eMusic Review 0
1995′s Different Class was one of the peaks of the Britpop era and the high point of Pulp’s career, and its secret ingredient was right there in its title: What Jarvis Cocker added to his already fearsome critique of his ‘n’ hers desire was a laceratingly smart awareness of how class affects the equation. That comes out most of all in its masterpiece “Common People,” in which a rich girl tries to pick him up to fulfill her fantasy of how the other 99 percent lives, and he responds with a six-minute crescendo of fury. Still, it’s all over the album: Cocker’s vision of a unified underclass launching a cultural uprising in “Mis-Shapes,” his remembrance of a love-object’s childhood house being “Very small/ With wood-chip on the wall” in “Disco 2000,” the jealous narrator of “Underwear” quipping that “if fashion is your trade, then when you’re naked/ I guess you must be unemployed,” the language of drug-addled ravers in “Sorted for E’s and Wizz.” (In that context, even the lush strings in the self-referential, apparently earnest love song “Something Changed” and the reggae gallop that underscores the first half of “Monday Morning” serve as class signifiers.)
On top of all that,… read more »
