Real Life Rock Top 10: July 15, 2024
Emma Stone refuses to quit, Lana Del Rey’s guitar, Jewish obstetricians, and (one of) Dickie Betts’s last words.
1. Pet Shop Boys, Nonetheless (Warner Records). Some years ago I took part in a pop festival in Málaga, Spain. I was on a small panel, but it was a huge operation; on the outdoor stage the Pet Shop Boys were headlining. It didn’t make sense to me, the night, the fireworks, the overloaded sound system. I could only picture the Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant singing and Chris Lowe on his synthesizers, never mind how many other people might be alongside of them, it had to be just those two, not on a stage but in a movie, a cabaret scene, at the back of a bar—put Lowe at a piano and they’d fit right into Babylon Berlin. At bottom it's always been the sound of thinking—of people thinking it over. What’s it all about? What’s it for? Is it just one day after another, or is there an end to point toward, something that justifies it all? Here, in Tennant’s five-minute memoir “New London Boy,” it’s a kid in the big city, his eyes widening at every lit-up sign, and after all the years he's not regretting it’s not like that anymore, that you can’t go back to where you ran away from home to get to. He’s thinking you can be seventy and glad you were in the right place at the right time, but not feel old, which is what, exactly? Nothing left to say? No way to find a new way to say what you’ve always said, which will change what you thought you meant? But they haven’t lost a step. With a broader terrain to cover, they could pick up speed.