From Wales, we now travel northeast to the steel city of Sheffield, where we find Jarvis Cocker performing his own take of a song he wrote for Nancy Sinatra (who recorded it in 2004). Perhaps the distance created when writing a song for another performer is what makes this record atypical for Cocker.
The lead singer of the Britpop band Pulp, Cocker typically writes mordant songs of political, personal, sexual, and class conciousness, and in his pen runs ink of hues mixed equally from three noteworthy Johns: Swift, Steinbeck, and Fogerty. Cocker's voice--earnest yet lackadaisical, always just this side of being in tune, never shying away from its Yorkshire accent--reflects his protagonists' typical working-class/loser/slacker roots, and it gives the Pulp records some of their charm.
In this record, Cocker's voice and typical topics take a backseat to the song itself. The song is soul song for the brokenhearted, classic Motown stuff, so good, so perfect a fit for that mileau, that it sounds as if it's a long-lost Smokey Robinson or Holland-Dozier-Holland tune that the Temptations or a young Marvin Gaye might have once recorded. The lyric's of a guy who pines for a girl who's being strung along by a chap who doesn't want to commit to her, a lothario, and the narrator sees right through it. We see right through him, to...thanks to Cocker's vocals.
As noted before, Cocker doesn't possess a traditionally strong voice, but within his limited range, he's very effective. He sings the song at a bit of a distance, as if he's just a friend giving advice, but every so often, at just the right juncture, his voice tightens, his volume raises, and his voice slightly seethes, and we can deduce that his narrator abhors his friend's suitor. Cocker backs off his anger as quickly as he rises to it, as if he--the narrator (and Cocker, too)--has deduced that the woman has already made her decision to stick with the guy, and that he--as her friend, and as the man who secretly loves her, who's truly dedicated to her--is giving his last warning before the girl leaves with her suitor for good, leaving him behind.
There's a strong sense of defeatism here--as is the case with many of Cocker's songs, and it's this sense of defeatism that moves this from a formulaic* soul song of the personal into the realm of universal class consciousness. The narrator knows that he won't be able to move beyond his lot, and that knowledge comes across in Cocker's vocal style: his vocals are distanced because the song's narrator has distanced himself from the situation, afraid from showing his feelings outright because he knows it will do no good. There's only the slightest glimmer of hope, here, and in that glimmer of hope lies the inherent tragedy. The song's both an affirmation of true love and a rejection of the concept all at once. Yeah, Marvin Gaye could have sung it better, but he wouldn't have sung it any truer. Maybe Temptation Jimmy Ruffin could have, though. He knew what became of the brokenhearted. Jarvis Cocker does, too.
NOTES
*Yeah, after listening to hundreds of Motown songs, one starts to see the formula, but hey....what a formula!
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