
in which they often remarked on the prominently locked groove, which can be understood
as an embodied feeling (Roholt 2014).
In the face of the failure of semantic language, the embodied groove and repetition of the
EDM beat takes over. The bodily pleasure of dance music, or the jouissance—“transcendant,
indescribable presubjective and prelinguistic bliss” of childhood—achieves what De
Man argues is impossible, but only addressable through irony (Hanson 2014: 390-91).
De Man’s irreconcilable subject can perhaps be temporarily reconciled or transcended in
phenomenologist Alfred Schütz’s concept of the “vivid present” in music (1951). The vivid
present is a time that musician and audience enter into and experience together as a shared
subjective temporality, which he interestingly describes as “growing old together”. Therefore,
Schütz appears to be juxtaposing an atemporal subjective present with a linear idea of aging.
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 43
Whether a vivid present or jouissance, or perhaps even a gerotranscendence, the experience
of EDM does produce a time outside of normative temporality. In fact, Frith asserts that the
purpose of dance music like disco is “to encourage its hearers to do nothing but listen to it.
Not even think” (1978). This absence of thought, and thus, an overabundance of presence
is aptly illustrated by Kieran Dahl in his article about using techno music to ameliorate his
depression. When immersed in the repetitive beat, Dahl writes, “there was no room in my
head for intrusive thoughts” (2017). He goes on to describe depression as
a disease of contradictions and opposites. . . . You’re anxious of what tomorrow will
bring, yet you’re certain you’ll feel no different. . . . Your mind is ablaze with distant
memories of roads not taken, yet you can’t remember why you just walked into a room.
. . . If depression is atemporal, rendering recollections of your past as bleak as visions
of your future, raving is feeling present in a series of moments delineated by a beat
(Dahl 2017).
This focus on the present moment rather than any other temporality generates a distance
from reality. Music theorist Jonathan Kramer’s description of what he calls vertical music is
useful in conceptualizing this temporal state. Kramer’s conception of vertical music
denies the past and the future in favor of an extended present. . . . Future as well as
past orientation is minimized. The future, to the extent that it is anticipated at all, is
expected to be the same as the present. This kind of music tries to create an eternal
now by blurring the distinction between past, present, and future, and by avoiding
gestures that invoke memory or activate expectation (Kramer 1988: 375-76).
Though he is describing avant-garde music, he could be defining EDM. Just as the vertical
and linear form a queer tension with the present in the music of Pet Shop Boys and LCD
Soundsystem, there is also a distinctive interaction between making timely and timeless
music at the same time. According to Charles Kronengold, this simultaneous timeliness
and timelessness is one of the features of disco, which is also a musical touchstone for
Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem. Kronengold argues that disco is a musical syntax
that works through textural stratification and on an affective continuum that ranges from
“absolute freedom to perfect rigidity”; he elaborates on the flexibility and multiplicity of
disco temporality by including “the moment that occurs too early or too late; tropes of time
accelerating, slowing down, or stopping abruptly, the sense of clock time’s inadequacy (or
adequacy); and . . . the machine time of the synth motive” (2008: 53, 55-56).
Pet Shop Boys make a consistent effort to write songs that keep pace with current dance
music and stylistic changes, incorporating elements of disco, Hi-NRG, house, techno,
electro, New Jack Swing and reggaeton, which resonates with Taylor’s description of
middle-aged queer music fans who continue to pursue and engage with new styles of music
in spite of their age (Heath 1990: 185; Taylor 2010: 903). As Tennant says, “We’ve always
tried to be of the present” (Heath 1990: 184). In one way, this attachment to the present
moment should make their music ephemeral, as much of popular music is; however, there is
Dancecult 11(1)44
a sense that past songs are in conversation with newer ones, and in this dialogue, they gain
a timelessness. Tennant remarks that “the making of new music is what fuels and re-fuels an
interest in the old songs…and being able to see the through-line of continuity within all the
work and how both the new material and the old somehow tie together”, implying a continual
return (Rachel 2013). Similarly, James Murphy explains how he wanted LCD Soundsystem
to produce music that could be returned to over time and be newly meaningful:
I kind of liked things that meet you as you changed your taste and changed and grew
up. Yeah, I think David Bowie’s good at that. I think The Smiths are really good at
that. You’re a kid and you’re like, “This music is so sad.” And then you get older and
you’re like, “This music is hilarious.” Like, I just didn’t know it was hilarious when I
was a kid because it seemed so sad, and then I realized he’s really funny. Like, it would
just keep refinding you and refinding you. . . . I was always trying to make it so if you
scraped through a layer, there was hopefully another layer that was interesting behind
it (Murphy 2013).
This kind of repetition is connected to a tension between growing older and repetition,
again suggesting a timelessness and timeliness. This sense of vertical time, or depth and
open-endedness of meaning, then converges with the difference to be found in the sameness
of EDM, or Hawkin’s oppositional repetition. The open-ended verbal ellipses that Balfour
identifies in Pet Shop Boys’ songs reappear in the music of LCD Soundsystem (see Balfour
1991). Leas describes the song “Sound of Silver” as “an obscure wandering, synths and
beats working in mutated ellipses and ellipticals as if forming pathways inward, through
those layers of childhood and teenage memory and occasionally bringing those watercolor
remnants to some clearer adulthood foreground” (2016: 50). As an ellipsis is an omission or
suspension point, and an ellipse is a cyclical figure, Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem’s
songs lack a resolution, and ultimately prove their inherent irony.
Conclusion
Tennant: For me, being in the Pet Shop Boys has always been a struggle between total
embarrassment and total shamelessness (Burston 1994).
