I just can’t decide if a merinthophobic masochist is a “good thing” or a “bad thing.”

I am currently experiencing a crippling bout of what I have discreetly dubbed “mnemonic dissonance.” It has become difficult for me to conjure up memories from a decade ago, and the pinching and prodding of my grey matter is causing my head to ache unbearably.

Far from my former stomping grounds and surrounded by strangers, face after face refuses to cohere to a familiar face. I am normally not nomadic by nature and I had no idea how intrinsically trussed memories are to those hazy halcyon places in which they were manufactured. I am starting to suspect one’s sense of surroundings may be almost as cognitively evocative as certain smells, and I’m almost always awed by the ability of an unexpected olfactory cue to furtively saturate the mind with memories. With the move, my formerly formidable powers of eidetic recollection have apparently started to suffer, and we (Mnemosyne and me) no longer seem to be on speaking terms.

But, blatantly barrowing from Arlo, that’s not what I came to tell you about.

Came to talk about Jarvis Cocker.

It certainly seems that former Pulp front-man Jarvis Cocker has been busy lately. Pulp has been playing musical chairs on one of my many mental lists for nearly a decade now. Specifically, Pulp has been consistently vying for the coveted “number one” within the top three spots for the title of “my favorite band.” That’s what started all this memory messiness.

I place my first encounter with anything remotely Pulp related sometime in early 1996. All signs point to early spring. Sadly, the consensus is that any of the journals that I kept during this crucial time-period were painstakingly gnawed to blue-Bic tinted confetti by rats. This conveniently mirrors what is happening to my memory right now.

Like Candace so accurately points out, everyone comes from somewhere, and I was still stuck in an angst-ridden teenage industrial rut. My eyes still sting with the resurrection of certain songs, particularly items on Ministry’s crunchy post-With Sympathy Twitch or the A and B-Sides lovingly culled and collected on the Black Box. However, during these years there was some slow growth, I found myself occasionally branching slowly out toward decidedly more gothic bands. It would take years of judicious pruning and grafting for the tree of my musical tastes to take a pleasingly shady shape.

Holly, the girl that would become bearer of the cumbersome title of “my first girlfriend,” had been receiving a steady stream of mix-tapes from a musically minded friend in or , and this was feeding her burgeoning obsession with Brit Pop, particularly female-fronted bands like Elastica and Lush. She was rapidly ascending the mental list of girls that my unformed fifteen-year-old self quaintly felt he was falling hopelessly in love with.

For this reason, I can establish that by April of 1996, I was slightly more than semi-conscious of the band Lush. Their recent singles were receiving a modicum radio play and when Lovelife rotated in that mammoth CD player of Holly’s, I pretended to despise it and violently decried all Pop.

That April would prove to be a busy month in my memory, with chronology that has, after ten intervening years (each one a fertile furrow in a field), become frustratingly hazy and puzzling. This brumous past is anguish for me, and I am easily swept away.

Lush were plodding diligently through the American leg of their “Shaving the Pavement” tour when they were cajoled into participating in one of the many “Alternative” festivals that sprang up in the wake of Lollapalooza. For reasons I do not understand to this day, two girls in my English class, both named Becky, had befriended me. They were blondish, intelligent and pleasant in an excruciatingly catty/chatty sort of way. It was a cute, almost maternal attitude that they adopted towards me, a self-imposed social pariah, consistently dressed in black and rather conventionally unfriendly. Perhaps their tendency to talk to me was some kind of token gesture toward misfits in general. Whatever the reason, the result was a serendipitous invitation to go with them to this festival, dubbed EdgeFest after the local radio station that organized the event and was already gradually losing its clout.

I feigned a now embarrassing interest in seeing the pop-dustrial bands Gravity Kills and Stabbing Westward and received permission from my mother to attend. I think the fact that two girls would be conducting her socially awkward son to the concert may have actually aided her decision to acquiesce. Before class the next day, I ponied up the price of admission and was rewarded with the soon-to-smudge ticket from behind the clear-plastic covering of one of the Beckys’ binders. I provided detailed driving directions to my house, for it would be five more months before I could drive.

I was retrieved on the morning of the concert in a small blue car. Why do all the cars from early 1996 seem so small in my memories? The Beckys were dressed in unabashedly short-ish shorts for the heat; I was wearing a faded red dress shirt and a leather jacket, a choice of attire that the rising mercury would soon make me regret. A Becky clucked, congratulating me for wearing a splash of color. They were excited, and we dutifully listened to the radio station pimp its festival during the drive.

