Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music

While, as a couple of other Pulp fans here have said, I wouldn't want to defend 'Mis-Shapes' 100% - and I'm not sure that's the only Pulp song worth considering here - I think there are a few key differences. Not differences which in themselves make Pulp irreproachable and the Kaiser Chiefs unforgiveable, by any stretch. (And of course, I'm aware that if I judged music by the morality or politics of the lyrics alone, I'd have to bin many beloved records.)

But... Firstly, I would argue that 'Mis-Shapes' is about the rough deal people who are marginalised get in all sorts of ways - arguably Jarvis' first instinct is always to symapthise with the 'weird' poor, then the 'mainstream' poor - with the well-off 'weird' some distance behind, however much they then took his songs to be for them. Someone somewhere else wrote "You get a sense of the frustrations of both sides – townies and 'mis-shapes'." I don't know if Pulp songs were always even-handed, but it is definitely true that there is a sense of desperation, a desperation that is shared by the songs' writer as well as their subjects. That sense of shared desperation, and thus of empathy with and compassion for many of the people who crop up Pulp's songs, distinguished them from many of their lesser contemporaries, and it is those bands whom the Kaiser Chiefs remind me of. We'll come to why that might be in a moment.

Next: I singled out the lines I did and left out the "A man in a tracksuit attacked me" line for a reason. There is an argument to be made that says for all we know, Ricky Wilson could really have been the victim of a vicious and unprovoked attacked by a man who just happened to be wearing a tracksuit, and who are we to object to him reporting that in song form? You can just about imagine Jarvis Cocker circa His & Hers writing a lyric about being beaten up for a taxi. And if you've been given a smack in the mouth or actively harassed for dressing/being different, then yeah, fair enough, be angry at the person or people who did that.

But I cannot for the life of me imagine Jarvis Cocker writing a song in which, to quote some smart Barbelither from a million years ago, "you can practically smell the cunt-fear". This is all the more pointed when you consider how many Pulp songs were actually about people who had more sex than money, and what the tone of those songs was. That line about the "chip fat" really brings this difference home, of course, because of the way it evokes the line about "chip stains and grease" in 'Common People'.

"Girls run around with no clothes on" - obviously this line isn't aimed at nudists, so what does it actually mean? It means they MIGHT AS WELL be naked, the way they dress! Stir in the explicit class commentary - these aren't just almost-naked young women, but poor ones too, they need to borrow money for contraception - and I don't see how anyone can disagree with the argument that this is a very Daily Mail Island attitude.

More in a mo.