He and Lowe prove that despite being past their salad days in the 1980s, they could still grow with the times and have something interesting and smart to say.
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Neil Tennant’s soft, ethereal voice-an oft-deadpan instrument-injects a distanced and witty irony to his singing. The Pet Shop Boys adopted a persona of the slouchy eccentrics who casts a critical and withering eye on their surroundings.
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(For one thing, Bush used queer folks as a wedge issue to pander to his conservative base and win votes.) This moment in contemporary history was the perfect-yet distressing-inspiration for the album. Bush (whose destructive partnership had tragic and fatal consequences in the Middle East) the revelations of torture and prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and the ongoing work of queer rights activists. It found its place at a time in politics that was beset by division and rancor that included the “War on Terror” the war in Iraq the hawkish governments of Tony Blair and George W. More so than any other Pet Shop Boys album, Fundamental is one of the duo’s most politically charged albums. While the Boys (Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, both singers and multi-instrumentalist) continued to make excellent music throughout the 1990s, it’s 2006’s Fundamental that engages most with the political/social conditions and environments of their Thatcher-era 80s period. With their first four albums- Please (1986), Actually (1987), Introspective (1988), and Behaviour (1990)-Pet Shop Boys took a smart, literate, and heavily ironic look at the 1980s. Though many queer youngsters may not have had their teachers to turn to during this difficult time, they had songs like the Bronski Beat’s “ Smalltown Boy” or “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. In the 1980s, artists like Boy George, Pete Burns, Marilyn, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, George Michael, and Madonna were all playing with concepts of gender, queerness, and androgyny. Strangely, in this restrictive and oppressive atmosphere, pop music responded with a resounding queer roar. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life. Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the UK at the time, said of queerness, “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay…. Moral panic over children being recruited into homosexuality led the conservative government to pursue the law. (Some schools believed that they had to follow the law as well, and libraries avoided materials that featured explicit homosexual content). The moody dance and synth ballads scored a period of contemporary queer history wrestling with the AIDS pandemic and a government that (in 1988) enacted Section 28: a law that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities.
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From 1986 to 1990, Pet Shop Boys released a series of albums that spoke to Thatcherite England.