What do you think?
Rate this book
Uncommon
If we remember them at all, the Sheffield pop group Pulp are remembered for jolly class warfare ditty 'Common People', for the celebrity of their interestingly-named frontman, for the latter waving his arse at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards, for being part of a non-movement called 'Britpop', and for disappearing almost without trace shortly after. They made a few good tunes, they did some funny videos, and while they might be National Treasures, they're nothing serious. Are they? This book argues that they should be taken seriously —very seriously indeed. Attempting to wrest Pulp away from the grim jingoistic spectacle of Britpop and the revivals-of-a-revival circuit, this book charts the very strange things that occur in their records, taking us deep into a strange exotic land; a land of acrylics, adultery, architecture, analogue synthesisers and burning class anger. This is book about pop music, but it is mainly a book about sex, the city and class via the 1990s finest British pop group.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
135 pages, Paperback
First published June 16, 2011
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 25, 2017
Christmas Day 1995, dinner done, presents unwrapped and now I was alone in my bedroom. There had been only one gift that I had been interested in: Pulp’s “Different Class” on cassette tape. I guess I had hoped for twelve “Disco 2000”s, but this wasn’t that, this was something very different. As “Common People” slid into the “I Spy” I was pitched into a world I really didn’t understand. It was angry, sexual and very adult, these were feelings and emotions my twelve year old self couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. It was far easier to stick with Oasis and their swaggeringly empty anthems than Jarvis Cocker’s uncomfortable whispers, groans and threats.
Owen Hatherley’s Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp seems like an attempt to bring these feelings back. His stated aim in the book is to reclaim Pulp from easy nostalgia, from greatest hits compilations, reunion tours and “I Love the ‘90s” shows. He wants people to remember, or perhaps realise, how weird, unnerving and angry they were. The bones of the argument developed in the book is made in this Guardian article. According to Hatherley Pulp were the last of a slightly ill-defined tradition that went from the likes of The Kinks and Bowie through Kate Bush to the Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths. It seems futile to argue against this as the tradition is one he alone has defined. If I was to suggest, I dunno, M.I.A. as carrying on that very lineage and that perhaps “Paper Planes” was a worthy, angry, British art-school successor to “Common People” or that Belle and Sebastian played a similar pop-outsider role as Pulp I imagine it would be curtly dismissed.
It occasionally appears, like Ian McDonald in Revolution in the Head and to a lesser extent Simon Reynolds in Retromania, that the author wants to enshrine the transformative music of his youth as a zenith, that everything after is somehow inferior, that no one will ever have the same intensity of experience that they had. On one hand, it’s true that there will probably never be another band quite like Pulp but then there will never be another band quite like The Beatles or B*witched. Nearly all pop groups – certainly the ones that capture the Zeitgeist – are products of their particular time and place.
I have not read much of Hatherley’s other work, indeed I didn’t really intend to read Uncommon – I found it abandoned on an East London pavement – but his regular beat appears to be polemical defences of British brutalist architecture. and it is this obsession which colours his insights and interpretations of Pulps work. He teases out the precise specifics of Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics and places them not just into the wider political context of post-Thatcher Britain but also the architectural landscape of Sheffield which seeped into the bands’ sound. His refusal to deal in straight biography is useful, by pretty much ignoring who was shagging who or what drugs were being consumed he is able to get concentrate on the magic in the music and tease out the significance of neglected pre and post-Britpop tracks such as “Sheffield Sex City” and “The Wickerman”. Incidentally, Hatherley’s views on Britpop’s most withering dissection of brutalist architecture – Denim’s “Council Houses” – are unknown.
Sometimes it is hard to work out who the book was written for. On numerous occasions he pours scorn on Pulp’s Britpop contemporaries – Blur coming in for particular opprobrium – and maintains that the ‘90s jungle scene was the most exciting, most brilliantly futuristic music being made in Britain during the ‘90s. It sometimes feels like Hatherley has been called before a committee of Marxists and Wire subscribers and is being asked to explain his love for the band, that he is being to forced to justify his love for this band that are supposedly unworthy of serious appraisal.
