Jarvis Cocker
This November, Jarvis Cocker the former front man of Britpop legends Pulp, received an honorary doctorate from his hometown university in Sheffield. Often, the allocation of honorary degrees to those in the entertainment industry causes a level of confusion as one wonders how the celebrity’s work can be appreciated and rewarded on an academic level. As a fan of Pulp and Jarvis, I was prompted by the awarding of his degree and his recent foray into the world of poetry to consider his work as a scholastic endeavour and question whether songwriters can really be considered as poets.
90’s Brit Pop. A collection of effeminate, pale, thin men with shaggy long hair speaking of deep seated feelings of rejection, sexual frustration, envy and the passage of time; shrouded in a veil of cigarette smoke and the influence of drugs and alcohol acting as their fuel and failure. Described in such terms it takes little projection of thought to affiliate such artists, of which Cocker is included, as fitting the same mould of ‘tortured artist’ that many poets fulfil. Indeed, Cocker narrowed the gap between the artistic spheres of music and poetry even more when he undertook a commission to write a poem for the Off the Shelf Poetry Festival which became immortalised in steel on The Forge in Sheffield’s university campus.
Cocker’s lyrics in songs such as Like A Friend and Disco 2000, when read, could easily be mistaken for poetry, with many current young British poets, such as Laura Dockill (http://www.myspace.com/lauradockrill) conversationally discussing similar topics of the banality of everyday life with the use of slang and dark humour. Jarvis’s poem Trashed on Cider bears many similar traits to his lyrics in his use of the vernacular, and his feelings of being an outsider having to justify himself to a voice of authority that asks ‘Don’t they teach you no brains in that school?’, just as he seems to bend to the will of his bullying lover in Like A Friend.
Trashed on Cider perfectly captures the Procrastion-Frustration Generation that definse the youth of the noughties. It begins with lofty notions of university as a seat of learning and ‘future forging’, as the youth of today see a diploma as a necessary means to making a life. But despite the pressures of society to prove ourselves and succeed, the encouragement only seems to stagnate us further and propel our own destruction as we choose instead to get ‘trashed on cider’, rejecting the voice of authority that rings at the end of the poem.
Cocker manages to capture and immortalise the zeitgeist of the current youth, an achievement that arguably places his work on equal standing with poets of any era, and in turn validates his writing as deserving of academic merit.
90’s Brit Pop. A collection of effeminate, pale, thin men with shaggy long hair speaking of deep seated feelings of rejection, sexual frustration, envy and the passage of time; shrouded in a veil of cigarette smoke and the influence of drugs and alcohol acting as their fuel and failure. Described in such terms it takes little projection of thought to affiliate such artists, of which Cocker is included, as fitting the same mould of ‘tortured artist’ that many poets fulfil. Indeed, Cocker narrowed the gap between the artistic spheres of music and poetry even more when he undertook a commission to write a poem for the Off the Shelf Poetry Festival which became immortalised in steel on The Forge in Sheffield’s university campus.
Cocker’s lyrics in songs such as Like A Friend and Disco 2000, when read, could easily be mistaken for poetry, with many current young British poets, such as Laura Dockill (http://www.myspace.com/lauradockrill) conversationally discussing similar topics of the banality of everyday life with the use of slang and dark humour. Jarvis’s poem Trashed on Cider bears many similar traits to his lyrics in his use of the vernacular, and his feelings of being an outsider having to justify himself to a voice of authority that asks ‘Don’t they teach you no brains in that school?’, just as he seems to bend to the will of his bullying lover in Like A Friend.
Trashed on Cider perfectly captures the Procrastion-Frustration Generation that definse the youth of the noughties. It begins with lofty notions of university as a seat of learning and ‘future forging’, as the youth of today see a diploma as a necessary means to making a life. But despite the pressures of society to prove ourselves and succeed, the encouragement only seems to stagnate us further and propel our own destruction as we choose instead to get ‘trashed on cider’, rejecting the voice of authority that rings at the end of the poem.
Cocker manages to capture and immortalise the zeitgeist of the current youth, an achievement that arguably places his work on equal standing with poets of any era, and in turn validates his writing as deserving of academic merit.