Pulp
This Is Hardcore

THE REVIEW

Sex and death, according to Jarvis Cocker.
After the public success of “Different Class,” the bestseller that in 1995 turned the Sheffield band into almost a cultural phenomenon in England (thanks to or because of the media acclaim of Jarvis, elected as a decadent opinion leader by a group of young people who adopted hits such as “Common People” and “Disco 2000” as generational anthems), Pulp, catapulted after years of anonymity to the top of English music, took two and a half years before releasing this work which in a posthumous retrospective might seem like a minor episode, but in reality represents, in my opinion, one of the highest artistic points not only of the band but of everything that was lazily defined as "britpop" in the '90s.

After the departure of guitarist Russel Senior, Pulp went through a moment of depression, linked both to the increasingly claustrophobic and ambivalent role of a Cocker who seemed to have become a slave to his character, and to the unexpected commercial success of catchy songs that did not reflect the complexity and depth of their musical proposition.
The result was therefore a bewildering and tense album, in which from a conceptual standpoint the adolescent sentimental dilemmas of previous works were surpassed to embrace more adult and reflective themes, using the metaphor of pornography as a frame of the age's decay, social anxiety of a late millennium England that had lost the collective enthusiasm of a few years before, a mal de vivre made explicit and pungent in the bitter lyrics of a 34-year-old Cocker in the full maturity of his lyrical prowess.

The music, filled with orchestral arrangements and acoustic accompaniments, mirrors this change of direction, emphasizing Cocker's verses, owed more in this case to his mentor Scott Walker: from the dramatic opening “The Fear” with a horror musical choir, to the melancholic “Dishes” which opens with the ingenious line “I am not Jesus, though I have the same initials” and ends with a phrase full of fatality and disillusionment (“I'm not worried that I will never touch the stars, 'cause stars belong up in heaven, and the earth is where we are”).
“Party Hard,” the hardest track of the album, recalls Bowie's “Lodger” and begins the leitmotif of sick erotic obsession that pervades most pieces, just like in “Help The Aged,” a delicate '70s ballad, Jarvis sings about the passing of time and aging without unnecessary rhetoric but getting straight to the point with disarming honesty (“Help the aged, one time they were just like you, drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue”) addressing himself more to the young people who had almost elected Pulp as teen idols than to the elderly to whom the song is dedicated (“You can dye your hair but it’s the one thing you can’t change: can’t run away from yourself”).

Then comes the title track, which is a formal masterpiece of over six minutes through which we witness a descent into the inferno of a porn actor who has lost all interest in what he does and the monotonous flow of an always-same, repetitive life, where everything, love, sex, death, drugs, becomes just the wallpaper of his own loneliness (“This is the end of the line: I've seen the storyline played out so many times before”), in a clash of strings, “Greenwoodian” guitars, and piano harmonies that render the balance between consumed drama and glam farce ever more subtle, making the final result even more mocking.
After the high intensity of “This Is Hardcore” (which, chosen as a single, was accompanied by one of the best music videos I have ever seen), the tension decreases with two acoustic and humble vignettes, “TV Movie” in which Jarvis uses an original way to describe the absence of a person (“Without you my life has become a hangover without end, a movie made for TV: bad dialogue, bad acting, no interest. Too long with no story and no sex”) and the relaxed “A Little Soul” (inspired in some way by Prince) that draws a connection with previous albums. Thus, if “I Am A Man” lightens the dark plots of the album with a typical pop melody of the more playful Pulp, “Seductive Barry” imposes itself as the perfect alter ego of “This Is Hardcore,” a sensual and humid duet between Jarvis (who recites rather than sings) and a never-so-feminine Neneh Cherry, a lustful track that seems to want to evoke the foreplay of a casual encounter, prolonging to give an obsessive, disturbed effect, a sexual desperation that increases with Steve Mackey’s bass pulsation and Jarvis’ vocal evolution, here seeming to have taken the more lascivious Marc Almond as a reference model.
“Sylvia” is probably instead interpretable as a song deeply connected to a personal situation of Cocker, tackling the theme of social solitude addressing a girl probably lost sight of forever, with a deceptively optimistic message but always focused on the difficulty of taking control of one’s life; this message is made more explicit in “Glory Days,” which melodically is a cross between the famous “Common People” and Leonard Cohen's “Suzanne” and which hypothetically seems to retrace the same path of other “love songs” like David Bowie’s “Heroes.”

It ends with the emblematic “The Day After The Revolution” (already the title deserves separate consideration) where Jarvis (who will soon leave England to move with his wife to Paris) bids farewell with verses that start from his private experience to go straight to the listener, in an emotional crescendo that finds rest only when the melody ends in a keyboard chord lasting about ten minutes: “I have waited and waited for this day to arrive, the revolution was televised. Now it’s over, bye bye. Perfection is over (The Rave is over). Sheffield is over. The Fear is over. Guilt is over. Bergerac is over. The hangover is over. Men are over. Women are over. Cholesterol is over. Tapers are over. Irony is over. Bye bye. Bye bye.”

And that’s all, for an album driven by a high emotional and intellectual quotient, a concept that can be summarized in the packaging phrase “IT’S OK TO GROW UP-JUST AS LONG AS YOU DON’T GROW OLD, FACE IT… YOU ARE YOUNG.” and that perhaps was not understood and appreciated in its originality (partly due to the quirks of the promotion, which Pulp entrusted to porn actresses tasked with advertising the album) but which always goes perfectly well for spending an evening among cigarettes and Port & Lemon… and maybe doing it afterwards.