on being boring (on sex, death and attention to detail)
"Boy Swallows Universe" by Trent Dalton
13 March 22
The original title was “on sex, death and attention to detail” but Neil Tennant’s concise two words contain a multitude, even when pitted against the twin monoliths of sex and death. Alright. I reneged. You really can’t beat sex and death as clickbait.
Not as succinct as “For sale: babies shoes, never worn”, accredited to Hemingway1, and cited as the shortest story. “Being Boring” still has such potential. I remain unconvinced by the shoes entry as a story, while emotionally powerful and evocative it doesn’t contain the essential triad of character, dilemma, denouement, or the more commonly held character, setting, plot. Although it does arguably contain sex and death.
As does Being Boring. Woody Allen once said all great literature is about sex and death. The two universals relatable to all. Written in 1990, it's a eulogy to those who died from AIDS, for me it’s one of the two great adult pop songs. Frequently (and rightfully so) named as the greatest song ever written2. We’re not here to analyse the lyrics through a lens of sex and death. Its place as a great adult pop song comes from its theme of growing old, of dealing with the changes ageing brings. The massive chunk of life we face between sex (albeit someone else's) and death.
The other great adult pop song is The Talking Heads “Heaven”. Another paean to boredom. Or acceptance. I was going to be contentious and throw in “Seasons in the sun” as well. As trite and mischievous as this might have been, we would have to have had a long explanation about the corruption to Jacques Brel’s masterpiece of cynicism.
Whereas Being Boring and Heaven could be seen as graceful acceptance over the price of growing older being a reduction in relevancy - losing the urgency of ambition younger years elicit. Be around for long enough and just the act of being there is a success in itself. An acceptance that boredom means life. By boredom I mean a lack of excitement, and by excitement I mean living in interesting times. “Heaven, Heaven is a place. A place where nothing, nothing ever happens”. Seasons in the sun is of course a massive fuck you, constructed entirely from irony and bile, and spat at an unfaithful wife. What? You didn’t know that? So it’s hardly about acceptance.
Originally entitled “La Moribond”, we’re already off to a poor start with the translation of the title alone. From a person on the verge of death to seasons in the sun. First translated by the American poet Rod McKuen. No, I’ve never heard of him either. A quick Google shows me why. Saccharine at best. Although he suffered horrible trauma as a child so I’m going to let it go and allow him his translation. He meet Brel, it’s unknown whether Brel was amused by the translation from his world-weary European view — anecdotal evidence says he wrote it in a brothel in Tangiers, of course he did, Paul Bowles would be heartened — to the schmaltzy American it’s all going to be alright aesthetic.
Farewell, Antoine, though we weren’t friends
Farewell, Antoine, we were not friends, you know
My body’s wracked and torn by strife
But you, I see, are full of life
Hard as a rock, sharp as a knifeFarewell, Antoine, I’m going to die
And though it’s hard to die in spring, you know,
I leave the peace I knew in life
And since you were her lover then
I know you’ll take care of my wifeFarewell, my wife, I loved you well
Farewell, my wife, I loved you well, you know
I can hear that whistle blow
Heaven’s train is coming slow
I’ll ride up, you’ll stay belowFarewell, my wife, I’m going to die
Although it’s hard to die in spring, you know
My eyes are closing, my dear wife,
And since I shut them to your lies
I know you’ll cherish my lost life
Translation cribbed from EGT Design3
McKuen found it “too macabre”.
Antoine his wife fucking best friend is removed, along with a duplicitous priest knowing everything from confession , replaced by “Papa”. We’re left with
Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife;
Without you I’d have had a lonely life.
You cheated lots of times but then,
I forgave you in the end
Though your lover was my friend.Adieu, Francoise, it’s hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky.
Now that spring is in the air
With your lovers ev’rywhere,
Just be careful; I’ll be there.
Finally Terry Jacks changed to something far more forgiving and definitely a lot less funny, leaving us the mawkish song you know and hate.
Goodbye, Michelle, my little one.
You gave me love and helped me find the sun.
And every time that I was down
you would always come around
and get my feet back on the ground.Goodbye, Michelle, it’s hard to die
when all the bird are singing in the sky,
Now that the spring is in the air.
With the flowers ev’rywhere.
I wish that we could both be there.
Obviously Francoise was too gender confusing. Even for Canadians.
Terry Jacks, who found fame with the hit version, never intended to record it. He was a producer for the Beach Boys in 1970 and suggested they cover it. Now I'm having a major Tarantino moment. Back in '68 Dennis Wilson fell in with one Charles Manson, and after engaging in group sex, mind bending drugs and making music he wanted that nice Mr Manson to join the Beach Boys. They declined. Surprisingly. I can only wonder what the effect on pop culture would have been had Manson sung Le Moribond accompanied by surfer harmonies. It feels like a scene left on the cutting room floor. Wrongly.4
Almost every pop song is about sex, and usually the only time horny hit makers go off piste is when they get political. Which while showing a new responsibility to something other than their genitals is still within the realms of passion. Hence my definition of adult meaning from a wider perspective not driven by desire.
