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Love Is a Bourgeois Construct

Writers - Nyman/Tennant/Lowe/Purcell
First released - 2013
Original album - Electric
Producer - Stuart Price
Subsequent albums - Inner Sanctum, Smash
Other releases - single (UK #105, US Dance #38)

A March 20, 2013 posting on Facebook, accompanied by an evidentiary photograph, indicated that Chris and Neil had met earlier that day with British composer Michael Nyman, best known for his many film scores. He shares with the Pet Shop Boys the fact that both had composed their own scores for Battleship Potemkin: PSB in 2005 and Nyman in 2012. And he noted that the Boys had written a new song titled "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" based in part on the track "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds" from Nyman's score for the 1982 film The Draughtsman's Contract. (Nyman referred to it as an upcoming single, which turned out to be correct. It would be released as such in September 2013.) Interestingly, since "Chasing Sheep…" is itself based on an earlier work—namely a melodic theme from the Prelude to Act III, Scene 2 of English composer Henry Purcell’s 1691 opera King Arthur—and (as Neil has noted) the track's intro was played from the Purcell sheet music, it's Purcell, not Nyman, who earned the co-writing credit for the song on the album packaging. But, perhaps as something of a compromise, Nyman received the credit instead of Purcell on the single. (Hence I've credited both of them above.)

Neil has also said (in an interview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia) that this song was inspired by a novel by the British author David Lodge. He was referring to Nice Work (1988), which, like much of Lodge's other writings, satirizes academia (among other things). The narrative persona of the song is much like one of its principal characters, at least with regard to their attitudes and expressions, as revealed in this specific passage from the novel—a conversation between the protagonist and a feminist university professor with whom he has fallen in love:

"I love you," he says…. "I've been in love with you for weeks."
"There's no such thing," she says. "It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy."
"Haven't you ever been in love, then?"
"When I was younger," she says, "I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes."

As Neil told Idolator interviewer Robbie Daw, he drew inspiration from this passage for the "story" of the song, which concerns a man who has led "a very respectable bourgeois life," but whose wife has just left him. "He’s seen where it’s got him, … so he’s going to give up the bourgeois life and lie around and be lazy and read and not try hard anymore."

This is the longest track on Electric, clocking in at a little more than six-and-a-half minutes. Musically, the song is very much in the semi-epic mode of such past favorites as "Go West," "A Red Letter Day," and "Delusions of Grandeur," with that mood derived largely from the fanfare-like components and chord structure drawn from the Nyman/Purcell work. It opens like something the circa 1969 Moody Blues might have produced if they'd been transported forty-some years into the future and commissioned to compose a Saturday night disco anthem. The lyrics are rather tongue-in-cheek (accentuated by that music), with Neil assuming his occasional mantle of "unreliable narrator," whose words shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value except perhaps as a negative commentary on the character's personality and viewpoint. Neil has even specifically pointed out that we shouldn't assume from the title of the song that he agrees with its philosophy.

That narrator is terribly bitter about a recent relationship, so much so that he strikes a distinct note of sour grapes:

When you walked out you did me a favor
It's absolutely clear to me
That love is a bourgeois construct
Just like they said at university

The narrator continues, "I've given up the bourgeoisie," having decided now to coast along with little or no further ambitions in life: "I'll just get along with what I've got." If nothing else, there's time for relaxation and contemplation:

Now I'm digging through my student paperbacks
Flicking through Karl Marx again
Searching for the soul of England
Drinking tea like Tony Benn

Now, one might wonder what disappointment in love has to do with rejecting the bourgeoisie. More to the point, in what way, precisely, is love a "bourgeois construct"? Karl Marx argued that a bourgeois patriarch, in order to be able to clearly identify his heir(s) so that his accumulated wealth might be passed on to the "right" persons, required the sort of monogamous relationship with which love is traditionally associated. In other words, love helps perpetuate the class system. It is therefore in the interests of the bourgeois middle class to encourage love. But the narrator, his lover having walked out on him—possibly even feeling that he has lost his ability to pass on wealth to his heirs—is now so embittered with love that he has decided to "go whole hog," so to speak, and reject what Marxists would regard as its capitalistic socio-economic underpinnings.

Toward the end, however (spoiler alert), Neil employs a clever old lyricist's trick of using a single line to subvert nearly everything previously stated in the song: "I've given up the bourgeoisie / Until you come back to me" (my emphasis). In other words, all that stuff about love being a bourgeois construct will get tossed out the window if love only reasserts itself once again.

