Common People: A lyrical discussion/dissection

I think the reinforcing them in a negative way aspect is a good thing.

Wait, waht, you WANT to reinforce the idea that working class people are by definition coarse and vulgar and incapable of doing anything more enlightening than drinking and dancing and screwing? Really?

Wow, and I thought I was Victorian. o_0

girl: "i want to try living this way"
dude: "uh ok but most people who live this way don't really have a choice, and it's pretty terrible. a lot of them don't even realize they're stuck. ps if you want to screw i'll go along with it for a while"

that's the story anyway, if we believe rich greek college girls who are hot to bone jarvis cocker exist

Wait, waht, you WANT to reinforce the idea that working class people are by definition coarse and vulgar and incapable of doing anything more enlightening than drinking and dancing and screwing? Really?

Wow, and I thought I was Victorian. o_0

The fact that character does makes it interesting. It reflects a complicated relationship with his class background. That enriches the song.

i like to think that he's the janitor for the sculpture studio - or maybe an artist model? Like I know a lot of people that do that for a living.

Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here

^^^^ worst line

Sarahel, this is my stock "North American and British person have really conflicting ideas of what 'middle class' means story:

My Canadian bass player and I go to visit our English keyboard player in her Essex home.

Canadian: "Hey, you guys are pretty middle class"
English: "OH MY GOD HOW CAN YOU INSULT ME LIKE THAT?!?!?"

What the Canadian meant was, Hey, your parents own your own house. Your dad works a white collar job in an office. You are currently attending University. Your parents are both fully funding your studies, and giving you enough money on the side for you to engage in nice leisure activities like being in a band. (Also, we have noticed that your parents bought your musical instrument, while we paid for ours from our dayjobs.)

What the English person meant was, Hey, I'm from a working class part of Essex. Even though my parents bought their home under Thatcher, I live in a working class neighbourhood. My dad works in an office, but my grandfather worked on the factory floor. I identify as working class, on account of my background, no matter how much cashflow my parents currently have.

Class in the UK is about identity, not so much money. Seriously.

plenty of UK ppl wld call that middle-class

she's right about a certain section though. i made the point earlier, of course. ahem.

She and her family all identified as working class. And I think the working class community in which they were embedded also identified them as working class.

oh, there's definitely a category of middle class people in the US according to lifestyle/income/cultural signifiers that feel insulted when called middle class, even if/when their parents were middle class, but a generation back they were working class. Like middle class is a pejorative term, like hipster.

all that business is why it's such an interesting song btw

otm

a question for Britishers - is it normal for middle class people from the provinces who aspire to hip urbanity to take working class jobs in order to live somewhere like London? Like art school janitor, or record store clerk, or bartender?

yes, but that doesn't make them working class.

shit, i was a kitchen porter last year. i wouldn't consider myself working class though.

no, exactly - that's how it is here, too, though some of them will refer to themselves as working class, when in fact, their parents have houses with paid off mortgages and paid for them to go to college, etc.

Class is (vast generalisation) simply more persistent in the UK and more mobile in the US, that, like, you can change class in the US within a generation.

And it cuts both ways, in that it's weird how you can persist in being "posh" in the UK even as you're penniless, on account of things like who your grandparents were and what education you had. Being posh is no actual guarantee that your "dad can stop it all" (though maybe he can just about send you a cheque for $200 if you threaten to sell your ovaries, but it means he's got to keep the garage door closed for the next few months so his car doesn't get repossessed)

But blah blah speaking of reinforcing stereotypes blah blah blah etc.

class in America tends to be more fluid. it's less of an identity thing. America likes to think of itself as a classless society a lot of the time.

So what was the deal with the other Pulp song, Mis-Shapes?

Maybe this song is just a giant lens through which we can project our own insecurities about class.

So yeah, it is effective on that level. Still doesn't mean I like it, mind you.

America likes to think of itself as a classless society a lot of the time.

HAH!

(sorry, did I say that aloud? issues...)

i think Americans just aren't as comfortable/used to discussing class - it's easier to talk about money - there is definitely more mobility in a lot of spheres, but there is also a lot of denial and delusionality about it

class in the UK is a holdover of a bygone era these days. plumbers can make twice as much as a university lecturer, but the former would still say they're working class and the latter would say they were middle class (or even upper, if they're from the right breeding). and the derision against other classes works all ways.

HAH!

(sorry, did I say that aloud? issues...)

it's true!

America likes to PRETEND that it doesn't have class.

My parents were stupid enough to actually buy the myth that America was a "classless society" when we emigrated there, and my god, was that a rude awakening.

hence the "likes to think of itself"

i don't think the political affiliations / subtle gradations of "working class" and "middle class" are really present in the song at all. those distinctions are elided by both the girl and cocker into "common people", who exist far below the strata of person the greek girl is anyway.

the whole point of the song is that resources and possibilities determine attitudes and culture ("you'll never get it right")

the girl wants to live a funny little common person life, because it sounds charming. and he's railing at her that a) it only sounds charming because she can check out and go back to rich-land whenever she wants, and more importantly b) the very components of life she wants to play around with -- dancind-drinking-screwing, chip shops -- are borne out of a type of life with no escape

xps in the US, that, like, you can change class in the US within a generation.

