As Townsmen Alexmagic and Oats mentioned yesterday, there’s a song by Pulp that they feel proves that even a Loser Rock artist can make successful Winner Rock. Check out “Mis-Shapes” and let us know if you, too, feel the thrill of victory!
Yet another important lesson about Winning and Losing follows…
Mis-Shapes
Mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits
Raised on a diet of broken biscuits
Oh, we don’t look the same as you
And we don’t do the things you do
But we live around here too, oh really
Mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits
We’d like to go to town but we can’t risk it
Oh, ‘cos they just want to keep us out
You could end up with a smack in the mouth
Just for standing out, now really
Brothers, sisters, can’t you see?
The future’s owned by you and me
There won’t be fighting in the street
They think they’ve got us beat
but revenge is going to be so sweet
We’re making a move
We’re making it now
We’re coming out of the sidelines
Just put your hands up, it’s a raid, yeah
We want your homes
We want your lives
We want the things you won’t allow us
We won’t use guns
We won’t use bombs
We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds
Check your lucky numbers
That much money could drag you under, oh
What’s the point in being rich
if you can’t think what to do with it
‘cos you’re so bleeding* thick?
Oh, we weren’t supposed to be
We learnt too much at school
Now we can’t help but see
that the future that you’ve got mapped out
is nothing much to shout about
We’re making a move
We’re making it now
We’re coming out of the sidelines
Just put your hands up,it’s a raid
We want your homes
We want your lives
We want the things you won’t allow us
We won’t use guns
we won’t use bombs
We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds
And brothers, sisters, can’t you see?
The future’s owned by you and me
There won’t be fighting in the street
They think that they’ve got us beat
but revenge is going to be so sweet
We’re making a move
We’re making it now
We’re coming out of the sidelines
Just put your hands up, it’s a raid, yeah
We want your homes
We want your lives
We want the things you won’t allow us
We won’t use guns
We won’t use bombs
We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds
And that’s our minds, yeah
And that’s our minds, yeah
*On the single “bleeding” is changed to “very.”
My feeling about this track is that it’s the closest rock has come to a 50-50 combo of Winner Rock and Loser Rock. I’m curious if other Townspeople think the song actually tips further in one direction than the other.
You can check the lyrics at http://www.pulpwiki.net/Pulp/MisShapes. Although I should probably pass along the instructions they always included on their albums: “N.B. Please do not read the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings.”
Thanks for posting the link to the lyrics. I’m going to put it on the next page of this post. I meant to do that but got distracted.
Thanks for uploading it. I have Different Class as well as one or two other Pulp discs (I definitely have This is Hardcore), but I’ve never spent a significant amount of time with any of them. Nevertheless, I like this song a lot. It pushes a lot of my musical and lyrical buttons.
The opening bit (and some of the other quieter) reminds me a lot of Franz Ferdinand, so now I get why they always get Pulp comparisons. I can also hear their influence on The Long Blondes. I also really like the soaring chorus (the “we want your homes, we want your lives” part).
If the rest of Different Class is this strong, I wonder why I’ve never warmed up to it. I’ll pull it out the next chance I get.
This is total Winner Rock. It may be Winner Rock for nerds, but it’s Winner Rock all the way. One question, though: Pulp must have been chuckling — or perhaps wincing — when they wrote those ridiculous words, surely? I mean, I’ll take naive sincerity over thermo-nuclear irony any day of the week, but come ON!
I think the song is slightly exaggerated for effect, but it’s mostly sincere. It was written when the band was on the cusp of winning after 12 years of losing. Later on, though, I think Jarvis Cocker was embarrassed by how idealistic it is, so they stopped playing it live and left it off their best-of, even though it was a big UK hit. So you may be on to something there, hrrundi.
I’ve got to say I can’t take “and that’s our minds” seriously, and I find it hard to believe that there’s not some irony intended there.
Seems to me that the distinctions between idealism and cynicism are not that great. One can easily shade into the other as on Jarvis Cocker’s recent song, “Running the World.”
We may be drawing different conclusions, but Oats and I are probably in the same corner on where “Mis-shapes” would fit into the Winner vs. Loser rockscape once fully defined. I specifically brought up this song because I think it not only pulls the rug out from some of the suggested Winner Rock definition points, but also gets back to what I believe Mr. Moderator may have been trying to express whenever he came up with the term.
“Mis-shapes” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Winner Rock built to be sung while sitting at that rain-spattered bay window, twirling that stray curl of hair. In terms of sincerity, there’s a calculated design at work: when heard alone by its intended audience, it can work as a straight-faced call-to-arms. In the context of the album it opens, the battle cry is intentionally skewed by songs that both mock and celebrate the downward spiral of loserdom. In that context, lines like “Just put your hands up, it’s a raid, yeah!” were pretty clearly written with a laugh, the imagination of a loser pretending to be a winner.
I’d asked about where anthems fit in because most of the “winner” songs that immediately came to mind are fist-in-the-air types, which “Mis-shapes” pretends to be. BigSteve has noted that lyrics tend to cloud the issue, and I agree. What I’d been getting from the Moderator’s past use of Winner Rock is that it wasn’t about the content of the songs as much as the intent of the band. And this felt like a good a test case scenario, as Jarvis would certainly be a first-ballot Loser Rock Hall of Famer for me, but “Mis-shapes” and Different Class – which meet the rock necessities of “building a like-minded community” (of misfits) and intra-band “team spirit” – are the work of a Loser Rock band that had decided to play to win.
Just to elaborate on my earlier points and build on what alexmagic said, the “Loser” elements of this song are I think what make it resonant. Lines like “Oh, we weren’t supposed to be” and the descriptions of getting picked on for looking different give the song a sense of melancholy as well as simmering resentments. So the stuff about “we want your homes/we want your lives” is in many ways a comical revenge fantasy. But the song also has a “This is our moment” spirit, like the band can almost taste it, so in some ways it’s not a joke at all. Like Randy Newman, Pulp do the “kidding-but-not-kidding” thing extremely well, which I really value.