I did something yesterday I’ve never done before: I purchased an entire album off of iTunes in one go. I’ve certainly cherry-picked songs for mix cds and party dj-duties, but this was a first.
Let me preface: I love Jarvis Cocker. Not in an “I want to shag him wildly and repeatedly” way, because he doesn’t inspire that. I love him in an “I want to give him a big long hug, make him eat something substantial, and clean his glasses if they’re smeary and also to push them up if they slide down his nose” way.
He is the first and greatest Tom Waits/Nick Cave/Elvis Costello/Leonard Cohen writer-as-rock-god figure that belongs unequivocally to my generation.
I’ve had a long courtship with this solo outing: a friend posted the video for its lead-off single, “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time,” on his blog months and months ago, and I came across the “Running the World” video back in February or March, and they both rather blew my mind.
I made the decision to just do it when I realized that iTunes was $4 cheaper than Amazon. But the album description nearly turned me off from the purchase; the entire first paragraph of iTune’s lauded the evocative aesthetic brilliance of the liner-note artwork.
In a world where shimmying squalls of blonde teens from every ethnicity pass as pop music, it seems criminal to apply that descriptor to an album and artist like Jarvis. But it’s pop music in the absolute best and truest sense of the word, and certainly not because it is popular. Because it isn’t cute. It’s aggressively not cute. It’s aggressive music, but wry. It’s horrific and cruel; his lyrics encompass some of the meanest things I’ve ever heard anyone say in my whole life: the most horrible (“I’ve kissed you more than twice, and now I’m working on your dad”), the vainest (“I’ve heard an old girlfriend has turned to the Church: she’s trying to replace me, but it’ll never work”), but also some of the smartest and most true and heartbreaking observations (especially in “Sorted for Es & Wizz,” “Do You Remember the First Time?”, “Lipgloss,” “Disco 2000,” “Mark of the Devil,” “Common People,” “Razzamatazz”…).
Several tunes off Jarvis sound eerily familiar. In a sense, evoking this sort of familiarity is perhaps Jarvis’s greatest pop gift. There is a sense, even when listening to a tune for the first time, that it’s the 782nd. The only difference is how far along you are at teasing out meaning and meanness from the lyrics. And yet, while I hesitate to use the term “sampling” for a primarily pop, relatively underproduced disk: the thrumming line of sound that drives “Black Magic” is pure “Crimson and Clover,” and the chorus of “From Auschwitz to Ipswich” is precisely straight up Maniacs, with the vaguely-tropical guitar phrasing seemingly lifted directly from “Like the Weather.” There’s a reason I can’t stray too far from the word “evoke.” “Quantum Theory” could be an outtake from the Last Unicorn soundtrack. And the guitar in “Heavy Weather” and “Disney Time” are just as familiar: someone with a sharper mind for trapping tunes would know them in a heartbeat. In these safe and comfortably almost-familiar frames, the vile genius lyrics gain extra bite.
Jarvis remains as supernally skilled a constructor of narrative as ever he was; incidentally: why on earth is this man not writing novels? He possesses such a brilliant gift for lyrical phrasing, for building entire dive-into-able worlds with the sparest handfuls of words, and for completely enfleshing complex characters who heartbreakingly and staggeringly live for hours or decades and blaze and dissolve in so-brief three-to-six-minute spans that it seems criminal. Is the narrator of “I Will Kill Again” female? And then hearken back to “Common People,” “Pencil Skirt,” et alia ad infinitum, really. Or this line, from the song “97 Lovers”: “and when the day was over, there were only ninety-one.” What happened to the others? Narrate, Jarvis, narrate MORE. Longer, give us more words. We can never squeeze enough from you. So many plots, so few words. Because his gift is to enfold, to make us care deeply about his characters, about their inner lives and workings, despite how casually he tosses them aside, despite our fleeting acquaintances with them. Of course, can such sublimity be sustained for more than a single song? And, begging Kant’s question: If so, should it?
My reply: if Jarvis ever puts out a short-story collection, I’ll be first in line.
