...what exactly do you do for an encore?

Pulp, His 'n' Hers
Different Class
This Is Hardcore

In the 90s and beyond, the savvy answer to the eternal Britpop question "Blur or Oasis?" was "Pulp". It was a plausible answer in the mid-90s: in Britain, it signalled a desire to be freed from the endlessly hyped Blur-Oasis rivalry; in the US, it signalled "I have heard of other British bands".

From the perspective of 30+ years, the savvy answer looks more like a kind of derangement, contrarianism for the sake of being different. The most avowed Oasis hater must give them two excellent albums and a handful of singles and B-sides, pessimistically a dozen. Blur has been many things over their decades, but never boring, and occasionally excellent. Oasis hit a peak and declined; Blur kept on going, the highs lower but more plentiful.

Viewed from 1995, Pulp had "Babies", Different Class, Jarvis Cocker's unlikely sex symbol status, and a weird one-sided feud with Michael Jackson. Viewed from 2026, Pulp has "Babies", Different Class, a retrospectively rehabilitated This Is Hardcore, and Jarvis Cocker's increasingly confusing solo career. In 1995, they were a worthy competitor; in retrospect, rather more like the Stone Roses or Suede. 

The fractures were evident at the time, if you cared to look for them: His 'n' Hers is "Babies", "Lipgloss", and a bunch of ballad-type songs about bad sex. Different Class alternates bad songs with classics: one can reasonably still go to the mat for "Common People", "Disco 2000", "Sorted for E's and Wizz" and "Mis-Shapes", but by God: "Pencil Skirt"? "Live Bed Show"? "Something Changed"??? The songs borrow compositional tics and even chord structures, see the spoken-word verses and sung choruses of "I Spy" and "Feeling Called Love". "Bar Italia", a song I've always loved, gives away the game at the end: it's just a little sappy and sentimental from a supposedly cold, black heart: the poor man who wants love but doesn't know how to ask for it, and ends up hating everyone else, instead.

This Is Hardcore is the best, but it beset by two problems of its time. First, it suffers from cd bloat: because the technical limitations of commercial LPs, 8-tracks, and cassettes had been overcome, you could add in twice as much music, and a lot of bands' ability to edit suffered as a result. Second, the cynical neutral politics that still had so much currency in the 90s has aged terribly in retrospect.