It was refreshing this morning to get a song that I really, really love. I mean really love. I got handed a pre-release copy of Pulp's Different Class by Jorge Just when I was working as the WCFM whipping boy/internal music director (read "glorified librarian for CDs") and fell in love with it. It was like nothing I had heard before that point - most Britrock I was familiar with was either Manchester-scene dance such as Jesus Jones, Happy Mondays, Ned's Atomic Dustbin or the fruity post-Beatles mimicking of Blur (before they got real good) and Oasis. Here was an album that was dark, sinister, seductive, and fundamentally listenable and it blew me away. Jarvis Cocker's vocals were dripping with a raw magnetism that those other bands just lacked, and his class mentality made Pulp seem like a less nerdy Billy Bragg, the sort of European post-punk that needed to exist. "Disco 2000" is one of the classic pop songs on Different Class where Jarvis laments the fact that his one true love is married and has a kid but he still wants to meet up with her just to see how she's doing (see the 2006 version of this song, "Emily Kane" by Art Brut). There is something both innocent and, well, dirty to the whole song ... it's a brilliant piece of 20-somethings wishing for the simpler time of their youth. (Oh yes, and if you can find it, Nick Cave does a great over of "Disco 2000" as a B-side to Pulp's "Bad Cover Version" single.)
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