Heccubus.Blog

In the autumn of 1995, I had just started grade 6, and was stuck in a new school (my previous school only went to grade 5 for some reason). For a 10-year-old, this was pretty awful. One night, while watching MuchMusic, however, something inside of me clicked. The video for “Common People” off of Pulp’s Different Class came on. I was completely enraptured with it. The retro visuals, touches of psychedelia and 60s pop, Jarvis Cocker’s smoky croon… Everything about it was just the most incredible thing for me at that time. I mean, okay, I didn’t “get” the song at all. I just thought it was a fun, bouncy song that made me smile. It wasn’t until about 5 or 6 years later that I realized it was a fairly negative song, lyrically speaking. No, for the 10 year old Heccubus, “Common People” was not yet a sneering jab at bourgeois college students’ naive obsessions with the proletariat (this is my own interpretation, it could very well mean something entirely different), it was just a silly song that I taped off the radio and listened to over and over again until the cassette wore out.
Around 2001 or 2002, however, I stumbled upon a copy of Different Class in a used CD store that I was shopping in while I was supposed to be in class. The kitschy look of the cover drew me in at first, before it suddenly dawned on me that I was fully aware of this band, and this album in particular, due to my old love of “Common People.” I grabbed the CD (as well as the other stack I was holding) and left with my ample purchases in tow. I wasted no time stuffing the album into my portable CD player once I was out of the store, and I listened to it all the way back to school. The walk was about 45 minutes, but listening to the album almost in its entirety made the walk seem to fly by. Once I arrived at school, I proudly showed my newly-acquired treasure to a few friends. Few of them could understand why I’d just bought the album, mostly passing it off as some “90s one-hit-wonder bullshit.” Ignoring the response, I kept that CD in my rotation almost nonstop for the next several months.
Having just recently discovered the (International) Noise Conspiracy not too long before, I was going through this phase where I was listening to a lot of music fueled by 60s and 70s rock and pop. Different Class was just the right combination of soaring, anthemic politicking, and velvet-smooth balladry. It was one of those albums that finally broke me out of a fairly ridiculous punk phase and pushed me toward broadening my musical horizons. Lyrically, the music covered two basic themes: sexuality, and social class. Both topics are spread across a grand suite of songs that veer back and forth between show tune pomp, glitzy Euro-disco, and new wave-tinged pop. For someone whose CD collection, at the time, consisted mostly of punk and hardcore bands like Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Operation Ivy, DOA, Rancid, and Bad Religion, this was a pretty eye-opening affair.
As a testament to my utter adoration for this album, the following tale is rather noteworthy. Over the years, I have been forced to sell off a good two thirds of the CDs that I have ever owned. Through all of this, however, despite selling some truly great albums that I thoroughly enjoyed owning, I have never once even considered letting go of that copy of Different Class. It has remained planted firmly in its place on my CD shelf, moving only to make room for new discs, or fill in the gaps left by albums that I decided to sell. Very recently, I decided to give it a spin once again for old time’s sake, and was hit by a rush of memories associated with it; lying in bed with a girl whilst “Pencil Skirt” wafted out of my speakers, realizing for the first time that “Common People” was a much deeper song than I remembered, nodding along to “Mis-Shapes” and its outcast narrator’s rallying cry, finding a like-minded voice against drug abuse in “Sorted for E’s & Wizz.” With each new track, I was reminded of another part of my past. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but all of it lead me to sit down and start writing this. To me, any record that makes enough of an impact on me that I have to sit down and write about it is worth taking note of, regardless of why I’m writing about it.
Different Class may be over thirteen years old, but its impact on my life hasn’t subsided in that time. In those thirteen years, I have yet to stop loving it any more than I did the first time I heard that brilliant lead single, and in the eight or so years since I bought the album its overall impact has not changed in any way. Every time I hear it, I am floored by the overall scope of the album. It soars, it sulks, and it generally outperforms most other mid-90s albums that I own.