Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker’s memoir: How to declutter the pop

Et is probably a stress test for every relationship: a friend is moving. Could you help carry it, it’s also definitely the last time? All right then. You agree, drag yourself there – and then the boxes aren’t even packed. If you don’t turn back at the front door, maybe that’s because said friend is Jarvis Cocker. Or that he talks about his stuff in a similarly charming way.

That’s what the Sheffield musician’s autobiographer, Good Pop, Bad Pop, is all about. For the first few pages, he looks into the attic of his London home, onto decades of stuff. Cocker immediately robs his readers of any hope for an efficient review: his mind is like that of a “turtle” and the long, narrow attic chamber is reminiscent of “the inside of a huge Toblerone pack”. How do you get that in order? By taking out every object, looking at it, and then judging it with a tongue-twisted North English: “Keep or cob?”, which translates to “stay” or “away”. And with help. In this case, it’s us, his audience, whom Cocker addresses directly. He calls us his “witnesses” and that is meant literally: We should take a good look, because every object has a short text and always a photo, an illustration or eye-catching typography on colorful pages.

Cocker isn’t doing this to free up space. There is enough to tell in his artist biography: In 1978, when he was fifteen, he founded Pulp. In the 1990s, the band became the most important representative of Britpop alongside Blur, Oasis and Suede, and the song “Common People” is a highly topical masterpiece. The group broke up, got together, broke up, regrouped, and so on. The next reunion is planned for 2023. Cocker also makes music as a solo artist, in 2017 he released an album with pianist Chilly Gonzales. There are also songs for Wes Anderson films, feature articles and radio shows. A life for pop. And if you read the subtitle of his autobiography, “Things of my Life,” you might expect Cocker to be mostly dusting off old guitars, song lyrics, and adolescent pamphlets about rock ‘n’ roll—which he does. So far, so rock star memoir. But he wants more.

He writes here not only as a musician, but also as a cultural critic, whose texts appear in the Guardian, among others. This is the only way to explain why twenty-year-old chewing gum is sometimes discussed as closely as milestones in the band’s history: Strictly speaking, it’s about a pack of Wrigley’s Peppermint, the kind Cocker always carried with him before he became a father. One could endlessly charge this object emotionally, stylize it as a symbol of youth and freshness. But the only special thing about this dented paper sleeve is that this chewing gum was then mainly sold in strips instead of in dragee form as it is today. Nostalgic but inedible, so get rid of it. Cocker is satisfied, not only because of the minimal progress, but also because: “We found it and thought about it.” That sounds like a cheap excuse for not having to clean up, but it gets to the heart of the book.