round 2

(2) Pet Shop Boys, “Always on My Mind”
laid its hands upon
(7) ORGY, “BLUE MONDAY”
180-82
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/22.

dan kois on pet shop boys’ “always on my mind”

In an apocalyptically abandoned railyard, two men brood in leather and fog. One, wearing aviator sunglasses, sits on an oil drum, hands on knees, head cocked just so. The other stands in silhouette, playing a synthesizer, intimidating in military cap and collar. Smoke billows everywhere. All is red, red as a sunset, red as the inside of a heart.
In 1987 the Pet Shop Boys agreed to perform at a televised tribute concert dedicated to the music of Elvis Presley. The duo, fresh off the success of “West End Girls,” were no fans of the King—well, Chris Lowe allowed, he appreciated Elvis’ “bloated Vegas period”—but saw the opportunities manifest in appearing on television across the U.K. As chronicled by guru of cover songs and tribute albums Ray Padgett, when their manager delivered a pile of Elvis cassettes with instructions to choose a song, the Pet Shop Boys picked the first track off the first tape they heard, simply so they wouldn’t have to listen to any more.
That song was “Always on My Mind,” a B-side recorded by Elvis right around the time his marriage with Priscilla was breaking up. Much more popular than Elvis’ version was Willie Nelson’s mournful 1982 country No. 1, which replaced Elvis’ orchestral bathos with piano and pedal steel, but which still ended with Willie leading a glorious chorus of angels. The Pet Shop Boys’ acid house-inspired cover felt similarly redefining, especially contrasted with the likes of Meat Loaf singing “American Trilogy” on the television tribute’s retro diner set.

