Common People (Clueless)

Jarvis Cocker delivers the song's opening lines with the careful, almost academic composure of a man reading a case study, and the effect is devastating. The production is deceptively simple at first — a keyboard figure, sparse percussion — but it builds incrementally, the bass thickening, guitars arriving, until the chorus becomes a full-throated roar that carries everything the measured verse has been holding back. The song tells the story of a wealthy woman who wants to "live like common people," to experience working-class life as a kind of tourism, and Cocker's performance tracks the narrator's complex feelings about it: initial attraction, gradual disgust, ultimate contempt, and underneath all of it a sorrow that the song only partly acknowledges. His vocal delivery is perfectly calibrated — sardonic and precise in the verses, almost involuntarily passionate in the chorus, as if the subject has gotten under his skin despite his better judgment. This is one of the defining texts of British Britpop, a genre that was always partly about class anxiety, and it remains surgically accurate about the specific discomfort of privilege performing poverty. It belongs at high volume, at a party where not everyone is comfortable, right around the moment the evening tilts.