“Learn to say it whilst keeping a straight face”: The evolution of Jarvis Cocker’s love songs
Love comes up a lot in the world of music. It’s one of our only truly universal feelings, with all the rest like grief and heartache merely deriving from the core of the feeling. It’s fascinating, but more so than that, it’s inescapable, and so Pulp couldn’t escape it, no matter how hard Jarvis Cocker might have tried.
There are many Pulp love songs – ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’, ‘Something Changed’, ‘My Lighthouse’, ‘Love, Love’, ‘I Want You’. But are any of them truly love songs? Are any of them romantic or actually sincere enough to fully warrant the label given Cocker’s penchant for wit?
Largely, early Pulp songs attack the feeling from a niche, allowing Cocker to maintain his position as music’s sharpest observer. So often, his lyrics are less about a feeling or a topic, or more about looking in on that thing or even looking for clues. “What…Is…This…” he asks in ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’, being baffled about the sensation rather than approaching it with the traditional declaratives and grand gestures. Instead, it received a cool confusion, or even a kind of clinical consideration, as he asks, “Why me? / Why you? / Why here? / Why now?”
‘Something Changed’ is about as close as Cocker gets in the early days. Here, he wrote his wedding song, so that cool couples have their first dance too. But even still, it’s not a big, grand, ‘I love you’ anthem. Instead, he’s an observer once more, getting into the weeds of the butterfly effect and the nonromantic logistics that make up the chance of love. “I could have stayed at home and gone to bed / I could have gone to see a film instead / You might have changed your mind and seen your friends,” he sings before the beautiful moment of two lovers meeting and marking the start of a romance is chalked up to nothing more than the simple phrase, “But then something changed”.
Sure, that is romantic. It’s deeply romantic, in fact. But there is an enduring bashfulness in Cocker’s more emotive songs that seemingly connects to the songwriter’s own journey about who Pulp are, who he is and what he should be writing about. The group found success when Cocker fell out of a window and decided to move away from writing songs packed with “immature jokiness and excruciating attempts at profundity” to instead write more candidly about the world around him. Perhaps in that, the idea of sincere love songs got long in favour of social commentary and in fear of trying to appear falsely profound when attempting to tackle a topic as vast and grand as love. Some of the band’s most outright love songs came before this moment, on their debut, It. But after the fall and the future it opened up, everything got notably more sarcastic and avoidant.
I’m not saying that on Cocker’s behalf, he would say it himself. As the group return with their first new music in decades, the songwriter is holding his hands up, owning up to it and facing it head on as ‘Got To Have Love’ not only delivers a moment of true sincerity, but goes a bit meta as it muses directly on Cocker’s avoidance of the love, idea and feeling alike.
“Love’ is a word I was unable to say until I was approaching 40,” Cocker said in a statement with the track, “I listened to love songs all the time but couldn’t use the word in real life.” This new track becomes a therapy session about exactly that, or, in Cocker’s words, him “having a word with myself about this state of affairs. I gave myself a real talking-to.”
It climaxes to what feels like a vital and central lyric, not just in the song but in Cocker’s evolution as both a person and a songwriter. “Learn to say it whilst keeping a straight face,” he declares, imploring it of both himself and his listeners in an outrightly emotive verse about the power the feeling has in our lives.
Coming full circle to connect this new lesson learnt with his old avoidant self, the band call back to ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’ as they chant once more, “L.O.V.E” but now seemingly with knowledge of what that feeling is, how to harness it and how to write about it.