Annotations

• The songwriting credits for this song read "Tennant/Lowe/Purcell" on the Electric album, but they read "Nyman/Tennant/Lowe" on the "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" single. As stated above, I've combined them here to read "Nyman/Tennant/Lowe/Purcell." (See additional notes below for more information about both Henry Purcell and Michael Nyman.)
  
  
• bourgeois – The French word bourgeois (roughly pronounced boozh-wah), the adjectival form of bourgeoisie, entered the English language centuries ago to refer to middle-class—especially upper-middle-class—persons, lifestyles, ideals, aspirations, and attitudes. Thanks largely to its often rather disparaging usage by social commentators (perhaps most notably Karl Marx) and artists, it has acquired strongly negative connotations even in common parlance. That is, the word "bourgeois," at least in English, is most commonly used to refer disdainfully to middle-class associations. Therefore to say "love is a bourgeois construct" doesn't say much of anything good about love at all, instead suggesting that love isn't "real" at all except as an idea "constructed" by middle-class persons for thoroughly middle-class reasons and to achieve thoroughly middle-class objectives.
  
  
• As one of my site visitors has astutely pointed out, if in the album's preceding song "Bolshy" we find (as I have argued) the suggestion of a leftist radical who may be confounded by the "ownership" implicit in love, in this song we find a thoroughly middle-class character so confounded by a seeming lack of ownership in love that he starts assuming a more "leftist" stance. In other words, the two songs seem almost to be conceptual "flipsides" of each other.
  
  
• Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was an English composer of the Baroque period and style, widely regarded as the greatest English composer prior to the nineteenth century. He composed both sacred and secular music, including operas, overtures, sonatas, and hundreds of songs, hymns, and anthems. His 1691 opera (sometimes referred to as a "semi-opera") King Arthur provided a melodic theme that was employed by Michael Nyman for "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds," on which "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" is in turn partly based. The Boys took advantage of this fact by making use of Purcell's sheet music for the song's introduction.
  
  One of my site visitors has suggested that Chris and Neil may have chosen this particular musical phrase from Purcell for more than exclusively "musical" reasons. That particular melodic theme introduces the famed (at least in classical music circles) "Frost Scene" from King Arthur, which attributes to love the power to melt even the coldest of hearts, climaxing with the chorus "'Tis love that has warmed us." Could the Boys have chosen to quote this Purcell theme partly because the conclusion of their song also suggests that the return of love might "re-warm" the narrator, who has grown so cold from its loss?
  
  
• Michael Nyman (born 1944) is a British composer known for works in what is generally termed a "minimalist" style. Although, as noted above, he is best known for his many film scores, he has also composed (during the period 1963-2012) numerous pieces of "serious" music, among them orchestral works (including six concertos*), chamber music (including four string quartets), and seven operas. Perhaps his best-known, most popular film score is the one for The Piano (1993), for which he received a Golden Globe Award and other honors. His other film scores include The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero's Books, Gattaca, The End of the Affair, and The Draughtsman's Contract, the latter of which includes "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds." His compositions at times draw unabashedly upon the works of both classical and popular composers, ranging from Mozart to Lennon/McCartney. He became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2008.

  *Yes, I know full well that "concerti" is traditionally regarded as the plural of "concerto." I despise it, however, just as I despise "octopi" as the plural of "octopus." (In fact, it's worse since I'll admit that "octopuses" sounds somewhat more awkward than "concertos.") It's not English; in the case of concerti, it's Italian. I therefore exercise my prerogative as an educated writer of English and use the alternate word of my choice. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can break the so-called "rules" of language as long as you know when you're doing it, why you're doing it, and how to do it well.
  

• The novel Nice Work (1988) by British author and former university professor David Lodge (born 1935) is, as noted above, a specific influence on this song. Nice Work is the final chapter in a satirical trilogy of novels written by Lodge in the 1970s and '80s, the first two novels of which are Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984). Collectively these books are referred to as The Campus Trilogy on account of their university setting.
  
