Common People: A lyrical discussion/dissection

On the bus now & this is gonna take forever but...

The whole thing about point 2 & the reaction of Brit alt at the time was this fetishisation of "working class authenticity" & the accompanying dull leaden culture that went with it - reaching it's apotheosis in what would become landfill indie. & ignoring (& actually disparraging in other forms) the flashy mod side of actual working class art. I know this is a big part of what gets up Lex's nose as well.

Hopefully someone smarter & more articulate will take this & expand on it.

I don't think this was Cocker's intention with this song but this song certainly got used as justification for the later lad-ification of 90s indie.

so basically this was an equivalent of the "keepin' it real" ethos?

lol sarahel u strike me as from a different planet sometimes, i just can't make sense of where you're coming from

it is true - i am actually an alien from outer space.

For US posters.....
Alongside the posh V common thing, it's important to remember that Cocker is from Sheffield - which gives a different weight to the setting 'St. Martin's College' (many English people mightn't know where it is, but for those who do, it is quintessentially metropolitan, and for those not from London, it's very 'London') - the singer is clearly Northern (accent would be immediately apparent to British listeners) so St. Martin's is not his home turf either.

would it be similar to say - someone from the midwest going to NYC?

cultural capital is a significant factor

I think sarahel is getting at something interesting actually; I mean this helps explain why American politics doesn't divide along class lines and yet during elections superficial class issues become a big deal (Obama's mustard choices or whatever)

horseshoe also raised a really important point about US vs. UK class difference vis a vis the history of immigration here and how immigrants are perceived and that it is probably more complicated here than in the UK.

I was attending Oxford University as a Marshall scholar when this song was a hit. I was, er, hooking up at the time with what I guess would be termed a very "rough trade" working class kid, a young barman who lived in a flat with some flatmates across town. I was over at his place and we watched the video for this on "Top of the Pops" at his place and there was this jubilation that he and his flatmates felt about this tune being a big pop hit and I felt this deep/comic humiliation and feeling of being "hailed" / called out by the song. Because I really was a totally privileged kid from an elitist school who was hanging out with these working class kids and kind of reveling in feeling like I had snuck into a world where I didn't belong and there was Jarvis laying it down. As an American I'm outside of Brit class systems frameworks, but this kind of slumming dynamic was a constant at Oxford: kids who would affect a Cockney accent and working class voices/slang, but then they'd be off to Blenheim to ride with the Duchess of Marlborough come the weekend.

Oh man - the slumming dynamic at Ivy League schools drove me crazy ... but it was good preparation for dealing with other white "hipsters" living in Oakland who affect ghetto slang

That's strange, Karen, I think Pulp represent the exact opposite of 90s laddism. Oasis portrayed working-class identity as pure good times, don't read books, don't worry about politics, etc - Pulp were the arty, intellectually aspirational, misfit alternative. If people took Pulp as representative of simple blue-collar "authenticity" then they were only listening to one song, and misunderstanding it to boot. It's bizarre to single out Pulp, of all bands, as responsible for boring landfill indie.

Britpop and class is v complicated. I recently read an old Manics interview in which Nicky Wire says he wrote Design for Life ("we don't talk about love/we only want to get drunk") in part as a response to Blur's Girls & Boys, which he thought was loathsomely condescending. In fact, you could read Common People as a sly attack on Damon Albarn in his mockney, dog-racing phase. But then he would claim he was misunderstood… It's the worthwhile side of Britpop anyway - a fistful of top 5 hits about class identity.

I'm not saying that Pulp were lad culture, quite the reverse. But THAT SONG was definitely mis-used by middle class ppl who wanted to rep for a really one dimensional take on "working class authenticity".

But you seem determined to misunderstand everything I say (probably because you really like the song, fair enough) but also it is really hard to make nuanced points on an iPhone on a crowded bus.

I find this song really hard to separate from negative contexts, bad ppl who have used it to justify stuff I think Cocker never intended.

K - that was what i thought you meant, and was gonna reply to dorian, but i felt you were capable of stating your case.

i don't know much about this song but this thread has sucked out any of my desire to listen to it cuz then i'll have to post here :/

I just listened to it - it's not even particularly enjoyable. Not sure how it ever attracted that much attention.

waht

Half-heartedly trolling on a Friday afternoon, Dan. Don't mind me.

it's really shapeless, formally, but it still works, there's a kind of constant acceleration feeling that really fits the lyrics. and there's a lot of lyrics! you'd have to go to rap to find a hit song with as many words crammed into it.

how did hypocritical middle-class alts deal with "if you called your dad he could stop it all" with the fucking drums going bananas. just pretended they didn't have that safety net? i think kate is talking about having to deal with class resentment in general, and this song being abt class resentment.

