Credit: Far Out / Album Cover / Alexander Krivitskiy
‘This is Hardcore’: How porn inspired Pulp’s most divisive album in 1998
Anyone who knows the slightest thing about Pulp beyond the ‘Common People’ dance knows that they were one of the most weirdly horny bands in 1990s rock.
It wasn’t something that came to light by putting two and two together by comparing interview asides with specific lyrics of B-side tracks and looking at their music videos in the right light. Pulp, and frontman Jarvis Cocker in particular, were fascinated by sex. Both in terms of it being a look into the most vulnerable and most private parts of everyone’s personality, and also because, y’know, British people are obsessed with it. Ooh-err matron and all that.
So, perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise when Pulp released an album that was seemingly about porn in 1998 in the form of This is Hardcore, their sixth album.
Now, to those who had followed the band for even half of the two decades they’d spent together by 1998, this was an album completely in their wheelhouse. In fact, the strange thing about it for fans would have been the album’s sound, which saw the group suddenly become a dark, trip-hop enfused lounge band. That wouldn’t have been a problem for fans, though; the new duds suited them well.
As is pretty much always the case, it was the British public that was the problem.
You see, despite being catapulted to astronomical levels of fame with their legendary Glastonbury set, the issue with Pulp was that they were never meant to be famous. Especially in the 1990s, when Cool Britannia and Britpop had sanded down the edges of British culture for mainstream consumption.
While more eyes were on the band than ever, those eyes really did only know the band for the ‘Common People’ dance alone, so when the title track of the album dropped and the first words Cocker muttered as one of the most famous people in the country was “You are hardcore / you make me hard”, people freaked out.
The backlash was strong and swift. Even the album’s cover art was banned from being advertised on the London underground. The album was called weird, exploitative, gross and sold just over half what their previous record Different Class had sold in its first week. Even the critics were a little unsure of what to make of it, but perhaps that was because they could look a little closer at the album and see the real, bleak darkness at its heart.
Because yes, the album was inspired by the mild porn addiction Jarvis Cocker freely admitted to developing while on tour. There was little else to do back at a hotel at the time, apparently. Yet Cocker is nothing if not a very smart man, and he felt a kinship with the people he saw in the content he was watching. In an interview promoting the album, he said, “It’s the way that people get used up in it. You’d see the same people in films, and they’d seem to be quite alive, and then you’d see a film from a year later and there’s something gone in their eyes. You can see it, that they’ve done it all and there’s nowhere else to go.”
He said the entertainment industry does the same thing to people. Pulp had been genuinely famous for three years, riding a wave led by the likes of Blur and Oasis, so Cocker wasn’t just talking about the way he felt treated by the industry. Everywhere he looked, he saw people sucked dry by the demands of play-acting something real and genuine to the cameras, trapped in this cycle that they’re never dreaming of getting out of because of how many people tell them it’s what they’ve always wanted.
It’s interesting to compare This is Hardcore to an album that could have gone down similarly from the following year. Another band at odds with Britpop who followed up their breakthrough masterpiece with a challenging, deeply depressing record that spat venomous bile at not only the very concept of fame, but also the fans who propped them up enough to keep them trapped within it. But Radiohead’s OK Computer was also as sexual as a bowl of cornflakes with no milk, so it was a smash hit hailed as one of the best albums of the decade.
This is Hardcore was hated for all the reasons that it’s a masterpiece. I’m reminded of a sample from another milestone of bleak rock music that was far too much for Britpop from four years before its release. The Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible includes a sample of JG Ballard talking about why he wrote his horrifying masterwork, Crash. In it, I see what Pulp were doing by taking the seedy, grim and dehumanising world of porn and analysing modern fame and modern culture through it.
“I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and then force it to look in the mirror.”
Turns out, people don’t like that much. It’s why albums like This is Hardcore are so necessary nearly 30 years after its release.
THIS IS HARDCORE - PULP
[adult version available at Dangerous Minds]