Comparing Pulp to Kanye West is like comparing apples and oranges. On one hand you have a bombastic hip hop artist who raps amongst ballerinas about how hard life is when the world hates you. On the other, you have a middle-aged man telling someone (who could very well be Mr. West) that he’ll never understand the true struggles of the commoner. Both are important, but in very different ways.
Indeed, this British six-piece have built their importance in pop music by dodging the usual pop tropes: they sang ballads not about emotions or raw experiences, but about the journeys that led to them. Each song, from the raucous Do You Remember The First Time? to the danceable Disco 2000 to the famed Common People leads the listener through the minds behind the tales. Emotions like love, jealousy, hate, ecstacy, and despair were implied rather than told, allowing the listener to build their own emotional connection. It was something few their compatriots even dared to try, but they succeeded with magnificently.
Supplementing this is frontman Jarvis Cocker, a scrawny man in a fitted three-piece suit at times more interested in telling daily anecdotes about births and deaths than singing songs. Cocker sings like a storyteller, a voice just close enough to The Queen’s English to feel authoritative - even fatherly - but just far enough away to feel authentic and vulgar. Part outrageous University lecturer, part charismatic dancefloor demon, part drunken man at the corner of the bar, Jarvis is a frontman few expect to enthral, but nobody doubts afterwards.
Whilst most of the crowd were waiting for Coldplay to come on stage (I’ll get to them later), you could see the strength of Pulp’s power over the crowd from the first song onwards, so much that not even the stench of a malfunctioning sewage unit uphill from the amphitheatre could distract the audience - through it did catch Cocker’s attention. People were dancing despite never hearing a single Pulp song in their lives, captivated by one man’s gyrating hips and one band playing like they’d never broken up.
Jarvis made a point that this may be their last ever show in Australia, making the show an unfortunate landmark. Maybe bowing out of Australia playing second fiddle to Coldplay, using the violinist of some random Australian band to fill in certain instrumental cues while the fresh scent of actual shit lay thick in the air wasn’t the best send-off for a band like them. But maybe there isn’t a “best send-off” for Pulp. The one major negative I can draw is that no matter how loud the speaker stacks, how bright the lights or how large the stage, their music speaks much louder than any performance ever will. With all due respect to the overused cliché, they may be gone from the live arena but their music, the driving force behind the wonder of seeing them live, never really left.
Notes, August 16, 2011
