The currency we’ve spent

A love letter to the lyrics of Rent by the Pet Shop Boys

It always seemed too easy to assume the obvious about Rent.

Such a nudge-nudge title, when I can think of few songs that are played less for laughs. And a cheap joke for the Pet Shop Boys to play, anyway. Despite the hats and the costumes and the Go West era, they were never anything other than deadly serious about the songs. There was nothing camp about the Pet Shop Boys in the 80s.

Besides which, when I first heard the song, innuendo about gay escorts was always likely to go over my twelve year old head.

When I did learn what it was that Rent might refer to, I tried to un-learn it. To me the song had never been about that. However consciously I’d understood it, this was about a skewed relationship in which something had gone terribly wrong. Male or female, gay or straight — I don’t think this is important. The taboo isn’t sexuality, it’s love and money.

(Although I seem to recall reading somewhere that Neil Tennant imagined it being about a kept woman, so if only for the sake of pronoun consistency we’ll go with that.)

This is a lyric with depth and ambiguity, neither of which reside in coded hints about the gender or sexual orientation of the narrator. Rent is a pop song about giving up happiness for money, and this makes it worthy of examination. It’s simply not a subject that crops up very much, let alone can become a top ten hit (back when that sort of thing meant something).

The lyric’s power lies in our understanding and sympathy for the narrator. Should we feel sorry for her because she’s trapped? Or should we pity her because of the life she has chosen? And if we pity her, is it OK that we judge her choice? How complicit is she and what does that complicity represent? Is she shallow and morally bankrupt? Or deeply compromised and telling herself she’s happy?

Like I said, it’s too easy to assume the obvious.

We should start with the chorus, the emotional heart of the song.

Look at my hopes, look at my dreams — the currency we’ve spent

I heard these twelve words when I was twelve years old. They still pin me to the wall. The narrator invites us to look upon her side of the transaction with bald, chilling self-awareness. It is the culmination of her emotional defeat. It is poetic but bleak in the extreme. It is beautifully phrased, but bruised and sad and hard to think about for too long.

But think we must. It’s a line that dares you to. It dares you to question what has happened here. Clues start to emerge — there is ambiguity even in this one line. My hopes, my dreams. Yet it’s the currency we’ve spent. Surely ‘the currency you’ve spent’ would make more sense. That at least would suggest bitterness, resentment, the sense of a life wasted.

But it doesn’t say you’ve. It says we’ve.

As if we went out shopping. Or we booked that lovely holiday.

As if it’s not a transaction at all, but a partnership.

The pay off to rhyme is also the pay off to the relationship:

I love you
You pay my rent

The relationship is a partnership of equal billing. I love you. You pay my rent. We each spend what we have to give.

And there, deep in the heart of what made a twelve year old feel confusedly sad and sorry for this nameless protagonist, is the sign that something very complex and adult is going on.

Of course, Neil Tennant is upfront about this. He sets out the terms of agreement right at the start. Four spoken couplets make the value exchange abundantly clear.

You dress me up
I’m your puppet

Kinky, or maybe oddly controlling — it’s not clear which. Strangely, I have Neil LaBute’s The Shape Of Things pop into my head here — a gender role reversal of Pygmalion that is dark and twisted because the guy (played by Paul Rudd in the movie version) is completely in the dark about being Rachel Weisz’s plaything. No such ignorance here.

You buy me things
I love it

Gifts shouldn’t be weird or sad. Yet here they seem so because the preceding line has done its work, casting the innocent pleasure of gift-giving in the shadow of a spooky, imbalanced relationship. The repetition of You/I helps us realise that each couplet is charting the terrain of the relationship, describing the strange equilibrium at work. In this context, the generic idea of ‘things’ as the object of desire makes becomes unsettling — a woman pleased merely by the attention and accumulation of shiny ‘things’, perhaps?

You bring me food
I need it

Now it’s clear she is totally reliant on him. And not just in financial terms — she lives to his timetable. This is getting dark.

You give me love
I feed it

And our picture of the couple is complete. The food / feed motif balances the third and fourth couplets. It underlines the impression of two people locked together in a cycle of dependency. There is love here, but it’s an arrangement, albeit one that benefits each party. They each provide and take what they need, feeding off each other. She feeds his desire as he feeds her hunger.