The strongest section of the book comes in his discussion of “Mis-Shapes” where he explores the never ending battle between “moshers” and “chavs” in provincial towns all over the country and the underlying class dynamics. His analysis is much more nuanced than Owen Jones’ blunderbuss approach to cultural-criticism in “Chavs”. Whilst Hatherley does not mention the word explicitly, for many “chav” was a word first learned as a sneering riposte to catcalls of “mosher” or “grunger”. Whilst of course the class connotations of such words are dangerous it’s hard to take notions of solidarity seriously when your engaged in teenage turf wars. He gets deeper into the nuances and antagonisms of the grey areas where social classes blur and clash through the lens of pop music and personal experience than one finds in the supposed neutrality of newsprint.
Whilst it is refreshing to read music criticism that takes popular music so deadly seriously, Hatherley’s occasional reluctance to take Pulp’s pop skill as seriously as their sociological import actually does them a disservice. To hold them apart from Britpop and almost from pop itself is defeating. It is telling that he limits discussion of “Disco 2000” to a couple of lines compared to the acres of verbiage devoted to other lyrically richer but less catchy songs. Hatherley insists that Pulp’s doomy 1998 comeback “This Is Hardcore” was as strange and daring a chart hit as the likes of The Specials “Ghost Town” or Laurie Anderson’s “Oh Superman”. To me “Hardcore” still sounds like the dirge with slightly sinister lyrics I remember it being at the time – kinda like The Beautiful South’s “Don’t Marry Her” but less catchy. Pulp are worthy of the seriousness with which Hatherley treats them but it was because Pulp wrote catchy, tuneful songs that they were able to smuggle tales of class war and sexual obsession into the charts and adolescent bedrooms. It is because they wrote songs like “Disco 2000” that they were able to make Christmas Day 1995 so memorably disturbing for me. Sure, celebrate the cerebral but as Jarvis once sang sing-along…
Owen Hatherley’s Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp seems like an attempt to bring these feelings back. His stated aim in the book is to reclaim Pulp from easy nostalgia, from greatest hits compilations, reunion tours and “I Love the ‘90s” shows. He wants people to remember, or perhaps realise, how weird, unnerving and angry they were. The bones of the argument developed in the book is made in this Guardian article. According to Hatherley Pulp were the last of a slightly ill-defined tradition that went from the likes of The Kinks and Bowie through Kate Bush to the Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths. It seems futile to argue against this as the tradition is one he alone has defined. If I was to suggest, I dunno, M.I.A. as carrying on that very lineage and that perhaps “Paper Planes” was a worthy, angry, British art-school successor to “Common People” or that Belle and Sebastian played a similar pop-outsider role as Pulp I imagine it would be curtly dismissed.
It occasionally appears, like Ian McDonald in Revolution in the Head and to a lesser extent Simon Reynolds in Retromania, that the author wants to enshrine the transformative music of his youth as a zenith, that everything after is somehow inferior, that no one will ever have the same intensity of experience that they had. On one hand, it’s true that there will probably never be another band quite like Pulp but then there will never be another band quite like The Beatles or B*witched. Nearly all pop groups – certainly the ones that capture the Zeitgeist – are products of their particular time and place.
I have not read much of Hatherley’s other work, indeed I didn’t really intend to read Uncommon – I found it abandoned on an East London pavement – but his regular beat appears to be polemical defences of British brutalist architecture. and it is this obsession which colours his insights and interpretations of Pulps work. He teases out the precise specifics of Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics and places them not just into the wider political context of post-Thatcher Britain but also the architectural landscape of Sheffield which seeped into the bands’ sound. His refusal to deal in straight biography is useful, by pretty much ignoring who was shagging who or what drugs were being consumed he is able to get concentrate on the magic in the music and tease out the significance of neglected pre and post-Britpop tracks such as “Sheffield Sex City” and “The Wickerman”. Incidentally, Hatherley’s views on Britpop’s most withering dissection of brutalist architecture – Denim’s “Council Houses” – are unknown.
