Common People: A lyrical discussion/dissection

scythe

Yes, sarahel - on a full scholarship. My mom thought it was hilarious to point out to people that me and my friend C, who grew up skint on a reservation near Hibbing because her mother married a Native American, were the poorest kids in the college (not true, BTW). I mean, I know there's a big difference between me and someone who grew up in a housing project, but my single-parent mom with no college degree was not pinching pennies because she thought it was something fun to do.

JC's order for "rum n coca cola" alludes to calypso tune also about tourism, imperialism, etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_and_Coca-Cola

xp - yeah, Sarah Lawrence had a serious rich kid snob factor reputation from what i remember - i had this sense that it was kinda like the characters in that movie Metropolitan, which i found fascinating, but didn't want to live in that world

What really bothered me is how class was reinforced there, and how those reinforcements were communicated. My experience in high school was pretty egalitarian, in that class was not a determinant in my friendship choices in the same way that shared interests and aesthetic appreciation and of my friends in school who were rich, their parents tended towards making them get jobs to learn the value of money and against things like country clubs. We did have snotty rich kids, but in school and in the Midwest generally, grades and thrift shopping can successfully compete with that, along with the consolation that you're dealing with big fish/small pond types and the situation isn't necessarily 'forever'. But at a place like Sarah Lawrence, the names sound familiar for a reason, because you're surrounded by people with real connections to history, culture, media and celebrity - the initial feeling is OHHHHH SHIIIIIT because, of course, it must never be discussed and it's all anyone can gossip about.

Things that gave me pause were the questions that people from a more stratified background than mine don't even have to ask, such as 'why can't we invite the cleaner to our hall party?' (the answer, 'insurance', was only half the answer IMO) and a sense that it was easier for kids from the projects, or kids of colour, to connect with the trust-funders because the trust-funders could earn congratulations (self-generated or otherwise) for that friendship, whereas the working-to-lower-middles (straight white kids from public schools with regional accents) were kind of seen as unsophisticated and not worth knowing (sometimes by me, but someone with a frizz perm and Van Halen records from my own socioeconomic background - whose family probably had more money than mine - was not my kind of people before I got there).

And that is perhaps my biggest problem with the narrator of this song is, he seems to be trapped by his own resentments (even as he *has* the possibility represented by art school and tertiary education) - *way* more so than he is trapped by some clueless girl who wants to sleep with him. And yet he takes it out in this ever more shrill and hysterical fashion *on* this girl.

I've read this whole thread and just wanted to go back to this because for me this song has never really been about the girl at all, it definitely reads like the narrator-as-Jarvis projecting/laying out his own confused feelings about weatlh/privilege/identity (not so much class I don't think) - the greek girl exists in the song as a sort of jump-off point for an extended rant. I mean you never get any sense of where the encounter goes or where the girl's attitude leads - ok it *starts* in the supermarket but what then? It always struck me as odd that it starts off as a story-type song then goes off on this tangent. This could well be intentional on Jarvis' part, the first verse could be a red herring - in which case it's quite a clever way to go about it; however if he actually was hoping to merely put forward a convincing case for 'Rich people slumming it are bad' then I think the song fails.

I agree with this - the primary conflict in the song is the kind of love-hate civil class war among the two visions of the working class, into the middle of which steps the clueless rich girl who doesn't even see that there's a difference. Nothing more annoying than someone ignorant telling you what you're like, and not only getting it wrong but telling you you're the same as your bitterest enemy. One can imagine how irritating locals must find it when everyone's got a glib view on Israel or Northern Ireland or wherever.

Nothing more annoying than someone ignorant telling you what you're like, and not only getting it wrong but telling you you're the same as your bitterest enemy.

Ha ha, trust me, I know what this is like - it's happened quite a few times directed at me on this thread and the other one.

And yeah, it is just a weird song, the way it starts as a story and ends as a rant and I don't know that those two halves hang together particularly well.

this is probably here nor there at this point, but the british class system isn't some impenetrable mystery that the r.o.w. will never understand. it's not really that complicated.

Never underestimate the American ability to completely fail to understand other countries' cultures.

(You could really substitute most any country for "American" there, but given the low possession of passports by the citizens there, and the high American presence on this board, it seemed the most fitting example.)

hey if a rich greek girl can learn and grow, someone not from the UK can figure out how status works there.

im p sure they have poor people in greece

― i am legernd (history mayne), Saturday, September 4, 2010 9:00 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^^ good one

i should probably note that my experience of this song at the time was as one of the most popular songs among boys in my school (and totally lumped in with oasis, blur, all the rest). yup, public schoolboys singing along to these lyrics as if it was their anthem. sooooo wrong. and that's partly why i find this song's ~outcast anthem~ status so laughable, because IRL it didn't work like that at all - this, and britpop generally, was the dominant aesthetic at my school, what you were expected to be into, and you were considered a weirdo if you deviated from it.

