| Pulp – Common People Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Well, if you're reading this then you've come to the very last (at least for right now) comment. What a lot of people seem to think is that Jarvis is berating a rich girl. "Common People" is deeper than that. When we think about the narrator of the song, it's tempting to think he's a working-class Brit fighting the good fight. But he meets this rich Greek girl at St. Martin's liberal arts college - a fancy place for people to get fluffly degrees and credentials. So while Jarvis could, perhaps, be a working class hero, he's not exactly the underdog people want him to be. He's mingling with the upper crust of society. ...and that adds another level of irony to the song. The narrator is telling her she has no idea what it's like to be poor, but is he living it too? Clearly not - he's at University, with no roaches climing the wall, and he's living with purpose and direction. When the chorus comes in it's romanticizing poor people, as persons without "meaning or control" but that's not true - being poor doesn't mean you're hopeless, or stupid, or without reason to live. But our narrator lumps millions of people into this category to make this girl feel like shit. Yet he's part of the joke too. So there's quite a few levels of irony to this song that people seem to gloss over. What "Common People" is about is how we can never truly understand people who live tougher lives than ours - no matter how much you think you know, you're never going to experience what it's like. This song is about feigning empathy, and our protagonist does that here. Let me ask you, what do you think happens in this story after the song ends? My guess is that our protagonist and the girl get it on - she wants to know what common people are like, and he's glad to exploit his "knowledge" of them to make himself seem like an authority. And it gets him in her pants, which is why he goes on this rant in the first place. |
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