Anti-Climacus

First of all, you should watch this video twenty or thirty times. They're a Durham band, and the song is excellent.

On to the real entry for this week:



Now, this is going to be strange, and you probably won't believe me. The album this song is from, Different Class, came out in Britain in 1995. It didn't come out in the US until sometime in 1996 (unless you wanted to pay two to three times as much and buy the import version--if you could find it)--that is, several of the songs, including this one, were massive hits as singles, and the peak of the album's popularity had passed, by the time it made it over here.

Being hip, as I was way back then, I got the album relatively soon after it came out over here; one of the decisive factors in attracting my first girlfriend was that I both knew and liked Pulp. They were described, in typical rock-writing x + y + z fashion, as something like David Bowie + Roxy Music + class politics (oh, plus either sex or death, depending). Which is true, up to a point: Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker occasionally sounds like Bowie, and Pulp sounds like Roxy Music if that reduces to 'rock-pop band with prominent keyboards' in your own personal mental dictionary. The class politics proved to be a one-album phenomenon, mostly: This Is Hardcore is mostly about death, as is We Love Life, when the latter bothers with having an overarching theme.

The song itself is unique amongst 90s pop for having a unified narrative, unified enough that a graphic novel interpretation is not immediately absurd. Narrative was something of a Cocker specialty (see also: "Babies," "Disco 2000," "I Spy," "Underwear" and numerous others), which distinguishes Pulp from most other 90s bands. Seriously--apart from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the most musicians could master was thematic unity, and that was rare enough (Everything Must Go and OK Computer leap to mind, along with... nothing else). The song itself is not quite danceable (takes too long to build), but otherwise an excellent slice of Britpop.