FEATURE:
Seductive Barry in the TV Movie
Pulp’s This Is Hardcore at Twenty-Five
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IT is a little hard…
IN THIS PHOTO: Pulp in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Martyn Goodacre
looking ahead to and celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pulp’s This Is Hardcore. The band’s bassist Stephen Mackey died earlier this month. It is a huge shock and loss for the music world. As Pulp are embarking on reunion gigs this year, it is an especially devastating loss for the Sheffield legends. I wanted to look ahead to 30th March, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the most anticipated albums of the 1990s. The band’s sixth studio album, it came three years after their breakthrough, Different Class. Reaching number one in the U.K., This Is Hardcore received mostly positive reviews. Though not as celebrated as Different Class, their 1998 album is one that contains some of the band’s best material. Definitely some of Jarvis Cocker’s most thought-provoking lyrics and most moving vocal performances are evident here. There are a few features that I want to bring in before getting to a couple of effusive reviews. Quite a few publications revisited This Is Hardcore for its twentieth anniversary in 2018. I am sure the same will be true later this month prior to its twenty-fifth anniversary. If Different Class fitted into Britpop in 1995, albeit adding an erudite, wittier, and more sophisticated alternative, This Is Hardcore brought it to an end. It was a year when Pulp flipped things and released one of the most serious and less jubilant albums. This is what Treblezine had to say in 2018 about an album that still sounds shattering:
“If these three events happened in consecutive order instead of decades apart, you’d have a fairly concise, if terribly ineffective, model of a coping mechanism: grieving, debauchery and commoditization. But what if Morpheus from The Matrix told you, “What if I told you they were all on the same album that some believe killed Britpop?”
The album was This Is Hardcore from Sheffield band Pulp, fronted by one of Britain’s best lyric-writers of the ‘90s, Jarvis Cocker. That “killed Britpop” part comes courtesy of Matthew Horton of NME, who ran the theory up the flagpole in 2013: “Jarvis Cocker had achieved everything he wanted. The spokesman for a generation tag was on his lapel and huge fame was his, but it encircled him like a cloying trenchcoat, every fibre wanting a piece of him. This Is Hardcore… is a sloughing-off of fame’s skin, a rejection of the Britpop monster. That monster could have been him, could have been the moribund wasteland around him.”
It’s not a bad theory. But it’s not enough. It doesn’t explain how shattering Pulp’s This Is Hardcore remains 20 years hence.
Still, let’s run with Horton’s theory for the moment: Britpop, which produced a handful of golden moments, was suffocated by its own grandiloquence, helped along by a British tabloid culture not especially known for being the model of temperance in a frenzy. While Oasis unveiled unifying anthems a la Beatles and Blur pecked out more locally-based portraits a la Kinks, Cocker and Pulp worked the inside game and questioned everybody’s motives.
Although they never implicated any of the bands they were told to be rivals of, Pulp’s albums served as reality checks for the sovereign hysteria of Britpop. What interested Cocker were the sexual and class politics of the people who bought the records.
Pulp earned their conjectures the hard way. Breaking out after a decade of recording with 1994’s surprise hit His ’n’ Hers, Pulp made their biggest and maybe best album, Different Class, in 1996. Songs like “Common People” and “Disco 2000” were more concerned with interactions that spoke to caste-definted roles in society—accounts that recast the Swinging London stories of Colin MacInnes in the last days before the Internet.
Examined strictly in context of its time, This Is Hardcore isn’t just Cocker taking the piss out of Britpop: It’s a full-on urological drain with spillage and bits of liver. NME would have you believe Cocker was shedding his status as the form’s most trenchant figurehead. He does so by ego-reduction in “Dishes” (“I am not Jesus, though I have the same initials”), or by becoming a con man (“Help the Aged,” “Seductive Barry”) or a monster (half the fucking album). Then he declares the whole thing dead (“The Day After the Revolution”). Regimes are supposed to fall when this much demystification’s at play.
