the Pop Song of Manners

Not rude like 'good', but just rude like 'uncouth'

‘Knock ‘Em Out’, the second track on Lily Allen’s debut album Alright, Still (2006), is about desperately trying to avoid the advances of some sleazy, teasing, seriously displeasing flirt — but without being rude:

Can't knock 'em out, you can't walk away
Try desperately to think of the politest way to say ('Er, sorry, yeah, but nah')
"Just get out my face, just leave me alone
And, no, you can't have my number (Why?), 'cause I lost my phone"

The funny thing is, even if she couldn’t knock ‘em out, she could walk away. Or at least be a bit mean to them. We’re talking about Lily Allen in the early days of her career — a young woman who had already gained a reputation as a ‘greedy’, ‘seedy’ (wholly unlike Cheryl Tweedy) party girl who had dropped out of a succession of schools to go and do drugs with dodgy DJs in Ibiza.¹ Yet here she is: handwringing over politeness, trying not to make the most annoying person in the world feel too bad, making increasingly lame excuses in the process (‘I've gotta go, my house is on fire! I've got— I've got herpes! Err, no, syphilis!’) This is not just because, as a woman, she is intimidated by these drunk men: after all, the first verse is about a man who is trying to shake off an outrageously flirtatious and seriously off-putting woman. A lot of it just comes down to pure Englishness.² Dan Fox wrote, of Pulp’s ‘Common People’: ‘only in Britain could a band have a Top Ten hit about class dissimulation’. Similarly, only England could produce a raunchy popstar capable of writing a dancey tune that is ostensibly about nightlife, but is really about social etiquette.

When you think about it, there’s lots of British music that dwells for a little bit too long on propriety and bad behaviour. One of my favourite songs from childhood, for example, Kate Nash’s ‘Foundations’ (2007), is about a relationship that has turned as acrid as battery juice; the tell-tale signs that this couple are beyond hope is that they are rude to each other, in front of other people. Observe:

I'm telling a story
And you find it boring
You're thinking of something to say
You'll go along with it then drop it
And humiliate me in front of our friends

Then I'll use that voice that you find annoying
And say something like
'Yeah, intelligent input darling,
Why don't you just have another beer then?’
Then you'll call me a bitch
And everyone we're with will be embarrassed
And I won't give a shit

A song about being reduced to the kind of person who makes their dinner guests uncomfortable spent weeks in the UK Top 10.³ Musings on manners are not specific to the alt-pop genre, either. ‘Sprinter’, which in 2023 debuted at number one in the UK music charts and then proceeded to amass the most streams in a week for any rap single in UK history, opens with this line from Central Cee: ‘The mandem too inconsiderate / Five star hotel smoking cigarettes’. The mandem too inconsiderate. You can practically hear him shaking his head and tutting as he says it. What are they like, says Central Cee. The mandem are just so rude!

Stills from the music for Kate Nash’s ‘Foundations’

There’s a difference, though, between a passing reference to behaviour, and a song which is all about politesse. The latter is what I have started calling the ‘Pop Song of Manners’. This kind of song is a direct descendant of the comedy of manners, a theatrical genre for which David L. Hirst offers the following definition:

The subject of the comedy of manners is the way people behave, the manners they employ in a social context […] Actions — rape, robbery, murder, adultery — are unimportant; what matters is the way in which they are performed, or more often the style in which they are concealed.

‘Knock ‘Em Out’ is a Pop Song of Manners because it takes pains to develop a certain social scene, introduce us to the characters within it, and then proceed to rip apart the way those characters are failing to behave appropriately in and for said social scene. In The Streets’s ‘Fit But You Know It’, to take another example, both the narrator and the women he is enticed by continually fail to abide by the social rules that are appropriate to their context (a night out on holiday). The women fail because of discrepancies in their appearance (‘Excuse me girl, I know it’s a bit embarrassing, but I just noticed some tan lines on your shirt’) and because they commit the ultimate English sin of having too much aplomb (‘You're fit, but my gosh, don't you know it?’) The narrator on the other hand is too awkward to approach these women, instead getting frustrated and drunk and lairy, and is all too aware that he is committing his own social crimes: ‘I didn’t want to bowl over all geezer and rude / Not rude like 'good', but just rude like 'uncouth''.

My favourite Pop Song of Manners, though, comes from Amy Winehouse’s debut album Frank (2003): ‘F- Me Pumps’. In it, Winehouse chronicles the travails of a group of women who, in their quest to find their ‘rich man six-foot-two or taller’, attend party after party and sleep with man after man, becoming increasingly run down in the process. Their crime is not so much that they are ambitiously seeking the attentions of a millionaire, but that they are doing such a bad job of hiding it: from the moment they walk in the bar, dressed like a star, rocking their eff-me pumps, everyone knows exactly what they’re after. The picture Winehouse paints of women who have failed because of their lack of propriety is depressing:

You can't sit down right, 'cause your jeans are too tight
And you’re lucky it's ladies' night
With your big empty purse
Every week it gets worse
At least your breasts cost more than hers

(Talk about uncouth!)

Stills from the music video for Amy Winehouse’s ‘F- Me Pumps’

Traditional comedies of manners satirise the behavioural rules and deportment of the upper classes, but Pop Songs of Manners have a distinctly working class/lower middle class vibe: one does not need to be posh, after all, to be a judgemental cow. ‘F- Me Pumps’ is a sobering reminder that in British society, no matter your age or class, there are real-life consequences in failing to abide by social etiquette. Moreover, when civility and politeness are abandoned altogether — as they are by the couple in ‘Foundations’ — it is a sign of something much worse: a complete breakdown of the social group, who will soon be destined to oblivion.

Still, there is something undeniably enjoyable about encountering those who, out of ignorance or obstinacy, flout the social rules. Even Winehouse admits it in ‘F- Me Pumps’: ‘Without girls like you,’ she concedes, ‘there’d be no fun. We’d go to the club and not see anyone! Without girls like you, there’s no nightlife — all those men just go home to their wives’.

1. Of course, she also had a famous father and film-producer mother and was briefly educated at the same private school that the current King of England once attended. But I digress.

2. When American pop girls, on the other hand, are confronted with unpleasant men in clubs they say things like: ‘my name is: no, my sign is: no, my number is: no. You need to let it go.’

3. Nash has another zinger in the second verse, the infamous: ‘you said I must eat so many lemons, ‘cos I am so bitter. I said "I'd rather be with your friends, mate, 'cause they are much fitter”’. Got him!!!!