In her latest edition of Gendercidal, Semtex lays into the rich white boy Jarvis Cocker meant to speak of and warn us all about in the seminal Pulp track, Common People.
While Jarvis Cocker might have tried to pigeonhole the spoiled rich girl stereotype to the best of his ability in Common People, the 1995 single that shot Pulp’s album, Different Class, into the forever collective conscious of what defined Britpop, these days, it seems, there are no such rich girls to be found. Alas, only rich boys. While, in the past, this might have been catnip to a black widow type such as myself, the problem with the affluent blanco of today is that he’s too fucking dainty, self-consumed and otherwise non-seducable to even be bothered with in terms of a financial plan. His money, in short, is wasted on his own damn self, never to be expended on the likes of your dripping with sex persona, which has no place outside of the Marilyn Monroe era of the 1950s.
Now that sex is all out in the open, for the taking–whenever, wherever–it has lost all meaning and validity as a source of tantalization to the rich boy finally dipping his toe into real world enterprises like going to a “dive bar” recommended by Yelp. But still, there you’ll be, a beacon of plebeian normalcy that can, if nothing else, at least instruct him on how to get to the subway. Or, in what will initially seem like a bout of “good luck,” he’ll want to spend additional time with you, maybe even go so far as to engage you in the charade of a relationship as you lose all your power, fall down the rabbit hole of l’amour and suddenly find yourself acting as though you’re the one with all the cash flow as you live the same lifestyle that he so easily affords: taking trips, ceasing to work as much or as diligently–in short, acting like the faux socialite you aren’t.
Alas, the rich white boy who will “never be like common people” is, ironically, the most common breed of male of all. And, like a Ponzi scheme, best left avoided at all costs.
By the time you’ve already gotten in too deep-find a moment of clarity long enough to check your bank account and suddenly remember that you, in fact, are one of the common people Jarvis was talking about-it will be too late. And you’ll come to grips with how you’ve lost all touch with your true identity as Rich White Boy continues living his oblivious to reality existence under the guise of, in his deranged mind, “slumming it.” Especially if he’s with you. But like Jarvis says, the Rich White Boy, in this case, will never know the realities of common people, even if he “rent(s) a flat above a shop, cut(s) [his] hair and gets a job, smoke(s) some fags and play(s) some pool, pretend(s) he never went to school.” He’ll “never get it right, ‘cause when [he’s] laid in bed at night, watching roaches climb the wall, if [he] called [his] dad, he could stop it all.” And there it is: the thing that will always irrevocably keep Rich White Boys happily sequestered in their land of delusion. Daddy-o will perpetually serve as a rubber ring while his son delicately puts on a rubber to briefly try his hand at a “common woman.” When he feels that he’s sufficiently and successfully engaged in such common people activities, he won’t be able to help but retreat back into his ivory tower to “recharge,” as it were. For it can be very taxing on Rich White Boy’s psyche to have too many dealings with the existence beyond the one sanitized for him by the assured presence of money.
You, on the other hand, will be left feeling like little better than street trash, unwittingly serving your purpose in his little experiment called Finding Out How the Other Half Lives. The problem is, he ends up hacking a touch more than half of your heart in the process of cajoling you into emotional involvement. And all so he can fulfill some sort of inexplicable fetish. And it is a fetish–Rich White Boys jonesing for “beggar girls” is in the same genre as white guys with an Asian girl proclivity. So while he “laughs along with the common people, laughs along even though they’re laughing at [him] and the stupid things [he] does because [he] think(s) poor is cool,” he’ll never be able to apprehend that the only nobility in poverty is, at the very least, not being a total douchebag with no concept of life as it is experienced by most.
He “will never understand how it feels to live his life with no meaning or control, and with nowhere left to go.” Because, for the common people of this world, there truly is no one to turn to (save for a loan shark perhaps) and nowhere left to go when finances are exhausted. Rich White Boy simply can’t process such realities or people, “amazed that they exist, and they burn so bright whilst [he] wonders why.” Well, the “why,” darling, is because, as Dorothy Parker said, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Total shitheads.
Alas, the rich white boy who will “never be like common people” is, ironically, the most common breed of male of all. And, like a Ponzi scheme, best left avoided at all costs.
Featured image by Steve Double