Everybody Hates a Tourist

I saw the British band Pulp on Saturday night, a second of two sold-out reunion shows. I wrestled with the decision, because of money, and honestly, do I like Pulp that much? I’ve seen a lot of shows and a lot of bands, this one was an expensive ticket. I continued to feel compelled so I bought a ticket and went by myself.

Jarvis Cocker founded Pulp in 1978 when he was fifteen years old in Sheffield. He is the mainstay of the band, a 60 year-old pale British man, a tall, gracefully gawky figure that understand how to use his silhouette on a large stage, how to wear a suit and large glasses, how to enmesh the broken doll notion of haute couture modeling with a very aspirational notion of voguing. It generally works.

Turns out I do like Pulp. I don’t know all the songs, but the ones I do, I really like. Not as much as the inebriated and maybe high, or high and maybe inebriated, woman next to me in the general admission pit who wandered around saying “Jarvis Cocker is my god.” She was hugged by a group of other altered souls I could only guess knew the band because of Spotify, which I know dates me more than it disparages other, except in my little book of bitterness. The algorithm introduced these stumbling, singing/yelling, Bud Light-chugging fans to the band. They loved it all, embracing each other to stay upright. I’m not going to pretend I’ve never been fucked up at a show. What I do know is I’ve never been to a rave, and last night maybe was the closest to it at moments, and the band was good enough I considered that I should go to the morning rooftop raves at the club close to my apartment in an attempt to change myself. Luckily I came back to myself, and photobombed more than one group selfies with a cold hard stare and raised eyebrow.

In 1995 I got a job at Cargo Records in Chicago after moving to town and being beat down repeatedly by my post-college job search. I didn’t want to work in a kitchen, I had student loans, I was starting my new life! I didn’t want to work at a coffee shop, I had student loans, I was starting my new life! I got passed over for the position working third shift selling tickets at a porn theater on Clark Street and I was disappointed. Or depressed. I didn’t work at the record store because I had to pay my loans (before I understood to default for twenty years). I took the closing shift at the Starbucks counter in the Barnes & Noble in Evanston out of utter desperation, with terrible tips and entitled Northwestern students. There weren’t enough hours to be full-time but it certainly felt that way.¹

I finally got a job in music, at Cargo, located in an old garage on the north side. I worked in the office doing payables, receivables and invoicing, so it was an office job, but with cool co-workers and music proximity. Cargo was a distributor for independent music, a middleman for a ton of record labels, both domestic and international. It’s the last time I was in charge of an Excel sheet and did it well, keeping track of every record store’s standing orders for Wire magazine, a task whose severity I well understood, and still do to this day. We sold to independent records stores, like, hmmmmm, all the ones that have gone out of business since the internet came about.

There was a daily crunch to pull, box up and invoice orders after lunch and before the UPS evening pick-up. Every store in the country needed their order by Friday, and they needed it the cheapest way possible with the order as complete as possible. West coast stores shipped UPS ground Monday or air on Tuesdays, and all the East coast stores needed to ship by Tuesday. UPS ground was important because it was the most affordable, fastest, guaranteed way to ship a package. It had to be cheap so the store could keep prices low. Everybody needed their shipment by Friday for new releases and restocks because we used to go to record stores and buy new releases, it was a thing.²

The person who introduced me to Pulp, specifically their 1995 album Different Class, was my colleague Sarah, a blonde goth accountant who was smart and funny as hell. We’d lose our minds every week, especially Mondays and Tuesdays, in a tiny galley office with tall particle board desks flanked by metal filing cabinets. It wasn’t easy, thousands of bands entered into the computer by people with different ideas of how to file records. So many formats—LP, tape, CD, CDS (the dreaded CDS single, often an import, often multiples of remixes with the same title and cover art…Björk, I’m looking at you). Was it a dance order? Because that was hand-written and never in the computer since so much of it would go out of print immediately. I still know the wholesale price of Dr. Octagon/Self-Titled/Double LP import/Mo’ Wax in 1996. $14.99. So when it got bad, as it often did, Sarah and I, the lowly office people in the hierarchy of music, would listen to our own, and that is how I learned to love Pulp. Sarah did it to me.