Before returning to Being Boring let’s give an acknowledgement to Green Gartside for his “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”. He will be forever in my heart for his retort when challenged about being a bit too clever. He replied “It’s hardly Wittgenstein in 4/4”. A bit too clever wouldn't you agree. The Sweetest Girl would be worth a mention alone for its bizarre conception as a duet between Gregory Isaacs (who fell from Night Nurse grace after firing his gun in a children's playground while filming a video) and Kraftwerk. Yes, the aloof Teutonic Overlords of electronic music and Krautrock. Apparently Isaacs was up for it but Kraftwerk when finally reached put something of a downer on it with their riposte of “We hate reggae”.
Gartside, having openly acknowledged his love for Jacques Derrida - with a song named after him - uses The Sweetest Girl as an exploration of how a word loses definition through overuse, explicitly the word ‘girl’ in pop songs, through Derrida's methods of deconstruction. “The strongest words in each belief. Find out what’s behind it.”5
Undoubtedly clever but not the sort of adult we're talking about. Too adult. We want grown up, not too-fucking-clever-by-half-thank-you-very-much adult.
Being Boring is an examination of time, and our place in time. Albeit through the life of a specific protagonist. It is also placed in time. Each verse name checks a decade. The twenties, the seventies and finally the nineties, when the song was released. It is a product of its time. Charting the progression of AIDS through the gay community, Tennant's escape from it, and if you want to read things into it how age makes you ‘boring but safe’.
Attention to detail. Neil Tennant didn't find fame until thirty. He started as a music journalist for the pop focused Smash Hits magazine in the eighties. I suspect his graceful and distanced handling of fame comes from spending a decade or so on the outside looking in. Watching the vanities of pop stars. And the courage to appear intelligent over sexy. Arch even. Very arch. The archest.
Most pop stars are content with repeating their hits, performing them in the same manner as the original, as if time has stood still. Let's be honest, we want them to. Nobody wants Rick Ashely to go jungle with Never Gonna Give You Up on his 90s revival tour.
Our awareness of our place in time is the kernel this ramble is trying to hone in on. I was struck by the sense that Tennant is acutely aware of this, performing, reproducing the same song live every time for thirty one years. He'd better. Gran Canaria being the gay hotspot of Spain means The Pet Shop Boys are playing la capital. I have tickets. If they don't play it I'll be mightily miffed.
Over the course of singing it for three decades he has made two changes to the lyric6. Both amends to signify his place as a performer singing a song that itself is placed in a particular time. Acknowledging his ageing is moving him continuously forward from the song's original conception.
In 1994 there was a small but significant change to the emphasis in the couplet “All the people I was kissing, some are here and some are missing, in the 1990s” to “All the people I was kissing, some are here but some are missing”. They are still missing. They will always be missing.
Then starting in 2000 when the nineties were over it was updated to "All the people I was kissing, some are here but some were missing, by the 1990s. An awareness of his place in time, and the song's place in its own time. Attention to detail.
Neil Tennant is 67. I am not used to pop stars being 67. Admittedly Rod Stewart is still going, behaving as if he’s still a face. I see no concession to age, he’s still fighting photographers.
Without getting Heidegger on your arse and spouting “Being in time” — OK, I did try, but there’s an awful lot of incomprehensible German to read through just to get one pithy quote out of it about falling — it seems we are living in time extended beyond the three score and ten our cultural models allow. Men at thirty in t-shirts with collections of unopened action figures, singers of 67 years in coats made of plastic straws stoically not raising an eyebrow.
I wanted to factor in an article from Metro7 I read about how the age of being old has moved forward - now it’s your eighties or nineties. But it turns out the research is from a company that makes adventure games for grandparents on half term. So let’s not go there.
Real and very serious research is going into extending our lifespans, and a great deal of money is being thrown at it. Jeff Bezos is funding one research organisation. Being somewhat glib, I would welcome death gladly, with open arms, if it escapes a universe with an eternal Bezos, Branson, and Musk in it. We are now at a point where ageing has been listed as a disease to be cured in the International Classification of Diseases. It’s disease number ICD-11 in fact.8
The more sensible researchers in the field call it extending our healthspan. We are here for longer. It seems we no longer fit our age. Either the aeon or the number of our years. We are seen as old too quickly in the accelerating quest for youth, while still feeling unready for old age, wondering how we got to be here so quickly. The terms child, teenager, adult, retiree don’t describe our blurred states of existence. The boundary between middle and old age grows ever more liminal.
