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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. 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 philsophy 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

According to an article in the May 2024 issue of Record Collector, "Love Is the Law" concerns "Oscar Wilde's post-imprisonment sojourn in Nice." I don't know where this assertion comes from since the song itself makes no mention of Wilde or any obvious allusion to him. Could it have come from Neil himself? Besides, the writer of the article—or perhaps Neil—may be mistaken about Nice. After his release from prison, Wilde did spend some time in the south of France near Nice, but he did not live in Nice itself. Wilde did, however, live for a time at the Hôtel de Nice in Paris before moving to his final address at the Hôtel d'Alsace, also in Paris. So it may be that someone has confused the Hôtel de Nice with the city of Nice. Then again, perhaps there are other misunderstandings at work here, such as my own.
"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.
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."

List cross-references

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