The 1990s File Feature
How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?
How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?: Pet Shop Boys and the Politics of Pop Pet Shop Boys released "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" in 1991 a…
01 The Story
How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?: Pet Shop Boys and the Politics of Pop
Pet Shop Boys released "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" in 1991 as part of their album Behaviour campaign on Parlophone Records. The single had a limited chart run on the Billboard Hot 100, debuting on February 16, 1991, at number 99, reaching its peak of number 93 on February 23, and falling to number 100 the following week before exiting the chart after three weeks total. This modest American commercial performance contrasted with the duo's continued strong standing in the United Kingdom, where their reputation was considerably more established.
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, the duo who constitute Pet Shop Boys, had formed in London in 1981 and achieved their American breakthrough with "West End Girls" in 1986, a number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Through the late 1980s they released a series of internationally successful singles and albums on Parlophone, working with producers including Stephen Hague, who co-produced "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" with the duo. Tennant's dry, detached vocal style and Lowe's synthesizer-oriented production approach had established them as one of the defining acts of British synth-pop.
Behaviour, the album released in October 1990, represented a somewhat more introspective and sonically restrained direction for the duo compared to their mid-period work. The album's production was influenced by orchestral and chamber pop aesthetics, with lush string arrangements playing a larger role than on earlier Pet Shop Boys recordings. The production approach gave the album a distinctive character that separated it from the more overtly danceable music the duo had made previously.
"How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" was one of the more explicitly polemical tracks in the Pet Shop Boys catalog, addressing what Tennant perceived as a contradiction between the political aspirations of pop artists and the commercial entertainment context in which they operated. The lyric engages with the question of whether popular music can function as a vehicle for serious political or social commentary, or whether the conditions of pop production and consumption inevitably compromise any such attempt.
The song received a significant promotional push including a music video directed by Howard Greenhalgh, who had worked with the duo on several previous projects. The video incorporated documentary imagery and newsreel footage in a way that underscored the song's engagement with contemporary events, particularly the Gulf War, which was underway at the time of the single's release in early 1991. This topical dimension gave the record an urgency that informed its promotion in several markets.
Parlophone's American distribution and promotion of Pet Shop Boys material had always been complicated by the duo's very British sensibility and by the specific character of Tennant's lyrical preoccupations, which drew heavily on British cultural references and a distinctly British mode of ironic understatement. The American market responded more readily to their more straightforward dance tracks than to the more intellectually engaged material, which helps explain the limited Hot 100 performance of "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" compared to earlier US hits.
In the United Kingdom, the single performed considerably better, reaching number 4 on the UK Singles Chart, a position consistent with the duo's strong domestic standing throughout this period. Pet Shop Boys were by 1991 one of the most commercially successful British acts in their home market, and the more sophisticated audiences of the UK responded to the nuances of Tennant's lyrical ambitions more readily than the US pop market did.
The track has been revisited in retrospective assessments of the Behaviour album, which critics have increasingly recognized as one of the more artistically mature works in the Pet Shop Boys discography. Its modest American chart showing has not diminished its standing in the broader assessment of the duo's output from this period.
02 Song Meaning
The Paradox of the Political Pop Star: Unpacking the Pet Shop Boys' Critique
"How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" poses its central question not as a rhetorical dismissal but as a genuine philosophical inquiry: is it possible for a popular music artist to engage credibly with political and social issues while operating within the commercial entertainment system? Neil Tennant's lyric examines this question from a perspective of genuine ambivalence, neither simply endorsing pop's political possibilities nor dismissing them as inherently compromised.
The song's irony operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Tennant is himself a pop star asking whether pop stars can be taken seriously, which makes the question self-referential in ways that cannot be accidental. Pet Shop Boys had always been a studiously self-aware act, and this self-awareness was central to their aesthetic identity. The song does not exempt itself from its own critique, and this intellectual honesty is part of what gives it its particular force.
The timing of the single's release in early 1991, concurrent with the Gulf War, was not coincidental. The Gulf War had generated significant controversy in British public life and had prompted a number of public figures, including musicians, to take political positions. Tennant's lyric can be read partly as a response to the spectacle of celebrities making earnest declarations about geopolitical events they were arguably not equipped to analyze rigorously, while simultaneously acknowledging that silence is also a choice with political implications.
The Behaviour album context is essential to understanding the song's meaning. The album as a whole is characterized by a tone of reflection and melancholy that sets it apart from the more exuberant earlier Pet Shop Boys work, and "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" fits this tone by engaging with questions that do not have comfortable resolutions. The orchestral production underscores this quality of thoughtful unease, giving the music an emotional weight that matches the lyric's intellectual density.
Chris Lowe's production on the track is deliberately restrained, allowing Tennant's vocal and lyrical performance to dominate without the kind of rhythmic insistence that might have suggested the duo was trying to make a conventional dance record out of politically engaged material. This production choice is itself an argument: by declining to wrap the song's difficult questions in an easily consumable package, Pet Shop Boys insisted on the seriousness they were questioning whether pop could possess.
The song also engages with a tension specific to the British cultural context of the period, where the relationship between popular music and political commentary had been foregrounded by events including the miners' strike of 1984-85 and the Thatcher government's long tenure in office. British pop had a tradition of political engagement, from the punk era through the mid-1980s benefit concerts, and Tennant's lyric examines what remained of that tradition by 1991 with a skeptical eye that is not quite cynicism but is definitely not optimism either.
What the song ultimately arrives at, through its self-questioning structure, is something like an acknowledgment that the tension between entertainment and serious purpose is real and probably irresolvable, but that acknowledging the tension is more honest than pretending it does not exist. Pet Shop Boys, by posing the question publicly and without a reassuring answer, demonstrated precisely the kind of intellectual seriousness the song was questioning whether pop could contain. The paradox is the argument.
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