Get It Online

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2013
Original album - (none)
Producer - Stuart Price
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - bonus track with the single "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct"

Released in September 2013 as a bonus track with the "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" single, this is, in keeping with the pattern set by the album Electric, a very "electronic-sounding" track—in the words of one site visitor, "very Kraftwerk-esque"—with sampled voices in various languages and a computer-generated or digitally distorted voice (with a hint of Chris's inflections, and sometimes sounding downright "Dalekish") singing the chorus, "Whatever I want, whenever I want, I can get it online." (That chorus is especially unusual in that Chris wrote its lyrics—a real PSB rarity.) Neil sings more of the lyrics, which prove to be an observational commentary on the revolution over the past two decades, greatly accelerated over just the past few years, in how we can so readily acquire over the internet almost anything we want, be it knowledge, physical goods, and even human contacts and relationships. In fact, the internet has, if anything, accentuated one of the driving forces of consumer culture: manufactured need.

Even if you don't need it
Get it anyway

Subsequent lines suggest even more pernicious aspects of online consumerism. For instance, "You might like this" is an obvious allusion to the way in which Amazon and other online retailers use information they gather about your purchasing habits to make facile, superficial assumptions about your tastes and thereby offer perhaps unwelcome recommendations. (If you like Pet Shop Boys, you'll probably like Erasure, too—right? I don't know about you, but I find such recommendations galling and presumptuous—even if, in that particular case, it happens to be accurate, at least for me. It's the principle that I find annoying: keeping track of my purchasing habits and making assumptions about me because of it.) Still later, we hear, "Find a sexual partner/You'll never be alone," alluding to the way in which the internet seems increasingly to serve for many people as a substitute for forming relationships and/or engaging in genuine interpersonal contact and caring. One can have hundreds of "Facebook friends" but few if any real friends he or she can actually touch.

The basic message of the song seems quite direct. The online phenomenon may appear to provide us with whatever we want whenever we want it, but its promise is little different from that of any other source of instant gratification: shallow, unfulfilling, and potentially self-destructive. While I'm surely reading into the song some of my own feelings about the internet—mixed blessing that it is—there can be little doubt that I do so at the Pet Shop Boys' prodding invitation. And if I may make a perhaps presumptuous assumption of my own, I'd be willing to bet my feelings on this subject closely match theirs. After all, if I remember correctly, didn't Neil once describe Facebook as "insidious"?

Annotations

At various points in the song, there are samples of male and female voices speaking certain phrases common to online commerce. In English they include "Proceed to checkout" and "You might like this," but they're spoken in other languages as well. So far I haven't been able to figure out most of these non-English phrases, but among them are:
- Proceder verificação geral - Brazilian Portuguese for "Proceed to checkout." In European Portuguese, it would apparently be more correctly rendered "Finalizar compra." This is likely another instance, as previously evidenced in "Bolshy," of the Boys using the internet (such as Google Translate) to come up with non-English translations of text, which is both deeply ironic and apropos given the subject matter of this song.
- Se você comprou isso, você pôde gostar deste - Brazilian (and somewhat faulty) Portuguese for "If you bought this, you might like this."
- 请继续退房 (Qing ji xu tui fang) - Flawed Mandarin Chinese for "Please continue to check out." Although this is a literal translation, an actual Mandarin Chinese speaker apparently wouldn't put it that way given the meaning of the sentence ("tui fang" actually refers to checking out of a hotel), but would instead use more precise and/or idiomatic choices for the words "continue" and "check out," resulting in 请进行结帐 (Qing jin xing jie zhang).
- 如果你买了这个，你可能会喜欢 (Ru guo ni mai le zhe ge, ni ke neng hui xi huan) - Mandarin Chinese for "If you bought this, you may like it" (and this time much closer to how a native speaker of the language would actually say it).
- Oформить заказ (Oformit' zakaz) - Russian for "Make an order," which in more idiomatic English would be "Place an order."
- Eсли вы купили это, вы могли бы это (Yesli vi koopili eto, vi moguli bi eto) - Russian for "If you have bought this, you might this," which is surely a flawed attempt at "If you have bought this, you might like this."
- إذا كنت قد اشتريت هذا (etha kent qed ashetreyt hatha) and قد ترغب هذه (qed tergheb hath) - Arabic for "If you have bought this" and "You might want this" as two separate clauses. (Please note that my extreme ignorance of Arabic makes my attempts at transcription to the Latin alphabet very questionable!)
It sounds as though some other languages may be employed in this way as well.

List cross-references

Songs on which Chris sings (or "speaks") lead (as a "possibly" addendum)
PSB songs with "Russian connections"
PSB titles and lyrics that are (or may be) sly innuendos
Tracks for a prospective third PSB b-sides album

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