Paris = Jarvis

you don't say!

i'd forgotten about the charlotte gainsbourg record, i'd like to hear it.

The Jarvis record proves - as does the Scritti album - the old edict that some acts need to be in the charts to make sense. Though really the Jarvis album should be listened to in tandem with the Gainsbourg record since lyrically the tracks run in near-complete parallel.

yeh but WHO is Jarvis' intended audience? the people who bought common people in '95? i mean his apperance on the front of the nme seemed odd to me as they wouldn't have touched him in 2001. i guess the nearest comparision is morrissey's "comeback" but that was centered around two big singles Jarvis just seemed to be centered around the fact we should be interested in him cos y know he's Jarvis...

and yeah, paris got loads of column inches, but she'd have got those for merely existing (and QUITE RIGHT TOO). did she even bother to promote her album? make any appearances on pop tv? even any live gigs? haha paris is THE ANNIE OF 06.

(or at least 'the boom boom bap' is; i haven't listened properly to the rest because i keep pressing repeat)

Also, I thought the Scritti album was rubbish.

Jarvis' album basically picks up where "We Love Life" left off. Albums about stalking, killing and death don't have a lot of commercial potential no matter how much advance hype they get. This covers every Pulp album except for two, so the fact that the post-"Different Class" albums didn't sell is more of a case of the hype being far out of proportion with those records' realistic sales potential. Maybe the press will eventually figure out that Pulp never really made jolly music.

I don't see where Paris Hilton fits in there.

xpost OK, I'm gonna cop-out a bit and say that Morrissey is an exception

morrissey had definitely faded into obscurity when he made his comeback! i'd thought he was dead until 2002 or so!

all hip hop albums ever to thread

xxp

please talk about the momentous new ciara album instead.

My point was more about the disconnect between the hype and the music ... if you've made your mark by selling death-obsessed records, then fine. But if everyone remembers you as the geeky dude who was riding in a shopping cart in that kooky mid-90's video, death is a hard sell.

xp

Perhaps I'll go on the Ciara thread and make snarky posts about current trends in improvised music and see how you like it.

how does it work in any conceivably rational manner?

the reason i said that is that within about two posts the paris angle had been killed and everyone was talking about morrissey again FFS, the reason for this being that nobody could add anything to the paris=jarvis comparison. there's absolutely nothing to add!

oh, and 'we love life' was ace. paris hilton has never done nor could ever do anything that could bring me such joy as that album.

(ahem)

yes.

perhaps Hilton has missed a trick by not covering 'Common People' ala Shatner.

for the first time in 5 years i should add

listen to it enough and it suddenly becomes their best album. it helps if the half you heard had 'sunrise' in it.

omg i hate shatner but i can imagine paris doing a 'stars are blind'-esque cheapo reggae cover of 'common people' which would be amazing and let's face it she is the ideal person to sing that song. well, ANY song, but especially that song.

how is this different to madonna/beyoncé/50 cent/babyshambles/xtina though?

also the ways in which paris & jarvis are celebrities is so different - jarvis is taken seriously in ways which paris will never be, even if she pwns him as an artist.

I note that Jarvis still charted four places higher than Ys though!

haha i would never have guessed that joanna newsom was half that popular!!!

I quite enjoy it when the record-buyers and the pop media (or broadsheet media trying to cover pop) are so fundamentally out of joint with one another? like how often Rachel Stevens would appear on totp/saturday morning kids' tv when those were dwindling: it was the only place she could really do promo, but her record sales didn't quite justify the presence she had. I think it's a manifestation of the same thing - this is how broadsheet media can connect to popular music, by dealing with people as Intellectual Survivor of Pop Life (jarvis) or Walking Symptom of Modern Culture (paris) -- but then it just isn't reflected by the pop markets, which don't follow those rules.

also, srsly, Just cos mans want to otm each other about how pulp are not the smiths (well done! no-one disagrees with you! have a cookie!) doesn't mean the original point doesn't stand.

xposts, obv

i also haven't noticed nearly as much press for jarvis' album as for paris'. neither in the context of this year have been that prominent anyway; joanna newsom and even My Chemical Romance have outstripped both in terms of publicity.

kind of why i listed them (as paul was talking about underperforming albums) - though cf american life for madge. also throw eminem in there too. i didn't think back to basics had underperformed though.

of course jarvis is a caricature. as much as he fights against it he'll always be to 95% of britain that funny bloke with glasses who wiggled his bum at michael jackson!

Jarvis on his own merits as a fantastic songwriter, Paris as a sort of reflexive 'Why do people pay any attention to this talentless waste of space? WHY??? Oh, whoops, we're paying her attention. Why are we paying attention to this...' vicious circle of doom. I can't make the leap!

oh, maybe he is a caricature to some (really, not as much as you say though!), but to us lot, who (hopefully) know our music, he'd be regarded as something rather more than that.

Back To Basics hasn't sold that well in the UK; there were already £4 copies going in MVE the week it went in at number one.