And then we’re into the first proper verse.

And look at the two of us in sympathy with everything we see
I never want anything, it’s easy, you buy whatever I need

‘And.’

It’s a leap straight from the cycle of dependency to this — an invitation to examine their happiness. With ‘look at’ we realise she is talking to her lover, though, not us. This is a conversation. ‘The two of us’ — so happy, totally together. You/I becomes I/You to underline the give and take once more — it’s there whichever angle you look from.

I imagine the woman testing her lover just because she can — buy me this, that, everything. He, passing the test, every time.

Then the chorus and its revelation about what she’s given away. Remember:

But look at my hopes, look at my dreams — the currency we’ve spent
I love you
You pay my rent

Only, that ‘but’. This first chorus is the only time it appears. It follows ‘you buy whatever I need’ to suggest an alternative view. It’s an ambiguous clue to suggest that, despite everything she says, she might not be entirely happy. Or at least, it admits that paying for all this luxury might have a downside. The ‘but’ is a chink in the armour. It’s the only hint of negativity to her side of the bargain.

Given the weight of everything that’s come before, though, she seems on board. I need, I love, I never want, it’s easy. When she says hopes and dreams are her currency, maybe she means just that — things to be exchanged for items of an equivalent value. She’s not cheap, or imprisoned, or compromised.

She’s complicit.

The second verse is waspish, withering even. Perhaps it reveals what a relationship built on money really feels like.

You phone me in the evening on hearsay,
And bought me caviar
You took me to a restaurant off Broadway,
To tell me who are

The lover has heard some rumours and calls. Maybe she’s been seen with someone else. She’s dismissive (‘on hearsay’ — is that it?). I imagine the lover becoming more desperate as her tastes become more expensive, locked into a habit that’s getting stronger as his ability to resist diminishes. The stakes rise each time — only caviar will satisfy her (it was the 80s). He takes her out — somewhere nice, and somewhere public this time. Only he goes and gets all serious. Yeah, yeah, all that who-you-are-deep-down stuff. Whatever.

Puppets bore easily, perhaps.

But still:

We never ever argue, we never calculate the currency we spent
I love you
You pay my rent

So it all seems rosy. And now we’re at the last verse, basking in the afterglow:

And look at the two of us in sympathy, and sometimes ecstasy
Words mean so little, and money less, when you’re lying next to me

A kept woman describes money as meaningless. Is it a statement of their true love, however unconventional? Or a demonstration of how shallow and complicit she really is?

My wife and I have discussed this song a lot and have different interpretations.

We’re not sure whether we picture a man or a woman. We instinctively agree that the rich lover is older, though there’s nothing in the lyrics to suggest this — only that the wealth might compensate for something, something that makes him less able to win her on his own terms.

Or maybe the narrator is one half of a secret affair, tucked away somewhere quiet. Maybe the narrator is a man and the lover is married — is that why he ‘tells me who you are’ that night at the restaurant?

Neither do we agree on how complicit, or how happy, the narrator is. The music, a mournful oboe and a minor key throughout, does lead the witness — it feels unutterably sad to listen to, sometimes. A despair to match what she feels she’s given up, perhaps. Or the emptiness left now self-respect has gone? Or maybe she — or he — is entirely shallow and really doesn’t care and the music is alerting to her lack of self-awareness.

What we can agree on is the incredible depth and richness of the lyric. There’s a film or short novel in these words. The contrast between monetary wealth and the emotional poverty of the life lived. The grubby transactional reality of a superficially glamorous existence — think Room At The Top or Mona Lisa or Breakfast At Tiffanys.

For a song with very few words Rent has a lot going on it.

My wife has just finished reading The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollingshurst. In it a gay man — a kept lover and witness to the power and money of 80s decadence and wealth — remains convinced of his own aestheticism, despite a shallow obsession with beautiful things and people that blinds him to his inadequacies. The parallels are clear. I can’t think of many hit pop songs that share a subject with Booker Prize winners. It’s just not an obvious thing to think of doing, let alone explore it in a way that’s as ambiguous and endlessly mysterious as a film might do.

But then, not many pop groups are as un-obvious as the Pet Shop Boys.

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