It’s mine, all mine
Hand-reared, one of a kind
You show me yours and I’ll show you mine
But hurry ‘cos my sex is running out of time
(“Pulp”, My Sex)
Jarvis Cocker is the last great dandy of that imaginary England that trembles with boyish lust beneath its gloomy button-down, rearing a menagerie in its trousers. All right, there were certainly others besides him in history. David Bowie, for example, is the glamorous sovereign of this heavenly area of predominantly male life. What to say about Bryan Ferry, who day in and day out radiates the masculine refinement of romantic longing, or about I will come. Nick Cave, which, like some pankoid marquis, blends horror and immortal love-meeting into all-pervading sweetness. But Jarvis Coker knows knowledge. Two dozen years after the previous one, he boldly comes out to the whole world with new album of his band "Pulp", under the name MoreWhat more do you want, really.
The group "Pulp" belongs to the natives of what will be much later Britpop to call... Conceived in Sheffield once upon a time in 1978, Cocker and friends painstakingly built their way, to be released with the album Different Class from 1995 enthroned as the "damn quintessential" band of the era at the pinnacle of the genre, an unsurpassed category for themselves. And the weirdo Jarvis Cocker - like a wacky university professor with impossible love situations, a clumsy intellectual full of passion beneath his maladjusted and apparently confused nature, whose strikingness literally screams on the breeze of longing for intimacy, anytime and anywhere - has remained, since those historic days in the nineties, magnetically attractive to the widest audience, among all those Gallaghers, Albarn and Anderson from bands of great britpop four - "Oasis", "Blur", "Suede" and, of course, "Pulp".
Tall and lanky, always impressive in his attitude and suit, elegant and flagrant, Jarvis Cocker used to we are also pulled on on ourselves to the extent that before the new production "Pulp", despite all the initial frowns and sarcastic objections, until the end of the record we dance to his rhythm, following his voice, rhymes and, of course, stature. It's pathetic, it's apparently Bowie second-hand, it's that he hasn't moved away from his teenage fascination with "The Beatles", even one of his songs ("Got to Have Love") sounds like a version of "Santa Esmeralda" and their "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" in a disco-flamenco manner, but who cares.
Because Jarvis is our idol from the gloomy Yugoslav nineties, when just watching that genius video for the song "Common People" could enchant you and make your "ordinary" human potential totally superheroic, and listening to the song "Disco 2000" could instantly lift you up from your slumber and, in high heels and with a new hairstyle, lead you to some place to dance.
An introverted geek with glasses, at that time he was waging crusades for unattainable loves on our behalf and becoming a rebel on the barricades of bitter class struggle, but only and exclusively for reasons of the heart.
Well, how can you not adore him?
Love turns into background noise
Like this ringing in my ears
Like the buzzing of a fridge
You only notice when it disappears
("Pulp", "Background Noise")
But when the madness passes forever and you finally step into the era of "after jeans" from Raymond Carver's story of the same name, you, me, all of us together and Jarvis Cocker - only then, brothers and sisters, do real breaks in the soul occur, according to which our youthful resistance, impatience, nervousness, elation and disappointment are the most ordinary cartoon. Pure nonsense, as it were. With the fact that Cocker and "Pulp" once made it the news of the day. And kudos to them for that.
But today, you see, Jarvis Cocker and the rest of the Pulp, for the first time since the death of their long-time bassist Steve Mackie, found the strength to sing once again under a glittering ball in a personal disco, which Cocker moved at his own will from the kitchen to the cosmos, to the escalator, the parking lot or whatever. Life revolves around the supermarket, the intercity train, casual encounters in the smeared everyday life, where eyes accidentally meet for a moment and already the forces of the rut drag them on with their soulless routine. But in moments of solitude, the man's already numb love ardor still reaches out to various types, dreaming of impossible relationships that turn into real ones, only that the other does not know it at all. Or, he does know... who knows.
Desperate hopelessness and cold-blooded reconciliation with fate, a cry for a possible existence that is somehow always within reach of realization, but in the end nothing comes of it, regret for youth, a little spiteful, but still determined to be bold, come what may, and, finally - as always with Jarvis - a lot of noble laughter, jokes at his expense and worship of women, with awe and licentious intimacy at the same time, like Petrarch, like Bukowski.
In Jarvis' trembling rhymes, on the album More, the lovers find traces of authentic warmth in prosaic things like the buzzing of the refrigerator ("Background Noise"), burn everyone in their orbit while in reality dealing with the central heating ("Partial Eclipse") or at the very end, in the beautiful "A Sunset" - with Brian Inn's family as backing vocals - they utter witty Lennon lines about how unlucky people spend more: So now I'm learning about money/ And I'm learning about law./ The first rule of economics:/ Unhappy people, they spend more.
But (hey) the record More it is by no means gloomy, and you will still enjoy it as a true "Pulp" fanatic, because the music here is grotesque, heartbreaking and, like a skillful hook, drags you down the shipwrecks and euphoria, just like before. Only thirty years later. But it is not too late to say: "You can fill your life with love". Remember that well.