Since it came after Britpop’s peak, it’s reasonable to suggest the style was in Pulp’s crosshairs on This Is Hardcore. But if that’s all it was, the album wouldn’t hold up as well as it does now. Cocker had more than champagne supernovas, whatever the hell they are, in his sights. The demise he sensed was an entire conception, a global shift out of a program that looked nice on paper but couldn’t sustain itself, like on There’s a Riot Goin’ On (“You can’t leave cause your heart is there/But, sure, you can’t stay cause you been somewhere else”). Managing one’s distress with such failure could require absolution through mechanistic, outwardly sensuous activities with no guilt, like in Less Than Zero (“There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy’s car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes…”). As for the dopey president, sit tight, we’ll get to him.
Pulp lays out the premise right up front as Cocker introduces the newest dance craze, “The Fear.” After a prolonged adolescence full of youthful sexual and social dramas, the terrible angst of middle age sets in—and that terror is just as seductive as powdered smart drinks and having back-seat sex with “Parklife” on the stereo: “A monkey’s built a house on your back/You can’t get anyone to come in the sack/And here comes another panic attack.” Forget fishnets, stiletto heels or buckle restraints: Fear is the new fetish in town. The gothic-lite chorus is a parody of the catchall singalongs that unified warring factions in the ‘80s; it’s like “We Are the World” with all the singers’ joined hands fastened together with thumbscrews.
At first Cocker tries to bargain with humility in “Dishes.” He’s just the help, really. He’s not the Britpop hero he’s made out to be, nor Jesus, not Willem Dafoe as Jesus, nor Liam Gallagher on one of his rare lucid days. “I’d like to make this water wine, but it’s impossible/I’ve got these dishes to dry.” It’s both touching and absolutely insincere. Of course he’s no miracle worker, but why did he even consider that was a possibility?
Cocker starts recusing himself on “Party Hard,” with the hysterically funny one-liner “Entertainment can sometimes be hard.” These are the last vestiges of meaningful inquiry we get for a few songs, as he’s about to abandon all hope that his date’s going to be as inquisitive as he is: “Before you enter the palace of wisdom/You have to decide: Are you ready to rock?” The wonderfully pathetic “Help the Aged”—Cocker was a ripe old 33, remember—reframes May-December lust as a charitable contribution, or a smashingly awful pickup strategy. “When did you first realize/It’s time you took an older lover, baby?/Teach you stuff, although he’s looking rough.” It’s a more sinister version of “When I’m Sixty-Four,” minus grandkids, plus unsolicited groping.
The title track, among so many other things, marks the first of a few repeated mentions of mass media on the album. “This Is Hardcore” kickstarts the album’s moral and empathetic decline with undulating brass. Cocker’s character is working off the simulated ecstasy that he’s seen in porn, having taken notes on the lighting and blocking, imagining that this sporting round of fornication is going to be fucking amazing. But by the end, for some reason, he reverses track and disparages the act: “That goes in there/Then That goes in there/And that goes in there/And that goes in there/And then it’s over.” It’s not satisfying in the least. But it’s hardcore. It’s a process. It’s escalation, not satisfaction”.
If some were not willing or ready to embrace a darker Pulp, then there were plenty who appreciated the evolution. This Is Hardcore might not have the legacy and same reputation as Different Class, but it is just as important, I think. Playing like a film or concept album, some of the band’s most daring and beautiful music is on This Is Hardcore. I think the album sounds a bit like something from Scott Walker. That is no surprise, as he would co-produce their 2001 follow-up, This Is Life. This Is Hardcore – in the way Different Class summed up 1995 perfectly – brilliantly reflects the changing sound of music in 1998. Britpop had been replaced by a scene that was more diverse, bolder, and embracing of other sounds. This is what Stereogum wrote in 2018. Tom Breihan provided his take on This Is Hardcore at twenty:
“This Is Hardcore’s title track is like an elegant, sprawling, very British take on Weezer’s “Tired Of Sex.” When the album came out, Cocker would talk in interviews about watching porn in hotel rooms, but it also sounds like he’s talking about sex, reducing it to absolute tedium: “Oh, that goes in there / And that goes in there / And that goes in there / Oooh, and then it’s over.” And that same fatalism extends outside of personal relationships, into grander narratives. “Glory Days” might be the one moment on the album where Cocker willingly adapts the whole generational-voice thing, and it’s simply to tell us that everything sucks: “Oh, we were brought up on the space race / Now they expect us to clean toilets / When you’ve seen how big the world is / How can you make do with this?” With some minor adjustments, a millennial could’ve written that exact same line, and it would be just as cutting and true now.
