Celebrating Jarvis Cocker’s 58th birthday yesterday. —Ed.
Some albums give off light; others suck it up like a black hole. They’re so dark you’d need Diogenes’ lantern to negotiate their lightless depths. Such an album is Pulp’s 1998 release This Is Hardcore, one of the most unremittingly bleak LPs this side of Lou Reed’s Überbummer Berlin. The brainchild of Jarvis Cocker, jaded romantic in search of purification through immersion in the squalid, This Is Hardcore is a joyless (but always melodic) diagnosis of the human condition, and the diagnosis isn’t good.
You’ve got the Fear, says Cocker, because you’re taking too many drugs, and you equate sex not with love but with pornography, and you fail your young and are terrified of growing old. And there aren’t enough kicks or kink out there to save you; and even the man who does right is dissatisfied.
Cocker is the same fellow who 3 years earlier had written “Sorted for E’s & Wizz,” which eviscerated rave culture and reduced it to a lost soul who’s seriously lost the plot: “And this hollow feeling grows and grows and grows and grows/And you want to phone your mother and say/’Mother, I can never come home again/Cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere/Somewhere in a field in Hampshire.'” A nattering nabob of negativity he may have been, but no one else of Cocker’s time–which was marked by a rebirth of pride in the culture of the UK–wrote so cogently and forthrightly about the “hollow feeling” at the core of Cool Britannia.
Pulp was formed in 1978, but it wasn’t until 1995’s Different Class–with its hits “Common People,” “Mis-Shapes,” “Disco 2000,” and “Something Changed”–that the band became bona fide rock stars and reluctant members of the Britpop movement. And while Different Class was chock full of class-conscious satire and dark sarcasm, it sounded upbeat; “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” may well be the cheeriest-sounding song ever written about the down side of a drug culture, while “Common People,” as sarcastic a song as any ever written, is also perky and upbeat sounding.
But by 1998, the vision of the gawky but sexy nerd with David Bowie’s voice–who famously spent a night in the Kensington Police Station after jumping onto stage and shaking his bum in protest during Michael Jackson’s performance at the 1996 Brit Awards–had darkened appreciably as a result of coke addiction,a broken relationship, and disillusionment with his new-found fame. The result was that Celine-bleak journey to the end of night, This Is Hardcore. It still charted at No. 1 in the UK–evidently the Brits can handle what Nick Kent called “the dark stuff”–but stiffed in the U.S. of Afraid, at least in comparison to Different Class. Too sordid and bible black, I suppose. One of its outtakes says it all: “It’s a Dirty World.”
From its controversial cover of a plastic-looking nude–which provides a brilliant clue to the songs about loveless and polyurethane sex contained within–to its porno-suggestive title, This Is Hardcore is an exhaustive series of x-rays not of the heart, but of the heartlessness of men. “The Fear” begins the album on a note of dread; from the funeral-carriage-slow and ominous synthesizers that open the song to Cocker’s introductory lyrics (“This is our Music from A Bachelors Den–the sound of loneliness turned up to ten/A horror soundtrack from a stagnant water-bed/& it sounds just like this,”)
“The Fear” is truly frightening, more anxiety attack than song, and its chorus diagnoses the problem: “Oh Baby, here comes the fear again/The end is near again/A monkey’s built a house on your back/You can’t get anyone to come in the sack/& here comes another panic attack/Oh here we go again.” Follow me, he seems to be saying, and you will end up like me, but no worries: “When you can’t even define what it is that you are frightened of/This song will be here.” “The Fear” ends in a squall of noise, with Cocker repeating the words, “Until the end,” and as someone who has known The Fear intimately, Cocker does an astoundingly good job of musically conjuring it.