Murphy: The whole thing was just made up because it was such a fertile and
embarrassing and circular set of feelings (Gross 2010).
Just as the remarks from Neil Tennant and James Murphy at the beginning of this article
reveal their bands’ queer temporalities, the quotations above signal the ambiguity and
circularity in their sense of age and their work in electronic dance music. Part of Murphy’s
decision to dissolve LCD Soundsystem in 2011 involved his discomfort in continuing the
band into his late forties. His “formula that appeals both to 20-somethings who just want to
lose their bodies to the music and to their more dignified elders who are beginning to realize
they won’t be able to do the same for much longer” is comparable to the mixed audiences
Wodtke | The Irony and the Ecstasy 45
of old and young for Pet Shop Boys (Cruz 2010: 57). The embarrassment described by
Tennant and Murphy could be viewed as part of their knowingness and distance from the
queer temporalities of their lyrics and music, but their continued work in an art form that
privileges youth and the present speaks to a simultaneous distance from heteronormative
time.
Despite the fact that Pet Shop Boys recently achieved their fortieth hit on Billboard’s
Dance Club Charts with “The Pop Kids” from their latest album Super, radio stations
continue to tell them “‘oh, we won’t ever play your records, because you’re too old’. . . .
They’re quite blatant about it. And someone else—who shall remain nameless—said, ‘if
yours was Daft Punk’s next single, we’d have played it automatically’” (Rogers 2013).
Moving from their usual disco-influenced lyricism to the minimal, simple lyrical content of
later EDM styles, Pet Shop Boys have actually become less conventionally verbal in their last
two albums, Electric (2014) and Super (2016), which were both produced by Stuart Price
and feature tracks such as “Axis”, “Shouting in the Evening”, “Pazzo” and “Inner Sanctum”.
The older Pet Shop Boys get, the more they appear to embrace the pure, wordless affect of
EDM, which moves in the opposite direction of linear notions of maturation.
As Simon Frith observes, “music is . . . about temporal possibility; it suggests that time
can be organized intentionally, as a matter of accent and stress, pulse and phrasing, rather
than having to be experienced only as a matter of industrial discipline, or of menstrual and
seasonal cycles, or of inexorable aging”, and this reorganization of time can also be read
as the performativity of age in the context of EDM (Frith 1996: 156). In this respect, Pet
Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem operate between poles and in cycles, a circuit that moves
across temporal planes and produces the irony of what Tennant describes as the “strange
dialectic that pop in theory is a young people’s musical form and it can be about growing
old” (Dax 2012).
Notes
1 Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner produced an edited collection (2012) looking at the
performativity of age and aging for female musical artists, but do not discuss artists who began
their careers at an advanced age; they are more interested in how female artists negotiate
propriety and success as an aged performer within cultural constraints, not least of which are
gender expectations.
2 LCD Soundsystem is mentioned in passing as an example of one of the bands that contributed
to the early electroclash scene in David Madden’s “Cross-Dressing to Backbeats: The Status of
Electroclash Producer and the Politics of Electronic Music” (2011).
3 Lizzie Goodman includes brief chapters on James Murphy, especially his involvement in the
founding of DFA Records and the production of “Losing My Edge,” in her oral history Meet
Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001–2011, but does not
focus comprehensively on LCD Soundsystem.
Dancecult 11(1)46
4 According to the setlists in Tim Lawrence’s history of the late 70s (2003) and early 80s (2016)
dance scene in New York City, music commonly ranged over diverse artists: The Clash, The
Slits, PiL, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Delta 5, The Bush Tetras, A Certain Ratio,
Was (Not Was), Quando Quango, Grace Jones, Suicide, Liquid Liquid, ESG, Konk, Cybotron,
Chic, Sylvester, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Blondie, the B-52s, Heaven 17,
Dinosaur L., Freez, James Brown, Funkadelic, Prince and Imagination.
5 Pet Shop Boys problematize the genre of EDM, especially as it has been used over the past
decade in a more mainstream, American context (including artists such as Skrillex, Deadmau5
and David Guetta), and assert that Pet Shop Boys music is not strictly EDM because of the
underground nature of their influences: “It’s sort of fragmentary. It does have a link to EDM,
because we make ‘electronic dance music.’ But we do something that’s a bit more coming from
a subculture. . . . It’s a different sort of inspiration” (DeLuca 2013). Similarly, James Murphy
has made a distinction between his style of EDM and the more recent mainstream trend; he
notably called this current incarnation of the genre “repellent”, “commercial” and “maximalist”
( Jones 2014). The implications of authenticity and inauthenticity at play in these comments
from both Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem raise questions about the cultural and
subcultural capital at play in their work that are beyond the scope of this article.
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Discography
LCD Soundsystem. 2017. American Dream. DFA/Columbia: 88985456111.
.
———. 2005. LCD Soundsystem. DFA: dfa2138.
.
———. 2002. “Losing My Edge / Beat Connection.” DFA: DFA 2123R.|
.
———. 2007. Sound of Silver. DFA: dfa2164.
.
Pet Shop Boys. 1990. Behaviour. Parlophone: 0190295821746.
.
———. 2013. Electric. x2: x2 0003 VL1.
.
———. 1988. Introspective. Parlophone: EI-90868.
.
———. 1986. Please. Parlophone: PW-17193.
.
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Dancecult 11(1)52
———. 2016. Super. x2: x2 0008 VL1.
.
———. 1993. Very. Parlophone: 0190295823085.
.
Filmography
“IMS Ibiza 2016: The Pet Shop Boys – Keynote Interview”. Youtube. Uploaded on 3 June 2016.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzLmFrWj5iE