‘Common People’, or, the chivalric romance of (mostly) the 1980s – Part 2

Master of the Codex Manesse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s in this more doomed condition of ‘ethical seriousness’, to borrow a phrase from critics of medieval literature, that it seems appropriate to enter the 1980s in earnest. So many hits from early in this decade seem to say, in different ways, ‘you hurt so good, and I’m addicted’ – as one fourteenth-century Earl of Lancaster put it, I ‘suffer willingly’. The woman of Daryl Hall & John Oates’ ‘Maneater’ (1982) is animalistic, predatory, going beyond the usually impassive lady at the top of the medieval chivalric hierarchy. The lean and hungry type’, ‘watching and waiting’ – it’s a monstrously seductive, calculated attack. She’s ‘tamed by the purr of a Jaguar’ – not necessarily richer than the male singer, but ravenous for money and power (in classic ‘80s girlboss fashion?) she runs circles around him through her ‘wild’ power. She resembles the chivalric ideal in one respect: she’s not quite there. She’s in a different physical world – ‘mind over matter’, ‘she’s sitting with you, but her eyes are on the door’. And she consumes him, literally and figuratively.

Although this ‘femme fatale’ is aggressive and dangerous, in other incarnations the female love interest is intimidating just by being herself. This is best captured in the title of Thomas Dolby’s gloriously camp, gimmicky and underappreciated ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ (1982). He’s overwhelmed simply by this woman’s boffin-like intelligence, his stupefaction spilling over so that every spoken repetition of the refrain feels like it must have an exclamation mark. If you’re trying to serenade a woman in STEM, look no further. When he's ‘dancing close to her’, he can’t compare, intoxicated by the smell of the chemicals. She ‘hit me with technology’ and ‘failed me in geometry’, and, suggestively, ‘biology’. The deep male voice in the background booming ‘Science!’ every now and then adds a faint satirical note, as if to query the strange veneration and sometimes unquestioning submission that science often provokes. This is never prodded further but left to speak for itself within the character that Dolby inhabits for the song, letting boyish infatuation coexist playfully with irony.

An almost absurdly earnest rendition that begs to be mentioned is the unwaveringly poppy hit, ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ (The Police, performed already in 1975 but released in 1981). The shy boy reappears, but he loves being shy – the line ‘every time that I come near her, I just lose my nerve as I’ve done, from the start’ comes against a constantly building keyboard melody, about to burst with excitement. The song is so restless and energetic that there’s no time to even contemplate thinking critically about romance. Sting’s character is spellbound. Love objects return with access to knowledge that men can’t for the life of them understand, coded as ‘science’ or ‘magic’ (The Police’s album title, ‘The Ghost in the Machine’, alludes seductively to hidden, possibly divine workings). The feminine unknown is eroticised and exoticised, recalling the chivalric tendency to conflate two or more goals: a love object, God, the Holy Grail (the key to a mystical prophecy), or the mythologised ‘land of milk and honey’. The ‘80s renditions lend their female figures a little more agency, but vaguely – what does she do that is apparently so magic anyway? We never find out.

Even the Talking Heads, with their funkier American flavour, give us the trope of a kind of male-gaze impostor syndrome in much more joyful form: ‘And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife / And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”’ (‘Once in a Lifetime’, 1980) David Byrne’s pinching himself. He has finally won the ‘paradise and honour and the love and praise of his beloved’ that medieval knights supposedly so ardently strove for. A lot of these songs play with space and time, and ultimately the counterfactual – the possibility that things could have ended differently – as if they are in some sort of otherworldly paradise: ‘How did I get here?’, ‘Could it really happen to me?’

Morrissey gets to the heart of this disbelief, reducing himself to ‘a jumped-up pantry boy / who never knew his place’ (‘This Charming Man’). I spent a long time mishearing this as ‘a jumped-up country boy’ (please say I’m not the only one!). While ‘country boy’ smacks of innocence, ‘pantry boy’ is subservient, making the ‘jumping up’ in terms of social mobility – and possibly in another, cheekier sense – potentially more fraught; if he ‘never knew his place’, he’s at risk of being put back in it. The queer resonances of his wonder ‘that someone so handsome should care’ might also be paralleled with medieval knights’ homosocial admiration, most of all for the beauty of Christ himself. Throughout the song, the singer reminds himself sternly of his humble origins, self-chastising in anticipation – like the ‘social self-monitoring’ one historian has found in chivalric masculinity – to avoid hearing it from his love object’s mouth instead. This is perhaps especially because of the risks of seeking out queer relationships, if we interpret the song this way, coupled with a hostile class environment. Compared to the Talking Heads, the British examples are much more pessimistic and masochistic, focusing on the struggle rather than the achievement of the end goal of ‘a beautiful house, and a beautiful wife’. I’ll leave you to decide why, but I think it’s no coincidence that most of these songs come from the Thatcher years.

Now, there is one song from the ‘90s that offers the exception to prove the rule. At first, it epitomises the chivalric dynamic I’ve been pointing out: the kind of vertical asymmetry between a self-abasing, self-flagellating male admirer and his gorgeously unattainable object. But it then moves beyond the lavishly self-indulgent wallowing in misery that The Smiths, for example, represent (see ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’). I’m talking about Pulp’s inimitable six-minute wonder ‘Common People’ (1995). It’s a real storytelling song, with jittery background synth and drums that I’ve heard described by less enthusiastic fans as ‘wannabe Bowie’. The singer fancies a girl who ‘came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge / she studied sculpture at St Martin’s College’. Of course, ‘her dad was loaded’, and, more than this, she simply has no idea about any class experiences other than her own. Out of the blue, she declares ‘I wanna live like common people’, which, with an air of inevitability about it, turns into ‘I wanna sleep with common people / like you’. There’s a sly half-beat rest in this last sentence that just barely stays clear of an outright proposition. And she has no idea what she’s said, seemingly unable to register the working-class man she’s met as a potential sexual interest. He responds, in a flirtatiously deep voice that builds with equal desire and frustration, ‘I’ll see what I can do / but she didn’t understand / she just smiled and held my hand’. Delayed gratification finds a new manifestation: he’s waiting for the ingenue to have her awakening. Although we never quite know if she’s guileless or intentionally manipulative, for now, he’s beauty-struck, entirely at her mercy – ‘what else could I do?’

The rest of the song, however, turns into a biting critique of class tourism. He asks her to ‘pretend you’ve got no money’; she laughs and tells him, ‘you’re so funny’; later, he mutters ‘everybody hates a [class] tourist, especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh’ – the lack of rhyme, and Jarvis Cocker’s Northern ‘laugh’, letting his point linger harshly. There’s not only anger here, though; that would be too easy. The rock ‘n’ roll, lip-biting guitar solos are furious and resentful but also desperate: in a life without ‘meaning or control’, ‘we dance, and drink, and screw, cos there’s nothing else to do’, the ‘do’ drawn out into almost a sob. ‘Common People’ takes the chivalry trope and flips it, asking why a woman pursues such an asymmetrical dynamic, one in which she coyly enjoys being desired for her class status and then judges her male worshipper’s performance. After interrogating this question, the male character rejects her, and the unattainable courtly lady is dethroned from her pedestal. He abandons his quest, realising the ‘prize’ isn’t worth fighting for. He might, one would hope, go on to choose a more humanised love interest.