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Love Is the Law

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2024
Original album - Nonetheless
Producer - James Ford
Subsequent albums - none
Other releases - none

Is this a song about prostitution, in which "love" is simply a euphemism for "sex," or does it use prostitution as an extended metaphor, enabling the Pet Shop Boys to employ language and imagery commonly associated with the world's oldest profession to make their points about love? Possibly both.

The final song on Nonetheless is, at least to the ears of this listener, its most profound. Regarding its inspiration, Neil told interviewer Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone (May 24, 2024) that he "was reading this massive biography about Oscar Wilde that came out just before lockdown. Oscar Wilde, after he comes out of prison, ends up in Nice, in the south of France, and he’s sitting beside the Promenade des Anglais, watching all the sexual transactions taking place." So it would appear that "Love Is the Law" is largely concerned with such "sexual transactions."

The music is serious-sounding, even ominous, as well as deceptively complicated. The syncopation of its block piano chords, often striking slightly ahead of the beat, creates an atmosphere of agitation and foreboding. For their part, the lyrics blend philosophy and politics. Their central contention is that "Love is the law that must be obeyed," and any attempts to circumvent it are both futile and unnatural. The chorus is particularly striking:

Love is the law
But you can't regulate it
The desire is so strong
And you won't moderate it

As they've suggested several times before in their songs (as in "Love Comes Quickly" and "Before"), the Boys maintain that, while love may not come to everybody, when it does come, it's inescapable ("Catch it like a cold / No one is immune"). Whether found in romantic getaways ("Such happy days spent in idleness / Now the sea is warm and the wine is young") or in more venal transactions ("While every night there's a busy trade"), love will have its way.

While we're on the subject of venal transactions, this song is replete with sexual innuendo as well as specific references to prostitution: "Love's a profession plied beneath the moon,… a trick of the trade,… a profession as old as time." Yet the overall tone, not to mention various other lines, would suggest that there's a lot more to this song than a mere paean to sex for hire. After all, prostitution is, at least in most cases and places, very much against the law, whereas this song staunchly asserts that love is the law. Or is that precisely the tension the Boys are aiming for?

Neil and Chris are issuing a firm warning. As with any law, there's a penalty for violating it, and "every day the price is paid." Any individual or society standing in its way is doomed to failure or perhaps even outright disaster. For love is the law.

Annotations

In the Rolling Stone article mentioned above, Neil doesn't state the title or author of the "massive biography about Oscar Wilde that came out just before lockdown." But my guess is that he's referring to Oscar Wilde: A Life by Matthew Sturgis. It's more than 800 pages long, which is indeed pretty massive, and it was published in late 2018 (before the lockdown or even before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19) in the U.K. although its U.S. edition apparently didn't appear until late 2021.
It's possible that the title line "Love Is the Law" is derived from the 1909 book Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law) by the English occultist and writer Aleister Crowley, which contains the line "Love is the law, love under will." I don't believe this is necessarily Neil's source—he may certainly have come up with the line independently, and it had previously been used by others as well (such as the 1982 song and album Love Is the Law by the U.S. New Wave band The Suburbs)—but there's no disputing that Crowley wrote those words more than a century ago.
"a trick of the trade" – "A trick of the trade" is familiar English-language slang for any specialized technique (a "trick") that someone, especially a professional (as in a "trade"), uses to complete a task more efficiently or with greater quality. For instance, as a website designer, I often use the HTML code of an existing webpage as a template for a new page, which thereby saves me a good deal of time and effort. It's a trick of the trade. But in this song the phrase carries double-entendre sexual connotations since both "trick" and "trade" are also words commonly used in prostitution, "trick" referring both to a client and to the activity performed with that client, and "trade" referring to the profession of prostitution in general. "Trade" has also long been used specifically among gay men to refer to other men—sometimes but not always "straight," but usually at least "straght passing"—who are willing to have casual or even totally anonymous sex for compensation, often monetary.
"You've a head for business / And a heart for crime" – Possibly a conscious takeoff on a line famously spoken by Melanie Griffith's character in the 1988 film Working Girl: "I have a head for business and a body for sin." It may be worth noting that, although the plot of the film and Griffith's character have nothing to do with prostitution, the phrase "working girl" has long served as a polite euphemism "prostitute."
The second half of the chorus—

That one's a gambler
This one's a thief
Both make it easy
And that's a relief

—is somewhat more difficult to interpret than the first. But I believe it's suggesting that even if one's lover is in some ways far less than ideal (and, let's face it, nobody's perfect), if there's truly love, then it's easy to love them. And if that sounds like circular logic, it's only because of love's often contradictary nature. Who can explain love? Of course, if you take the view that the song is "about" prostitution, then these lines make a little more sense, alluding to sexual clients from the perspective of a prostitute.

Toward the end of "Love Is the Law," Neil's fading repetitions of the title line blend into a concluding sequence based on a portion of the famed choral setting of Psalm 51, Miserere mei, Deus, by the Italian composer-priest Gregorio Allegri (c. 1582-1625). Neil has affirmed that this segment was created using their "Neilotron." Allegri's Miserere, and a great many religious choral works, including countless hymns frequently employ plagal cadences (popularly known as "Amen cadences"), harmonic subdominant to tonic sequences. This strongly hints at religious overtones in interpreting the song, something that the repeated line "Love is the law that must be obeyed" does as well—a complementary though hardly essential aspect of the song's core message. Incidentally, it's interesting that both the first and last songs on Nonetheless have such "classical connections." Even more interestingly—and somewhat surprisingly—the Boys would subsequently release their own adaptation of Allegri's Miserere itself on the expanded edition of Nonetheless.

List cross-references

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