Still, for all its darkness, This Is Hardcore is an uncommonly gorgeous album. The band never turned “TV Movie” into a single, but it’s a perfect song, a tender and elegant lament from a dumped man. It might be the most soulful, controlled, masterful vocal performance in Cocker’s entire career, and the climactic moment — “why pretend any llllllooooooonnnngaaaaa” — is one of things I wish I could inject directly into my cerebral cortex. Between April 1998 and whenever I stopped being able to buy cassette tapes in Rite-Aid, I put “TV Movie” on pretty much every mixtape I made. (I made a lot of them, too. Never adapted to the CD burner era.)
“TV Movie” is, for me at least, the album’s greatest moment, and probably the greatest moment in Pulp’s career in general. But you’ll find that kind of transcendent beauty all over This Is Hardcore. “A Little Soul” flutters and tingles. “Dishes” has a sweetly assured lope to it. “I’m A Man” has a tiny bit of glam-rock strut, but it’s soft and considered. Even the endless synth-drone that ends album closer “The Day After The Revolution” is pretty enough that I rarely cut it off early. The album’s production is warm and pillowy and inviting. Usually, when bands make knowing and conscious career-suicide albums, they do it by either making everything into a noisy, discordant scrape or by throwing in 15 different genre left-turns per song. Pulp did it by making the most outright gorgeous album of their career. It was all in the attitude.
And that beauty, more than the perfectly rendered darkness, is what’s kept me coming back to This Is Hardcore for the last 20 years, why I still rank it as the best Pulp album. This Is Hardcore wasn’t especially influential, and it didn’t sum up a moment in time. But it’s a stark and complete and beautifully realized personal statement. It’s the deepest, heaviest distillation of a remarkably deep and heavy band’s worldview. Two decades after it first confused me, I still get lost in its perversity”.
I am going to finish with a couple of reviews. In a retrospective examination, AllMusic made some interesting observations about Pulp’s sixth studio album. This Is Hardcore was certified Gold by the BPI in April 1998 for sales of 100,000. I think This Is Hardcore has gained more appreciation since its release compared to how some reviewed it in 1998:
"This is the sound of someone losing the plot/you're gonna like it, but not a lot." So says Jarvis Cocker on "The Fear," the opening track on This Is Hardcore, the ambitious follow-up to Pulp's breakthrough Different Class, thereby providing his own review for the album. Cocker doesn't quite lose the plot on This Is Hardcore, but the ominous, claustrophobic "The Fear" makes it clear that this is a different band, one that no longer has anthems like "Common People" in mind. The shift in direction shouldn't come as a surprise -- Pulp was always an arty band -- but even the catchiest numbers are shrouded in darkness. This Is Hardcore is haunted by disappointments and fear -- by the realization that what you dreamed of may not be what you really wanted. Nowhere is this better heard than on "This Is Hardcore," where drum loops, lounge piano, cinematic strings, and a sharp lyric create a frightening monument to weary decadence. It's the centerpiece of the album, and the best moments follow its tone. Some, like "The Fear," "Seductive Barry," and "Help the Aged," wear their fear on their sleeves, some cloak it in Bowie-esque dance grooves ("Party Hard") or in hushed, resigned tones ("Dishes"). A few others, such as the scathing "I'm a Man" or "A Little Soul," have a similar vibe without being explicitly dark. Instead of delivering an entirely bleak album, Pulp raise the curtain somewhat on the last three songs, but the attempts at redemption -- "Sylvia," "Glory Days," "The Day After the Revolution" -- don't feel as natural as everything that precedes them. It's enough to keep the album from being a masterpiece, but it's hardly enough to prevent it from being an artistic triumph”.
I am rolling it back to 1998 and a review from Rolling Stone. Even though This Is Hardcore was not a massive commercial success in the U.S., it still gained quite a bit of press there. I do hope there are new articles and features written about the album before it tuns twenty-five on 30th March:
“Pulp's "This Is Hardcore" is arguably the first pop album devoted entirely to the subject of the long, slow fade. This is a bold move because it breaks one of rock's oldest songwriting taboos. Rockers have always fled from the prospect of aging and ignored the mundane details of survival. Even when the Beatles took on the subject, they did it as a lark: "Will you still feed me when I'm sixty-four?" Pulp, on the other hand, dive right in. "Help the aged," Jarvis Cocker sings on the album's first single, "one time they were just like you."
