Go West
23 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in 90's Music, 70's Music Tags: Pet Shop Boys, The Village People
Pet Shop Boys’ Go West video – not gay at all. At least compared with The Village People’s original. Of course, none of The Village People’s songs made any pretense of being anything other than gay anthems. The Village People found ginormous success, partly thanks to gays who got the joke, but mostly because large swaths of the record buying public didn’t get the joke. Today it’s hard to imagine not getting it, but in the seventies most people weren’t even aware of the gay subculture that flourished in New York City, San Francisco and almost nowhere in between. Go West is supposed to be an ode to San Francisco, a haven for gays fleeing their intolerant flyover home states. The Village People may have made a meaningful statement in their time, and perhaps a few listeners enjoyed them unironically in 1979, but their campiness has not aged well. So in covering Go West, the Pet Shop Boys couldn’t just go at it with a straight face. They had to come up with something entirely different to erase the image of the original artists prancing about in costumes that were already stereotypes in the gay community. One thing they did was make it slightly less gay. (Though Neil Tennant’s vocal is even more gay.) They’re just taking the bombastic imagery of Soviet propaganda and playing up the unintentional homoerotic subtext that patriotic marching-around iconography often has. The political message takes on a very different tone, too. From merely celebrating the freedom of the American West, namely San Francisco, it’s gone to taking on the whole idea of an idealized Western society. Now the encouragement is towards, presumably, the liberated masses that were streaming West from the rubble of the USSR in 1993. But the video shows no signs that life in America is all that much better – everyone is still marching around in matching hats. It seems that Tennant and Lowe’s take on The Village People’s idealistic song is deeply ironic. Or heartfelt. Or both.
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