posted on 11 Feb 2016

Mother, Lover, Brother by Jarvis Cocker

Here’s an old chestnut to ponder over : are song lyrics poetry? You’ll find there’s a whole sub-genre of writing and blogging that seems to be obsessed with this question. I’m prepared to bet that you won’t be surprised to discover that the answer they seem to come up with is ‘Well….yes ….but then again…no.’ Or even less surprising, ‘Some is, some isn’t – it depends.’ What it seems to depend on is how highly the person rates the lyricist in question as an ‘artist’ – by which I mean a musician as well as a poet.

It seems to me to be common sense to conclude that not all song lyrics can be considered to be poetry – nor are they intended to be. The music world is full of cliché ridden, boneheaded lyrics programmed from a computer data-bank of rhyming words and phrases that can be linked together in pretty much any combination and make as much sense. It also doesn’t require a genius to work out that people want dance music to dance to rather than to listen to and so lyrics are hardly likely to be the element of those songs that people are drawn to.

On the other hand there is a long and legitimate heritage of poetry written to be set to music and where the musical element has largely been lost to history – the poetry of Wyatt, Surrey and Donne spring readily to mind. The centrality of the lyrics has also been a feature of folk music and the output of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell who have all had their lyrics published as free-standing collections of poetry.

I think the confusion really sets in when pop or rock bands have a song writer(s) in their midst who has an aspiration to combine catchy tune-mongering with thoughtful, intelligent and carefully crafted lyrics. This is why I was interested to see that Faber had published the selected lyrics of Jarvis Cocker – the frontman of Sheffield band Pulp.

By any stretch of the imagination Pulp were a decidedly unusual pop success. They somehow found themselves riding the crest of the Brit-Pop wave in the late 1990s but had, in fact, been on the circuit since the 1970s. Their unique selling point was their extraordinary singer, Jarvis Cocker – a beanpole of geekiness (before geek was a fashion statement) who delivered disturbing slices of working class confession and intimate doubt backed by driving and subtle musical arrangements that were as quirky as he was. Their breakthrough to public consciousness came in 1995 when they released the album Different Class which contained the now classic Common People and Disco 2000. Cocker has gone on to become a sort of pop cultural icon and commentator and to broadcast and write about a range of issues that demonstrate his deep-seated understanding of and commitment to cultural studies. It is perhaps this new found status as  public intellectual and minor eccentric that has prompted Faber to publish this book.

Having said that, the selection of lyrics taken from recordings that span the whole output of Pulp as well as some of his later solo projects, is in my view full of delightful gems.  Crucial to the success of Cocker’s lyrical persona is the notion of him as the outsider, the voyeur of the unobtainable.  His lyrics go to the heart of teenage angst and speak to the boy who is never the object of the girls desire.  See, for example, Do You Remember the first Time:

You say you've got to go home 'cos he's sitting on his own again this evening. 
I know you're gonna let him bore your pants off again. 
Oh God, it's half past eight you'll be late. 
You say you've never been sure tho' it makes good sense for you to be together. 

Or, here in Mis- Shapes:

Raised on a diet of broken biscuits, oh we don't look the same as you
We don't do the things you do, but we live around here too. 
Oh really. 
Mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits, we'd like to go to town but we can't risk it
Oh 'cause they just want to keep us out. 
You could end up with a smash in the mouth just for standing out.   

 Cocker also does a good line in disgust. His distaste for the shallow and the fashionable runs through his writing – this from Lipgloss:

No wonder you're looking thin
When all that you live on is lipgloss and cigarettes. 
And scraps at the end of the day 
When he's given the rest to someone with long black hair. 
All those nights in, making such a mess of the bed. 
Oh you never ever want to go home. 
And he wants you so you may as well hang around for a while, 
call your dad on the phone. 
He changed his mind last Monday, so you've gotta leave by Sunday, yeah.
You've lost your lipgloss Honey
Oh yeah.     

His sense of the political is also acute and withering – his dismissal of middle class ‘tourists’ who think that ‘poor is cool’ in the iconic Common People  drives home the sense of identification with, and understanding of, his own class roots that is almost reminiscent of a modern day Orwell.

So is this song writing or poetry? You know what? I don’t care. This is just fabulous stuff to read. I have to admit though that I find much of it impossible to read without the soundtrack playing through my head as I scan the lyrics and give them the same intonation and phrasing as Jarvis does on the recordings – so maybe really I’m just reading my music collection?

 

Terry Potter

February 2016