|
On the face of it Fat Children, the latest single from Jarvis Cocker, is a much a pop-glam stomp as any of Pulp's greatest moments, a floor-filler to rival Disco 2000 with a fab drum intro and a sing-along chorus.
But when was Jarvis ever just about the shiny surface of his songs? Hasn't the point of his entire career been to take the shallow, superficial, jaunty world of pop and dig a well in the middle of it that leads down to the dark, hidden depths of the human soul?
The seething class war hatred behind the romance of shagging posh birds that was Common People, the call-to-rape underneath the nursery rhyme harmonies of The Birds In Your Garden: these were the songs Jarvis was made of.
If there's such a double meaning in the lyrics of Fat Children, they're lost on me. Instead what comes across is a grumpy old man moaning about the youth of today nicking his phone (oh all right then, and murdering him while they're at it) and having a fourth-form politics debate dig at the police at the same time.
Gone is the acerbic wit, the razor-sharp sociological observations on society. Maybe now that life is so comfortable with the wife and the kids, the irony is that the most danger Jarvis is in from fat children is that he might produce one of his own.
Comments
|
 |
|