Jarvis Cocker
Jarvis
Rough Trade, 2006
By Andrew Nicholas McCann Smith
He’s reinvented himself. Again. Not as Jarvis Cocker, just as Jarvis: always a ladies’ man, a dream fuck, and a pure fashionista — the haute couture of metrosexuality, before it was butchered by blokes with feelings and yuppies in pink button-ups. Since his Pulp days, Jarvis has taken a half-decade to focus on other pursuits: directing music videos for Aphex Twin and Erlend Øye, releasing an album as Darren Spooner, throwing together a failed band, and getting hitched. Seeing Jarvis get married shocked me as much as if the Pope had announced “God is dead.” Common People was a tribute to how he could get any woman he wanted, how he refused to settle, how women were his toys. His warnings of infidelity won him more chicks! Jarvis was a man that every man wished he could be, in his designer suits and faggy style. Jarvis was my hero, but he’s changed a little now.
This new Jarvis is a bit older and a bit wiser. He’s not so sex-driven, and a tad more serious, on first glance. Like any debut diva rock album, Jarvis has just enough synth to make it contemporary, but not enough to steer away from rock. The range of styles shows he’s attempting to diversify — to really make himself out as a singer. Tragically, this collection of songs seems more of an attempt to actually say something, but at least he says it with cynicism. Jarvis touches on religion (“It’s the true believers who crash and burn”), sex (“Sex is for dummies anyway, for when you’ve run out of things to say”), even economy (“The free market is perfectly natural / Do you think that I’m some kind of dummy?”). And he throws in “dummy” whenever he can.
Were this a record by someone a little more serious, and a little less sexy, I would have sloughed it off as another attempt to convey meaning in vagueness, like Radiohead. Thankfully, after all the politics, Jarvis simply declares: “Shit floats.” It seems so fatalistic to hear a whole album about the horror stories of the everyday and then get shot down with: “Use your right to protest on the streets / Use your right, but don’t imagine it’s heard.”
The construction of the album is as eccentric as Jarvis’s lyrics. The prereleased single, “Cunts are Still Running the World” (titled as “Running the World” on the album, but I won’t be tricked), is tagged onto the CD 30 minutes after “Quantum Theory”, as a bonus track. In the LP version of Jarvis it doesn’t even fall on the vinyl — it’s included as a separate 7”. But, because he’s just so deliciously English, it’s easy to accept the album for its style: sensual stories told with compelling wording. The ballad “I Will Kill Again” is one of the many songs written with that kind of emotion. When his voice cracks ever-so-slightly while singing it, you can tell he’s straining for breath – that maybe he actually worked for this album.
The literary side of Jarvis has surfaced before — like the time he walked onto the English show TGF, pushed a cardboard cutout of himself out the window, sat down, and referenced Oscar Wilde. When asked why he pushed himself out the window he claimed: “To let something new grow in its place.” So after his mid-life crisis reinvention process, Jarvis has come out the other end older and married, and apparently wiser for it.