Thing about Rachel S is that her TV promos/interviews actually worked against the album because she came across as so blase and uninterested that the public shrugged their shoulders and wondered why they should bother. Which is a shame because Come And Get It >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> any other album mentioned here thus far.

but doesn't this happen all the time? and is actually quite natural when you consider that a great deal of press coverage is pre-release; i don't think it was implausibly silly to think that paris and jarvis might sell quite a bit (same with rachel), and it wouldn't invalidate the coverage if it turned out that they didn't. it's like when people say "omg critics must feel so silly after jizzing over rachel's album which tanked" - well no, it's still a good album!

isn't this true of virtually all famous people or artists though? from the reference point of the wider population, most artists/celebrities/whatever will only known for one or two key moments in their career.

i can only assume this is because you are not familiar with his excellent side work as an actor - the pinnacle of which being the recent adverts for Kellogg's All Bran Bran Flakes Yoghurty.

when it comes to column inches/publicity, it doesn't matter if someone's a Personality because they're widely respected by kids shackled to old indie or a Personality because they were on a tv show that was popular in recent memory or a Personality because they're a paraplegic or a Personality because they are unquestionably a genius. All that matters is that they have a hook, any hook, to get people to read papers/maybe even buy records. Take up Lex's list of names: what sets Paris aside from them is that her previous fame contained no music career. But none of those are famous just for music: they're also famous for all this external stuff, for drugs and divaisms and who knows what else.

What sort of bugged me to sadness was the "Jarvis, yeah nice bloke but hey he's no Morrissey,is he?"

Louis, I don't think it is plainly unhelpful! There's a set of critera we haven't worked out yet which determine what kind of coverage a celebrity gets - Katie Melua and Keira Knightly get, I think, a much more run-of-the-mill treatment than either Paris or Jarvis did.

yes but the way the jarvis album was treated it seemed to be being billed as a "you are the quarry", "aerial" type first week unit shifter but the fraction of the population who consider a worthwhile artist to shell out a tenner on is far far smaller than though. lex is probably right that jarvis is not a "national figure of fun" but he isn't primarily known for his music to a lot of people thou!

cis and nick s are repectively both really onto something upthread

no artist on this thread has written as great a song a motivation by sum 41

so you have to be a caricature to qualify.

okay, paris=jarvis=chris evans=gary neville :P

keira knightley = bambi-eyed skeletal pirate moll

everyone's a caricature.

it's not so far-fetched to think it might be one of these though, i mean i have no interest in it but i would have thought that if those shifted what they did then jarvis could too. i don't really know why it didn't but that's a different question surely?

both of those albums were preceded by singles that annocued "i'm back" maybe.

Rachel Stevens is an interesting case because there's a disconnect between the media that care about her (lads mag press essentially), the people who actually buy her records (handful of people off the internet who like 80s-influenced pop) and the people its aimed at (the Kylie market). It's a combination of poor marketing and a complete lack of interest in the personality.

Katie Melhua neither says nor does anything interesting, looks quite pretty, but lacks the persona to get any editor particularly excited and sells more records than all of them put together. Because it's this very LACK of personality that appeals to the All About The Music crew (see also Dido, Snow Patrol).

(Marcello that's all well and good but I very much doubt you tallied with 'the public' even in your day)

"Jarvis" had a d/l, a year previous (or so it seemed) and no single on the radio.

that's why it wasn't a big hit.

The "PulpHits" was a flop as 1) Everyone had the tracks they liked best already 2) No extra anything (a live disc and/or rarities/bsides or DVD would have been mandatory thesedays)

3) Pulp were never quite crossover enough for whatever reason for these things not to matter (there must be countless big-selling no frills best ofs out there).

I don't think this was much of a factor. How well do you think 'Stop The Clocks' will sell despite everyone already owning everything on it?

xposts

i would've liked the song better had she done it i think (probably just something to do with expecting better of the Scissor Sisters and not expecting something of that nature from Paris)

this surely sold a lot more than Different Class overall.

funny, this is exactly what i realised the other day about...chris fucking martin. 'see it in a boy's eyes', 'should i go', 'all good things (come to an end)'...

Agreed, "I Don't Feel Like Dancing" sounded completely like the SS (see what I did there?) had just given up with the first single (the new one isn't any better)

But his lyrics work perfectly with Air's music and Gainsbourg's voice on 5:55 so maybe that's the way he needs to go in the future.

All Seeing I comeback thirded

Done. Sorta.

They weren't event singles because they didn't engage the whole spectrum of consumers; only a certain section. Of course any act's new single will be an "event" to their fans, but that's not quite the same thing.

Examples of "event singles" would include Do They Know It's Christmas, Roll With It/Country House, Free As A Bird, Candle In The Wind '97 and Patience.

I suppose the next Kylie single, whatever that turns out to be, will also qualify.

welcome to the world of objective fact, bitches.

Throw the words around a bit and the answer would be: any dick if it's attached to a camera.

I ask you for the second time: why do you hang around threads which you don't like?

OMM did a pretty miserable job of hyping Cocker in the last-but-one issue.