An Album You Need to Listen to

by Adam Kotsko

As many of you know, music now sucks. Pop has degenerated (?) into a series of copy-cat vocal groups hastily thrown together by tone-deaf record executives while rock has degenerated into the intolerable, self-absorbed whining of self-righteous, half-educated jackasses (i. e., the lead singer of Creed). Good music, however, is not as "rare nowadays" as one would think, and I have taken it upon myself to enlighten seekers on where to start looking for it:

This Is Hard Core by Pulp

After a day of listening to N'Sync and Staind, anyone who is actually human would stand to gain a great deal from listening to Pulp's This Is Hard Core. Certainly there are self-absorbed moments, but more important is the band's irony and genuine introspection. The opening track, "The Fear," starts to talk in very ominous terms about a life devoid of meaning, but then crosses over into the chorus with the line "And the chorus goes like this." The second track, "Dishes," has the same questioning, but begins and ends with the line "I am not Jesus, though I have the same initials" (the lead singer's name is Jarvis Cocker). The most revelatory moment is "Little Soul," in which Jarvis addresses his son and says, "You look like me, but please don't turn out like me." He says this not because he is depressed or because he's had a bad family life, but because he has done bad things to other people and has failed to do good things. Failure for Jarvis is something other than a failure to love himself properly, and after listening to countless "ultra-hard rock" bands whine about their "insecurity" and "depression," I appreciate the fact that a rock star can admit that people other than himself actually exist.

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