'Rum and coca cola' is a nice touch, I hadn't heard of that before

can't imagine being shunned at school for what music you did or didn't like. thought that kind of thing only happened in john hughes movies.

And Jarvis is probably clever enough to know exactly what he was referring to. xpost

Public schoolboys singing along to Common People is just like Republicans' relationship with Born In The USA, but I can totally understand not liking something because it has stupid fans - and I can well imagine Lex's fellow students not being into Li'l Kim, etc.

of course i didn't get shunned, it wasn't even that horrible - just things like other dudes acting like listening to tlc/erykah badu/tori amos/suzanne vega = "terrible taste", or battles over the common room stereo. i can't imagine anyone doesn't know about how teenagers pressure each other to conform aesthetically!

i can't imagine anyone doesn't know about how teenagers pressure each other to conform aesthetically!

Yeah, this is, actually, to me is way more o_0 what universe do you come from than, say, not knowing who John Wayne or Pavement are. ;-)

i mean isn't that the premise on which cocker casts himself as an outsider? the weirdo who dresses differently, likes reading, likes different music, to everyone else around him? it was a bit like that, except it was his music that everyone else around me liked. (i didn't dress particularly differently to everyone else, though.)

and 'Rum and Coca Cola' was appropriated by its targets as well

Much touched upon upthread, but I think Cocker's own class discomfort is crucial to the song. In a retrospective for the 25th anniversary of the miners' strike a little while back, he was one of the talking heads, and he explained that he absolutely didn't support the miners at the time. After all, they were the people who out in Sheffield on a Saturday night would rain misery down on people like him, for not being proper working class lads with the appropriate interests in beer and pool and screwing. Common People is like the response of someone from an ugly town - you know it's awful, but it really pisses you off when someone from somewhere nice stats going on about how awful it was when they visited for a day.

i can't imagine anyone doesn't know about how teenagers pressure each other to conform aesthetically!

sure there were different groups with different tastes, and maybe i've got some rose tinted memory specs on, but i don't really recall any kind of aesthetic pressure, no worse than you get on ilm anyway (sure you get heated discussions here but i don't really feel any *pressure*). ok there was that one time i was embarrassed to admit i liked a bros song.

maybe it was a different kind of school, or maybe if you actually liked the stuff that everyone else liked you wouldn't have noticed it

Good call on "rum and coca-cola"; despite being vaguely familiar with the song of that name (though I wasn't in '95) I'd never put 2+2 together, but I had sometimes wondered why the "in that case"

I love this thread, particuarly the Rum and Coca-Cola connection, the miners strike fact and the phrase "fractious autodidacticism". This is one of my favourite songs of the 90s and this thread makes me feel like I'd only skimmed the surface.

(there's a huge wall, I think, between the kind of school where pressure to conform aesthetically took the form of physically hitting you and where it didn't - people act like these are the same thing but they 100% aren't)

That's a good post, ithappens, and informative!

I was at high school a few years earlier than Lex, '87-94, and it was definitely not the usual thing to be into indie or proto-Britpop at that time - most of the kids were into Guns'n'Roses/Aerosmith/hair metal or U2/INXS/Queen. I didn't get much shit for liking indie though, that was mostly reserved for hip hop or house.

high school for me was '93-'00 - it was an oddity in that it was a specialist music school, and once in sixth form the dynamic of the year changed completely, due to lots of musicians (previously a minority group in the year) arriving on scholarships, and the...less academically inclined local farmers' kids leaving. sixth form was really great as far as aesthetic tolerance went tbh. prior to that it was britpop all the way with a smattering of, like, nirvana and pearl jam. don't remember hip-hop getting much play but then i hadn't got into it yet at that point either. i was intro trip-hop, female singer-songwriters and r&b, none of which was considered acceptable to go on the house common room - i remember sneaking into the girls' houses a few times, which was mostly forbidden, just so i could listen to, like, en vogue and madonna with friends. amusingly, that was before i came out.

my most triumphant common room stereo battle was when i put erykah badu's first album on one day, not long after it had come out and BLOWN MY MIND - a group of some of the nastier elements in my house turned up not long after that and the usual hostility ensued. (beating people up wasn't really something that happened in my school, at least not to me, but physical scuffles did, including THROWING MY CD ACROSS THE ROOM. hateful cunts!) anyway there also happened to be some sixth-formers there who i didn't know (rare, sixth-formers didn't use that common room much), one of whom happened to be a musician specialising in jazz piano, ie someone who could actually appreciate good music, and he marched over to the little cunts who were bothering me and literally picked the ringleader up by his collar and told him not to ever fuck with a) me b) erykah badu ever again. then he put the cd back in, turned the volume up ten times as loud as it was, and we jammed to this -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Wa4tIofqU

<3

Starting to understand Jarvis' complicated defending-despite-hating relationship with the working class in regards to my countrymen, what with all the America comments on this thread.