^^ fwiw in real money terms this is totally wrong, class mobility in the US is shockingly constrained, compared to the rest of the oecd. but this is another whole set of myths...

i just remember in junior year of high school, discussing The Great Gatsby. Our english teacher was from Connecticut - her father was a professor at Amherst - and she was trying to get the class to see the class difference between the Buchanans and Gatsby - and my classmates just could not grasp that they weren't of the same class because the characters all were rich.

lol your classmates sounded like the were on to something, rather than missing the point, to me

I'd agree with all of that, but the guy's view on/representation of the 'common people' adds another level.

xpost to goole

old money vs new money in the US. a distinction that only really matters to the old money tbh.

lol your classmates sounded like the were on to something, rather than missing the point, to me

― goole, Friday, September 3, 2010 3:52 PM (44 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm this is my pet peeve about discussions of class

(in America; i guess i don't really get England)

uh, actually no - it really doesn't work that way with certain strata of American society - they'll be polite and attempt to stifle condescencion (or not) - but it'll be obvious whose in the metaphorical old boys club and who isn't.

there isn't any old money anymore

uh, yeah there is.

a question for Britishers - is it normal for middle class people from the provinces who aspire to hip urbanity to take working class jobs in order to live somewhere like London? Like art school janitor, or record store clerk, or bartender?

― sarahel, Friday, September 3, 2010 8:41 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

it's kind of an interesting qn coz i'd reckon that now more than 25 years ago (when jarvis moved to london) these 'working class jobs' are done by minorities/immigrants who don't really feature in pulp's class landscape

i shd have clarified earlier re 'if you called your dad he could stop it' -- i guess for a large-ish number of people, perhaps more than in jarvis's day, even, it's more like, if you called your dad he could 'help out' because entry-level positions in arts admin/the media/______ are s0 hard to come by.

and even among the middle classes - there is a tension about people who have similar income and live in their neighborhoods that are "coming from" a lower class, because there are often different values

there most certainly is. but it's interesting where the cut-off point is. the closes to blue bloods you had for the longest time i think were DAR type people. then industrialists came in and, after a number of generations, were accepted into that society. i mean, how many generations are the Kennedy's removed from their origins as the bootleggers? and yet they'd be deemed 'aristocratic'.

xxpost

Class in the UK is about identity, not so much money. Seriously.

― cymose corymb (Karen D. Tregaskin), Friday, September 3, 2010 12:34 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

yes, but it's also about the money. and this song is more about the underlying realities of class, about crushing poverty that one can't escape, or comes to feel somehow that one can't escape. someone said upthread that it attempts to cut through the class = culture baggage to get at money issues at the heart of it, and that's otm, afaic.

it's a burning hate letter to those who don't have to worry about surviving, and it's deliberately delivered in such a way as to exacerbate class tensions, it delights in its rage against the posh & empowered, and i can see as how one might dislike it for that reason, but there's more to the song than one-sided aggression. it critiques itself, ultimately lacerates its own narrator more than this harmless-seeming greek girl.

oh it's relative - different regions have different old money - new england old money behaves a bit different than midwestern old money vs. southern old money ...

and there's also the current issue in America w/r/t the new urbanism where you have middle class and upper middle class people settling in working class neighborhoods and you see some definite clashes

So what was the deal with the other Pulp song, Mis-Shapes?

― olivia tribble control (kkvgz), Friday, September 3, 2010 8:46 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

this was a pretty basic 'alts takin over' narrative. britpop kind of felt like indie music 'breaking into the mainstream'. i h8d because britpop *really* meant that all the lamestreamers were listening to 'our' music or an increasingly formulaic version thereof. now i just lol coz it's not like any of it was ever particularly challenging.

there isn't any old money anymore

― goole, Friday, September 3, 2010 3:55 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

uh, yeah there is.

― sarahel, Friday, September 3, 2010 3:56 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

there kind of is, i guess, but the only place these people's lives have ever intersected with mine was at college, because i went to a pricey ivy league one, and since they just made themselves up and decided they were "old noney" and there are like three of them, metaphorically speaking, i have to wonder whether it matters. for the purposes of most discussions of class, again, what matters is how much money you make. ftr wrt gatsby, the made-up-ness of American aristocracy is the whole point.

i mean what really distinguished those people in college from me was that their parents had an insane amount of accumulated wealth, not that they were aristocratic in some way.

who really is 'old money', anymore, in 2010? someone with a dutch name living off central park? that's like twelve people anymore. i think it's a whole conceptual framework that capital & management has completely discarded, certainly past the 90s and globalization. it seems to live on in literature studies tho.

otm

i'd agree that it's breaking apart, but there were sections of my hometown in Alabama that were walled off, old money. they mixed with the new money, of course, but also had (basically) hereditary positions in clubs and charities and what have you. new money had to be invited.

Listening to this song now, immediate thought (and banal): lyrics only make sense in context of the song.

well I think there definitely was a period of time where there was a discernable American aristocracy (hi dere Vanderbilts) but I think the culture window has narrowed significantly over the last 100 years, largely via entertainment, fashion and technology

not to say there still aren't "old money" ppl because there certainly are; there just aren't that many of them

xp: oh damn you all said all of this already, explicitly and implicitly