The following song, “Dishes,” is an anomaly of sorts–told in the first person by a man washing up after dinner, it seems utterly innocuous. But at its heart it’s a rather veiled confession (he tries to make everything sound hunky-dory, but the mask occasionally slips) of a seemingly good man’s dissatisfaction–with being a humble human instead of Christ (“I am not Jesus/But I have the same initials” and “A man told me to beware of 33” and “I’d like to make this water wine/But it’s impossible”), but most of all with his banal lot in life. It starts slowly then builds to a beautiful melody, with Cocker singing “You’ve got no cross to bear tonight/No not tonight,” but that’s exactly what the man wants, and while “Dishes” lacks the dread and utter darkness of some of the album’s other songs, it’s a twilight tune, and brings to mind Thoreau’s “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
“Party Hard” is a fast and hard song told by a hard and bitter man who has reduced love to its lowest common denominator–namely, fucking. “This man is dangerous,” he sings, “He just shed his load on your best party frock/Before you enter the palace of wisdom you have to decide: are you ready to rock?/Oh can you party with me?/Can you show me a good time?/Do you even know what one looks like?” To pummeling guitars and drums he adds, “And I don’t need to hear your stories again/Just get on the floor & show me/Show me what you’re made of/Just what exactly are you made of?” In the end, he follows an honest question (the only moment of real doubt in the song) with a blunt truth: “Why do we have to half kill ourselves just to prove we’re alive?/I’m here whenever you need me & whenever you need me I won’t be here.”
Like “The Fear,” it is followed by a seemingly benign tune, “Help the Aged.” A very pretty song with a wonderfully melodic chorus, it begins as a seemingly honest plea to “Help the aged/Don’t just put them in a home/Can’t have much fun in there all on their own.” But very quickly an element of self-interest creeps in; help them not because you want to, but because one day you will be just like them, and in the meantime, baby, “Try to forget that nothing lasts forever/No big deal so give us all a feel,” and “It’s time you took an older lover baby/Teach you stuff although he’s looking rough.” The song ends on a bleak and bitter note: “You can dye your hair/But it’s the one thing you can’t change/Can’t run away from yourself, yourself…”
“This Is Hardcore” is the dark heart of a dark album, and it opens with some horns, piano, and drums playing a ponderous and rather joyless melody. Another first person tale, the teller is yet another man with a pornographic heart; “I’ve seen all the pictures/I’ve studied them forever/I wanna make a movie so let’s star in it together oooow/Don’t make a move ’til I say, “Action.”/Oh, here comes the Hardcore life.” At its core lies degradation–“Oh this is Hardcore,” sings Cocker as the song reaches a crescendo, “There is no way back for you/Oh this is Hardcore–this is me on top of you”–degradation and debasement and a clinical reductio ad absurdum of sex to pure mechanics: “Oh that goes in there/Then that goes in there/Then that goes in there/Then that goes in there/& then it’s over/Oh, what a hell of a show/But what I want to know/What exactly do you do for an encore?” Cocker sounds less ecstatic than pained as he sings these lines, almost as if the character whose whole fantasy life has led to this moment finds it empty–as empty as he is. “Put your money where your mouth is tonight,” he tells the woman, but the same goes for him, and having put his money down, he seems to find the return on investment paltry.
Then comes “TV Movie,” which opens with acoustic guitar and is a song about love lost (“Without you/My life has become a hangover without end/A movie made for TV”). The guy telling the tale is hurting, and honestly wants his lover back, and there isn’t a hint of sordidness or hollowness (other than that of a broken heart) in it. It’s a pretty and very likeable song, with some brief whistling and a really nice chorus, but for the life of me I don’t know what it’s doing on this album, which is otherwise cohesive in its theme of moral degeneration. Me, I’d have replaced it with an outtake: either the funky “It’s a Dirty World” or the wonderful “Cocaine Socialism,” which is big and boasts a great horn section and some wonderful vocals (“Buzzzzzzzzing all the time”), and which became the b-side of “A Little Soul.”
