We weren't supposed to be - twenty years of Different Class

"In the dark times 

Will there also be singing? 

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.” 

Brecht 

"We weren't supposed to be/ we learned too much at school/ now we can't help but see/ that the future that you've got mapped out is nothing much to shout about". Those words spoke to me, and continue to speak to me. I first heard them as one of the last students in England to get a full maintenance grant and go to university, the first in my family to do so. The others who bought Different Class were, in the main, from that same generation, one which even at the time had the tangible feel of existing at the end of something. The welfare state continued to be dismantled around us. For those on the political left there was precious little hope around; defeat continued to be multiplied upon defeat, a minor variation in theme being provided by the fact that, under the leadership of Tony Blair, some of those defeats were now internal to the Labour Party. Meanwhile, for those who hoped for from music both a relief from and a critique of reality the creeping success of Britpop already threatened to be its undoing. What had once told us about ourselves, consoling us for our failures, steeling us for our fights - rock music at its best, has the double-edged character Marx attributes to religion, both analegesic and expression of rage - was already fading into mood music for an age without hope, an age which didn't need consolation since its inhabitants were increasingly unlikely to do anything interesting enough to regret.

Different Class, which was released twenty years ago yesterday, captured this moment with a poignant beauty. Still to come were the betrayals of New Labour, the descent of popular culture into the blandishments of Coldplay and Jamie Oliver, the new puritanism, and the sheer accelerating bloody cruelty of a world unable to see virtues beyond the entrepreneurial. Ahead lay the institutionalised inability of rock music, with occasional honourable exception, to say anything remotely useful about anything whatsoever. It's kind of fitting that This Is Hardcore felt like the musical equivalent of waking up with a sore head.

Different Class observed this conjuncture sardonically, sometimes acerbic in its criticism ('you'll never understand/ how it feels to live your life/ with no meaning or control'), sometimes affectionate in its telling of ordinary lives and loves (Disco 2000). This latter aspect already set it apart for its humanity in a period when the done thing was to sing of being a rock and roll star, or at least to document the ordinary with a tone not innocent of mocking appropriation (thus, Blur's Parklife). And here's where the most striking thing about the album: at precisely a time when working class identity was being passed off as a fashion statement, whether worn authentically by Noel Gallagher or with the conviction of a hastily manfactured fake in Justine Frischmann's mockney drawl, Jarvis Cocker wrote about class. Mis-shapes told it like it was, with a gentle anger. Common People, a song which now reads like a prophecy of the hipster phenomenon, documented the frantic condescension of 90s Britain towards a fetished working class, and did so at a very personal level. So, for that matter, did I Spy, a song which is sick, in an older sense of the word than that now current amongst writers about music. Part of Jarvis' greatness as a songsmith is that he writes truthfully about the sordid. This is not a virtue that is obvious in the output of Travis. F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E combines this taste for the depraved with a real romance, a feat only Shane MacGowan amongst contemporary lyricists can carry off with equal profundity.

Romance, it should be said, is pervasive. Something Changed is a wonderful, touching, bucket of slush. Underwear charts the delicate, frightening, thrilling negotiations of romance. This is important, and not just because our capacity for love marks our humanity, for which reason every songwriter worth attending to has written about it. It also stops the, socially aware and, at least in a broad sense of the word, political Different Class from descending into preachiness. The world presented to us in the album is one in which politics is everywhere, but not everything is political. There is no succour to be had here for the kind of emotionally stunted leftist who wants to hear songs with titles such as 'fuck the Tories'. If Jarvis Cocker were to write a song about fucking Tories it would be in a rather different sense. This even-headedness is a necessary corrective to the idiotic idea that music can change the world, an error whose Blairite incarnation Pulp were later to pastiche with Cocaine Socialism. Leaving aside the politically paralysing nature of this delusion, it leads directly to the aesthetic horrors of Chumbawamba. Still worse, it leads to Bono.

Bono is a good topic on which to conclude a post on Halloween. We live, alas, in a world that is not safe from Bono. It is to just such a world that Different Class is the soundtrack.