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Pulp's This Is Hardcore
- Author: Savidge, Jane
Witty insights into the music and a chatty, conversational tone that creates a huddled intimacy around a record that drew some pretty stark dividing lines for both fans and band alike. Top-drawer...
Pulp's This Is Hardcore
- Author: Savidge, Jane
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Witty insights into the music and a chatty, conversational tone that creates a huddled intimacy around a record that drew some pretty stark dividing lines for both fans and band alike. Top-drawer...
About
"Essential reading, plain and simple." - Cult Following
"Savidge knows the album backwards." – UNCUT
This Is Hardcore is Pulp’s cry for help. A giant, sprawling, flawed masterpiece of a record, the 1998 album manages to tackle some of the most inappropriate grown-up issues of the day – fame, ageing, mortality, drugs, and pornography – and still come out crying and laughing on the other side. The subject of pornography dominates the record – from its controversial artwork to the images conjured up by songs like "Seductive Barry" and the title track – after Pulp’s main man, Jarvis Cocker – who'd spent most of his teenage and adult life chasing celebrity, only to be cruelly disappointed when it finally arrived in spades – hit upon the grand notion of using pornography as a metaphor for fame. The album's commercial failure as a follow-up to the band's Britpop-defining, Different Class, also symbolizes a death knell for Britpop itself.
Dark, right? Except just like Pulp themselves, Jane Savidge’s book is playful and sometimes very funny indeed. Kicking off with an imaginary conversation between Jarvis Cocker and the people who run the Total Fame Solutions helpline, Savidge expertly guides us through the trials and tribulations of an album that begins with the so-called Michael Jackson Incident, when Cocker got up on stage at the 1996 Brit Awards and waggled his fully-clothed bum at the King of Pop. Pulp’s This Is Hardcore may be a sleazy run through porn and mental demise, and an album that chronicles Cocker’s continuing disillusionment with his newfound lot in life, but Savidge’s book assesses the cultural and historical context of the album with insider knowledge and a sharp modern lens, ultimately making a case for it as one of the most important albums of the 1990s.
Contents
- Prelude: Fame: What Is It Good For?
- 1. You Got to Take These Dreams and Make Them Whole
- 2. Something Changed
- 3. This Is the Eye of the Storm
- 4. That Goes in There
- 5. The Sound of Someone Losing the Plot
- 6. The Earth Is Where We Are
- 7. Nightclubbing
- 8. Leave Your Wheelchair Outside
- 9. This Is Barry
- 10. A Hangover without End
- 11. Letters Home
- 12. Cartoons from Other People’s Lives
- 13. Let’s Get It On
- 14. You Look Like Her to Me
- 15. Come Share This Golden Age with Me
- 16. The Meek Shall Inherit Absolutely Nothing at All
- 17. “Are you well? Well, you won’t be in a minute.”
- Postlude: The Sound of Failure
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
Awards and reviews
Witty insights into the music and a chatty, conversational tone that creates a huddled intimacy around a record that drew some pretty stark dividing lines for both fans and band alike. Top-drawer study of Pulp’s top-shelf reaction to fame. -- Jason Draper
This Is Hardcore is more than a book about an album; it’s a love letter to music itself. -- Iain Key
Savidge knows the album backwards. -- Alastair McKay
Savvy [and] gossipy. -- Tony Clayton-Lea
Savidge picks at the album’s bones, track by track, with warmth, candour and insight. -- Paul Whitelaw
[Savidge’s] book provides an excellent survey of a record that has only gained in stature since its release: an unflinching examination of fame, notoriety and what it is to be a man. -- Jon Savage
