Bob Lind. Pulp. 2001. Island.

 Maybe the first thing you notice about the lyric for Bob Lind is that it’s an entertainingly accurate narrative detailing the psychological desperation following a breakup. You also notice what a great time the vocalist Jarvis Cocker is having recounting the experience, imparting to the sense of desperation a heady feeling of momentum, as if the process of recovery were actually a race to see how fast you can once again acquire love. Cocker also subjects himself to, in his finely controlled surrender to lyricism, a good deal of self-appraisal, of the kind typically associated with what has come to be called accountability. Other songwriters who have practiced this poetry of self-critique are Jason Lytle, Paul Westerberg, and James Murphy, all of whom are determined to hold themselves accountable, but only to the extent that accountability transforms the sin of self-involvement into an ironic, glamorous form of self-annihilation, always a welcome topic in rock and roll. What’s also welcome is a plethora of energy and a clearly stated sense of direction. Bob Lind is all positive release, a self reckoning that doesn’t bother naming our flaws because anyone who’s been in a relationship knows already what they all are. The seminal role played by neurotics in pop music history can’t be overstated; “fuckups,” as Cocker rightly identifies us in the Bob Lind lyric, are to the body politic what our psychological flaws—often times the result of an imbalance in brain chemistry—are to the body human. It was outcasts and misfits who erected the scaffolding upon which today’s mega billions, largely conservative, rock and roll industry was built. In 2021, onstage for his band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, drummer Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters thanked the band’s management team, “For making us a shitload of money.” A year later, Hawkins was found dead in a Bogota, Colombia, hotel room, killed by cardiac arrest. According to the official record a variety of drugs—including antidepressants, marijuana, opioids, and benzodiazepines, which are often taken to treat anxiety and insomnia—was discovered in his system. 

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