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.
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