It seems Jarvis Cocker has succumbed to the urge
to relive his Britpop glory days and reformed Pulp. Footage of their
first performance since reforming has been posted at Pitchfork.
I don’t much blame Jarvis,
since his records since leaving Pulp
have highlighted just his weaknesses. Initial release Jarvis and second album
Further Complications demonstrated that, sans a strong backing band to bring emotional heft to his
tales of class and gender relationships, he
falls flat. Besides which it
seemed that in both those records he’d ran short of things to
discuss.
On
a historical note, Jarvis’s failure to continue his success
post-Pulp is interesting given the media attention Jarvis
received in the nineties. It’s obvious that the front man
occupies the spotlight, but media reports created the impression
(for me at least) that Jarvis was Pulp, and so
underplayed the band’s contributions.
I
think the Pitchfork videos make the reasons for this media bias
obvious. Disco 2000 sounds fucking awesome, but none of
the band makes the slightest gesture to indicate that they’re
responsible for this sound. Jarvis meanwhile dances like a
loon, flailing his arms and wailing like the big attention whore
that he is. It’s great. It’s fantastic. But it just serves to
reinforce the illusion that Jarvis is the centre of Pulp. In fact
Jarvis’s failure post-Pulp demonstrates that he needs the
rest of the band. He needs the drama that they bring to his
lyrics. But the band dynamic is one that draws more attention to
Jarvis, while turning heads from the skill used
to manage this in the rest of Pulp. Bah. Just one
of those cosmic ironies...
