Underwear

"Underwear" is Pulp doing what Pulp did better than anyone — finding the grotesque and the erotic and the achingly human all coiled together in a single domestic scene, and then describing it with the precision of a novelist who refuses to look away. The production is deliberately slightly cheap-feeling, keyboards with a faintly synthetic edge, drums that sit back in the mix, everything creating the impression of a room with bad lighting and wallpaper that hasn't been changed since the seventies. Jarvis Cocker's vocal is its own entire instrument — part confession, part accusation, part dry report filed from the scene of an emotional crime — and he modulates between wry distance and something almost unbearably vulnerable in the space of a single line. The song watches a woman undress for someone else and the narrator tries to maintain detachment while failing completely, and Cocker finds the precise emotional geography of that failure: the class resentment, the desire, the self-disgust, the strange pride. This is the kind of song that exists nowhere else in British pop, rooted so specifically in a certain kind of English experience that it functions almost as social history. You would listen to this alone, probably at night, probably thinking about someone you shouldn't be.