Old Pop, Good Pop

Pulp, memory, and ways of coming alive.

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1.

Is More good? Is Pulp’s first album in 24 years, released earlier this summer, good? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. And to be clear, good does not necessarily mean worth listening to. We know the album is worth listening to because millions of fans listened to it after its release. Most of them probably listened to it more than once.

Similarly, we don’t just mean enjoyable when we say good. More is obviously enjoyable. That Pulp are currently able to fill fairly large venues while touring in support of the album makes this clear enough.

Then again, plenty of demonstrably bad acts produce songs listened to repeatedly, and manage to sell out even larger spaces than the Hollywood Bowl or Detroit’s Masonic Temple. Some of the most well-known artists in the world are demonstrably bad. Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker seems to have always been aware of this on some level: whether an artist’s music is good has little to do with whether it’s an obvious spectacle. Such spectacular bands may also be good, but their being good has little to do with the fact that they can produce a spectacle. When Cocker infamously shakes his ass at your performance, you can at least take comfort in the fact that he isn’t necessarily calling you bad.

The lines, the definitions, are blurry. Cocker and Pulp don’t seem to particularly care though. The lead single from More seemed to straight up revel in the idea of being bad, inept, out of step.

The video for Pulp’s “Spike Island” announces itself bluntly. “This is the new single by Pulp,” reads the chyron in big, pink, block letters. “It’s called ‘Spike Island.’” As we learn, the video is made entirely from thirty-year-old photos of the band and their albums, fed through an artificial intelligence application.

The animation is bad. Hilariously and intentionally so. Over the song’s shimmering keys and soaring guitars, we watch as still images of Pulp are crudely dropped into row-houses and chip shops, moving in wooden, unrealistic ways. “Perhaps I need to work on my prompts” say the pink letters. Before long, the scenes around the wooden, inert band members devolve into the same incongruous slop we are used to seeing from AI. Bicycles and coaches move sideways. Bodies mutate extra limbs.

“Spike Island” is the lead single from More. Being out of step isn’t just inevitable here; it’s probably on purpose. “Maybe,” reads the chyron, “we need to work on other ways of coming alive.”

2.

“You will never understand / how it feels to live your life / with no meaning or control / and with nowhere left to go.” It’s been almost 30 years since Cocker famously spat these words in the face of a class tourist in “Common People.” While its premise is familiar enough today, the archetype of the “class tourist” stung in a different way in the “end of history” 1990s.

Most of Britpop at the time, compulsorily laddish as it was, often pointedly disdained the idea that pop music could actually do something. This was of course in perfect line with the proto-Blairite Cool Britannia optimism that attempted to shed pesky concepts like class or inequality.

Ten years before “Common People” was recorded, some of Pulp’s members had been on picket lines supporting the miners striking against Thatcher. Russell Senior, the band’s then-guitarist, volunteered as a flying picket, blocking scabs from entering the mines. The miners’ crushing defeat stuck in the minds of many of the era’s bands. Manic Street Preachers. The Mekons. Pulp.

Listen to “Last Day of the Miners’ Strike,” the one new track included on the band’s 2002 Hits compilation, and you can hear it. Horizons for young working-class people in their native Sheffield shrank. Thinking about politics became a fool’s pursuit, and by “‘87 socialism gave way to socialising.” The contrast between hope and defeat became a kind of “Magna Carta,” a nostalgic touchstone wistfully longed for rather than actively remade.

Now, a few decades later, the future of neoliberalism is in question. What looks set to take its place, though, is an amplification of its most venal, coercive aspects. Cruelty becomes a virtue. All things bearing a sympathetic human touch are regarded with spite and suspicion. After enough time having the synthetic and simulated shoved in our faces, one starts to think they’re natural. That they’re good.

3.

Ways of coming alive. It’s an odd turn of phrase. Life, at least in how we are taught of it, just is. Its biology manifests of its own accord. Finding a way to come alive seems to push where there’s already momentum. Unless, of course, something in that biological process is out of step…

Ways of coming alive. It bears a certain resemblance to one of the most influential books on art of the late 20th century: John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Whether this is deliberate or not, we do know that Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is a fan of Berger’s book. He has publicly cited it as an influence on his memoir Good Pop, Bad Pop. (The list also includes Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing, which creatively applies Berger’s framework to music.)