Sometimes it is hard to work out who the book was written for. On numerous occasions he pours scorn on Pulp’s Britpop contemporaries – Blur coming in for particular opprobrium – and maintains that the ‘90s jungle scene was the most exciting, most brilliantly futuristic music being made in Britain during the ‘90s. It sometimes feels like Hatherley has been called before a committee of Marxists and Wire subscribers and is being asked to explain his love for the band, that he is being to forced to justify his love for this band that are supposedly unworthy of serious appraisal.
The strongest section of the book comes in his discussion of “Mis-Shapes” where he explores the never ending battle between “moshers” and “chavs” in provincial towns all over the country and the underlying class dynamics. His analysis is much more nuanced than Owen Jones’ blunderbuss approach to cultural-criticism in “Chavs”. Whilst Hatherley does not mention the word explicitly, for many “chav” was a word first learned as a sneering riposte to catcalls of “mosher” or “grunger”. Whilst of course the class connotations of such words are dangerous it’s hard to take notions of solidarity seriously when your engaged in teenage turf wars. He gets deeper into the nuances and antagonisms of the grey areas where social classes blur and clash through the lens of pop music and personal experience than one finds in the supposed neutrality of newsprint.
Whilst it is refreshing to read music criticism that takes popular music so deadly seriously, Hatherley’s occasional reluctance to take Pulp’s pop skill as seriously as their sociological import actually does them a disservice. To hold them apart from Britpop and almost from pop itself is defeating. It is telling that he limits discussion of “Disco 2000” to a couple of lines compared to the acres of verbiage devoted to other lyrically richer but less catchy songs. Hatherley insists that Pulp’s doomy 1998 comeback “This Is Hardcore” was as strange and daring a chart hit as the likes of The Specials “Ghost Town” or Laurie Anderson’s “Oh Superman”. To me “Hardcore” still sounds like the dirge with slightly sinister lyrics I remember it being at the time – kinda like The Beautiful South’s “Don’t Marry Her” but less catchy. Pulp are worthy of the seriousness with which Hatherley treats them but it was because Pulp wrote catchy, tuneful songs that they were able to smuggle tales of class war and sexual obsession into the charts and adolescent bedrooms. It is because they wrote songs like “Disco 2000” that they were able to make Christmas Day 1995 so memorably disturbing for me. Sure, celebrate the cerebral but as Jarvis once sang sing-along…
October 15, 2012
As a long-standing Pulp obsessive I was not expecting to be impressed by this book, but here Hatherley has written nothing less than a call to arms for music writers. Not for him the standard clichéd track by track descriptions of most biographies. In much the same way as, in Militant Modernism, he scratches the surfaces of modern architecture to unearth the secret tides beneath, he ventilates much of the undiscovered layers of Pulp’s back catalogue in a compelling way. He interrogates how ‘Sheffield: Sex City’ addresses modern architecture in a fetishistic, almost Ballardian manner. He considers the long over-looked and highly skilful way that the band charity shop aesthetic evokes futures that never occurred. The complex social, sexual and class wars afoot in even their most forgotten tracks are delicately considered. To a fan of their work who feels the band have only been obtusely considered, this books feels long overdue. For an objective take on the band, Truth and Beauty might be a safer bet. Hatherley says from the off that his take is entirely subjective, but even so the sometimes high handed and occasionally inaccurate sweeping statement aside (most other Britpop and post-Britpop bands are dismissed with a sideswipe) this is well worth investigating. A lot of tired old music writers could learn a lot from Hatherley’s unabashed intellectual courage.
October 11, 2022
This is quite a satisfying piece of work. Hatherley shows that he is clearly at home chatting about music and class as he is about architecture and class. His enthusiasm is palpable and fairly infectious too and although I don’t share all of his opinions on the greatness or importance of Pulp, I was certainly made aware of and developed a further appreciation of the band and their work through what he had to say.
There are times when this can become a little silly and he can get a bit carried away, but nevertheless, this is good quality writing from Hatherley, its told with authority and persuasion, and there were a few times where I enjoyed a good laugh too.