― zvookster, Friday, September 3, 2010 6:08 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark

most of them didn't have (didn't think they had) that safety net. getting a haircut, getting a job, renting a flat -- these are not exactly unknown to middle-class folk. it's only the very rich, the top 5–10% of the population, who are really so rich that their dad could -- what? pay their rent? so it was quite easy for middle-class alts to participate in the hatred of rich greek girls that the song enacts.

wait what if the girl is actually greek.

i assume the first line means, just back from 'holiday' before starting school.

lol xp IS SHE GREEK THIS IS CRUCIAL

Thing that's really annoying is, I would really like the droney propulsion if the song if it weren't for Jarvis & the lyrics. :(

I am not going to judge K for having queasy associations with the culture around this song given my own tortured relationship with a lot of metal bands that I would enjoy a lot more sonically if hearing them didn't evoke images of a lot of the racists I grew up with (or in some cases the bands themselves weren't actually racists, ha).

um, "were actually racists"

gah work sucks

lol xp IS SHE GREEK THIS IS CRUCIAL

― goole, Friday, September 3, 2010 7:02 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

EGGSZACKLY

Dan, did you have to cut your hair?

as far as the "is she greek?" question - i interpreted it as she was literally from Greece, like she was from this rich family - like the Onassises or something - from another country who had the luxury of attending college as a foreign student, which in America is a sign of being wealthy.

i interpreted it as she was literally from Greece, like she was from this rich family - like the Onassises or something - from another country who had the luxury of attending college as a foreign student, which in America is a sign of being wealthy.

That's how I interpreted it as well.

ya im sure she is actually greek.

which is part of why it's a tad bit fucked up imo, i mean sure class solidarity across poxy national borders and everything, but jarvis's class resentment is so specifically british, and never political-political, that, well, it seems kind of off.

like where i went to college, there were a number of European students that provided some seriously rewarding dumpster diving at the end of the academic year, because they'd just throw away barely worn designer clothes because they just couldn't be bothered to ship all that stuff back for the summer, or pay for storage.

Dan, did you have to cut your hair?

... Yes? Although it only happened like once every 6 months and was a big production that chewed up an entire Saturday with a trip to St Paul up until I got into high school and started saying "fuck it, let Supercuts in town give me a buzz cut". Not picking up on the relevance of the question.

pavement ref iirc

oh lol, I was never going to get that

no, you posted that "work sucks" - the line in the song - "cut your hair and get a job" - the earlier post about how middle class people are no strangers to having to cut their hair and get jobs ...

Britpop and class is v complicated. I recently read an old Manics interview in which Nicky Wire says he wrote Design for Life ("we don't talk about love/we only want to get drunk") in part as a response to Blur's Girls & Boys, which he thought was loathsomely condescending. In fact, you could read Common People as a sly attack on Damon Albarn in his mockney, dog-racing phase. But then he would claim he was misunderstood… It's the worthwhile side of Britpop anyway - a fistful of top 5 hits about class identity.

Cocker said "it seemed to be in the air, that kind of patronising social voyeurism... I felt that of Parklife, for example, or Natural Born Killers - there is that noble savage notion. But if you walk round a council estate, there's plenty of savagery and not much nobility going on."[3]

that "cut your hair" song is the only Pavement song i'm familiar with tbh

oh haha

I was jumping from one meeting to another and distracted and made an egregious context-changing typo because of it, that's all.

(The thing about her being Greek - I think this song is very possibly about a girl! From Greece! Isn't Jarvis kind of known for doing that, as a lyricist? Certainly 'Inside Susan' is explicitly about a specific person.) (Haha I only know that from an Official Pulp book I got from the library aged 14)

sure - it probably is - but i agree with history mayne about that detail feeling a bit off

Cocker said "it seemed to be in the air, that kind of patronising social voyeurism... I felt that of Parklife, for example, or Natural Born Killers - there is that noble savage notion. But if you walk round a council estate, there's plenty of savagery and not much nobility going on."[3]

the song 'parklife' is baffling to me, i kind of have no idea what it's about, but the album isn't really about council estates and whatnot, is it? a lot of it is about suburban middle-class philistines; 'girls and boys' is about people who can afford to go on package holidays. jarvis's outlook is either more true to the north or more rooted in the 1970s. but he's wrong about blur, on the whole. (i do think blur did some really awful character songs, but none of them were 'noble-savage'. albarn, on some songs anyway, was shooting for a london's fields vibe: no nobility there.)

london's fields vibe:

what is this?

very pre-millennial novel by martin amis from 1989

i used to f/w it, and amis writes like a motherfucker fuiud, though er, owyousay, feminists have 'raised objections' to it...

http://cdn2.mog.com/images/000210931214520987.jpg

actual title 'london fields' which is now a very expensive place to live but wasn't then

yeah i mean blur dressed up in old pop styles (ie mod revival) and made it clear that that was what they were doing -- i don't think that's blur going for a noble savage thing

if you post on ilx are you automatically at least middle class

probably a minimum of lower middle

wondered abt that after a few months tbh

from what i understand about that era and blur's aesthetic at the time (which was when i had my britpop fixation) - it doesn't seem at all about noble savagery - i mean, doesn't commodity fetishism and aspirations to a higher class (or at least its signifiers) play a major role in that sensibility?

hm: You could be right ... just following up the Jarvis quote.

FWIW & thinking about it - I initially agreed that the Greek detail doesn't help the song but I think I disagree now!

I think it achieves some things that 'she came from Cheshire' wouldn't:

1) It makes her *even more blameless* - there is no sense, as there would be with an english girl, that this hopelessness is her family's fault in some small way
2) If you are European and at art school in another country and that country is England, you are read as a specific social class in this country and that class is upper middle class bohemianism - this runs true basically regardless of any other factors afaict.