BCB 130 - Pulp

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Betty Denim
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BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby Betty Denim » 26 Sep 2014, 15:50

Ok, I’ll begin by declaring that I now rarely listen to Pulp. It’s more that jolt of reminiscence, these days. For me, they’re very much a band of formative years and interconnected with true and false memories. I’m also not sure how worthwhile it is to appraise them beyond the context of Britpop. It’s easy to fall into a trap of subjective recidivism when dealing with nostalgia, even if something seemed at the time to capture the zeitgeist. I’d probably, if drunk and belligerent, argue that if you’re not northern and don’t or didn’t belong to what Simon Reynolds called the ‘liminal class’ then you’re an interloper in the fan base. Sober though, I’d berate myself for parochial wankery.

Though the caveat remains that, in my case, I came to Pulp as an 18 year old far away from home, faced with the insurmountable barriers of the social complexities and ciphers of Edinburgh University, punctured with clandestine networks; almost everyone was not ‘the likes of me’. It was all too easy for me to latch on to Common People. Retroactive ‘northernising’ was like oxygen. Sometimes the only way to create your niche is to further sink into the mire of your own caricature. I soon realised that class got you into bed with startlingly mapped-out predictability. My posh friend and I ran the Poetry Society. If we had the old Etonians, the traditionalists, the silver-tongued lotharios to read for us, they’d spend the after-hours pub sessions hanging on to my pimped-up council-slut genius persona, open-mouthed, and never made it back to their hotel. If we had the gruff, pugnacious, shoulder chipped bloke-poets, they’d be like flies round her fragrant, clipped and porcelain-like hip-aristo shite. (Metaphorically; she’s adorable.) God, it was intoxicating.

It’s all there. In I Spy. The battle between despising and desiring …

I can't help it, I was dragged up.
My favourite park's a car park, grass is something you smoke,
birds is something you shag.
Take your year in Provence and shove it right up your arse.
Your Ladbroke Grove looks turn me on, yeah.
With roach burns in designer dresses
And thousands of tiny dryness lines
Beating a path to the corner of your eyes
And every night I hatch my plan, it's not a case of woman v man.
It's more a case of haves against haven'ts and I just
happen to have got what you need, just exactly what you need yeah.




“Songwriting is about counterpoint,” says Nick Cave in his recent biopic 20,000 Days On Earth, “like letting a child into the same room as a Mongolian psychopath or something.” But for Jarvis Cocker the focus would be on the room, and its curtains, and the ice-cream van outside. The intensity of his lyrical, conversational, minutiae sears against the shrill, poppy brutalism of the music.

On a pink quilted eiderdown
I want to pull your knickers down
Net curtains blowing slightly in the breeze
Lemonade light filtering through the trees
It's so soft and it's warm
Just another cup of tea please
One lump, yeah - thank you


Unlike, say, Oasis, Pulp were a sexy band. They had that John Osborne-esque coruscating anger sewn up. And unlike Noel Gallagher’s faux-surreal, lumbering lyrics, Cocker obviously knew how to write within a tradition. He wrote from and for those stagnant or bewildered people who were neither the enduring and impassive working-class or the innately ambitious and connected middle. It’s not difficult to map the non-musical influences: John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Alan Bennett, David Hockney, Tony Harrison. And, for me, I almost think of them as a documentary band. Class. Sex. Class. Sex. What else is there in Pulp’s world? Not really love – even the lilting, anthemic fatalism of Something Changed is oddly desolate – religion, politics, art?



Take Babies:

We listened to your sister when she came home from school
'cos she was two years older and she had boys in her room.




