The summer song is a piece with ingredients and a goal. An easy to learn refrain, a simple dance and a catchy melody that achieves a media impact on society. For all this, Common People, from the British group Pulp, can win the award for the perverse song of the summer of 1995 in the United Kingdom. It didn’t matter if you were washing dishes in an infested den, on one side or the other of a bar in a pub, ironing hotel sheets or babysitting a couple of university professors, Common people played around the clock and it was your song
Common People is a poisonous summer song because the lyrics are extremely clever and well developed. Jarvis Cocker, the lyricist and co-composer, singer and leader of the band, has talent and restraint, irony and the same dose of self-love as emotional punching bag.
If we go to the essential and humming part, the song scores well. Easy to learn refrain: Wanna live with common people and its derivatives. We can remember it. Next is the dance. There was none until it was time to record the video clip. At that moment Jarvis improvised a ridiculous, parodic and robotic dance that anyone could imitate, make it their own, take it as far as they wanted in pathetic and funny dimensions. And people got the joke and did it.
Its catchy melody is also defensible. But as in all masterpieces, it all starts with an apple that, when it falls from a tree, ends up on the right head. Our man, Jarvis, went all the way to Notting Hill to sell a number of records he no longer wanted.
With the money obtained he thought of buying something. He went to a store nearby that sold used instruments and got a Casio. When he got home he wanted to make an immediate return on the purchase and it can already be seen that it was the best purchase of his life. There was no enthusiasm when he brought it to the rehearsal room, but the simplicity of someone using only two fingers on a keyboard to play three chords meant that it could be compared to the mammoth grandiloquence of a piece of Emerson, Lake
The song is full of good news. The interpretation of the band, the distance and the right words with which Jarvis tells us the story, self-harm, bad milk and epic of a loser, and also great psychological depth. Because if anyone wants to ask what this is about the social elevator and the mental conflict between who jumps without a parachute and who aspires to fall straight, this is his glorious song.
The song begins in the form of a conversation between an aborigine and Dr.Livingstone I suppose, in the form of a Greek girl, who studies art and has made her adaptability, of normal opinion, to feel good in the dress of neoprene of ugliness, an identity he believes is alien to any attack or injury. She is not her millionaire father. She’s not some stupid tourist who goes shopping at Harrods and watches the changing of the guard. She has no objections to eating fish’n’chips and going to infected dens. She is something else. The problem is the blood, and hers remains alien.
The singer offers himself to the Greek student (perhaps Danae Stratou, current wife of the politician Yanis Varoufakis) as a singular Horatio in that particular descent into the hells of the working class. Obviously, they start with a supermarket. Everything within reach, replaceable and consumable. Offers, carts and coloring pages. If you have enough money to buy, and enough faith to bear knowing that this will get you nowhere.
The essential part of the song is that the narrator of the story is not a John Fogerty cop, or a Bruce Springsteen dignified worker, but the typical Kafkaesque aberration of the social elevator: stigmas, rooms, family, streets and class grudges working woman and a brooding dandy, full of readings, films, songs that speak of a stylistic ideal within reach only of your imagination. What sets Jarvis apart from the student is that she has a silver bullet: call her dad, go home, and play rebel as often as she wants. Instead, he must pretend to be ignorant in order to survive, and an eternal fugitive towards a beauty that will always escape him. And if ordinary people only drink, buy and card, it is because there is no other way to entertain themselves and feel alive. The rich live knowing that their money is inexhaustible. The poor knowing that if they get to them, they will be finished and it will be worse: debts and grudges.
