We live round here too (oh really?)

All of Pulp's contradictions are brought to the fore in the 1995 single, 'Mis-Shapes', where the relentless momentum of 'Common People' takes on a newly insurgent tone. If Pulp's mid-90s records are best understood as a South Yorkshire retooling of disco, then 'Mis-Shapes' is their 'Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now' – a statement of triumphant collectivity against the odds. It bottles the giddy feeling that 'we' were on the move that accompanied both Britpop and early Blairism, and the knowledge of what false dawns both were is bound to colour any listening today. Not incidentally, it's a song the group themselves quickly grew to hate, and they didn't play it again from 1996 onwards, although they made a couple of curious attempts to rewrite it. The motorik pulse is replaced by a peculiarly prancing, piano-driven glam-stomp, and like those sleevenote communiques, it's addressed at the Pulp People, at the constituency of outcasts they acquired after 1992. We're defined by being poor, weird misshapen waste products, 'raised on a diet of broken biscuits', so when facing the enemy, we have to use 'the one thing we've got more of – that's our minds'; but we're also defined by certain choices – 'we don't look the same as you, we don't do the things you do', 'we weren't supposed to be, we learnt too much at school'. If it ended there, then that would be one thing – but other, grander associations are courted.

What makes 'Mis-Shapes' so exciting, other than the feeling – lesser than in 'Common People', but still electric – of someone finally finding the right words to convey an age-old grievance – is the way it speaks unashamedly in the language of class war, with the threat aimed directly at property: 'we want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won't allow us'; you hear someone who has unexpectedly chanced their way into the unexpected position of spokesman, and seizing the role with alacrity – or rather, using it as the way of avenging the defeats of the past, that hissed 'you think that you've got us beat, but revenge is going to be so sweet' – and there's nothing else produced by Britpop which takes on so fully the role of punk-style upending of received values. Yet though it might present itself as being about class conflict, 'Mis-Shapes' encapsulates rather more a conflict which anyone who went to a comprehensive school or lived in a provincial town in the 1990s will be all too familiar with. That is, the one-sided fights between conformist, violent, sportswear-clad 'townies' and 'hippies'/'moshers'/'goths'/'indies' (otherwise competing tribes pushed into uneasy alliance by a shared and deeply relative nonconformism), fought out in corridors and precincts across the UK.

The phrase 'townie' itself – which Pulp used in interviews to describe 'Mis-Shapes'' adversaries - comes from the town vs gown conflicts of University cities. It's the students' derisive term for the inhabitants of the city that they're exploiting (or, more recently, that is exploiting them). It's also used by the teenagers that most probably will soon be students as a counter-insult to the usual 'poof', 'dyke' and suchlike directed at anyone who doesn't quite fit. So it's deeply double-edged. In the context of school, or at a weekend in the centre of town, it's an expression of weakness, a word you direct at those who directly act to make your life a misery; but by the time you're at university, it expresses a far loftier contempt. In that, for anyone who, like the present author, got given a black eye in the centre of town for wearing a 'Mis-Shapes' T-shirt, the song still elicits an intense feeling of belonging. Here is a record that appeared to dramatise our daily predicament in the plainest of terms.

(image via)

In class terms, though, it hardly mapped onto 'haves against haven'ts'. In the mid-90s, judging at least on personal experience, most (if not all) 'townies' were more-or-less working class, raised in an environment which is much more apt to violently enforce conformity, the duress of everyday life causing an all-too-often suspicious attitude to 'difference', towards getting funny ideas. Meanwhile, most (if not all) of 'us' were either middle class or raised at the intersection where the self-educated working class meets the bohemian lower-middle, where reading books were not something to be ashamed of (i.e, with backgrounds like Pulp themselves), and oh, how all of us loved 'Mis-Shapes'! - even the Green Day fans, so perfectly did it describe our literally embattled position. But why are those who torture the 'Mis-Shapes' every weekend so inclined to play the lottery when they're in so much more privileged a position than their prey? You can hear why Pulp were later so embarrassed by 'Mis-Shapes' when it reaches quasi-Albarn sneers like 'what's the point in being rich, when you can't think what to do with it – 'cause you're so bleeding thick'.