Or Remember The First Time:

Now I don't care what you're doing
No I don't care if you screw him just as long as you save a piece for me




And the fiercely love/hate self-immolation of Acrylic Afternoons:

Can I hold you?
Forever in acrylic afternoons
I want to hold you tight
whilst children play outside
and they wait for their mothers
to finish with lovers
and call them inside for their tea




Of course, once the Oxbridge lot sided with Jarvis, I was off. And nowadays I’m done with that. I’m happy to be ‘liminal’. I don’t have to constantly negotiate the common as muck/lady muck dichotomy. And neither do Pulp. I think they were a band of their time. They made a handful of bright and dazzling pop songs and two fine albums that stand up to anything else of the 90s. But I now have a jaded impression of the illusion. Jarvis, with his Conservative councillor mother, song writing in Paris and Central St Martin’s, wasn’t really like me at all.
mission wrote:gravity's greedy fingerfucking

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der nister
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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby der nister » 26 Sep 2014, 16:03

Good stuff, Betty
'Oatboy, 'oan, and machuk take note
It's kinda depressing for a music forum to be proud of not knowing musicians.

Bent Fabric
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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby Bent Fabric » 26 Sep 2014, 20:12

HELL of a piece!

Of writing.

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Quaco
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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby Quaco » 26 Sep 2014, 20:55

What you've pointed out without saying it explicitly is that when you hear Pulp, you realize just how lazy most lyrics are. I suppose it's like hearing Dylan in 1965 and realizing how much everybody else falls short. I mean, I'm not saying that lyrics need to be anything in particular, and most do the job, but they just don't do much.

Doing something intentionally, taking a stand, creating a mood on purpose, not just being vague, is a thrill -- the thrill of art. It's the difference between sitting outside on a nice afternoon and writing about it. You want to be able to impart the feeling of the afternoon, but you can't just do that, you have to use specific tools to get across a chosen version of that feeling. In photography, by choosing your moment, you capture a version of events that happen in reality. It's also the difference between spending time with somebody and really turning them on.

So much music and lyrics just plod along with no feeling that the person writing them is even there. Jarvis is very clearly there, and that's why, though I've had a few issues with them and it's taken me some time to come around to them (whereas Supergrass, Oasis, Boo Radleys, and others were more immediate), I always like them more and more as I get to know them/him.

Jesus, take a stand, people. Have fun with your words and music!
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doctorlouie
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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby doctorlouie » 26 Sep 2014, 22:14

You're right that the things Jarvis managed to conflate - class war and sex - were their calling card. In I Spy he makes the sex seem like a spoiling of something as much as an erotic adventure. My favourite parks are car parks. Brilliant.

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby WG Kaspar » 26 Sep 2014, 22:25

Excellent post Sarah. They mean so much to me. When I first came to England in 95 it was all about Blur and Oasis but this band along with Radiohead really meant the world to me back then. I won't refer to the lyrics because I didn;t and couldn't pay much attention back then despite everyone praising them, but it was the actual music that lit up my world, both retro and modern at the same time, absolutely brilliant in fact. There's just some times that you could freeze time and that's when it was for me.
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the masked man
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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby the masked man » 26 Sep 2014, 22:34

Great OP! I feel I might have outgrown Pulp now, but for a period in the mid-90s they defined exactly how I felt. They were full of cutting lyrical comment, and, as you say, they were sexy, which is something British guitar music rarely manages to achieve. Today, i feel that musically, they sounded a little thin (certainly, within the confines of Britpop, Suede managed to be more spirited and rockier). Still, I think I'll always feel a thrill when hearing 'Razzamatazz' (that opening line!) and 'I Spy' (this song should be in a time capsule of mid-90s pop culture).

And I'll never forget attending a Pulp concert in Cardiff just a couple of nights after the Michael Jackson/Brit Awards incident. I have never been at a gig with such incredible electricity and anticipation in the crowd. And the band delivered. An amazing night!

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby Pool Hall Richard » 26 Sep 2014, 22:40

His n Hers is a great album, a few average tracks (Joyriders/She's a Lady) but ends great with David's Last Summer and Babies is perfect.

I know its wrong, very wrong, but I don't like Common People but I do like the Different Class album, saw them live at Brixton December 1995, i'm somewhere in that video.

