What Do You Say?

The first Pulp song ever released, appearing on a compilation entitled Your Secret’s Safe with Us. The sound of the song is twitchy and doomy – very Factory Records. As a lyricist, Jarvis has already acquired a sense of ambition, sketching a macabre scenario in which he wakes to realize he’s literally changed into another person. Is he thinking along the lines of a less gruesome version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis? Or maybe it’s an inadvertent precursor to the movie Big. Jarvis would have been around 18 when this song came out. Maybe he’s reflecting on adolescence, and the emotional and physical upheavals that come with it. Here he takes that feeling, and transports it into the realm of horror, making the metaphor into something concrete. He truly wants to contemplate -- not only for himself but for those around him -- what it would mean to become another person.