162. Pulp, "Different Class"

 

On "Sorted for E's and Wizz," the eighth track on this remarkable and beautiful album, Jarvis Cocker sings:

Oh, is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?
Or just twenty thousand people standing in a field?
And I don't quite understand just what this feeling is
But that's okay 'cause we're all sorted out for E's and wizz
And tell me when the spaceship lands 'cause all this has just got to mean something

Somehow, the press jumped on this as some kind of drug-positive song, probably because it has drug names in the title ("wizz" is Brit slang for speed; you know what "E" is), but if you just listen to it, it's obviously not.  Cocker explained, "You're searching for that illusory thing, where you're always trying to get back to that state, but you know you never will.  And you start to see through it, notice how it's a bit frayed at the edges.  And that's what that song's about.  Drugs aren't a magical thing.  Just chemicals that leave you feeling hollow."

I point this out because, like so many of the songs on this album, it pulls you in effortlessly then BAM hits you with the real message.  The most famous song here is, of course, "Common People," a tale of a rich girl at St. Martin's College slumming it with the narrator, who comes from more humble means.  "I wanna live like common people/I wanna do whatever common people do," she says, but later in the song he reminds her that even if she gets a flat above a shop and a pretend job, "If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah."

Of the "Big Four" Britpop bands (Blur, Oasis, Suede, and these blokes), Pulp was maybe the most charged and intellectual and thoughtful.  Jarvis doesn't sing, he croons, and instead of thrashing guitars, there are strings and baroque chamber pop arrangements along with the guitars.  The songs are beautifully crafted, obviously influenced by Bowie and 60's pop, and the band had already been around for almost 20 years before this album was released.  They were hardly snot-nosed kids like Oasis or college lads like Blur; they had been around the block, and it shows.  

Pulp's concerns were class, of course, as the title suggests (and "Common People" makes clear), and sex, and not really romance but what passes for romance once you've been around to see it in all its forms.  "Pencil Skirt," the second track, mixes this all up into a song about fucking over the rich by literally fucking their wives ("They think they've got us beat/but revenge is going to be so sweet").  Cheating is a recurrent theme; in "Underwear," the woman's husband is just outside and it's far too late for her to get dressed in time.

All this is couched in music that is just so fun to listen to and sing along with and turn over in your head again later and wonder how did they pull that off?  The songs are lushly instrumented and above it all is Jarvis' theatrical, haunting voice.  I'm so glad this album bubbled up for me again.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes, yes, yes, yes.