Pulp’s ‘Common People’ has been one of my top ten songs for quite some time now. I’ve mentioned it a time or two in the past, which I spent a few minutes throwing together a silly little video putting the audio from the song against this mashup of the song and panels from Archie comics, which you might be able to view here or here on my blog, or maybe here on YouTube, depending on what the copyright rules are in your country.
So it was fun to come across this post about the song from The rage of Common People « 33revolutionsperminute’s Blog:
Insecurity breeds viciousness. The pathos of “watch[ing] your life slide out of view” and having “nothing else to do” gives way to blistering fury at those who “think that poor is cool” and that, in turn, to violence. In a verse cut from the single edit, Jarvis compares the “common people” to a dog lying in the corner who, without warning, will “tear your insides out”, a line so savage that it seems impossible that just two minutes ago we were still smirking in the supermarket. In the BBC3 documentary, Jarvis calls another section missing from the single edit (“You will never understand…”) the “punchline” to the whole song, and winces at the intensity of his own vocal. Did he intend the song to contain so much discomfiting ambiguity, or did it get away from him, as great songs often do?
(via MetaFilter)
I think it’s the slide from amusement to condescension to all-out-rage as the song goes by that really does it for me. This is one song that I just will never get tired of.