On "Common People"

Pulp is a great band with intelligent, introspective lyrics; I would recommend their albums to just about anyone, and there is one song of theirs which I really like called “Common People” in which the singer talks about a little rich girl who decides she wants to be trendy by hanging out with the lower class crowd and do all the things that common people do, which by his accounts is dance and drink and screw because there is nothing else to do. And while I don’t share quite the cynicism he projects throughout the song, I have to admit that he does have a point. For most folks it’s pretty easy to get stuck in a rut of going off to college with high hopes of becoming something or somebody and then getting a girl knocked up and the next thing you know you’re getting married and then all of a sudden you have a mortgage and a couple of young’uns and all the hopes you had at sixteen are out of reach and the best you can do is eke out a living 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, coming home to eat processed meals and watch t.v. with canned laugh tracks looking forward only to weekends filled with tits and whiskey and maybe some dancing thrown in to make you feel like you’re a superstar on those rare moments when you’re really in the groove.
Okay, I guess that did turn into an icky, almost cynical rant, but truly, speaking from an objective standpoint, isn’t that pretty much what life is about? Dancing and drinking and screwing? I mean, c’mon, who are we kidding? We are creatures of instinct, and we do what feels s good, or rather, that’s how I think people should live. Nay, scratch that, that’s how I think I should live. And so I do. Pretty much. Most of the time at least, except on those rare occasion when I am feeling especially cosmic and I start wondering if there really is a higher meaning to all this stuff floating around beyond that whole joke thing that I seem to have a handle on already. But more and more frequently I am still coming back to the same conclusion that life is here to be enjoyed, and as long as you t’aint hurtin’ nobody, then I say go for it. Live life. Have a second piece of cake. Eat tubs of ice cream with your dog on the kitchen floor at 8:00 am on a Saturday morning and wash yourself clean in a coconut-scented bubble bath later.
Yeah, I may be bored every now and again, but pretty much most of the time these days I find myself smiling and getting a kick out of the silly little absurdities which I encounter as I skip, no, dance merrily along this interesting road I have chosen.