At that time I liked a lot of music on Chicago labels—kranky, Thrill Jockey, Drag City, Touch & Go and just a bunch of noise and metal and esoteric shit. The music was part and parcel to our identities at that time, bound to a subculture where our signs and signifiers were important. In middle school and high school in Baltimore County and City, there were rules about bomber jackets and wearing all black and you better not wear the wrong laces in your Docs because fuck those racist skins. I wasn’t goth, more a progressive, crimped hair and black eyeliner, but I wasn’t like my friend Alice who dressed like Siouxsie Sioux everyday and inspired an endless amount of art class photos taken of her in cemeteries. Chicago was utter utilitarianism, so many thrift stores work pants and shirts, a few band tees but nothing garish, and hoodies, lots of hoodies. It wasn’t that different from dressing to go to the barn to milk and feed the cows. So I came to like Pulp, one of the big Britpop bands of the 1990s, a bit begrudgingly. I still do. Consider this a confession. 

I like Pulp. Different Class is a great album. 

The third track on it is “Common People,” a song, like many on the album, that is perfect to sing along with. The narrator, ostensibly Cocker, is pegged by a rich, Greek, art school student to be her tour guide for slumming it in London. She buys him a rum and coke, she marvels at the people at the supermarket he takes her to, and as the song progresses, he realizes how egregious the situation is, that it’s all just a game for her while it is his life. Her status in life inoculates her from his every day reality, he is one of the people included in her rank voyeurism. It’s an incredible dissection of class, the most searing one of all the songs on the album.

Something happened after leaving the liberal arts school that I attended. I realized some of my friends came from money. It sure didn’t seem that way when we were students. They didn’t have the fear I had, that the choices they made would ultimately be their own ruin. Their student loans didn’t consume the pathetic income that remained after rent and bills. Do you know the fear? Do you have it? It’s that the bad stuff, what you see on local news, which is what we had then, could happen to you. That you are one mis-step away from failure.

I didn’t have language like generational wealth or privilege at the time, I just knew it was fucked up that one of the richest person I knew lived in shitty apartment for a few months and bragged about how roach-infested it was. She refused a brand new car her grandmother bought her because it was too nice.³ She told me how she freaked out when her bank account dipped to just $600, while mine couldn’t even muster such fantasy. Yet she was a terrible person to go out to dinner with, a person who just paid the menu price, without tax and tip, for whatever she ordered. She could afford to be a full-time intern for a brand new public radio show, stories about people’s lives. She was able to intern full-time, then became the first paid staff member, even though she had no experience in radio. She also didn’t need to have a job to pay the bills.

Me? I had a radio show during college and volunteered doing fundraising for the station.

So yeah, I like the song “Common People.” I understand the lyrics. It’s offered great catharsis on days when I’ve just had enough with the rich people around me. I’ve learned that the rich people who don’t pretend to be working class are generally more trustworthy than the ones who pretend they are working class. They’re more honest, I prefer to know upfront that we don’t have that in common. I loathe an undercover rich person.

When someone pretends to not be rich, there is often a tell that makes it all make sense, especially the masterful gaslighting and condescension effortlessly utilized, nurtured from childhood, a result of an upper-crust upbringing. That shit works for a while, at least it did on me, a younger, more insecure version of me who felt the fear and always found myself in situations where I had to prove myself. My instinct was to please them, to make myself notable. I think when my mom taught me and my sisters to always work harder than expected and be generous and thoughtful, she didn’t anticipated these situations. These lords of class cosplay are also the people who tell me that I come by something, mainly just being myself, “honestly.” It’s a dead giveaway.

Those folks tend to believe their own narrative, that they earned it all, they worked harder than anyone else. The rest of us, well, we didn’t want it enough. That’s why we didn’t get our dream jobs, or have dreams to begin with. It’s taken me decades to express myself in regards to this. I always felt like I was revealing my own shortcomings, and sometimes I am, but it takes two to tango. Part of that is how we have normalized calling behavior like this out, instead of just keeping it to our simpatico sidebars. We’ve elevated our analysis and with it our strong critical eye. But in the beginning, one of my first steps towards this analysis, was singing along to “Common People” at the top of my lungs.

1. Every now and again I remember how hard a job search is, and I don’t think we give us enough credit for doing them. They can be cruel. We all deserve more credit than we give ourselves for having to endure them.

2. I feel like a fucking archeologist right now, and if you find any of this interesting you should read “I’m with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music” by Bruce Adams. He so eloquently and fully describes whatever stage of capitalism this was and how distribution functioned and why Chicago was so important—location location location. He also writes about the labels and musicians and the incredible indie music scene. Chicago has a lot of music scenes, this is just about one of them.

3. It was a sedan.