I parted ways with the Beckys at the gate. I would glimpse them briefly throughout the day, clutching purloined plastic cups of pilsners. The day grew gradually warmer, and as the many one-hit-wonders of the year sliced the air with sounds, I sat in a shady spot and waited for Lush. The heat was stifling and caused me to affect what must have been a somewhat bewildered expression, exacerbated by the sheer amount of people I did not, and would probably never, know. My shyness and muddleheaded countenance must have been mistaken for an unhappy hallucinogenic experience by a nice young lady who had camped adjacent to me.

Her name was Lindsay. I remember her cleavage. She watered me and concernedly conversed. She was about a year older than I was, and had already weaned herself down to smoking Marlboro Ultra-Light cigarettes (a few of which she gave me to hold, smoldering self-consciously, for I had no idea how to smoke). I was watered some more and then uprooted to visit with some of her friends, two of whom were ferociously making-out on a beach towel to their soon-to-be-summertime soundtrack of the Verve Pipe.

When Lush was finally announced, I joined a band of miscreants and snuck closer to the stage. Their set-list was disappointingly short and they launched into it with Ladykillers. Then Heavenly Nobodies, 500 (which would take a year or so for me to realize was about the Fiat, another small car), Hypocrite, For Love, and Sweetness and Light. I can recall little in the way of intra-set banter.

Time has now eroded the complete list of bands that played that day from my memory, and when I met the Beckys and their sun burnt noses at the gate to leave I was tired and eagerly climbed into the backseat to be taken home.  I had seen Lush, and I remember being vaguely disappointed that they didn’t play Ciao, and a lanky legged gentleman didn’t stride onstage and begin the duet, so I must’ve known about Jarvis—remember Jarvis, this is a post about Jarvis—before this date.

In five months, I would be driving my Oldsmobile (the cars grew larger later, alongside the freedom a driver’s permit grants a teenager) with dread-like little braids. Chris Acland (Lush’s drummer) would hang himself and Lush would announce an official split two years later.

Also in April that year, there was also the Annual Denton Art’s & Jazz festival. The circle of friends I had latched onto in high school were all going to be there. This included Holly. My mother was out of town tracking down my runaway stepsister in , I engineered a ride from the kind old women assigned to check on me. Under the pretense of wanting to go to the mall, I waved good-bye to their shiny Cadillac and resolved to walk to the Jazz festival. It was early morning, and the weather was wonderful. I spent most of the meager monies I had on a bottle of Ozarka about a quarter of the way into my journey.

I would make this walk many times later in life. Leisurely shaving microns off my soles on the sidewalk and attempting to soak up absolutely everything. But half a decade earlier, and only a vague destination in mind, the walk seemed to take forever.

 Upon arrival, I milled about the crowd, straining for a familiar face and finding a few, feigned an interest in a dance troupe artistically interpreting the Nine Inch Nails song “Sanctified.” The whole herd gradually assembled and we meandered throughout the rest of the afternoon. At one point, it was decided that the majority of us would retreat to Holly’s house.

Inevitably, Lovelife began to rotate in the CD Player. As Jarvis crooned his part in a bitter breakup, Holly commented about how “sexy” he sounded. I dog-eared all Pulp in my brain. I was going to be hopelessly grounded for the next few weeks for this stunt, but I would use the Camelot card in my wallet (recently punched to “free-CD voucher status”  by my purchase of Elastica’s Wire-riffic self-titled debut) to acquire Different Class (the only Pulp CD sandwiched between a Quinton Tarentino movie and Queen). It would profoundly ameliorate my parentally imposed exile.

I made friends with Different Class immediately, for it is an exceedingly friendly album. Neurons and ganglia began to form pathways between its sounds and memories, which are by now, old worn out grooves. A fledgling internet and creased and crumpled back-issues of NME revealed that I had discovered Pulp at a pivotal point.

The sparkling production on Different Class, Jarvis’ lyrics, and guitars that were not simply accents or afterthoughts shamed me into slinking back to my Nine Inch Nails albums, where angst was unilateral and unimportant, anger for the sake of the angry, and always eerily un-triumphant. Love and emotion were more like diseases, peculiar types of cancer. Industrial was safe, and I have struggled with articulating precisely why.

Up until this point, most of the music I listened to lacked a human narrative. Every song was simply a song that stood on its own, surrounded by other songs standing on their own. To me these songs existed in a vacuum, without concrete tethers to itself or others. Before Pulp, my definition of a well-constructed song left one feeling a bit sad at the end, like finally finishing a particularly good book. Different Class captured this feeling over the course of an entire album and was the first album that I owned that could be played from start to finish, without skipping ahead to the best bits, or fumbling to forward past a particular song. And I listened to it like this for ages.

