Good Pop, Bad Pop
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Good Pop, Bad Pop
Buy Now for $21.99
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Narrated by:
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Jarvis Cocker
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By:
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Jarvis Cocker
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
What if the things we keep hidden say more about us than those we put on display?
We all have a random collection of the things that made us—photos, tickets, clothes, souvenirs, stuffed in a box, packed in a suitcase, crammed into a drawer. When Jarvis Cocker starts clearing out his loft, he finds a jumble of objects that catalogue his story and ask him some awkward questions:
Who do you think you are?
Are clothes important?
Why are there so many pairs of broken glasses up here?
From a Gold Star polycotton shirt to a pack of Wrigley's Extra, from his teenage attempts to write songs to the Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, this is the hard evidence of Jarvis's unique life, Pulp, 20th-century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he'd rather forget. And this accumulated debris of a lifetime reveals his creative process—writing and musicianship, performance and ambition, style and stagecraft.
This is not a life story. It's a loft story.
Recorded on location with the author and featuring archival material, Good Pop, Bad Pop, is an intimate and immersive listening experience with an icon of British culture.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2022 Jarvis Cocker (P)2022 Penguin AudioI tried to stay objective
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Unexpected gem, he's a wonderful narrator
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It starts in the present, with him wading into the strata of his London storage space. The place is rammed, every box and bag crammed with relics – knackered soap remnants, brittle carrier bags, the odd Velvet Underground LP sleeve. His self-appointed task is to decide what stays and what gets “cobbed” – chucked out, basically – but the real pleasure is in watching him riff on each item until it morphs into a small, perfectly formed essay on life, pop culture or the indignities of growing up.
The beauty here is in the mundane. You get the house run by women, his absolute hatred of change, the years of signing on while writing songs and nursing obsessions over everyday objects. There’s the 1985 pratfall out of a window in a bid to impress a girl, which left him hospitalised for six weeks and, more importantly, convinced him he’d been surrounded by inspiration all along. From that point, the music changed – so did he.
By his early twenties, Pulp’s mission statement was locked in. “Pop was empowerment,” he writes. “Pop was made to satisfy primal desires.” And in his hands, even a hoard of obsolete toiletries can feel like part of that manifesto.
Cocker’s gift with words is exactly what you’d hope from a man who’s smuggled poetry into pop songs for decades – lyrical, metaphorical, often very funny. The book jumps around in time and tone, one minute unpacking a childhood memory, the next musing on the existential significance of a supermarket bag. It’s digressive in the best way, like a long pub conversation with someone whose tangents are never dull.
"Good Pop, Bad Pop" is essentially a British history museum between two covers, filtered through one of the country’s most singular pop voices. It’s warm, witty and self-deprecating, but never lapses into self-mythology. Four stars then – not because it’s flawless, but because it’s exactly what you’d want from Jarvis: clever, odd, a bit scruffy round the edges, and completely his own thing.
Classic Cocker!
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Better than an autobiography
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Excellent
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