  
• "Speaking English as a foreign language" - One of my site visitors asked me about the meaning of this line. Considering that the narrator is almost certainly a native speaker of English, why would he be speaking it "as a foreign language"? It's simply an instance of figurative language: a metaphorical means of describing his distressed state of mind—and its effect on his behavior—in the wake of his recently collapsed love affair. As other surrounding lines indicate ("Putting my feet up a lot," "I can't be bothered to wash the dishes or remake the bed," "I’ve been hanging out with various riff-raff," and so on), he now finds himself doing things he would never have done before, as well as not doing things he would normally do. His life has turned upside-down, his world topsy-turvy. So this otherwise articulate man, fluent in English, is nevertheless now finding it difficult to express himself intelligently. In short, at least from a somewhat exaggerated figurative perspective, English now seems like a foreign language to him.
  
  Incidentally, with this phrase Neil may also be engaging in a playful takeoff on the term "Teaching English as a Foreign Language"—often abbreviated as TEFL—which several of my British site visitors have pointed out as having often been touted in recent past decades to unemployed and/or disaffected young adults in the U.K. as a means of killing two birds with one stone: earning a living while traveling to and living in other countries. Perhaps that option is on the mind of the disaffected (and perhaps also now unemployed, seeing as how he's avowedly "putting [his] feet up a lot") narrator of this song.
  
  
• "Any words that I haven't forgot" - Immediately after the preceding line ("Speaking English as a foreign language"), Neil's narrator uses the clause "I haven't forgot," which sounds glaringly incorrect to formal American ears, for whom "I haven't forgotten" would be more traditionally acceptable grammar. Actually, however, "forgot" and "forgotten" are both regarded as grammatically correct past participle forms of the verb "to forget" in both British and American English, although there are some regional distinctions. "Forgotten" is decidedly "preferred" in the States, whereas it's far less cut and dried in Britain. There it seems that the traditionally correct "forgotten" is increasingly regarded nowadays as quaint, formal, old-fashioned, and perhaps even somewhat "stuffy," while "forgot" is widely considered more informal, more modern, and less pretentious. So, on the one hand, maybe the choice of Neil and/or his narrator to say "I haven't forgot" is quite ordinary and carries no special significance. Then again, it's possible that it's a very conscious decision on Neil's part to have his well-educated narrator use "forgot" as the past participle to represent his intentional rejection of the tradition and "correctness" of his academic background. Instead he's embracing a more modern way of speaking—maybe indeed even "speaking English as a foreign language"—in keeping with the new attitudes he seems to be adopting in the song.
  
  
• "What's the point when I could doss instead?" - The word "doss" is British slang—not at all used in American English—meaning "slack off" or "take it easy." It's also sometimes used to refer to taking a nap or just going to sleep. (It can even mean "useless" or "stupid," but that's not how it's being used in this song.)
  
  
• "I've been hanging out with various riff-raff somewhere on the Goldhawk Road" - Goldhawk Road is a busy, highly commercial street in West London, some sections along the way of which have decidedly seedy reputations, although the street in general has undergone a largely positive transformation in recent years. Jude Rogers, writing for The Guardian, had suggested that the mention of Goldhawk Road in this song might be a playful nod to British director Peter Greenaway, in whose 1980 film The Falls it figures prominently. (Greenaway also directed the aforementioned The Draughtsman's Contract, for which Michael Nyman composed the also aforementioned "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds.") Neil, however, has noted that he actually wasn't familiar with the earlier Greenaway film before Rogers mentioned it in her article. Rather, he chose to refer to Goldhawk Road because it's quite near the studio in Acton, West London, where the Boys worked with Stuart Price recording Electric. He therefore sometimes traveled on it on his way to said studio. Mentioning it also appealed to him because its longtime disreputable reputation befitted what he was trying to convey in the song.
  
  
• Karl Marx (1818-1883) - A profoundly influential German philosopher of socio-economics whose writings (particularly The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital) formed the basis for subsequent socialist and communist movements, most dramatically manifested in the establishment of the Soviet Union (1922) and the People's Republic of China (1949).
  