<<insert lengthy album review here>>

Pulp became my dirty little music secret. On the exterior, my Nine Inch Nails was traded for Joy Division and The Smiths, Skinny Puppy became Bauhaus, and Marilyn Manson was upgraded to Alien Sex Fiend. The music was still safe, if not incredibly good in places, but I needed more narrative. My enjoyment of Pulp was an intensely personal thing, misunderstood by my Goth friends, who could accept the T. Rex and David Bowie, but drew the line at “modern” Brit Pop and Indie.

Three years and two months after that faithful April, another girlfriend (another planet) bought me the Countdown compilation after cleaning my car for my birthday. It had just been given stateside release and finally trickled down to . Different Class, alongside Smiths singles, Gary Numan’s (re-branded to match her name) Sacrifice and the Tindersticks had been the soundtracks for our mad, shadow, random and abandoned love life.

In March of that year, I had driven all the way to to pick up a reserved copy of This Is Hardcore that I had special ordered. I listened to it on the way home and naturally loved it. It was far too dark and it seemed far too clichéd to be played in the bedroom, so it played for Dawn and I in the car.

She had asked to borrow that car for some innocuous reason that day, and I had to work. Up until this point, it seems that I had made it a subconscious effort not to be dating anyone on my birthday, for I tend to have terrible birthdays. It was only another hot June day in Texas to me and when she drove up to retrieve me from work, I recall being incredibly touched by the way she must’ve had vacuumed up the ashes from my floorboards. She had thrown out all the empty packets of Camel Lights (I was had started smoking fairly heavily exactly a year previous), donned her faded cut-off shorts for the car wash, and even acquired a faux leather case that comfortably accommodated sixty-four CDs in their respective jewel cases. The practicality of the present still brings a smile to my face after all these years.

Concealed among the Tori Amos (echoes of “everyone comes from somewhere”), Cure and Depeche Mode CDs was the copy of Countdown. We went back to her apartment and she began to sip a tumbler Drambuie slowly, a contextual clue that conveyed to me that the third part of my birthday present was on its way. We listened to whatever was already in the CD player, and I realized that I no longer had to be self-conscious about my unabashed love of Pulp.

Several sweaty moments later, I wrestled with the shrink wrap encasing the CD and placed the disc gingerly into the multi-disc changer. Like nearly all fans exposed to Pulp in this order, I was initially struck by its differences from Different Class, but it grew on me like verdigris. I began to realize that I was gradually growing up and out of Goth. However, since Countdown was just an arbitrary selection of individual songs from an old label attempting to cash in on Pulp’s recent triumphs, it lacked the narrative structure of This Is Hardcore and Different Class.

I finally found the claustrophobic Freaks and the lovely Separations (with the Countdown Trilogy!) and after many listens, decided that I really did like Pulp’s earlier work. Dawn and I wouldn’t outlast the summer.  I would lose Different Class in the break-up, alongside certain songs my brain had connected so intrinsically to memories.

It seemed that every time I tried to share my enthusiasm for Pulp with people, it ended up ruining things. Certain songs would acquire additional, stronger associations, some of which proved quite negative. I stopped accepting applications for musical associations some time ago for exactly this reason.

In 1999, single again, and working constantly to take my mind off the fact, I found His ‘N’ Hers at a used CD store on my lunch break and didn’t go back to work that day. Instead, I drove around listening to what would become one of my favorite albums of all time. A few months later, I would start the laboriously task of rebefriending Different Class by ringing in the new year with Disco 2000.

It certainly seems that Jarvis Cocker has been busy lately.

Let’s see:

A potential new single:  "Cunts Are Still Running the World" with an album on the way in October. Two European tour dates have been announced in November.

There’s a karaoke-esque video on  youtube  that played at Reading this year. Allowing an equally disenchanted and disgruntled audience to sing-a-long.

Production and songwriting work on Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new album 5:55.

A Leonard Cohen cover, "I Can’t Forget" on the "I'm Your Fan" Soundtrack. One of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs, and fairly true to the original.

A sea-shanty‽ "A Drop of Nelson’s Blood" on a new pirate themed compilation “Rogue’s Gallery.”

Two disc remastered editions of three albums (His ‘n’ Hers, Different Class, This Is Hardcore) containing hand-picked Demos, some of which haven’t seen the light of day until now.

Life is good for Jarvis Cocker fans at the moment.