The group released the track as a single shortly afterward, and the song went to No. 1 in Britain. In the U.S., “Always on My Mind” was packaged as a CD single and shrink-wrapped alongside some copies of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 album Actually. That’s how I first encountered it, when for my 13th birthday my parents bought me a CD player and my brother bought me Actually. 
In an unguarded moment years later, my brother, five years my senior, told me he chose the Pet Shop Boys because he suspected I was gay and hoped the album might help me on that journey. I can see why he might have thought that. I was artsy, finicky, unathletic. More than that, I was sharp-tongued and witty, and took great pride in those qualities. I was obviously striving toward a kind of verbal sophistication, an urbanity, that I’m not surprised read, in our Wisconsin suburb, as queerness. I didn’t fit in, was proud not to fit in. I was a perfect target for the Pet Shop Boys’ music.
In its irreverence—indeed, its distaste—for its source material, the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind” is working in a different register than many popular cover songs. Among the tracks in this year’s March Faxness, only a handful display even a hint of archness toward their origins. Even covers that one might expect to come from a place of disdain—the Mountain Goats’ cover of synthetic ‘90s hitmakers Ace of Base, for example—reveal themselves, upon listening, as celebrations of the originals’ tunefulness.
Or perhaps in expressing that expectation, I’m revealing my own generational cynicism. In 1987, I was just developing an aestheticism that didn’t allow for appreciation of music I viewed as simplistic, whether that took the form of Elvis’ opulence or Willie’s plainspokenness—but which did approve of a pair of British dance musicians taking a song they simply didn’t like and recasting it until they did. It seemed a thrillingly clever thing to do, snobbery in its ideal form, snobbery to aspire to—for what is snobbery, I thought then, but taste, exerted without compromise?
Just listening to the Pet Shop Boys, it was clear they had taste. They weren’t dismissive about pop music—“The Pet Shop Boys genuinely love pop music, which makes them quite rare in the music business,” Neil Tennant once told an interviewer—but about the preening and posturing that’s so much a part of the rock tradition. The journalist Chris Heath’s two remarkable books about the Pet Shop Boys—Pet Shop Boys, Literally (1990) and Pet Shop Boys versus America (1993)—include the duo’s quite astonishingly candid appraisals of nearly everyone in the contemporary pop and rock firmament. (Tennant on U2: “They’re saying nothing but they’re pretending to be something. I think they’re fake.”)
Throughout the books, which chronicle, respectively, the group’s very first tour ever (of Japan and England) and their first tour of America, Lowe and Tennant constantly enact a game which Heath calls “Let’s Play at Being Tragic Rock ‘n’ Roll Stars.” (Lowe pretends to chug a bottle of whiskey at a duty-free shop, that kind of thing.) “The point of it,” Heath writes, “is of course to emphasize how far removed they really are from all that.” Onstage, the pair abjure all rock-concert cliches, and each is ruthless with the other if he observes the slightest hint of what they view as pandering: a fist raised in the air, a mid-song “whoo!” “Don’t look triumphant,” Lowe warned Tennant just before the group’s very first TV appearance on Top of the Pops, even as “West End Girls” ascended to No. 1.
But of course despite their careful self-presentation the two love being pop stars, love making music, and love when people love their songs. This leads, in the Heath books, to delightful moments like Lowe, onstage in a stadium before thousands of fans in Hong Kong, standing completely still on stage during every song and then, the moment the lights go down, dancing furiously in place—because, he says, “it’s so exciting.”
Something in me connected in 1987 both to this skill and enthusiasm for a particular kind of artwork, the pop song, and this disdain for pompous spectacle. I was a budding fan of what was then called college rock, with little knowledge of dance music, but “Always on My Mind” struck a chord in its understated majesty. “Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died,” Tennant sings, in his reedy tenor, his voice placid underneath a driving beat. “Give me one more chance to keep you satisfied.” The Pet Shop Boys’ song turned pleas into declarations and in doing so rendered them more relatable to me.
To many listeners, I know, Tennant’s delivery transforms the meaning of the song, changing the narrator from a man who’s overcome by sorrow to one who’s offhandedly acknowledging his own shortcomings as a partner, and who doesn’t much care. That’s an interpretation endorsed by the Pet Shop Boys themselves: Tennant has described the song’s narrator as “a selfish and self-obsessed man, who is possibly incapable of love.”
Yet teenage me didn’t hear it that way, and I still don’t. It feels too simple to read Elvis’ moaning as representing authentic sorrow and Tennant’s understated singing as representing unconcern. As a person who’s always struggled to express emotion, someone who has only recently learned not to distrust naked displays of feeling, I still find the former insincere, and the latter a true representation of a person with a limited palette going as far as he can.
Just a few years after I first heard “Always on My Mind,” my first real girlfriend broke up with me. I have a vivid memory of telling a friend of hers what had happened. We were in the high school band room just before rehearsal began, and I explained with a rueful smile that we were no longer together. “You’re smiling about it!” the friend said accusingly. “What’s wrong with you?” She read as callous the thing my body did to keep my face from crumpling, to keep me from expressing an emotion I could only view as embarrassing. I think of this moment when I read Tennant describing what he was trying to accomplish with his vocals. “I thought I sounded very sincere and my voice was dripping with emotion,” he said, “until people started congratulating me on being so deadpan”—accidentally describing not only his singing, but the experience of being a sensitive but stunted young man in the Midwest in the 1980s.
I understood, innately, that I could in liking the Pet Shop Boys’ music set myself apart from other music fans. The group, at the time, felt the same way. In Heath’s books one reason they judge other bands so harshly is because they hold themselves to such a high standard, and believe their fans—their unique, special fans—do the same. They’re constantly comparing their own achievements with those of other groups, and are constantly disgusted at what the result says about the taste of the public. “I don’t mind us not being successful,” Lowe says at one point; “it’s other people’s success I don’t like.”
But of course liking a band doesn’t actually have to mean anything. I wasn’t that unique, or that sophisticated. (For starters, the first CD I bought with my own money was Weird Al’s Even Worse, which shared with the Pet Shop Boys a kind of pleasure in taking the piss out of rock ‘n’ roll, but was hardly emblematic of the urbanity Actually represented.) It didn’t take long for my aspirational taste to harden into the kind of know-nothing snobbery that leads one to disregard whole genres of music without listening to them or even thinking seriously about them.
The Pet Shop Boys realized how ordinary their fans were on their first tour of England, years into their pop careers. It’s the tragic plot, really, of Heath’s first book. He writes:

Before this tour they had enjoyed three and a half years of imagining what Pet Shop Boys fans were like, without ever having to match their ideas up with reality. They knew one thing: whatever Pet Shop Boys fans were, they weren’t the same as other fans.…But it wasn’t like that. The London audience was…just the normal Wembley Arena crowd for a group like the Pet Shop Boys who straddle several markets. The faces may be different when Simply Red play but the overall crowd would look much the same.