  
• "Drinking tea like Tony Benn" - Popularly known as Tony Benn, Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (1925-2014), formerly Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician. In the early 1960s, his desire to renounce his hereditary title in order to serve in the House of Commons—from which his peerage disqualified him—was a key factor leading to the passage of the Peerage Act of 1963, which permitted hereditary peers to renounce their titles. This and other aspects of his strongly left-leaning career have helped make him one of the most popular politicians in Britain. It's thus only fitting that the seemingly bourgeoisie-rejecting narrator of "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" should ostensibly choose to emulate Tony Benn—who, as it turns out, passed away less than a year after the Boys name-checked him in this song. The "drinking tea" reference is especially pertinent in light of the immediately preceding line: "Searching for the soul of England." To Americans and many others around the world—and, it would appear, to the English themselves—drinking tea seems a stereotypically and even quintessentially "English" thing to do. (In fact, according to Wikipedia, Benn even met his wife "over tea" and proposed to her just nine days later.) So to "drink tea like Tony Benn" is to behave in a quintessentially English (and bourgeois) manner. But it's also quintessentially Tony Benn; as asserted in his 1993 biography by Jad Adams, Benn was well known to be a teetotaler whose "tea-drinking habits were a frequent source of entertainment," including public jokes at his expense.
  
  
• There are many examples of that "clever old lyricist's trick" I refer to above—subverting an entire lyric with a single line toward the end. One of my all-time favorites, lovely in its casual simplicity and elegance, can be found in the 1968 song "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," in which lyricist Hal David (working with composer Burt Bacharach) has the narrator repeatedly assert why he or she is indeed never going to fall in love again, only to admit somewhat flippantly at the end, "So for at least until tomorrow, I'll never fall in love again." It renders everything previously said about not falling in love utterly absurd—which, of course, is the whole point.
  
  
• In 2017 the German singer Andreas Dorau released his tenth studio album, Die Liebe und der Ärger der Anderen (translated The Love and the Anger of Others). Its very first song, "Liebe ergibt keinen Sinn“ ("Love Makes No Sense“), includes the following lines:

  Liebe ist wenn man genau hinguckt
  Nichts weiter als nur ein bourgeoises Konstrukt

  Translated into English, that's "Love is, if you watch closely, nothing more than a bourgeois construct"—a direct, obvious, and all but indisputable allusion to the PSB song released roughly four years beforehand.
  

Mixes/Versions

Officially released

• Mixer: Stuart Price
• Album version (6:40)
• Daytime Radio Edit (4:02)
  • Released on an official promo CD
• Nighttime Radio Edit (4:10)
  • Released on an official promo CD, on the CD single, and in a digital bundle
• Instrumental (6:49)
  • Released on an official promo CD
• Inner Sanctum CD live version (6:43)
• Mixer: Dave Audé
  • Dave Audé Big Dirty Dub Remix aka Dave Audé Club Mix (6:16)
    • Released on CD and digital bundle
  • Dave Audé Vocal Mix aka Dave Audé Extended Vocal (6:47)
  • Dave Audé Big Dirty Dub Instrumental (6:17)
    • The above two mixes released on 12-inch vinyl
• Mixer: The Penelopes
  • The Penelopes Remix (7:00)
    • On the CD single, digital bundle, and 12-inch vinyl
  • The Penelopes Remix Radio Edit (4:09)
    • Released in a digital bundle
  • The Penelopes Dub (7:04)
  • Released on 12-inch vinyl
• Mixer: Claptone
  • Claptone Remix (7:00)
  • Claptone Instrumental (6:57)
  • On the CD single, digital bundle, and 12-inch vinyl
• Claptone Vocal Mix (7:00)
  • "Officially available" as a free download on SoundCloud
• Mixer: Little Boots
  • Little Boots Discothèque (6:50)
    • Released on CD and digital bundle
• Little Boots Discothèque Dub (6:51)
  • Released on CD

Official but unreleased

• Mixer: Dave Audé
  • Dave Audé Extended Instrumental (6:45)
  • Dave Audé Radio Edit (5:09)
• Mixer: Claptone
  • Claptone Radio Edit (3:29)
  • Clapton Radio Edit Instrumental (3:29)
• Mixer: Pet Shop Boys
  • October 9, 2013 KCRW radio session version (6:43)

List cross-references

• PSB songs based on classical compositions (and some others with "classical connections")
• PSB songs that have been used in TV commercials
• PSB songs with literary references
• PSB lyrics that include non-English words and phrases
• Real places mentioned by name in PSB songs
• Real people mentioned by name or title in PSB lyrics
• PSB songs that have been used in films and "non-musical" TV shows
• The Pet Shop Boys' greatest acts of deconstruction
• How PSB singles differ (if at all) from the album versions
• What it's about: Neil's succinct statements on what a song is "about"
• Early titles for Pet Shop Boys songs

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