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Monkey Business

Writers - Lowe/Tennant/Price
First released - 2020
Original album - Hotspot
Producer - Stuart Price
Subsequent albums - Smash
Other releases - single (didn't appear on the overall UK singles chart but hit #1 for UK physical sales)

Pet Shop Boys get funky.

They had initially worked on this track, "pre-lyrics," during their recording sessions for Super. When Neil first heard the music Chris had created, he thought it was a remix of that album's "Pazzo!" But Chris corrected him, describing it as "a new track using the same sounds." By the time of Hotspot and Neil's addition of lyrics, it had evolved into a virtual throwback to the 'seventies, evoking a funky, frivolous take on disco.

Neil, as he so often does in his lyrics, adopts the role of another character. This time it's based on a man they encountered by chance in front of their hotel in Austin, Texas, during their visit in 2016 on the Super Tour. Recognizing them, he asked what they were doing in town, and they replied that they were appearing in concert. In exchange, they asked what he was doing in town, and he responded, "I'm here on monkey business—just playing around." Neil took it as inspiration for this song's narrative persona: a shamelessly hard-partying, globe-trotting hipster who lives for the mantra of sex, drugs (at least alcohol), and rock'n'roll, or something closely akin to it. As the chorus goes, whenever he arrives in town, he announces:

I'm looking for monkey business
Just playing around
I'm here on monkey business
Look what I've found

Asserting his legendary status as a world-class partier, he insists that everyone around him join in on the revelry:

Bring me margaritas, champagne, and red wine
We're gonna have a party where we all cross the line

As one might expect, the music itself sounds like the soundtrack to just such a party. Neil has described this as "a groove song"—which is, from my own perspective, one of those things that are elusively hard to define but which you know when you see or hear them. To say a "groove song" is irresistibly danceable captures only part of it. Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars's 2014 smash "Uptown Funk" is a groove song. So is Daft Punk's big hit "Get Lucky" from the previous year. A groove song is all about the groove. Take away the groove—that hooky, relentlessly danceable quality—and there's nothing left. But it really doesn't need anything else. It's lightweight fun and doesn't pretend to be anything more. Of course, if one is inclined to ascribe to the Pet Shop Boys ulterior motives, such as employing the groove to deliver critical commentary on it, or at least on the ilk of the lyric's hard-partying narrator, then it is indeed something more. Consider, for instance, the line "There are diamonds in the sky that shine for me." The sense of entitlement those words suggest are something the Boys would hardly seem to approve of, as evidenced by the Elysium track "Ego Music." Regardless, make of it what you will.

Co-written with producer Stuart Price, "Monkey Business" is the third single from Hotspot (following "Dreamland" and "Burning the Heather"), formally released as such in February 2020, but unveiled to the public in early January, in advance of the album. The music video—the first featuring Neil and Chris "in motion" since 2013's "Thursday"—was premiered one day before the release of Hotspot.

Annotations

The English-language idiom "monkey business" dates back at least to 1883, its first known appearance in print (in the novel Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa by U.S. author, publisher, and politician George Wilbur Peck), although it's quite likely to have existed in popular speech before then. It was then and still is a rather lighthearted means of referring to silly, disreputable, and/or dishonest behavior. It's possible that it grew out of an earlier British idiom, "monkey tricks," used by parents to describe bad behavior by children, which dates back at least to the early 1800s. Monkey Business also served as the title of the Marx Brothers' third movie, released in 1931.
Diamonds in the sky – One of my site visitors has suggested that this phrase in the song is likely borrowed from Rihanna's 2012 hit "Diamonds," which includes the lines "We're like diamonds in the sky" and "We're beautiful like diamonds in the sky." Therefore when the narrator of "Monkey Business" says that "diamonds in the sky… shine for me" and that he's going to "pick them one by one," he's metaphorically saying that he's intending to pick up beautiful, glamorous women like Rihanna—or at least like the ones referred to in Rihanna's song. Of course, as another site visitor has pointed out, Rihanna's song isn't the first or even the most famous in pop history to associate diamonds with the sky. The classic 1967 Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" does so as well. In light of the "party monster" narrative persona of the PSB song, the fact "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" has, since its inception, been rumored to be a "coded" reference to the psychedelic drug LSD (which the Beatles have always denied) might be particularly pertinent.
EINGANG! – The "Monkey Business" CD single has a gatefold sleeve that, when opened, reveals a photo of a wall (or door) with the word "EINGANG!" in all-caps. That's "ENTRANCE!" in German, likely suggesting the entrance to the club where the song's narrator is currently (or prospectively) partying.

Mixes/versions

Officially released

Mixer: Stuart Price
- Album version (4:08)
- Radio edit (3:09)
- Instrumental (4:08)
- Mixer: Prins Thomas
  - Prins Thomas diskomiks (8:45)
- Mixer: Friend Within (Lee Mortimer)
  - Friend Within Remix (5:45)

List cross-references

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