Brett Anderson was Britpop’s androgynous sex pest, Damon Albarn its brattish mockney jester, the Gallagher brothers its scowling rock’n’roll hardmen. Jarvis Cocker, meanwhile, was the witty, dishevelled, malnourished academic, raging against class injustice while finding time to shag thirsty undergraduates in between gin-soaked lectures. It’s a tale as old as time, and Jarvis played his role to the hilt; while Liam Gallagher was marauding around in a parka, and Brett Anderson was applying his mother’s makeup, Pulp’s frontman was falling around awards ceremonies like a drunken scholar at a provincial Medieval History conference, all leather elbows and oversized spectacles. But this penchant for donnish theatricality notwithstanding, I’ll be damned if Pulp weren’t responsible for one of Britpop’s finest moments in Different Class.
In recent years, Jarvis has apparently taken increasing exception to the Britpop moniker, given that the Union Jack has come to be associated with imperialist plunder, crimes against humanity, and jingoistically departing the European Union. But this merely represents a failure to historicise on Jarvis’ part – which is ironic indeed for a guy who dresses like a history professor. Waving the Union Jack and celebrating all things British may now indicate a broadly right-wing political disposition but, in the mid-90s, and in the very specific context of British rock music, it represented the plucky underdog breaking free from the overweening dominance of hyper-capitalist America, as well as, not infrequently, a rejection of snooty and uncool British conservatism. This variant of Britishness was not an ethnic, but rather a civic, above all a cultural nationalism, one frequently married with a hatred of the upper classes.
Class hatred is, of course, the most important and most abiding theme of Different Class. The album’s rousing and dramatic opener, “Mis-Shapes”, serves as a kind of manifesto for everything that follows, an appeal to impoverished working-class freaks to reclaim society from aristocratic halfwits. Or does it? Yes, it explicitly impugns the upper classes for being “bleeding thick” but, equally, when I was a lad, it was generally lower-class louts from the council estates who were liable to knock ten bells of shit out of freaks like me for wearing black eyeliner. Either way, Jarvis’ prediction that the future would belong to the “mis-shapes” proved to be prophetic, given that, in the 25 years since this album was released, freaks and misfits of every description appear to have taken over British public life and implemented their crazed agendas. I’m increasingly unsure of which side I’m on, come to think of it.
The album’s most direct treatment of social class is, of course, “Common People”. The song begins as a quirky undergraduate love story, in which a rich, well-educated, bored student of sculpture approaches Jarvis because she wants to experience some of the apparent “realness” and “authenticity” which she takes to characterise the lives of the poor – though of course, she never really can, being inoculated from its realities by her money. The song develops into a remarkably articulate tirade about how our imposter, played here by Sadie Frost, will never be able to empathise with the meaninglessness and lack of control of working class lives. Equally effective, and possibly more disturbing, is the operatic “I Spy”, a menacing Bond theme about a vengeful prole who sleeps with a rich man’s wife purely to spite him. The depths of hatred that this song plumbs are more unsettling than the scathing, but ultimately resigned and fatalistic, “Common People”.
“I Spy” is not the only song on Different Class which deals with infidelity, and indeed, Jarvis is all too keen to inhabit the role of elegantly wasted, scholarly lounge lizard. The mellow, sleazy “Pencil Skirt” is about an affair, and it’s full of malice, but it’s clear that the impulse for the tryst initially came from the guilt-wracked female party. This exploration of tortured feminine eroticism continues on “Live Bed Show”, which narrates the sad consequences of a woman losing her looks and enduring the gradual but unmistakeable and irreversible decline of her sex life, while “Underwear” is about, presumably, a fashion model being forced into bed, even though she doesn’t particularly want to, a rather unhappy reminder of the prehistoric gender relations which still obtained in the 1990s.
Other songs on Different Class are altogether sweeter. Ostensibly, “sweet” is not a word that can readily be applied to “Disco 2000”, which is written from the perspective of a high school loser who was in love with, but irrelevant to, the cheerleader at the top of the food chain, and who still nurses his teenage crush some 20 years later. It’s essentially Weezer’s “Teenage Dirtbag” but without the happy ending. Nonetheless, it presents an idealised image of romantic love, in contrast to the carnal sleaze which colours much of the rest of the album.
Similarly, “Something Changed” and “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E” are unashamed, one might even say old-fashioned, love songs. Both essentially deal with the serendipitous, irresistible, chaotic nature of love; on the former, Jarvis resorts to entertaining the idea of the existence of God in order to explain the seemingly inexplicable genesis and development of the romantic experience. Perhaps this apparent mystery is a trick nature plays on us, to induce us to commit the cardinally irrational act of having and raising children, something that no sane person could possibly want.
Alongside Different Class’ treatment of the unbridgeable conflict between social classes and genders, a good number of the songs on this album deal with the attempt to escape from these contradictions by taking drugs and getting fucked up. Most notable is “Sorted for E’s & Wizz”, which gently ridicules the drug-fuelled communitarianism of music festivals, a temporary, chemically induced high of life-affirming positivity which ultimately and inevitably degenerates into a depressing, isolating come down. The mean-sounding “Monday Morning” conjures the sense of directionlessness which confronts graduates of British state schools, who must choose between working in shoe shops or getting blind drunk every night of the week – with the protagonist of this song predictably and wisely choosing the latter. The album’s closer, “Bar Italia”, narrates the progressive descent into inebriation which typifies an average night on the town, whereby, by 2AM, the only option left is the notorious dive bar, the last chance saloon before the dreaded comedown.
All in all, then, Different Class is a most bacchanalian record, a document of the sordid lives of working-class youths in northern towns who get drunk and laid from a lack of anything else to do. And yet, the album is maybe a bit too clever to be confined by this characterisation, given the eloquent socio-political revenge fantasies of “Common People” and “I Spy”, the freak manifesto of “Mis-Shapes”, or the rye, self-ironic epicureanism of “Sorted for E’s & Wizz”. Any trace of white male rage at the unjust state of the world is, ultimately, superseded by Jarvis’ desire for, and desire to comment on, sex and drugs.
This is reflected in the album’s musical style, which generally eschews the scything hard rock guitars of other Britpop highlights such as Definitely Maybe or Modern Life is Rubbish in favour of a sparse, string-laden, almost pop-like, New Wave mien. This makes for a compelling and absorbing listen, but my feeling is that the music is rarely centre stage here; rather, it merely provides a platform for the histrionics and enormous intelligence of the frontman, who was a poet first, a musician second, and a revolutionary class warrior a very distant third.
8/10
Highlights: “Common People”, “I Spy”, “Something Changed”