Unfolding like an elegy for much of what had gone before,
Behaviour
shifted the Boys from sly commentators to reserved-but-pained participants, with its understated but devastating lead track, “Being Boring.” The first verse presents the singer looking through keepsakes, as one does after losing a loved one. He finds a party invite paraphrasing?Zelda Fitzgerald’s “Eulogy on the Flapper,” specifically the line “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.” Boredom was a prickly subject for the pair: Their early deadpan videos and TV appearances were routinely dismissed by clueless critics as generating it.
Set in the ’70s, the next verse depicts the singer leaving his hometown, a mandatory rite of LGBT passage. He softly declares, “I’d bolted through a closing door,” an image evoking both the end of his closeted adolescence and the beginning of fully realized adulthood. By the third verse, which is set in the ’90s, the singer is self-actualized, but reflective: “All the people I was kissing/Some are here, and some are missing.” That simple rhyme still reduces gay men who lived through this era to tears, for AIDS had sorted our intimates into these two categories?those who died young, and those who might soon follow suit, including ourselves. If you hadn’t seen your gay neighbors and friends and former sexual partners around town, chances were they were dead, had gone home to die, or were nursing the dying just like you. “But I thought in spite of dreams,” the survivor sings of his fallen pal, “you’d be sitting somewhere here with me.”
Fashion photographer Bruce Weber shot the song’s lush B&W video, which features models enacting a fantasy version of the parties Tennant attended in the ’70s. The tension between the freedom of Weber’s imagery and the sadness of the third verse makes the eulogy even more devastating, but some fleeting nudity meant that MTV in America had an excuse not to show it. Still, “Being Boring”?ostensibly a dance track, but one featuring fluttering rhythms, a
Larry Heard
-style deep house bassline that appears only as the album version fades out, a subtle upward chorus modulation that adds sweetness to the sorrow, and a whirring plastic tube conjuring spectral cries?eventually earned its rightful acclaim. A fan site solely devoted to it dwarfs the official web presence of many bands, and on its 20th anniversary, a
Guardian
critic proclaimed it the greatest single of all time. Even
Axl Rose
allegedly bemoaned its non-appearance during the duo’s 1991 tour.
That tour, Performance, their first in North America, transformed the staginess of their videos into opulent theater just as Blonde Ambition did for
Madonna
the year before; in the Pets’ case, it was so over-budget that the well-attended?trek still lost half-a-million dollars. And just as the autobiographical
Like a Prayer
fed Blonde Ambition, the personal nature of
Behaviour
lent Performance pathos. The dirge that opened the show, “This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave,” affirmed that, like Madonna, Tennant suffered major Catholic damage. The tune is hummable, but the tone intersects opera and
Joy Division
as it evokes Catholic mass, freezing rain, and grey architecture. No wonder the Pets eschewed the church for wit and disco.