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For Mature Audiences
Pulp releases "This Is Hardcore."
By Noel Murray
JUNE 15, 1998:
Duran Duran, essential [night versions] (EMI)
Pulp, This Is Hardcore (Island)
I'm constantly amazed at how quickly rock critics are willing to declare
that a particular sound is "dead." If you believed everything you read, you
thought disco died in 1980, even though you were probably dancing to "Don't
You Want Me" and "I Ran" a couple of years later. The latest knell has rock
music flying with the California Condor, even though it was the Dave
Matthews Band--a rock combo if ever there was one--who finally knocked the
Titanic soundtrack off the top of the album charts.
At any rate, what amuses me about these premature obituaries is the idea
that "sounds" have some kind of limited life cycle--after which hipsters
only indulge the music for nostalgic kicks. I'm sure just such a kitsch
factor is behind the release of Duran Duran's essential [night
versions], the latest in EMI-Capitol's increasingly bizarre
"Essentials" series. But what this compilation of dance remixes really
shows is that, for a few years at least, Duran Duran cultivated a sound
that was abandoned way too soon.
For one thing, Duran Duran took a unique approach to the 12-inch dance
single. While lazy synth-poppers simply extended a song intro by creating a
three-minute loop, Duran Duran actually rerecorded their hits in longer
versions, with vamping breaks that came off much tighter and warmer than
any Arthur Baker boom-box fiasco. They called these "night versions," and
some of their best early songs were given this treatment--"Planet Earth,"
"Girls on Film," "My Own Way," "Hungry Like the Wolf," and "New
Religion."
The night versions collection adds more conventional remixes of
"Rio," "Hold Back the Rain," and "Is There Something I Should Know?" before
collapsing into the dreck of Duran Duran's dreadful "middle period": "Union
of the Snake," "The Reflex," and "Wild Boys." For the first half of the
collection, though, the band sounds far more supple than I remembered them.
In their prime, Duran Duran were a weightless but luxurious amalgamation of
Roxy Music and Stationtostation-era David Bowie. Their lyrics were
awful, true, but the current breed of English pop sensations could learn a
trick or two from the Durannies, who knew how to work a good groove
and show a smiling face from time to time.
One of Britrock's latest causes clbres, Pulp, actually dates back to
the glory years of Duran Duran. In 1983, when the synth-pop elders released
Seven and the Ragged Tiger (one of the worst albums ever cut by a
chart-topping combo), Pulp released its debut LP, It. After 10 years
and a few more records, the group finally began to hit its stride. By
1994's His 'N' Hers, Pulp had left behind wan, Aztec Camera-y social
ballads in favor of broadly theatrical dance music.
Pulp's sound on His 'N' Hers has similarities to Duran Duran,
inasmuch as both bands borrow liberally from Bowie. Pulp's platter of
choice is Lodger--the record on which the Thin White Duke turned
fractured rhythms and expatriate aloofness into cozy, catchy pop music.
Frontman and songwriter Jarvis Cocker's croon is often blatantly
Bowie-esque (when he's not channeling Nick Cave or ABC's Martin Fry), and
his mates back him up with sounds that range from thumping rock to
intricate tapestries of folk guitar and disco synths.
The band can write some lovely melodies, but it's Cocker's lyrics that
have garnered Pulp so much attention. His 'N' Hers illustrated the
sex lives of the partying class with a voyeuristic glee. Pulp's next
album--the spectacularly lauded Different Class--took the
time-honored rock subject of British class consciousness and again filtered
it through the prism of sex. Now comes the group's latest and best album,
This Is Hardcore, wherein all the illicit affairs, mind-altering
substances, and late nights begin to take their toll.
The liner art sets the tone of the record: The cover depicts a prone,
naked woman sporting a blank expression. On the inside, printed lyrics are
interspersed with colorful photos of haggard men and women hanging out in
bars and hotel rooms. One picture shows a sad-faced man watching a live,
lesbian sex show; another shows a scantily clad woman curled on the floor
in a stupor while a man sits slumped in a chair rubbing his head.
Arrayed with such chilling images, This Is Hardcore opens with
the equally frosty "The Fear," a blunt account of a swinger's sad life.
"This is our Music From a Bachelor's Den," Cocker sings at the
song's opening. "The sound of loneliness turned up to 10." Over swirling
feedback and an intermittent martial beat, Cocker describes how it feels to
walk into a pub with a smile on your face and self-loathing in your heart.
"You're no longer searching for beauty or love," he sings, "just some kind
of life with the edges taken off."
From there, This Is Hardcore moves through a dozen tableaux of
desperate people who meet, share a few drinks, and let slip a little truth.
In the title track, the singer realizes to his horror that the sexual
encounter he's engaged in is every bit as empty as the on-camera cavorting
of porn stars. In "A Little Soul," an absentee father confronts his grown
son with the violent, friendless creature the younger man could easily
become. On the furious dance track "Party Hard," Cocker sings in exhausted
tones of a man ready to abandon the night life for something more
meaningful. In what could serve as the album's mantra, the song ends with
the line, "Now the party's over, will you come home to me?" Is Cocker
singing to a person or an idea--the hope of solace, perhaps?
The concept portion of This Is Hardcore ends with "The Day After
the Revolution," wherein Cocker rubs his eyes on the morning of a brighter
day and greets the hope of a healthier life. The album then closes with a
tacked-on single--the terrific kiss-off "Like a Friend," featured on the
Great Expectations soundtrack. (Some free career advice: If Pulp
wants to conquer the American market, they should play "Like a Friend" on
every late-night show; then they should follow it up with videos for the
rollicking "Party Hard" and the soaring "A Little Soul.")
This is Pulp's best album for two reasons. One, the music is as lush,
sweeping, and complex as any they have previously attempted. Although the
production verges on sounding bombastic at times, the addition of strings
and horns makes Cocker's horror stories sound downright cinematic. Since
the group found its sound on His 'N' Hers, Pulp has sounded
exclusively like Pulp. Yes, there are strains of Bowie, Queen, Springsteen,
Sondheim, Talking Heads, and Portishead, but unlike Oasis and Blur, Pulp
combines hot sounds both old and new to create something with sinew and a
pulse.
And a heart. That's the other thing elevating This Is Hardcore: a
feeling of sympathy that was largely absent from Pulp's earlier work.
Different Class was an especially nasty album, taking the piss out
of the rich in the grand tradition of The Kinks, The Jam, and The
Housemartins. Although the record produced one masterpiece--the single
"Common People"--songs like "Mis-Shapes" and "I Spy" were so mean-spirited
as to sap the listener's enjoyment. The songs on This Is Hardcore
are more in the vein of previous Pulp classics like "Babies," "Disco 2000,"
and "Sorted for Es and Whizz." Although these peek-a-boo games are a little
bleaker, Cocker can't bring himself to be totally nihilistic about the
characters he's describing...maybe because he knows he's one of them.
That Cocker sets this vision to spiffed-up rock music is a bonus. The
rock press tends to reward novelty when it should be keeping an ear cocked
for melodic invention, lyrical depth, and bold arrangements. As a result,
critics tend to encourage bands to move on like dilettantes before they've
fully developed a sound. Over the course of its last three albums, Pulp has
made a stunning musical and thematic leap. The group has taken the same
sounds that Duran Duran used as teenybopper chic and converted them into
music that is bluntly, dazzlingly adult.
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