I was at high school a few years earlier than Lex, '87-94, and it was definitely not the usual thing to be into indie or proto-Britpop at that time - most of the kids were into Guns'n'Roses/Aerosmith/hair metal or U2/INXS/Queen. I didn't get much shit for liking indie though, that was mostly reserved for hip hop or house.

I was in high school '83-'87, and something so innocuous as liking Prince or Madonna -- which I did, and at the time when they were like two of the two top four or five artists in the music industry -- was sufficient to get you called "faggot" and threatened with ass-beatings constantly.

High school was '92-'99 for me and while britpop definitely led to an increase in people listening to indie/guitar type music, it didn't dominate to any extent - maybe it's the sort of school I went to but there was never really any consensus regarding music. For the first couple of years I definitely felt that there were divisions ('moshers' vs. 'ravers' or whatever) but after a while you realised that peoples' tastes were often more complex than you thought. We never had a common room until the sixth form - I never put anything on it but most of the stuff played was decent (notable exception: Ian Brown's solo album).

Sorry should be "put anything on in it"

The building at my school containing the common room was destroyed in a storm before we inherited it, so we were allocated a tiered lecture theatre as a replacement. Not a very relaxing place to chill out and nobody bothered putting in a stereo or anything. Some idiots smashed the place up on our last day, so that was probably a good call. Only a handful of kids were really into music anyway as I recall, so we set the agenda pretty much unopposed.

I was in high school in the Midwest from '82-'86. No common room, but art studios and a radio station with a 'classic rock' format - which was fought over by metalheads and punks. You were highly unlikely to be called queer for liking Prince in the Twin Cities, and luckily we had a posse of punk girls who'd been precocious gig-goers that Husker Du and the Replacements hung out with as peers ready to police anyone who gave people like me shit about their musical tastes, but if you liked British stuff as opposed to generic all-ages punk shit, the local flannel shirts often cried 'poseur'. The great mass of 'normal' students liked big hits (Blondie, Human League, The Police, The Clash) from certain new wavish groups but mostly listened to top 40. At a recent reunion some of the people who did give me shit about what I liked (smithscurebunnymenmarychainremcocteautwinsneworder) took me aside to say they were glad I listened to that stuff because they got into whatever I liked 2-3 years after I had.

The more I think about it, the more I've figured out that Jarvis is one of the only British people I can think of whose financial and family background almost exactly echoes my own; also there's the emotional thing of wanting to get the fuck out of Dodge because of the more conservative/conformist elements of the working/lower middle class people you call your family and neighbours. I'm sure he's also about as *eyeball roll* as I am about being told by a bourgeois that certain feelings of annoyance I have towards people who just don't seem like they think too hard about much of anything are *invalid*.

Eh, my high school was very rural -- nearly an hour from the nearest actual city (Cleveland) and fewer than 500 students in the entire school. I was, to my knowledge, the only student who had ever heard of R.E.M., let alone bought one of their albums, let alone any other indie rock or postpunk bands.

LOL, another parallel is that Sheffield - as far as having a healthy music scene in the late '70s and '80s, with its smattering of people who'd reach national significance, warehouse parties, influential indie labels and unusually good record stores - was so much like Minneapolis, the Human League were very happy to come there to work with Jam and Lewis when I was a senior in high school.

High school 85-88 and I listened to a random mix of top 40, classic rock and KROQ/91X style programming. As did everyone at school, pretty much. I don't remember one musical argument from the time at all!

1985-1992. Sixth form common room split between goths, Madchester/dance/hip hop types and classic-rock musos with strained tolerance the norm and occasional bursts of mutual admiration - the early 90s was a good time for crossover because of all the hip hop and indie-dance going on. I remember the real conflicts happening at house parties - we got evicted from a metal-dominated party for slipping on a tape of dance music. We deliberately started with 808 State's Cubik and In Yer Face in an attempt to woo the metalheads, to no avail.

In my latter years at secondary school, five of us in a sixth form of 100 odd liked indie. Jazz funk dominated. Indie types too small a number for anyone else to give a shit either way. But the dominance of the Smiths over indie in the mid-80s meant the music was characterised as crybaby stuff for bedwetters.

Hi. I like this song and this thread.

I got a hold of this album right when it came out. I was probably in my second year of high school.

I always identified with the narrator of the song even though I wouldn't even know how to begin talking about talking about my own relationship with class without numerous paragraphs that would be of very little interest to many.

I just wanted to say, at the risk of taking this thread back a few hundred posts, that, contrary to a few people above, and maybe the spirit of this thread, I do appreciate Marx's focus on ownership as the primary factor in determining social class, even as the more stringent categories he lays out for class distinction do tend to obfuscate the value of the numerous paragraphs each of us could write about our own backgrounds.

A few posters have brought up the importance of choices, possibilities, etc. and how important one's sense of what is out there and what is possible might be in determining class. While this is certainly important, what is more important is that there are those who are able to actually determine what those choices and possibilities are.

What does this have to do with the song? Maybe(!) its the obliviousness to this fact on the part of both the wealthy and the working class that perpetuates the cult of working class authenticity that is distasteful to the narrator. On the one hand, Cocker has to resent that someone who may be of the class of people that could change the material conditions of the lives of the people would actually want to live like them, not out of political solidarity, but out of a twisted vision of social prestige but, on the other hand, he probably dislikes as well, even if he reinforces somewhat, the fatalism of working class culture and weird pride some have in their fatalistic view. The discomfort in the song comes form having to be mediator between the two*, though ultimately, he has to choose a side and he does, perhaps partially out of solidarity but also just because of the ethics of the situation.

*(and others have described above the feeling of having, due to circumstances out of one's control, to become a representative of a group one does not identify with out of choice - it is not a comfortable feeling - I know it as someone raised Jewish who is not Jewish and rather far to the left and not supportive of Israeli policy but also aware of the fact that simply because "I am Jewish" to other people, my thoughts will usually be assumed before being heard, I will usually be seen as speaking form a certain perspective that is not entirely my own, etc. and a sense of solidarity will be re-established between myself and other Jews/"Jews" purely out of being "put in my place")

1996-2001. Oasis, other Britpop and East 17 popular at first, then came dance/trance dominance. All of the various rock/indie subcultures got lumped into the one category. UK Garage came after but was never really as popular.

I remember a lot of guys switching their allegience from dance to rap towards the end, especially after Eminem.

I wonder what Sarah Palin would think of this discussion.

82-87. Metal, electro/old school hip hop, post punk/punk/goth

I don't remember music ever being an issue at school. Even if you liked the Smiths. All the violence and aggravation was all about football, rugby, the brand of your trainers, the tightness of your jeans and for the unfortunate minority, the colour of your skin. My school was a terrible hive of cuntery but I will give them musical open-mindedness. Even the house breakers were bong loaded Zappa and Neu! fans.

And yeah, it is just a weird song, the way it starts as a story and ends as a rant and I don't know that those two halves hang together particularly well.

This is partly why it's great. There isn't even a story past the first two verses - trip to the supermarket and then it's all rant. The last thing the girl does is laugh at him taking the poverty tour guide stuff too srsly, and then it's a feverish speculation that allows her to vicariously experience the frisson of dirt and lust and torpor while he gets fucked up about it.

The reasons to dislike are centred around other people miseading the lyrics as a proletkult apology and the general dishonesty and shittiness of the britpop era. The ~ song itself ~ is pretty singular and great rly.

I feel like I will never go thru a hardcore drug addiction phase
Will never live in a shithole crack den meth lab apartment
Do drugs that involve needles
have sex in a graveyard
communicate with spirits
Have my bros crucify me just 4 shits
Sell my body for drugs
Contract some sort of infection/STD/terminal illness

Just dark ass shit

Feel like I'm always gonna be kinda mnstrm
and I won't ever be that dark

that 'story of Common People' doc is on You Tube it appears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltodth1h1Oo

terrific blog by Dorian: http://33revolutionsperminute.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/the-rage-of-common-people/

Has anyone read Owen Hatherley's book "Uncommon"?

wow, somehow i completely missed this thread the first time around. i've been reading for 20 minutes and have barely scratched the surface.

it's amazing to me that so many people are new to this song!

to my mind it's one of the best pop (rock?) songs of the 90s. maybe the best? at any rate it's one of the few pop (rock?) songs in recent memory where the snarling, desperate, animal energy of the vocals actually has a convincing basis in the lyrics. i just don't believe singers when they get all angry or excited usually, cause what are they singing about? who knows.

also i just want to take this opportunity to mention that an unremarkable baseball card from a particular year - a card that doesn't command any sort of price above and beyond the rest of them - is called a "common". i always felt sorry for the players pictured on them.