“I always imagined people who like us were really quite subversive,” Lowe says, despairing. “The audience is very normal, a lot of them.”

Dan Kois is a writer at Slate and the author of Facing Future (33 1/3, 2009); The World Only Spins Forward (Bloomsbury, 2018, with Isaac Butler); and How to Be a Family (Little, Brown, 2019). His first novel, Vintage Contemporaries, will be published by Harper in 2023.

ROSE HEREDIA ON ORGY’S “BLUE MONDAY”

The first time I heard Blue Monday I was in high school, circa late nineties. This band, Orgy, had this song playing on TRL and VH1 non-stop. I always saw it on either MTV2 or the Alternative Sunday block of videos on MTV. I was listening to Korn at this point. I had discovered Korn’s early work and that shit was harder than Freak on a Leash (which I loved). The aesthetic of Blue Monday—with the drums and heavy guitar riffs at the beginning had me hooked. And the distortion on the track, giving an industrial vibe in the same vein as NIN, was a plus. The lyrics were simple enough and I had very emo vibes before goth went out of fashion (and then back in!). Before Spotify, Napster and LimeWire ate away many hours of downloading music. I learned Blue Monday was a cover from the band, New Order, a new wave/eighties band. Soon after, their original version has become my favorite of this song but I still love Orgy’s song.
Honestly, Orgy’s music video itself did not age well. The way it looks completely dates itself but serves as a time capsule when so many new artists had the same art production designer—with the shiny makeup, lighting, and alien aesthetic in every freaking musical genre shown in videos. Also, if you watch Orgy’s video now, I felt like aliens/UFOs were all the rage in pop culture during the nineties: The X-files, Roswell, Men in Black, Fire in the Sky, just to name a few. While I was unsure if this was the way Orgy and all creative producers on this shoot was going for, by the time the video premiered, it was all old hat, and I mostly cared about the song than the video (and back then, music relied so much on music videos too).
Ultimately, by the time I discovered Orgy’s cover of Blue Monday, I was into all the artists associated with them. Powerman 5000, Limp Bizkit, The Deftones, Rammstein, and even Methods of Mayhem for a second. The sound of these bands brought out my teen/early adult angst. Well after I graduated from college, I still listen to these bands on repeat. My love of Blue Monday, I believe, in addition to watching MTV/MTV2 when they aired basically all eighties/new wave countdowns/weekends/whatever reason all the time, awoke my love of this genre. I devoured each song by each band and in 2022, I’m still discovering new music of that time period! Another reason I also appreciated new wave was because to me, it was inverted angst: longing, sadness, vulnerable in a subdued way. While nu metal allowed me to scream and yell, get out all of my shit when I was feeling blue, new wave allowed me to cry, relate, and really feel seen in ways that nu metal couldn’t provide. I was never an introvert, but I absolutely see how introverts fuck with new wave music a lot; they were gotten and nu metal was so aggressive and, in your face, (HOW DOES IT FEEL?!).
Listening to both versions of Blue Monday are like sides of the same coin. When I’m ANGRY, I play Orgy’s version. When I’m in an introspective mood and I want to begin my day with “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (which until writing this essay I had no idea the members of Joy Division formed New Order!), I add New Order’s version on the playlist. This song will transcend all of us, years after we are gone. It’s so versatile and it never gets old, no matter who sings it.

Rose Heredia is Afro-Dominican from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she helps lawyers save the Earth. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program in Writing. She is a VONA and Las Dos Brujas alumna. She is a Culture writer and editor for Epifania Magazine, Assistant Non-fiction Editor for VIDA Review and has been published by the Dominican Writers Association and HeadFake.