What 'Mis-Shapes' does beautifully – and, irrespective of the group's own disdain, this is a thrilling, totally convincing pop single, one of their best - is lay claim to working-class intelligence against the notion of class as mere identity and ethnicity, sportswear and accents, thuggery and racism. Instead it says we, 'coming out of the sidelines', are the true misfits, those who won't fit either into the tastefully arranged world of the middle-classes or the enforced stupidity of a defeated proletariat. It's enormously exciting as an idea, a call to arms where we will rise up and take over from M People on one side and Oasis on the other, and it's hard not be carried away with its insurgent pride in awkwardness. But it's a fantasy, however wonderful that fantasy might be. We're wrenched out of class-as-essentialism, but where to? A solidarity of clothes and records, of freely-chosen identities as indie kids in charity shop threads?

Pulp - Mis-Shapes przez Pulp

Pedro Romhanyi's video dramatises it in terms as horribly dated and Britpop-ridden as his video to 'Common People', although this one is significantly funnier. We're in a nightclub again, where a townies vs 'us' fight is brewing; 'we' again look like the members of Menswear and Cast, while 'they' are casuals. Yet of a weirdly dated sort – rather than the Ben Sherman shirts and Puffa jackets of the genuine mid-90s thug, they're dressed as the likely late-70s tormentors of Pulp themselves, dressed in Fred Perrys, skinny ties, short skirts, sequins and wedges. 15 years later, it's all completely reversed, as the vintage tracksuit jackets and overgrown Liam Gallagher shagcuts worn by 'us' in the video are much more likely to be the uniform of someone kicking your head in outside Wetherspoons, while the circa-1980 thug-wear worn by 'them' fits perfectly with the never-ending 1980s revival favoured by vaguely bohemian or indie youth. What saves the video is the fact that Jarvis Cocker plays the leader of both gangs, once as 'himself' in brown velvet jacket, once as the evil angry prole alterego in skinny tie and pencil moustache. It's a welcome pointer that the divide is not nearly as clear as the song – and us – wanted it to be. The them and us in 'Mis-Shapes' is wishful thinking, an urge to take the moral force of class warfare and apply it to a rather less righteous fight between the wearers of different jackets. Any real battle between haves and haven'ts would involve some common cause between bullied, intellectual dole youth such as Pulp once were, and the lads and ladies who chased them around town every Saturday. The song still carries, though, the urge to reimagine the divides of class, to produce some sort of alternative collectivity. As a single, it was double-A-side with a song which remembered another moment of failed communalism, a genuine and brief attempt to live in common – rave.

This is an extract from Uncommon - An Essay on Pulp, published tomorrow.

If you can remember the nineties, you weren't really there

The Major years witnessed the final demise of a particular kind of drug-based radical hedonism. Of course, the so-called radical aspects of drug taking have always been compromised by the fact that drugs tend to get in the way of social protest and other related important stuff like, well, critical thinking. Nevertheless, it's inarguable that the counterculture (however loosely defined) was at certain crucial moments and in certain important ways galvanized by a subversive, imaginative use of illegal substances. What's equally certain is that this particular approach to drug use is no longer with us, and that the nineties was the occasion for its repudiation.

The telltale sign that something is about to become extinct is always a hyperbolic, last-gasp flourishing of it. Reliably then, we might note the carmodism that the very same day Major was announced PM (27 November, 1990), this was released:

Within months there was this:

And about another year later, of course, this:

At this point, pre-Leah Betts (another last-gasp - this time of anti-drugs tabloid sanctimony), even the retro-conservative aspects of these records cannot cover over the fact that there is still something faintly meaningful, if not quite subversive, about invoking illegal substances. Drug culture was still vaguely an alternative one, and the nineties was going to give it one final fling.

There was an element of eighties hangover here. The unemployment pogroms of the eighties had not quite broken the spirit of the working classes and their ability to create collective identities. And one cogent response to being continually out of work and without money to even go to the pub is of course to resort to a kind of unbridled hedonism: cheap pills, powders, weed, petty larceny, playing loose shaggy music, listening to the classic records that happen to be to lying around, scrapping, going out raving. This hedonism might end up killing you, and its long-term social effects can only be utterly pernicious. But for a while you might be able to derive a large amount of radical creative energy from it. Hence acid house, and the above indie-pop reductions of it.

