“It Couldn’t Happen Here” is a track from the earliest days of the Pet Shop Boys’ careers, being stuck right in the middle of their multi-platinum “Actually”, from 1987. While I was not lucky enough to be cognoscent during the years of the main PSB popularity in the United States, I was able to pick up on the force of the Boys thanks to one of my earliest internet buddies. After picking up a few albums, the attraction fell away for a few years, as I explored more in the way of punk music. During the last few months of my second year at DePauw, Mandel* and I were talking about dance music, and by chance, the Pet Shop Boys came up in our conversation. I brought out my CDs and from that point, every time that ey came over, I would throw a disc of theirs on the stereo.

After not being able to listen much to the Pet Shop Boys early last summer, aside from the Behavior and Actually tapes I had still in my collection, I started searching around half.com and amazon to find some decent deals, picking up Introspective and Behavior. I found this song on Introspective as I didn’t have a copy of Actually, and I was hooked. “It Couldn’t Happen Here” is the perfect example of a timely song that has yet to become dated – discussing exactly how offguard the GLBT community was during the first years of the AIDS epidemic. The lyrics describe the entire community as a person – the lack of serious work during the earliest days of this disease, before it had a name, before people knew that protection really did mean the difference between death and life.

The urgency surrounding AIDS has been decreased a lot in the twenty years since the war has been waged against it. However, since the disease has been tamed in the media by the advent of certain “drug cocktails” that dramatically lengthen the lifespan of those infected, people have by and large moved away from trying to find answers to how AIDS was introduced or why exactly pharmaceutical companies won’t cut their rates for the masses of people dying in Africa and other Global South countries every days of this plague.

People have said that my inclusion of lyrics, most of which are “sappy” or “without a meaning”, are just yet another problem with my magazine. I entreat that my inclusion of lyrics that personally move me serves a two-fold purpose : first off, most of these songs have a personal significance, and secondly, they are used to inform people about a song they may not be familiar with. “It Couldn’t Happen Here” strikes me as a queer, as a compassionate human being, and as a song indicative of an era. “We’ve found ourselves back where we started from” shows the beliefs of the time : since only Gay and Lesbian individuals (and don’t forget those tricky Bisexuals– this was before the slightly wider acceptance of Transgendered individuals) were getting AIDS, it was okay to treat them like second-class citizens. Where “Go all the way, you knew you could” was the mantra of the pre-AIDS GLB movement, the agency of an individual identifying as a queer might be challenged by this atrocious disease, not even to mention those individuals who worked against queer rights.