Anyone read this yet? I've ordered it today. The best price seems to be here:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Uncommon-Owen-Hatherley/9781846948770

Having a day off to recover from Wireless so I've read this is one go this morning. So, for what it's worth, here's my review.

It is a self-avowedly intellectual take on Pulp but Hatherley is clearly a real fan. Some of the writing is rather dense and the Intro is rather laboured in its attempts to theorise Pulp. And playing Hatherley at his own game, I'd favour Freud's notion of the unheimlich (uncanny/unhomely) over Shklovsky's Ostranienie (making strange/enstrangement). I was reminded of Jarvis' comment in No Sleep 'til Sheffield that people have china dray horses because they like them, not because they're kitsch. Anyway, academic quibbling aside, Hatherley is good in the Intro in differentiating Pulp from their Britpop contemporaries.

In the main body of the book Hatherley gets into his stride and displays a lighter touch. The trainspotter in me particularly liked the insertion of Pulp lyrics into the text as well as their use in subheadings. Hatherley's focus is on the meanings of Pulp's records: their lyrics, soundscapes, cover artwork, sleevenotes and videos, "taking the line that the artist's actual intentions are secondary, and that once they have let a work out into the world, they've lost control over it". This may frustrate some, but, taken on these terms, I found it an enjoyable read that provoked me to revisit songs familiar to me (the magnificent rendition of I-Spy on Later) and seek out lesser and unknown ones.

Hatherley is also candid about his own identification with Pulp as a teenager in the mid-1990s (he's young enough to be their son) and their appeal to self-proclaimed misfits and outsiders across generations. Coming from Southampton (where I also grew up), he also rightly evokes an appeal in a shared decaying post-war urban landscape across the north-south divide that once appeared to offer a promise of a brave new future. This is not surprising as Hatherley is mainly known for his writing on architecture, particularly, post-war brutalism. He's also good on the role of domestic interiors and their furnishings and paraphernalia in Pulp's songs. I liked the comparison with Martin Parr and the Signs of the Times documentary tv series but I think Pulp differs in their position as viewers of everyday life from the inside rather than the outside.

Writing with passion and enthusiasm, Hatherley doesn't shy away from criticism. There's a fine analysis of the shortcomings of This is Hardcore. And, consequently, I was inspired to try out his alternative mix on my iPod, to which I think I will return often. If I have one quibble with the book it's that Hatherley is perhaps a little too keen to claim Pulp as a working class band. As Jarvis has said himself, his upbringing wasn't exactly solidly proletarian and he only really felt working class when he came to London (there's a tendency amongst southerners to think of anyone with a northern accent as working class). And, although it was there at the beginning, I would have like a little more on the art school context (explored really well in Michael Bracewell's book on Roxy Music Re-make/Re-model) and the possibilities and transformations that offered. But I applaud his attempt to reclaim the political sensibilities and possibilities of Pulp's songs (a point brought home only too clearly to me on Sunday at Wireless when the braying posh couple who'd barged in front of me seemed to only, ironically, know the words to Common People).

Hatherley seems more than a little dubious about Pulp's recent reunion (or coming off hiatus) and stops just short of accusing them of cashing in. This is a criticism that could be levelled at him, although he has claimed in interviews that the book was conceived before this. However, I suspect that his publishers were keen to get the book out promptly. Perhaps, this undue haste might explain the many unfortunate typographic howlers that could have been eliminated by careful typesetting and proofreading. In conclusion, this book might make a fine accompaniment to the faber book of Jarvis' lyrics. But, please do not read the words whilst listening to the recordings. And if you don't like this sort of intellectualising thing (I, for one, think that popular culture is worthy of serious consideration like any other form of art), then, of course, you don't have to read it.

-- Edited by Deborah on Tuesday 5th of July 2011 03:18:48 PM

-- Edited by Deborah on Tuesday 5th of July 2011 03:23:35 PM

-- Edited by Deborah on Tuesday 5th of July 2011 06:08:01 PM

Thanks Eamonn. Great quote from Nick!

I also meant to say in the review that it's a shame the book hasn't got an index of song titles - so you can go straight to where they're mentioned. But indexes are time-consuming and publishers don't like paying to have them done professionally and authors don't like doing them.