As with so many things the period 1995-'97 was the turning point. In September '95 Pulp release this, which sums up the opiate of the people motif pretty eloquently:

In December, Leah Betts dies. A few weeks later in February '96, the filmic behemoth that is Trainspotting descends (Carl has said almost everything that needs to be said about this, so I'll limit myself to observing that it was timely and apposite partly for being a perfect pastiche/retro-annullment of post-war drug culture, with its reifications of Iggy, heroin, etc). In 1997 Blair comes to power, and the remainder of his time in office sees a rapid removal of the taboo on public figures and drug taking, to the point that an almost Dickensianly old-fashioned Tory can be elected Prime Minister in 2010, without his fondness for cocaine being anything of an issue. That's before we've even gotten onto that early-nineties escapade involving our chancellor, the call-girl, and the white stuff:

     
In 1995 Oasis said "where were you while we were getting high?" and for me, putting aside the band's copious culture crimes, there's a good deal of pathos in that line. It seems to compound a past tense of collectivity ("we") with a present in which some sort of extraneous betrayal ("you") has travestied solidarity and replaced it with pleasure-seeking egotism. Oasis's ramifications were entirely negative, but it's also true that their roots lay in a much more positive context of affirmation, brotherhood, and most relevantly for our purposes, in the hedonistic culture of the early nineties. This is most evident of course in the better tunes on Definitely Maybe (Supersonic, Cigarettes and Alcohol), which were, ineluctably, actually written on the dole, whatever lucrative poisons would subsequently come to turn the Brothers G into nouveau-Thatcherite monsters. Here's the elder Gallagher on the contexts underlying the composition of Live Forever:

"it was written in the middle of grunge and all that, and I remember Nirvana had a tune called I Hate Myself and I Want To Die, and I was like . . . seems to me that here was a guy who had everything, and was miserable about it. And we had fuck-all, and I still thought that getting up in the morning was the greatest fucking thing ever, because you didn't know where you'd end up at night. And we didn't have a pot to piss in, but it was fucking great, man."

 

This was radical hedonism. At its best Oasis's music is ultimately redeemed, I would argue, by its ability to encapsulate this tendency at the very moment it's about to be transformed into its opposite, morphing from a means of retaining some kind of empowerment and collective enjoyment in the middle of the dark night of neolibralism, into an egocentric, acquisitive hedonism that is utterly, tragically complicit with the neoliberal status quo. The lyrical climax to Live Forever is perhaps the most compelling instance of this double-pull, as it moves in the space of a few syllables from a remarkable declaration of solidarity (maybe you're the same as me) to hubristic - but still oppositional - drug-speak (we see things they'll never see), before finally collapsing into a final, hardcore Thatcherite statement of Faustian self-regard (you and I are gonna live forever). Oasis's songs can be heartbreaking for the way they embody this shift from "you and I" to just "I". It's surely no coincidence that the promo video for Live Forever features a symbolic burial in what looks like the ruins of a council estate, as it was more than just drummer Tony McCarroll (soon to be screwed over by his band mates) that was being buried here. 

I've never been more than a very sporadic drug taker. But I've come to think recently that this is more than just a matter of inherent temperament, also a consequence of the Times. Put simply, drug taking and drug culture just isn't that interesting any more. Intoxication is still a central part of our culture, and probably always will be, but the subversive potential of opening the doors of perception seems to have been somehow nullified. Alcoholism, the eternal state-sanctioned, commercially profitable form of inebriation is rapidly approaching pandemic proportions. Meanwhile, in January, an NHS survey found that illegal drug use (cannabis, ecstasy, heroin, cocaine) had fallen significantly over the past few years. A charity spokesperson said: 

"There could well be a generational shift away from drugs going on ... Overall drug use has been declining significantly over the last six or seven years, which is encouraging, and we are seeing fewer young people reporting that they are using drugs. It could be to do with young people's culture and fashion..."

 

From Pete Doherty to Russell Brand to Skins to Ke$ha to David Cameron: it seems that the superficial, commodified aesthetics of drug taking and pseudo-radical lifestyle hedonism are more popular than ever. A casual admission of an appetite for drugs has become acceptable, just as an admission of one's actual wealth has become the most unacceptable taboo. The reality is that we're all impoverished, and no one's actually getting high any more, or daring to think outside the box.

[NB: credit for this post's title goes to Phil Knight.]