So far, Pulp's chief impact in the United States has been as the band whose leader (Cocker) disrupted a Michael Jackson performance at a British awards ceremony. But Pulp have been at it since 1983, when they were mere teens out of working-class Sheffield, England. It took them a decade to make much of a splash, but their 1995 breakthrough, Different Class, sounded like nothing else on the Brit-pop landscape. With flamboyantly catchy tunes and wry lyrics that commented on everything from rave culture to social snobbery, the album was a defining moment in U.K. pop.
On This Is Hardcore, the band expands on that promise with an album that is less bright and bouncy but that is even more daring and fully realized. From the doorstep of middle age, midthirtyish singer and lyricist Cocker looks to his future with a mild case of nausea, even as drummer Nick Banks, keyboardist Candida Doyle, bassist Steve Mackey and guitarist Mark Webber keep the pop champagne fizzing. Cocker writes songs about aging nightclubbers driving themselves to the brink of exhaustion to feel more "alive" ("Party Hard"), a father shamed by the example he has set for his son ("A Little Soul") and the recognition that the singer has become "the man who stays home and does the dishes" ("Dishes").
And yet Hardcore manages not to be a self-absorbed downer. Instead, it plays like a movie, a series of scenes from a life in which the touchstones are the subversive, theatrical glam-pop of Hunky Doryera David Bowie, Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music. Pulp's cinematic songs tuck their hooks inside dramatic, constantly shifting sonic scenery, from the tambourine-guitar-piano sparseness of "A Little Soul" to the lavish orchestral grandeur of the title track. Cocker wallows in campiness, but no self-respecting lounge would hire this guy: Unsentimental lyrics, unexpected musical juxtapositions and disruptive noises make even Pulp's silkiest musical passages sound unsettling.
Behind the ridiculously overwrought "Bohemian Rhapsody" chorus of "The Fear," two sustained guitar notes swing back and forth as though mounted on a rusty hinge until the listener is left contemplating the sound of someone laboring for oxygen. Smokey Robinson's poignant "The Tracks of My Tears" echoes through "A Little Soul," as if to amplify how hollow and soulless the singer has become: "I did what was wrong," sings Cocker, "though I knew what was right." On "Seductive Barry," Pulp sail on a sea of strings to Barry White Island, only this time the land of sexual intimacy has become a porn movie: "When I close my eyes, I can see you lowering yourself to my level."
Cocker's deeply flawed characters flail around in the limbo between youth and the geriatric ward. But look deeper and the mood turns strangely hopeful. In echoing Peggy Lee's immortal midlife question, "Is that all there is?," Cocker isn't just throwing up his hands in surrender. Even as he describes his inertia in a world defined by fast cars and strong alcohol in "I'm a Man," he sounds determined to overcome it, his high-pitched vocals machine-gunning his disdain – "Ma-ah-ah-ah-ah-an!"
"Help the Aged" is the wake-up call; it suggests that the folks to be pitied aren't the ones in the retirement village but those trying to deny the possibility of someday winding up in one. Pulp reach out to the inevitable with a mixture of resignation, compassion and humor, and package it all in a mirror ball of florid strings, helium-enriched vocal harmonies and shimmering guitars. "The Day After the Revolution" suggests a long look in the mirror to cure all that midlife angst. Its closing litany – with Cocker mumbling, "The rave is over, Sheffield is over ... men are over, women are over, cholesterol is over" – pays homage to and slyly mocks John Lennon's clearing-the-decks, post-Beatles manifesto in "God."
"Bye-bye, bye-bye," Cocker burbles, like a flight attendant with a bad hangover. In midlife oblivion, Pulp have found a strange kind of liberation. Desperation never sounded quite so entertaining”.
A magnificent album from band who suffered a huge loss recently, I wanted to spend time with 1998’s This Is Hardcore. Because it is twenty-five on 30th March, it will be looked on with fresh eyes. If it was a big departure form 1995’s Different Class, it definitely cannot be seen as disappointing. In fact, This Is Hardcore is seen by many as one of the best albums of the ‘90s. A work of brilliance from Pulp, go and play it now if you have not heard it in a while. It is an album that is…
IN a class of its own.