The book sounds really good, however it seems to be written around the assumption that Pulp are a working class band, which they are quite obviously NOT... pretty much all the band members were lower middle class in the mid 80s, and their backgrounds, whilst perhaps not particularly well off, were far removed from those employed by the heavy industries and those who did menial jobs for the local council. Class is definitely not defined by how much money you earn, and I think it's difficult to class any member of a healthy arts scene as 'working class' just as it's difficult to give a university student the same tag, no matter how little money they may be living off.

calumlynn wrote:

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The book sounds really good, however it seems to be written around the assumption that Pulp are a working class band, which they are quite obviously NOT... pretty much all the band members were lower middle class in the mid 80s, and their backgrounds, whilst perhaps not particularly well off, were far removed from those employed by the heavy industries and those who did menial jobs for the local council. Class is definitely not defined by how much money you earn, and I think it's difficult to class any member of a healthy arts scene as 'working class' just as it's difficult to give a university student the same tag, no matter how little money they may be living off.

---

 

Agreed.

Yes, their backgrounds seem more lower middle-class and in Jarvis' case, for want of a better word, bohemian. His mum did go to art college after all. And all those years on the dole living in squats and makeshift housing didn't necessarily make them working class. This "different class" rejects both lower middle class aspirations (His 'n' Hers) and bourgeois values (I-Spy). And, it's also why I think the art school context is so important. You don't exactly go to art school expecting to enter a profession and make a lot of money (despite what we're being told about training and employability in the current climate) - it's a very particular sensibility about creativity, self-expression and pushing boundaries. A lot of people who go to art school (no matter what class they've come from) continue to live a very student-like hand-to-mouth "alternative" existence years after they've left. I was very touched by Jarvis talking on Sunday about how important St Martin's was for him and supporting the student protests. 

And also the point about them being positioned as working class once they were in London by others and maybe also adopting that position as an alternative to being subsumed into a middle-class establishment.

Fuss Free wrote:

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Would somebody like to explain the difference between 'working class' and 'lower middle class'.

Is it the difference between a bricklayer and an admin assistant? Same pay, dirtier job?

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Yeah, the official classification is a mess. A call centre worker on £18k is 'lower middle class', but an electrician on £35 an hour is 'skilled working class'.

There is no 'official classification'. I'm lower middle class, my parents are from working class backgrounds and went to uni, my mam is a careers advisor (though is losing her job next month), my dad works in the press office for the local council, they dont earn much money, got a little house, I get grants towards uni etc however we're also relatively cultured, politically informed, vegetarian, national trust members etc etc, yeah we don't host dinner parties and are members of a wine club or anything but we're pretty much middle class. What i mean is that class isn't about how much you earn.

And no way an electrician on £35 an hour would be 'working class'! I mean I'm generalising here, but anyone like that probably lives in a detached house on a new build estate with cream walls and a huge telly... Nouveau Riche, a little, perhaps.

Another review from a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/106645?


Uncommon
by Owen Hatherley (Zero Books, £9.99)
Monday 04 July 2011 by James Walsh Printable Email

On Sunday the reformed Pulp played London's Wireless festival.

You could have gone for £55.25, not including booking fee, or £155 for the Club Experience Package, which featured a private entrance away from the common people, a chill-out area and hot and cold barbecue platters.

As the VIPs chatted and took photographs of each other in their private grandstand, the lanky working-class Jarvis Cocker was on stage, screaming: "You will NEVER understand how it FEELS to live your life with no MEANING or control..."

In Uncommon, Owen Hatherley has produced a wonderful long essay on the "articulate and increasingly furious" working-class pop group Pulp which Cocker fronts.

As the author reminds us, it's barely believable now that this band from Sheffield "managed to send a krautrock epic about class warfare to number 2 and then used this public goodwill to convince tens of thousands to purchase a despairing six-minute dirge on the subject of amateur pornography three years later."

Hatherley's avowed intention is to save Jarvis and band from their association with Britpop, described here as a musical movement "at its most rhythmically inert and vacantly optimistic," anchored in a "Poujadist national resentment."

They deserve better than to be remembered merely alongside the mockney class tourism of Damon Albarn's Blur.

Pulp songs were deeper, truer - twisting, complex worlds of compelling narratives and exotic detail.

Their mastery of the themes of class, sex, and urbanism - the latter Hatherley's area of expertise - means that the songs deserve the detailed analysis received here.

Through the band's finest moments - their febrile Sheffield synth songs of acrylic, adultery, and failed council visions of the future, the epic class revenge fantasies of Different Class and the prescient sex-as-voyeuristic capitalist-exchange masterwork This Is Hardcore - the author sees what Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky called Ostranienie, "a technique that makes the most mundane daily acts into extraordinary rituals."

Pulp are likely to be the last major pop group to be "consciously working class and consciously, unashamedly arty," due to the neoliberal drive to end welfare and free universal education.

Though understandable, the band's reformation for festival appearances like Wireless is perhaps a sadder end than this book suggests they deserve.

I went to school in Kenton where the kids said mam and mammy, now I work up the road in Gosforth where they have middle schools and the kids say mum and mummy.