Owen Hatherley*, Uncommon
The history of Pulp via pop, class war and the erotic city.
"This book is a small marvel. Even within the most ambiguous cultural flowering, something transcendent is cached. Owen Hatherley knows this. Possessed of an architect's clarity and a modernist's astringent vision, he draws forth the the paradoxical and brilliant core of Britpop, and restores Pulp's contradictory genius to its proper place in history. Behind the Blairite swagger of Cool Britannia and the spackle of commercial spectacle, Hatherley finds the truth of pop culture and social antagonism, entangled with the glory and oddity of Pulp's musical career and evanescent fame. Elegant about the songs, lucid about the band's warped trajectory, and incisive about the politics of daily life coiled within the sound and lyrics and moment, Hatherley chronicles the adventures of the Sheffield gang and their "class war casanova" who came forth as the truth of a deeply false moment, bad faith you could dance to, a dialectical verdict on a singular passage in time."
Joshua Clover
*Owen Hatherley is also the multi-blogger behind the architectonic polemics of Nasty, Brutalist and Short, and others.
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