Pulp – ‘Do You Remember The First Time’
This is my single favourite Pulp song which isn’t directly about class. There is a level of ambiguity to this song which fascinates me, hinging on the line oh god // it must be great // to be straight. Yeah yeah yeah, it’s probably not meant to be taken like that. Maybe. But the funny thing about Pulp and Britpop is that Pulp was so antithetical to so much of what made Britpop, well, Britpop. There’s nothing laddish about Jarvis Cocker. He is androgynous and something about him is constantly shifting, making him impossible to get a fix on. What if the point of the song is ambiguity? What if the pronouns are ambiguous on purpose?
There was an intense laddishness about Britpop, all about leering at a bird’s tits and then having a fight outside a pub. Blur would be somewhere more upmarket, some sort of fucking yuppie wine bar, obviously, but it was still doggedly, suffocatingly heterosexual. Of course the simplistic explanation is that the lyric refers to someone 'straight-laced’, but. The trick to many Pulp songs is that the narrator isn’t Jarvis. But I’ve always wondered if the trick to this song is that it is. Or, to take it slightly differently, that you’re to treat the voice singing the song, a male voice, as possibly not-straight. When he wants a piece left for him, is it from the girl or the boy? Why does the narrator seem to think that his loneliness is caused by some sort of external pressure?
THIS IS ALL CONJECTURE OBVIOUSLY DON’T SEND ME WEIRD HATEMAIL. But there’s something about the way Jarvis spits out the word straight live, that has always made me wonder. Jarvis who’s kissed his mates, had bisexual thoughts. I struggle to believe that someone as careful with words as Jarvis Cocker wouldn’t have realised the ambiguity to the word 'straight’. Wouldn’t have noticed how ambiguous the song is overall. But who knows? That’s what’s fun about music in general, about Pulp more specifically: sometimes their stuff is shockingly direct, sometimes you never quite know at all. It’s nice not to know. It’s nice to have this song mean something to me that it might never have meant to the man who sings it. MUSIC’S GREAT, INNIT.
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