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\"Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)\" is a song by UK synthpop duo Pet Shop Boys, released as a single in 1985 and then in 1986, gaining greater popularity in both the UK and U.S. with its second release. more...

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Written as a satire of Thatcherism and its embodiment in conspicuous consumption and yuppies in the United Kingdom during the 1980s, the song's indirect attack on its subject matter has come to exemplify the Pet Shop Boys as ironists in their songwriting.

Overview

History

The song was written during the Pet Shop Boys' formative years, in 1983. According to Neil Tennant, the main lyrical concept came while in a recording studio in Camden Town when Chris Lowe asked him to make up a lyric based around the line \"Let's make lots of money\". Tennant has said that he was somewhat inspired by the relationship between the characters of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy.

The first version of the song, recorded with the duo's first producer, Bobby Orlando, was not released; upon signing with record label Parlophone, they re-recorded the song with J. J. Jeczalik (of Art of Noise) and Nicholas Froome.

The original single release charted lowly at number 116 in the UK, to be exceedingly outdone by the number one spectacle of the second release of \"West End Girls\" in multiple countries. With producer Stephen Hague still on board from that release, a new single version and a version for the duo's debut album, Please, were mixed. The second release of \"Opportunities\", following the album's release, resulted in better chart performance, becoming the duo's second Top 10 single in the US and just missing out (#11) in the UK. In Australia, the first version was the one to chart (although outside the Top 40).

Please also included a brief, cacophonic track entitled \"Opportunities (Reprise)\", which was the original middle section to the song proper before it was edited out.

Lyrics

The lyrics depict, in Tennant's words, \"two losers\", and are written from the perspective of someone self-declared, in a series of statements, as being intellectual and educated. Other statements are addressed towards the alluded-to other character, whom the first identifies as having \"looks\" and \"brawn\", and apparently bids to join in a scheme to \"make lots of money\".

Tennant has made it clear, however, that the schemes are doomed to failure: for example, that the protagonist's claimed accreditations, a PhD in mathematics from the Sorbonne and knowledge of computer programming, are conceited. The punchline of the \"joke\" of the song, he says, is that \"the people in it are not going to make any money\". The band have attributed the cynicism of the song, in part, to the punk rock attitudes of the period.

Read more at Wikipedia.org