Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics (2012)

Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics (2012)

Author: Jarvis Cocker | Page Count: 192

"If nobody's listening you can say whatever you want."

A selection of lyrics (66 in all) penned by Meister Cocker over the span of three decades. They're mostly from his time in Pulp, but his solo work is well-represented, too.

Each one is accompanied by notes that act as illumination and commentary on the themes and allusions made in the songs themselves, which will be helpful to people outside the UK, or for those folks who were born too late.

Before you get to the main event, there's an introduction from Jarvis that's so beautifully constructed and insightful that it's worth the asking price alone.

He speaks of the profound things that occur in everyday life, the things that don't stand out until later, and he does so in common language for (ahem) common people.

It's from a point in time that enables experience to lay tender hands on and memory to whittle away anything superfluous. Without meaning to demean anything that comes after, the introduction is arguably the highlight of the work.

With regards the lyrics, despite Jarvis' insistence to the contrary, they're intrinsically poetic, and therefore I'm labelling the book as poetry. (He's never going to read this, so I think I'm safe.)

They're narrative-based, so work just as well when written on the page as they did when put to music. I could go into depth about why I think that is but I'd need twice the word count I have, and very few people would even care. I will say, though, that the lyrics of songs I've not heard sung were more enjoyable to read than the ones I know well. I found myself breaking up the words of the familiar ones into their existing metre structure, attributing qualitative and quantitative and, because I was hearing the music in my head while reading the text, I was putting pauses in places that a pause would be better left out. It was a very odd experience.

Note: for the record, I'm not appraising with blind bias in play; I'm a Pulp fan, yes, but that fact doesn't influence my final verdict. I own two Pulp albums and one Jarvis solo album, and have not heard the rest. I'm interested in the others but haven't got around to purchasing them yet.