Speaking of “A Little Soul” it’s lovely and perhaps the catchiest tune on the LP, and involves an Alfie-like philanderer of a father who begs his son not to turn out like he did. Unlike the rest of This Is Hardcore’s sex-obsessed louts, the narrator not only has a clear insight into his own lack of moral fiber, he wants to do right by his son: “I could show you how to do it right. I used to practice every night on my wife now she’s gone/Yeah, she’s gone.” Then comes the ecstatic and rousing chorus complete with handclaps, in which Cocker sings, “Everybody’s telling me you look like me/But please don’t turn out like me/You look like me but you’re not like me I know/I had one, two, three, four shots of happiness/I look like a big man but I’ve only got a little soul.” It’s the rare one of Cocker’s grim little tales that gives off light; not much, mind you, but the light is there in the singer’s blunt “You don’t want to know me,” and “I wish I could show a little soul,” and that’s something.
“I’m a Man” also gives off a little light. Indeed, it’s the flipside of “This Is Hardcore.” In it the narrator wonders what it means to be a man; he smokes, drinks, and tells off-color jokes, then concludes, “If that’s all there is then there’s no point for me.” The song opens with a single guitar, then bursts into life, and to a bouncy chorus Cocker sings, “So please can I ask just why we’re alive?/’Cos all that you do seems such a waste of time.” The character doing the singing is unimpressed by a friend’s car that “can get up to a hundred and ten–you’ve nowhere to go but you’ll go there again.” In “I’m a Man” Cocker seems to be singing from the heart; the doubts and reservations he expresses are his own. He may not know what a man is, but he knows what a man isn’t, and if the former eludes him, at least he’s on a quest to find the answer.
“Seductive Barry” (a great, unsavory title if I’ve ever heard one), on the other hand, returns us to the blighted and loveless spiritual wasteland (Cocker has quite a bit in common with T.S. Eliot, come to think of it, although the latter never shook his bum anywhere, much less at the Brit Awards) of “Party Hard” and “This Is Hardcore.” A slow–and for lack of a better word, seductive–tune featuring lots of “Dark Side of the Moon” female backup vocals, “Seductive Barry” has Cocker crooning, “When I close my eyes I can see you/Lowering yourself to my level/I don’t know where you got those clothes/You can take them off if it makes you feel better.”
Mixing romantic hokum (“I will light your cigarette with a star that falls from the sky”) with porn-industry imagery (“So roll the soundtrack and dim the lights ‘cos I’m not going home tonight/This love scene has begun/There’s nothing left for us to do but get it on/Lets make this the greatest love scene from a play no-one’s thought up yet”), “Seductive Barry” is the story of yet another man caught up in a filthy fantasy made real, but unlike the singer of “This Is Hardcore,” Barry insists upon dressing his X-rated fantasies in the facile trappings of romantic cliche.
“Sylvia” is a love song, or a song of love lost rather, but a rather hopeful one at that. The singer sees a girl who looks like an old love, Sylvia, and in a rousing chorus explains “She’s living in the country now yeah/ Oh, she’s trying to get better/Her beauty was her only crime/Yeah, I remember Sylvia.” He sees a man hanging around this new woman and warns her, “He thinks if he stands near enough then he will look as good as you/Oh, he don’t care about your problems/He just wants to show his friends,” then realizes he was the same way with Sylvia and says he’s sorry. The song ends on an up note, with the narrator singing, “So keep believing & do what you do/I can’t help you but I know things are gonna get better/Yeah you know that you deserve better/Yeah you know that you deserve better/Oh Sylvia.”
Meanwhile, “Glory Days” is a song about spiritual emptiness, with a rousing and fast-paced melody and propulsive drums serving as ironic counterpoint to Cocker’s unhappiness with his new-found fame (“If you want me I’ll be sleeping in/Sleeping in throughout these glory days” and “These glory days can take their toll/So catch me now before I turn to gold”). He may have money unlike in his days of hopeful poverty (“Now I can’t see into the future/But at least I can use the heater”) but his “Oh it doesn’t get much better than this” is pure sarcasm. And it’s not as if his days before stardom were so great either, as he sings, “Come share this golden age with me/In my single room apartment” and “Oh we were brought up on the Space-Race/Now they expect you to clean toilets/When you’ve seen how big the world is/How can you make do with this?” In short, all is bitterness, and as E.M. Cioran once said, “To live is to lose ground.”
