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Moving pictures
Why have there been more good movies in the past eight weeks than in the past eight years?
By Sarah Vowell
[11/17/99]

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Sharps & Flats
Forget the solipsistic neurotica of Fiona Apple. On "To the Teeth" righteous babe Ani DiFranco feels the funk and represents Buffalo, N.Y.
By Michelle Goldberg
[11/17/99]

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For the love of the game show
ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" hits the jackpot; Fox's "Greed" is not good.
By Joyce Millman
[11/16/99]

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Sharps & Flats
Steeped in Crescent City musical voodoo, Los Hombres Calientes reconfigure jazz in the city where it was born.
By Philip Booth
[11/16/99]

The extras
One bad Hollywood experience is just one too many.
By Robin Strober
[11/15/99]

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That sense of a finely crafted vignette is strongest in "In Denial." What other band would even attempt a song like this, let alone pull it off so beautifully? A duet with Australian pop star Kylie Minogue, the song is about the reunion between a gay father and his disapproving daughter. Switching between what they say to each other and what they're afraid to say out loud, the song posits the daughter's callow certainty that he can change ("You should be quitting all these/Queers and fairies/And muscle Marys") against the father's weariness of life in general ("My life is absurd/I'm living it upside down/Like a vampire working at night/Sleeping all day/A dad with a girl who knows he's gay"). What you hear as you listen are the crossed wires of pride and hurt and age getting in the way of the connection the two are eager to make. And that makes the tentative rapprochement that the song ends on -- as their voices blend on the shared, unspoken question, "Can you love me anyway?" -- even more touching. This is Pet Shop Boys' version of a big, teary pop payoff and a sign of their understatement and maturity. Why jerk tears when you can earn them?

There were unlikely alliances on view last week at the closing night of Pet Shop Boys' first American tour in eight years at Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom, though the show took a while to work up to a pitch. The first half often felt like a rock concert as imagined by Robert Wilson, deliberately paced and working off a plan that corresponded to some private logic. In addition to percussionist Danny Cummings, the only people onstage were Tennant and Lowe (who didn't move from behind his keyboards) and their quintet of back-up singers (Mason-James, Keith Anthony Fluitt, L. Steve Abram, Billy Cliff and John James).

Stalking around the striking and enigmatic set designed by London-based Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid -- a large, slanting "L" shape on different levels, upon which graphics were projected -- the Pets seemed at times a bit unyieldingly wedded to the concept. They have said that, since "Nightlife" is a less personal album (ha!), they decided to adopt a "professional" look. What that turned out to be was spiky orange wigs, dark glasses, satiny black overcoats that opened to reveal slim gray suitcoats and blousy black-and-white culottes. The most audacious move was when Tennant announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, Dusty Springfield"; film clips of the late singer appeared as the group performed its duet with her, "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" (the hit that returned Dusty to mainstream pop consciousness in 1987), complete with her recorded vocal. What could have seemed merely exploitative instead became a very touching tribute. Nobody, in their hearts or in the song, was about to take Springfield's place.

Appearing without the costumes after the intermission, the Pets made an immediate connection with the audience. One of this half's pleasures was the unlikely sight of Tennant strumming an acoustic guitar while surrounded by the backing vocalists ("the Von Trapp family singers," he called them) for the lovely "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk" and "Se A Vida E." But it was during the next number, "I Don't Know What You Want ..." when all the singers surrounded the stoic figure of Lowe, that the performance achieved a meaning more basic and more moving than any of the conceived staging. The contrast between the robust voices of the backing singers and Tennant's own reedy one had been drolly humorous all evening; but the harmony they achieved in this section anything but. Part of the beauty of the combination was that it was, of course, blacks and gay men who were responsible for the music that has been Pet Shop Boys' inspiration all along.

For me, the emotional peak of the evening came on their version of the Elvis Presley hit "Always on My Mind." The Pets have always performed the song as pop deconstruction, laying bare the caddishness at the tune's heart. This night, it meant something else -- not the mea culpa of a man who's been too preoccupied to care, but Pet Shop Boys' way of making sure their audience knew exactly what lay beneath the duo's surface reticence. At one point Tennant leapt into the audience to greet the fans crammed up front. It was a sweet gesture, the perfect one to follow the words he had just sung, "And I guess I never told you/I'm so happy that you're mine." You'd have to have been asleep to think otherwise.
salon.com | Nov. 17, 1999

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