Common People.
Appropriation vs transformation.
So I’m on the tube and the middle aged white man next to me is silently rapping along to the music which underscores a clearly very tense game of computer chess. He grips his phone, rocks in his seat as if dodging blows, but it’s unclear whether these are from the beats or the chess game. His thinning hair is combed over, his glasses on a cord and I notice that his suit isn’t just blue but actually some sort of stomach churning blue check, the pattern subtle enough to not be a statement but pervasive enough to be disgusting. The suit of a salesman not a stage magician. Instantly I wanted him banned.
I wanted the doors to open and some sort of cultural police to rip the music away from him. It’s one thing for a teenager to act like Compton is in the Home Counties but you’re beyond grown-up, your over-grown and gone to seed and you need accept it’s just not decent to shoutwhisper about shooting up your enemies whilst angrily clacking your fingers at a chess battle on the Piccadilly line. The music, like the suit, does not fit you.
I tried to work out how old he was and came to the grim conclusion that he was probably a little younger than me. Not much but enough for me to pause in my dreams of a purge. Our reflections in the darkly hurtling window opposite double doubled. Two of him and two of me warping against the racing tube tunnel and barely indistinguishable from each other, a pair of white men not in the Hammersmith Palais but at least on the right tube line.
The other week I went to see Pulp in Finsbury Park and no I can’t believe I didn’t bump into you either. Because I’m old I stood near the sound desk so I could hear the best mix but that also meant standing near the VIP enclosure. It must be emotionally complex to choose to watch Pulp from a position of privilege. Surely this sanctum where no one will sweatily stamp on your foot, could only have been accessible to those able to prove that they came from Greece with a thirst for knowledge. Did they not feel deeply uncomfortable when 45,000 people sang “we want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won’t allow us” whilst sitting in seats demonstrably most people were not allowed.
Towards the end of the night my attention was snatched by a sprinting security guard. She hurdled a barrier near me and helped rip apart a group who had started brawling. They were middle-aged and very drunk, the sudden violence in their arms betrayed by the staggering incoherence in their legs. It wasn’t the joyful violence of a mosh pit but some resentful malice released but not escaped from. A man, two women, a confusion of fury still swinging at air. Around them the crowd were unsure how to react, after all we all knew that in a moment Jarvis would sing about the common people and we’d all pretend he meant us, when really he meant them.
Currently my gig going life is neatly bookended because the first I ever went to was the ’92 Madness reunion also in Finsbury Park. On that occasion the true fans threw bottles of piss at Morrissey when he draped himself in the Union Jack and looked gay. Who knows, perhaps it was that experience that turned him into the problematic right-wing embarrassment he is today. It’s certainly hard to know how to feel now about a skinhead bottling a racist, even if the skinhead was probably acting out of homophobia. I was also in Finsbury Park for the Fleadh in ’94 which means I unwittingly saw astrophysicist Brian Cox play what would become the political anthem “Things Can Only Get Better”. “Common People“ was released the following year but in some ways would have been the better anthem for New Labour in ’97.
I had my honeymoon in New York’s Ace Hotel which I once heard wittily described as “cultural appropriation of white culture by white people”. I laughed without fully understanding, but the phenomenon that was New Labour, and indeed “Common People”, is, I think, made of the same material. I don’t blame Jarvis Cocker at all. He is unarguably amongst the very greatest lyricists, equalled by few, bettered by none. However it’s notable that the lyric of his that bedded deepest in our culture is the one that directs its disdain at a rich female foreigner. She is pop music’s George Soros. Again this is not his fault, by all accounts the song grows from a genuine encounter with a real person who just happened to be who she was. On an individual basis I’m sure there are plenty of problematic rich women from Greece but I always find it hard joining the crowd uniting in song against her. As if hating her enables us to be him.
Cocker’s degree is in fine art and film so barely counts but still makes him an exemplar of the hopeful desire, contained and expressed by New Labour, to vastly expand the rate of university attendance by traditionally under represented groups. The unspoken side of this ambition was that rather than staying the same, barred by accident of birth from the VIP lounge, you were now encouraged to become the same, holding onto your vowel sounds only if you rilly must. It was always at heart an attempt to built a better demos rather than better democratise the nation. As Cocker also said, cunts are still running the world. Now they just like the same music as you.
Cultural appropriation is the act of listening without hearing, of loving without letting love alter you. I don’t love “Common People” because it’s a song that denies the power of art to change someone’s perspective, yet ironically, I do love it because it’s a song that powerfully does just that. I defy anyone listening to it not to live for a moment in Jarvis’ well-tailored suit. However uncomfortable, however crass, it has to be OK to listen to hip-hop whilst playing chess, it has to be ok to imagine yourself as something and someone you are not. The art that changes has to welcome anyone willing to change but the deal is, if you love something, you have to let it change you, otherwise that’s stealing.
I have also written about the importance of allowing empathy in art in this piece about hatred and about the complex nature of political promises in this piece about advertising.