We're All Criminals Now
Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2009
Original album - Format
Producer - Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - bonus track with single "Love etc."; Yes 2017 reissue Further Listening 2008-2010 bonus disc
This song was completed in early January 2009, after work on the album Yes was wrapped up. As Neil put it on the official PSB website, "Yes, we're still banging on about the erosion of freedoms" in the U.K. in the wake of the "war on terror"—a subject that the Boys had begun to explore in earnest with the previous album's "Integral." Elaborating in a subsequent interview with The Sun, he added, "We are all under constant surveillance and are all treated as being potentially guilty, as if we are about to commit some kind of crime." Hence the title.
The Boys have stated that the lyrics, composed in the first person, were originally written from the perspective of Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian national who was shot and killed by London police at the Stockwell subway station on July 22, 2005. The police had mistakenly identified him as a likely terrorist and suicide bomber. Neil and Chris, however, decided to modify the lyrics before the final recording, instead casting the narrator as a subway passenger who witnesses this event.
The song has a surprisingly cheery, upbeat sound despite this somber backdrop and lyrics describing "cameras on my back, suddenly hearing sirens sounding panic attack." The narrator expresses his dismay with an ironically flippant "Hey, hey, don't ask me how. We've changed, we're all criminals now." In fact, the entire track, if you look just beneath its glossy surface, has a bitterly ironic tone. The instrumentation is in on this bleak joke. A case in point: the flute accompaniment (or synths/samplers mimicking flutes) in the chorus, which strongly suggests both extremely inappropriate levity and much more reasonable whistling in the dark. If the lyrics seem slightly paranoiac ("We're being framed"), it's only because the Boys are saying, in effect, that a little paranoia in the current sociopolitical climate is entirely justified.
Annotations
- "Walking along the high street" - In Britain the main or most important street in a town is often referred to as the "high street." (In the United States, the same street might be described even more informally as the "main drag.") The Boys had previously used the term in "Suburbia" and in the unreleased song "Oh, Dear."
- "Waiting for a bus in Stockwell" – Stockwell is a district in southwestern London. At one time among the city's poorest neighborhoods, in recent years it has been undergoing economic revitalization.
- "Police shot someone dead" – As noted above, this song was inspired by the July 22, 2005 shooting at the Stockwell subway station of immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes by London police, who were acting under the suspicion that he might have been a prospective suicide bomber. The police (and the public in general) were on edge: first on account of a coordinated series of terrorist attacks earlier that same month (July 7) targeting rush-hour commuters, during which 52 people (including the four suicide bombers) were killed; and, second, because of further bombing attempts that had failed the previous day (July 21). Menezes had been mistakenly identified as one of the fugitive suspects, for whom the police were searching.
- "We've been framed" – The idea of framing an innocent person is nearly always applied to individual instances where evidence has been fabricated or "planted" in such a way as to make a particular innocent person appear to be guilty of a crime. The Boys, however, stretch this definition out to society at large, suggesting that all (or at least most) of us are innocent people who have been "framed" by our modern culture to appear guilty. Rather than being innocent until proven guilty, we're being treated as guilty until proven innocent. The use of "frame" as a verb to describe the specific act of making an innocent person appear guilty dates to the early 1900s. Its antecedents, however, can be traced all the way back to the early 1500s, when the notion of "framing" something—that is, building its support structure—began to be used metaphorically to describe the process of constructing a false story for wicked purposes.
List cross-references
- Evidence that death haunts "the Fundamental era"
- Real places mentioned by name in PSB songs
- The Pet Shop Boys' 10 greatest protest songs
- What it's about: Neil's succinct statements on what a song is "about"
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