As sonics, this is the Pet Shop Boys in their geared-down meditative groove, which was well underway with "To Speak Is a Sin" and has slowly but surely taken an ever-growing piece of the recent catalog. That's fine, everyone has to slow it down sooner or later. But I'm not sure any lyric across their entire career has yet been so sharply fabricated, or may ever be matched again. The explicit target is Eminem, and its aim is true, a sly, gleeful jab, an unerring bull's-eye, and a friendly twit that's all the more potent for the deceptive ways in which it assembles the elements. Where once, in the beginning, the Pet Shop Boys played coy with the gender assignments in their love songs, making the scenarios artfully ambiguous enough to work fine for multiple audiences, yet also ensuring that the majority wouldn't necessarily notice various undercurrents. That's out the window here. The POV is first-person, there's not even the ghost of a woman in sight, and the "I" is a high school kid out on the first big lark of his life, with the luck and grace to wind up backstage at "the show," where he meets the star. Things proceed from there. As the details come into focus—moving from initial encounter to goofing on one another to hotel room overnight, with an enviable, easygoing camaraderie except for one dangerous moment that gives away the game whole ("Your name isn't Stan, is it?")—the picture is painted of a doth-protest-too-much quasi-closet case and the preternaturally percipient kid who exposes him simply by not getting it: "When I asked why have I heard so much about him being charged with homophobia and stuff he just shrugged." Eminem's only response to date has been a throwaway scene on one of his tracks that involves him running over the Pet Shop Boys in a car. No word from Elton John either.
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