Jarvis Cocker’s Global Outlook is Still Less Than Rosy

Britpop revisited: Oasis plagiarized the Beatles brilliantly but only wrote convincingly about snorting cocaine and seducing your sister. Blur genre-hopped nimbly, but couldn’t even say “woo-hoo” without irony. What about Pulp, the brainchild of the bookish and bespectacled Jarvis Cocker? They had style and depth. Their signature hit “Common People” stands as a marvelous piece of drama; set to a new wave-meets-disco backdrop, it was a pop epic about a slumming rich girl and her romantic notions about being poor.

Cocker strikes similar anthemic gold today with the profanity-laced “Running the World.” (That’s short for “C*nts Are Still Running the World,” if you need to offend anybody.) Now the “common people” aren’t just his broke flatmates trying to make ends meet, but anyone who finds themselves at the wrong end of a globalized economy. Pulp fans will be pleased to see Cocker’s vision is intact and that he still writes compassionately about the alienated, lonely and deviant. They will also be pleased to see he’s evolving, too. Jarvis (Rough Trade) has a few sunny moments on it, including two songs he wrote for Nancy Sinatra. He sounds refreshed, and perhaps that’s a byproduct of his more settled lifestyle. (He left England a few years ago for Paris, got married and is raising two kids.) Cocker spoke with Monitor This! from the land of crepes about his new solo plunge.

Is it that c*nts are running the world, or is it that running the world makes you a c*nt?

That’s an interesting question. And I’m going to avoid the issue by saying it’s a bit of both. I think to want to have power over the people means that you’ve got to have something a bit defective in your personality or something a bit missing in your life. You only have to look at some pop stars: They probably start off as quite nice people, but if they get too big they generally tend to go completely off their heads.

Success can do that.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a Pandora’s Box. I remember when Pulp became quite popular. Suddenly this specter of choice comes up in your mind. If you get a bit of money, you can kind of do what you want and I think it makes you face up to… you realize that there’s a darkness within the human spirit and if you’re not careful, you can end up being an idiot, really. Like there’s that famous bit in Easy Rider when Jack Nicholson says to Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, “The reason why people are scared of you is because you represent freedom.” I think we’ve passed through that phase and now we’ve seen what that freedom can bring, as in it can bring out the worst in people. And I think now, it sounds boring, but it’s more like self-control is the thing. People can have all that but not be destroyed by it—I think they’re the people we tend to admire.

That’s a theme in “From A to I” ["From Auschwitz to Ipswich"], that evil lurks within all of us.

With that song, part if it is kind of a comment on the War on Terror kind of thing, probably in the States and also in the UK, which has been characterized as a very black and white “we are the goodies, they are the baddies” kind of thing. And just to think about things in those terms doesn’t help because it’s a much more complex issue than that.

You said that after the dissolution of Pulp that you considered not recording again. Why?

It was a lot of things. It probably had to do with me approaching 40, you know, you think you’re too old to do this. And you can write songs for other people and kind of do it at a safe distance and not get too involved. But that just seemed like a limiting thing to do… If I write a song, I have a personal involvement in it. So you can’t keep at a safe distance. You have to go the whole hog and go out and play it in front of people. That’s the only way you’re going to get it exactly how you want it, I think, is to go out and do it yourself. I suppose you run more of a risk of making a fool of yourself as you get older and still keep performing, but I don’t know—life without a bit of danger is pretty boring anyway.

So you still have those kind of nerves regarding performances 20-some years in?

Oh yeah. I’d be very worried if I didn’t. It would kind of signal to me that I wasn’t really bothered about it anymore. And that’s the last thing that I want to feel.

How do you like fatherhood?

It’s not bad. Especially since I never thought that I’d get to experience it. I didn’t really think that I would have kids. I didn’t have any idea of what a father should do seeing as mine disappeared quite early on in my childhood. It’s not that hard. It’s good for a person like me because it makes you realize that you have instincts. At some point I might’ve thought that I didn’t have any instincts at all because I tend to be a more cerebral person. It’s all in the head. It’s quite nice to find out that you’ve got this kind of animal side to you. It’s been a humanizing experience.

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