December 16, 2012
The book allowed me to revisit Pulp whose "Different Class" was for a while one of my favourite albums to listen to. So it was interesting to see this album in the context of their work as I haven't really been following them while they were famous (I discovered "Different Class" in the beginning of the 2000s - of course I knew of Pulp but actually only "Common People", their hit single, which was okay but to hymnic for my taste). The whole continuum of sex, class and the city is definetely an area to consider. On the whole a nice little read. It is not an introduction into Pulp but the author says that in the beginning and recommends another book for that (Mark Sturdy's Truth and Beauty: the story of Pulp).
June 12, 2013
This is a fascinating little book, if a little... obsessive. Although Owen Hatherley is not uncritical in his assessment of 20 years-worth of Pulp songs, I couldn't help but feel that his judgement is rather clouded by the fact that, as he admits, he first discovered the band in his early teenage years, and subsequently enjoyed many formative experiences with his girlfriend while listening to these songs. As a result, he has no patience for any other music from the same time as Pulp or since, and enjoys laying into the likes of Blur and Oasis at every opportunity. Obsessive, unashamedly high-brown, and at times a little unhinged, but still a fun read.
April 15, 2018
Brilliant exposé of the genius of Pulp, arguably the most original English band of the 90s. Hatherley manages to be both a meticulous observant eye, flirting with social and cultural theory and a 16-year-old filled with enthusiasm, which gives the book-long essay a certain delight for reading, not easily found elsewhere in music criticism. The chronological analysis of the records is done with a good amount of personal identification and with no less of reflection regarding the changing-times.
'Uncommon' remains a must-read for anyone who has heard the first notes of 'His 'n' Hers', 'Different Class' or 'This is Hardcore' and turned their heads and said 'Wait, what's that?'
'Uncommon' remains a must-read for anyone who has heard the first notes of 'His 'n' Hers', 'Different Class' or 'This is Hardcore' and turned their heads and said 'Wait, what's that?'
September 21, 2011
Thoughtul, interesting analysis of Pulp, looking at the band's preoccupations with 70s nostalgia, post-war social housing, domesticity and sex as class warfare, and their odd place in Britpop, amongst many other things. As per usual, Hatherley's writing is elegant, engaging and insightful, but at times verges on the polemical and didactic. Still, if you love Pulp, you can't go wrong with this. Also features some great etchings by Lisa Craddock which was a lovely unexpected bonus. Typical Zero Books fare, so no bad thing.
June 27, 2013
i love Owen Hatherley and i love Pulp how can this be bad.
Whilst i sometimes disagree with his views on individual pulp tracks, Hatherley has the ability to make you forget this and carry you on with his views and opinions.
This is the book you want Paul Morley to have written but Morley doesnt have the stones. Its slight but full which is an achievement in itself.
The comments and opinions will cause you to double take but and this is a big but the social history and the sense of place and personality will carry you through.
Whilst i sometimes disagree with his views on individual pulp tracks, Hatherley has the ability to make you forget this and carry you on with his views and opinions.
This is the book you want Paul Morley to have written but Morley doesnt have the stones. Its slight but full which is an achievement in itself.
The comments and opinions will cause you to double take but and this is a big but the social history and the sense of place and personality will carry you through.
April 10, 2014
If I wasn't from Sheffield, a similar age to Owen and also a die-hard Pulp fanatic it might only have got three stars. Appreciate his amazing ability to plausibly labour a metaphor for all it's worth. Still reeling in shock that Jarvis' mum stood as a Tory councillor. Lapped it up and then revisited my Pulp back catalogue. Loved it. Just my chipped cup of cheap strong tea.
July 2, 2014
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this essay. I loved reading Owen Hatherley opinion and breakdown of Pulp lyrics. I agreed with him to a certain extent but I did not fully support his views on 'This is Hardcore'. But that was bound to happen at some point in the essay.
Overall the essay made me laugh and smile and just brought joy to me. Thank you for publishing it!
Overall the essay made me laugh and smile and just brought joy to me. Thank you for publishing it!
July 9, 2015
A concise, delicious assessment of Britpop's genuine outsiders, academic without being impenetrable, glowing without being a hagiography (although Hatherley's wholesale dismissal of Cocker's leanings towards balladry seem a little uncharitable).
October 12, 2020
Provides an amazing insight into the music of Pulp. Took me ages to read because I had to listen to each song after it was mentioned in the book. What a great experience <3
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews