You Name The Drama, And I’ll Play The Part

Pulp are, weirdly enough, the band that’s come to personify Britpop to the majority of Britpop-loving Americans that I know. This always seems weird to me; I liked them, but Britpop was always the struggle between Blur and Oasis to me – and not in the sense of their ridiculous Battle Of The Bands, but in the way that it was the intellectual, sensitive art school magpie versus the thuggish thieves (or, as Grant Morrison called them once, “the Rutles for the ’90s,” which still makes me smile), and the way that so many of the other Britpop bands seemed to stem from that dichotomy. Pulp always seemed off to the side to me, doing their own thing but… not really at the center of things, I guess.

Where Pulp excelled, though, was the comedown of 1997-1998, when all of the bands who’d suddenly become massive and unlikely teen idols released their follow-up albums, and almost all of them were trying to deal with being successful in their own ways; Supergrass did In It For The Money, with four great songs and the beginning of their obsession with muso noodling instead of songwriting, Blur did Blur and abandoned their formula and came up with something much more honest instead (before deciding to go and get William Orbit involved for the somewhat over-produced 13 afterwards), the Boo Radleys did C’Mon Kids, which almost defines the term “cruelly overlooked,” and Pulp did This Is Hardcore, which is just… perfect, in its own way.

This Is Hardcore came out when I was doing my Masters degree, and flailing and floundering, the way that you do at that time. I’d become disinterested in my own work, and plagued by self-doubt about almost everything, obsessing instead over a relationship that was (looking back) really just making everything much worse instead of offering me something different and good. No wonder, then, that I kept listening to an album with song titles like “The Fear” and lyrics like “This is the sound of someone losing the plot/Making out like they’re okay when they’re not.” It’s a wonderfully dark album, lyricist and singer Jarvis Cocker getting the fame he’d always wanted and realizing that it was the worst thing he could imagine.

But for all the self-loathing (The B-side to the wonderful, Bond-theme-gone-wrong “This Is Hardcore” single, “The Professional,” is one of the most stunning songs the band ever did, just for the harshness Cocker brings against himself, saying “I’m only trying to give you what you’ve come to expect/Just another song about single mothers and sex/Single mothers and sex, single mothers and sex/Just another song about single mothers and sex/Okay, you’ve heard it before, it’s nothing special/But it’s a living, can’t you see? I’m a professional”), it’s also a weirdly human, loving album, with “Help The Aged” turning what could’ve been a joke into something oddly touching, and “Dishes” offering a heartfelt embrace of the mundanity of real life (“I’m not worried that I will never touch the stars/Cause stars belong up in heaven/And the earth is where we are/And aren’t you happy just to be alive?/Anything’s possible”). When all else was going wrong in my life, this was something to indulge my worst fears and gently remind me that things could get better.

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1. But Where Does She Go
2. Is It Just That I’m Much Too Much For You?
3. Look What You’re Doing
4. And As We Drive, I Keep Calling Leaving Cute One Liners
5. The One Band Reunion I’d Want To See Live