“The Day After the Revolution” is a mid-tempo hard rocker, with power chords and everything, and it’s nothing less than an obituary of the “revolution” that was Cool Britannia. “We are the children of the new world,” sings Cocker, a world in which the revolution doesn’t take place in an open field with dancers saying “Nice one” and “Geezer,” but “begins and ends with you.” In other words, it’s an inside job, and no ecstasy or happy hardcore is going to get you to where you have to go. Cocker looks back at rave culture and the drugs and all the rest of the trappings of the glory days of clubs like Helter Skelter and The Fridge and concludes, “Now all the breakdowns and nightmares look small/Now we decided not to die after all.”
And to Cocker it’s like looking back at a nightmare that everyone mistook for a glorious dream, and he feels like a survivor: “Yeah, we made it, just by the skin of our teeth/Perfection is over, Sheffield is over, the fear is over, guilt is over/The Bergerac is over, the hangover is over, men are over, women are over/Cholesterol is over, tapers are over, breakdown is over, irony is over/Bye bye, bye bye.” That “irony is over” is prophetic, for on Pulp’s next album, 2001’s We Love Life, Cocker sings with real sincerity, especially on such songs as “The Night That Minnie Temperley Died.”
This Is Hardcore could end with “The Day After the Revolution,” but it’s followed by “Like a Friend,” a bittersweet and Dylanesque putdown of an old lover who shows up at his door. “Come on in now, wipe your feet on my dreams/You take up my time/Like some cheap magazine.” But he’s still in thrall to her: “I’ve done this before/And I will do it again/Come on and kill me baby/While you smile like a friend /Oh and I’ll come running.”
Then comes the most ecstatic and euphoric musical passage on the whole album; the melody practically soars as Cocker sings on and on: “You are the last drink I never should have drunk/You are the body hidden in the trunk/You are the habit I can’t seem to kick/You are my secrets on the front page every week” and “You are the party that makes me feel my age/Like a car crash I can see but I just can’t avoid/Like a plane I’ve been told I never should board/Like a film that’s so bad but I’ve got to stay till the end.” Only to end the song ironically by singing, “Let me tell you now: it’s lucky for you that we’re friends.”
This Is Hardcore is a gimlet-eyed examination of a utopia that was actually a dystopia; everyone wanted to believe in England’s ecstasy-fueled dreams of unity and brotherhood, but Cocker knew better. There are no utopias, only human beings pursuing their own selfish and often sordid dreams. Cocker, cocaine addiction and all, had the honesty to burst the drug-induced bubble of what came to be called the Second Summer of Love, and he did it the way Jonathan Swift would have, with razor-sharp satire and a generous helping of bile. But he also understood that he was much a victim and perpetrator as the people he was satirizing, and in the aftermath of This Is Hardcore’s numbing brutality he seems to have done his best to embrace the positive in “We Love Life” (a title that I don’t believe is ironic).
We Love Life is an album about emerging into the sunlight, instead of hiding indoors all night, snorting lines. As Cocker sings in “The Night That Minnie Temperley Died,” “‘There’s a light that shines on everything & everyone/And it shines so bright–brighter even than the sun.” It’s a beautiful line and a million miles away from This Is Hardcore, which is all night, soulless exploitation captured in the blinding glare of movie lights, and the dream that kills dreams. It’s as the aforementioned T.S. Eliot once wrote: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” Yes, we drown, or else we see the light, which shines brighter than the sun, and which goes by the names of hope, love, and redemption.
(RE)GRADED ON A CURVE:
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