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby copehead » 27 Sep 2014, 08:56

Jarvis is a magnificent creation.

He is, of course, a brilliant lyricist but I also find him a mesmerising front man, I wonder where he got that from?

He made himself into a sexy front man through an act of will because the raw material isn't great, and I love the way he is almost (over)acting out the songs on stage.

Favourite song - Babies, the perfect encapsulation of everything he was about - sex, human failure, class

It also has one of the most perfect rhyming couplets of all time

I know you won't believe it's true
But I went with her 'cause she looks like you
My god!
Dancing in the streets of Hyannis

Image

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby naughty boy » 27 Sep 2014, 09:28

You've really captured something there, Sarah. I wasn't in the UK at the time but for the first time in a decade I felt a real connection to what was going on musically. I remember the fuss when Different Class came out. It was some sort of occasion. With its matt-black/chrome cover and glossy inserts it was the best packaged/presented album of 1995 (people forget!). Jarvis was everywhere, and he got on my tits. But the music was fabulous. At times they even managed to touch the hem of Mr. Ferry's tuxedo.

In many ways they were 'of their time', and today Jarvis' thing does look a little like a college art experiment (have you seen the documentary?) but he was very skilled at the whole observational thing. Not many could have done a better job (the fact that for ten years before the band broke he stood around on the sidelines watching probably helped). And I still listen to them quite a bit - they're probably my favourite band to come out of that era. Hang around Facebook long enough and Mr. Roussety will post 'Babies' again, and say it's the greatest pop song ever. And he's not completely wrong.
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.

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The Modernist
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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby The Modernist » 27 Sep 2014, 10:08

Haven't got much to say about Pulp, but that was a hell of a piece of writing Sarah. Wonderful.

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby Insouciant Western People » 29 Sep 2014, 10:56

hey white boy you chasin our FRUIT CLOWN wrote:In many ways they were 'of their time'


Perhaps, But they also had that thing that most great bands tend to have, of being characterised of coming from a certain definite place at a certain definite time - and Pulp had it in spades. Sheffield seems to have a knack of turning out bands who did that brilliantly - The Human League, ABC, Pulp, and the Arctic Monkeys of Whatever You Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (the less said about what they've done since the better, but the debut is a perfect album).

The fringes of Manchester since the 70s have done it often too - Salford, Prestwich, Oldham, Altrincham. You can't imagine The Fall or Joy Division, or the Happy Mondays appearing anywhere else.

There is probably a book to be written on the psychogeography of pop, and Simon Reynolds will doubtless be the one to do it.
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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby doctorlouie » 29 Sep 2014, 12:18

Cocker's dryness (echoed in that Arctic Monkey's debut and in Phil Oakey's deadpan baritone) is VERY Sheffield. An innate mistrust of the effusive ('it was reyt' being a doubleplusgood) is important.

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby Insouciant Western People » 29 Sep 2014, 12:26

Yeah, Richard Hawley has that combination of a blunt, unexcitable stoicism and a desert-dry wit too.

I love Alex Turner's propensity on that first lp to puncture pretension - "You're not from New York city you're from Rotherham", delivered with just the right degree of amused disdain.
Jeff K wrote:Nick's still the man! No one has been as consistent as he has been over such a long period of time.

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby doctorlouie » 29 Sep 2014, 13:53

Nick wrote:Yeah, Richard Hawley has that combination of a blunt, unexcitable stoicism and a desert-dry wit too.

I love Alex Turner's propensity on that first lp to puncture pretension - "You're not from New York city you're from Rotherham", delivered with just the right degree of amused disdain.


Praise is stoic, but disdain can be a bit more animated: 'the band were fucking wank!'

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby naughty boy » 12 Sep 2017, 12:46

We did like 'em once. Some of us, anyway.



anyone heard from Sarah?
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.

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Re: BCB 130 - Pulp

Postby naughty boy » 19 Jan 2018, 14:53

BWUMP
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.


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