"Common People" by Pulp (1995)
Dad’s Song of the Day #103, Dec. 10, 2025
Thirty years on, it appears that Oasis has won the Britpop Wars of the 1990s. It’s hard to argue with their $425M concert tour in 2025.
But—from an artistic point of view—I don’t think anything from the era touches Pulp’s “Common People,” maybe the most concise and vicious statement on class in my lifetime.
Jarvis Cocker, Pulp’s lead singer and spiritual core, insists that it’s a true story that he met an entitled daughter of a Greek millionaire, who told him, “I wanna live like common people, I wanna do whatever common people do.” Cocker says that she had an idea that it would be an adventure to live in one of the grimier areas of London.
Cocker’s rage at this silly person’s dalliance with poverty tourism is unbridled, combining biting humour with ruthless condemnation:
Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school
But still you’ll never get it right
‘Cos when you’re laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your Dad he could stop it all
Her pretending to be poor in order to live “authentically” is only a narcissistic game of dress-up, while real “common” people face the indignity and suffering of actual poverty. They don’t have a daddy to call up when things get a bit uncomfortable. Venomously, Cocker reminds her:
You’ll never fail like common people,
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view,
i.e. Snap out of it, you dimwitted poseur!
Spotify:
YouTube:
This series is for my two 19-year-olds, who moved off to school with the misguided belief they’d escaped their dad’s relentless nostalgia and monopolization of the car stereo. I’m very happy for anyone else to come along for the ride.
The Spotify playlist for Dad’s Song of the Day is located here:
Oh do I have some trivia for you:
In 2015, during the worst of the Greek debt crisis, the finance minister was an economist named Ioannis Georgiou "Yanis" Varoufakis, who was famous for riding around on a motorcycle and generally just being a cooler guy than your average finance minister. He was married to Danae Stratou, an installation artist whose family owned the country's biggest textile company. She was mega rich. Some enterprising journalists noticed that she had attended St. Martin's College, London, the place Jarvis Cocker mentions he met his rich Greek girlfriend and that she went there at the same time as Cocker. Neither of them has commented on whether she was the woman in the song but Cocker has said that while much of the song is true, the part where the heiress wants to sleep with him is made up. Varoufakis, when asked, did say that Cocker and his wife were at the school at the same time and she is a "fascinating" woman.
I too love the song, btw.
One of my all time favourites. Was great to see them on tour this past summer.