PopArt: The Hits (Deluxe Edition) [Remastered]

Collections like this are best suited to acts who have two distinct audiences, a category that certainly includes the Pet Shop Boys. On one hand, they have proper fans: people who buy their albums, people who care. On the other hand, they have, well, everyone else. Among fans of pop music and dabblers alike, it's surprisingly hard to find anyone who doesn't harbor some affection for this duo. When it comes to their 1980s output, this is UK pop success nearing the level of Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Starting in 1991, the best shorthand for the PSB world was Discography, an 18-track singles collection that could be found perennially popping up-- like the dance-pop equivalent of Bob Marley's Legend-- in record collections of countless sorts and sizes. PopArt: The Hits, now officially available in the U.S., aims to replace that, adding an extra decade of hits, and splitting the whole of it over two loosely themed discs: "Pop" (more disco) and "Art" (more ballads).

It's worth nothing that we don't have much of this kind of act in America. Our pop stars are relentlessly young, and these days they're expected to be knowable, physical, and guileless; the words they sing are meant to dramatize who they actually are, and how great they are at it (just like you). We worship at the altar of the words I Am, I Can, I Will, and I'm Gonna. (We're also notoriously averse to frothy disco, except as a novelty: Our dance music comes from hip-hop.) The Pet Shop Boys belong in a British role that's irresistibly far from that, a lineage of pop laureates of the sort that Jarvis Cocker and Saint Etienne aspire to be. They're commentators, not dramatizers-- mature, arch, and crafty. (The point isn't them-- these two guys, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe-- but what they might write about the world.) It should be ironic, then, that their timeless first single, "West End Girls", was popular in America before it caught on at home, but notice how perfectly it packages and exports that whole laureate role. We meet Tennant not as a singer, not as an attention-getter, but as a speaker: He mumbles the verses to us not like a star, but like a stranger in a raincoat, slinking alongside you and pointing out the sights.

It's that odd twist that makes the group's 80s hits so easy to love, and so hard to dislike: They're too unassuming to be bothered by. The music may be clattering hi-NRG synth-pop, and full of high drama, but Tennant's thin, moneyed voice and cheeky play-acting cut against it: He's not a spotlight-hog, just a lone schemer in an expensive suit. It's these hits-- the same ones on Discography-- that a Pet Shop Boys compilation is for; these are their touchstone contributions to the history of pop music. You don't need to be told that they're fantastic, any more than you need to be told that Thriller is fantastic. These songs are, in a way, the urtext of dance-pop: The alternately ecstatic and ominous lilt of "Suburbia"; the strangely mellow, downtempo Latin freestyle on "Domino Dancing"; or the incredibly sly, stylish sing-speak on "Left to My Own Devices".

They are also the urtext of everything the modern American 13-year-old male would describe as "totally gay" (and possibly the modern American 50-year-old male, too)-- but this, ironically, seems like one of the main reasons Americans get to enjoy them. One of their greatest singles is a sappy Euro-disco cover of the Village People's "Go West", complete with house piano and horns and diva backing, over which Tennant sings with the dreamy primness of a drag-queen Twiggy; another is a grand trancey version of "Always on My Mind", on which the Boys sound like they're taking a pop-chart victory lap. It's euphoric, hands-in-the-air, heart-swelling dance-pop, the sort that's almost less for dancing and more for hugging the people you're dancing with. (See also: Daft Punk's "One More Time".) Calling it camp is like calling Madonna calculating: There's no point.

Discography, of course, offered all of this-- and all in a row, ready to be thrown on at house parties and left there to do its work. PopArt is a longer dip, and given its non-chronological sequencing, it begins to feel more like an album than a greatest-hits compilation: Hanging around between those joyous scorchers are songs from the duo's second decade, during which their laureate role took them away from euphoria and into ballads, character studies, and even more subtlety. The value of this isn't just as a deeper relationship than Discography offered-- Pop/Art is like a two-week fling compared to Discography's dazzling one-night stand-- but also as a contrast to the solipsism of America's pop. Tennant's level of nuance and introspection may be an obvious point of praise, part of the conventional wisdom of what this act is about, but it's still true: There's a depth to his writing, and to the premises and situations he starts from, that begs a lot of unraveling. (See: "Can You Forgive Her?" or "Being Boring".) It's this attention to the complexity of the world-- the switch from the teenaged I Am to the worldly Are We?-- that makes these songs captivating, even as the duo tries to navigate massive changes in the world of dance music, dabbles in Latino sounds, and drifts off toward milky, less vibrant ballads.

The collection certainly doesn't make the Pet Shop Boys look as good as Discography did, and if that's your yardstick for a good compilation-- creating the sense of endless, unfaltering brilliance, and then leaving you with nothing but good feelings for the act-- this might not do the trick; sometime during that two-week fling, you start to see the qualities that take time and inclination to love. At the same time, that makes this collection much more than an update of Discography: It's no longer just a string of pop hits to throw on when people are around, but something you can spend time digging your way through and coming to grips with-- less a greatest-hits package, and more a Portable Pet Shop Boys, in something approaching their totality. It's certainly worth it: As far as England's dance-pop laureates are concerned, this is right up there with Saint Etienne's Smash the System as your single-artist desert-island dance mix.