William wrote the words and I wrote the music in my den that night. He came over to my house the night before the session. Recalling how the track came together, Jones told NPR: “At that time, my writing partner was William Bell. To be “born under a bad sign” is to be doomed from birth. Jones, this 1967 Albert King hit is one of the few blues songs to refer to astrology. You know I wouldn’t have no luck at all”. The opening lyrics of this blues classic speak for themselves: “Born under a bad sign / Been down since I begin to crawl / If it wasn’t for bad luck It is one of the things I’m always trying: To assert a sexual persona and on the other hand trying desperately to negate it.” To actually assert yourself in a masculine way without looking like you’re in a hard-rock band is a very difficult thing to do… It comes back to the music we write, which is not effeminate, but it’s not brutal in its arrogance.
Written as an attack against the ‘beautiful people’, the 1993 offering is easily relatable to anybody who has ever felt like they don’t conform to the world’s ever-fluctuating beauty standards.ĭiscussing the track shortly after its release, Yorke said: “I have a real problem being a man in the ’90s… Any man with any sensitivity or conscience toward the opposite sex would have a problem. ‘Creep’ from Radiohead’s debut album Pablo Honey is perhaps the most archetypal. Rich in the melancholy of bands like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Radiohead, the era saw the release of a host of classic underdog anthems. If there’s one thing that the ’90s did well, it’s songs about self-loathing. Once I got that narrative in my head it was very easy to write, lyrically.” I hated all that cobblers you got in films and magazines in which posh people would ‘slum it’ for a while. She was from a well-to-do background, and there was me explaining that that would never work. She wanted to go and live in Hackney and be with the common people. “It would be used in ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’ as this idea of the noble savage, whereas it was a real insult in Sheffield to call someone ‘common.’ That set off memories of this girl that I met at college. When he bought it into the band’s next rehearsal: “Steve (Mackey, bass) started laughing and said, ‘It sounds like (Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of) ‘Fanfare For The Common Man.’ I always thought the word ‘common’ was an interesting thing,” Cocker continued. Discussing the making of the track in a conversation with Uncut in 2010, Jarvis Cocker explained that ‘common people began life as a three-chord wonder which the frontman wrote on his new Casio keyboard. Released in 1995, the track offers artful criticism of what some have since labelled ‘poverty porn’. I’m never going to come up with a synopsis, a shorthand version of myself that somebody can just glance at and say, ‘That’s it.'”įew Britpop anthems tackled contemporary social issues with the same deftness as Pulp’s ‘Common People’. Although, speaking to The Guardian in 1996, Beck explained that the track was never necessarily meant as an anti-establishment encapsulation of slackerdom: “That sort of slacker idea, or the goofy hip-hop guy, I just think it’s silly, it’s not me. On release, the track was quickly adopted as an outsider anthem – and with its confrontational refrain of “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me,” it’s easy to see why. Though vast swathes of Beck’s 1994 surprise hit make no sense whatsoever (“With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables / Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose”), the overall message of ‘Loser’ is clear: don’t let the fuckers get you down. The 10 greatest underdog anthems: ‘Loser’ – Beck From Radiohead to Nina Simone, artists have sought to inspire those without hope, convincing them that, although the outlook might not be great, there is always a reason to carry on fighting the status quo. This mindset is one of the most essential aspects of a truly great underdog anthem.
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