We need new definitions, models, examples of how to behave, what to expect as our health spans extend. I salute Neil Tennant for showing us how to live in extended time so graciously.
Speaking of extended time here’s a really clumsy segue into talking about Netflix longform series.
My friend Isabella told me this week that “Boy Swallows Universe” is being turned into a Netflix series9. I panicked. I wanted to feature Trent Dalton’s novel in a future edition. Once I had worked out what I wanted to say about it.
But there's little point in featuring a book after it’s been televised.
Boy Swallows Universe is of course a bildungsroman (if you've just subscribed don't worry, move along). The same friend recommended I read the novel. I tried. Twice. Finding it hard to get beyond the first few pages. On third attempt I was hooked. It’s an audacious read. Bold flavours. It’s also interesting because it has a distinctly Australian voice. You can draw a direct line between Peter Carey’s “Illywhacker” through Steve Toltz’s “A Fraction of the Whole” to “Boy Swallows Universe”. In the postscript Dalton mentions A Fraction of the Whole being an influence, and I recommend you read the postscript too. It shines a light.
While I read it I could see it so easily being turned into a film. Perhaps someone Spielberg-y directing. It turns out I am a product of my time: a Netflix series. Of course.
The on-demand longform series is the most exciting development since, one could say television, but it’s obvious now that TV was a step backwards from cinema. On-demand longform is a format ideally suited to book adaptations. Two limitations from television have been removed, trimming away superfluous filler and fluff. The more noticeable of the two is the number of episodes in a season. Breaking Bad debuted with seven episodes10. The correct number for the length of story it had to tell. It’s unknown if it's a coincidence that the total of 62 episodes matches the position of the cancer curing element Samarium in the periodic table.11
The other less noticeable restraint is episode length. Without the restriction of scheduling there’s no requirement to pad scenes to reach or halt at an exact number of minutes, to the second. No need to cut away at dialogue in important scenes. So I’m excited to see Boy Swallows Universe, and being given all the extended time it needs. But as always, read the book first. Bildungsroman or not, it’s a ripping yarn.
Given all this rumination of sex and death, and the emergence of an editing lyrics thread I’ll sign out with this gem. The Beach Boys released as a b-side the song "Never Learn Not to Love".
Shortly after release Dennis Wilson awoke to find a bullet on his bed.
Charles Manson would fess up with the words “I gave him a bullet because he changed the words to my song”. It appears Dennis had chosen to rewrite Manson’s little ditty “Cease to Exist". Never Learn Not to Love to Cease to Exist. Sex and death indeed.12
Guess Wilson found it "too macabre".
This week’s recommendation
“Boy Swallows Universe” by Trent Dalton
https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/boy-swallows-universe-trent-dalton?variant=32546606088270
Buy here
“Being Boring” by The Pet Shop Boys
Video by Bruce Weber, which everyone loves, but I always found rather vacuous and pallid considering the sincerity of the song, as if he never got past the line “teenage parties”. Like only filming the Charleston for The Great Gatsby.
My gratitude to Marcin Wichary’s excellent and elegant 10yearsofbeingboring.com where I first read about the lyrics being updated.
https://10yearsofbeingboring.com/lyrics/information
https://10yearsofbeingboring.com/lyrics/differences
https://10yearsofbeingboring.com/picture/lyrics/23
Further reading and listening
“A fraction of the whole” by Steve Toltz
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/56178/a-fraction-of-the-whole/9780141031828.html
Buy here
“Illywhacker” by Peter Carey
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/24038/illywhacker-by-peter-carey/
Buy here
“Heaven” by the Talking Heads
I have deliberately chosen the version from Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense”, because it’s the greatest concert film ever, fact, and whose work helped this make this blog happen. A medium lengthed story. For another post.
“The Sweetest Girl” by Scritti Politti
“Le Moribond” by Jacques Brel (did you think I wouldn’t?)
References
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/aug/05/pet-shop-boys-being-boring
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200121-why-pet-shop-boys-are-still-the-cleverest-men-in-pop which is where I pinched the photo of Neil Tennant from, no credit visible, I looked, this is my hobby so please be nice Mr Photographer and Mr Lawyer.
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7131622/
A nod of gratitude to "researcher" Fatima Fletcher for the age as disease reference.
Can't fault the connections here Jules. The ransacking of chanson to make popular English-language hits must be a constant source of irk for so many French artists. I've always thought of the PSB's as one of life's brilliant but benign live acts. Until their gig in Singapore was closed down by gun wielding police. Too much of the wrong type of sex its seems threatened the safety of all us I think was the message the Government wanted to convey.