“Supermarkets are the only place you can go when you feel a bit sad and you don’t want to be at home…”

While I’d anticipated a conversation about music and his latest album Seems Unfair when I interviewed Trust Fund’s Ellis Jones this month, we also ended up musing on the nature of supermarkets – a recurring theme on the record.

Afterwards, I began to think about the way supermarkets structure our lives: from the amount of time we spend in them (at least once a day for the less organised among us) to their ambiguous status in society as all-powerful providers of nourishment.

Ellis isn’t the first songwriter to use these pervasive halls of consumerism to reflect the unavoidable framing narratives that bookend our lives – in fact it’s a theme that’s common across most genres.

“I guess supermarkets are like a weird public space where you can go and feel safe but at the same time they’re not public at all,” Ellis told me. “They’re owned by big private companies.” And it’s that sense of ambiguity that makes supermarkets so intriguing and so emblematic of modern life. They’re void of any purpose apart from consumerism, they’re everywhere, so much so that they feel like parks or plazas.

I’d go so far as to say that that’s the reason supermarkets are so prevalent in lyrics. They are a huge, confounding part of modern daily life, reflecting and highlighting the humdrum nature of existence in a very universal way. They are ubiquitous, self-aware and all encompassing. Sure, the millions of lines written about love (including several written by Ellis himself) are beautiful, but they can only exist within a nirvana fallacy, ignoring the ludicrous intricacies of reality. Supermarkets, on the other hand, are very fucking real.

Pulp – Common People

"I took her to a supermarket / I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere"

In Pulp’s Common People Jarvis Cocker sums up the phenomenon in a neat couplet. His tale of My Fair Lady in reverse is now regarded as a classic, speaking to every ‘common person’ on some level. Perhaps it has something to do with the imagery of everyday life (smoking fags, playing pool), or perhaps its the succinct and subtle opening line about one of life’s seemingly innocuous tasks: popping to the shops.

Belle And Sebastian - The State I Am In

"Now I spend my days turning tables round in Marks & Spencer / they don't seem to mind."

Belle & Sebastian’s lead singer, Stuart Murdoch, is a true master of kitchen-sink level observations on lower-middle class life. The high street is a theme he returns to again and again. In fact, on Expectations, the track that follows The State I Am In on Tigermilk, he name drops both C&A and Debenhams.

Like many of Murdoch’s earlier songs, The State I Am In takes the form of a short story. In this case we follow a drifting layabout – probably a fictionalised version of Murdoch himself – as he marries a foreign girl to save her from deportation, visits a preacher and eventually ends up in the depths of insanity. And what better place to be insane than iconic British department store-cum-supermarket, Marks & Spencer?

The Clash - Lost In The Supermarket

"I'm all lost in the supermarket / I can no longer shop happily / I came in here for a special offer / a guaranteed personality"

The Clash’s Lost In The Supermarket is perhaps the most obviously anti-consumerist song on this list. Strummer muses on intense branding, aspirational targeted advertising and the not-so-special offers thrown at people while they shop for their necessities. It’s a classic case of consumer enlightenment versus corporate marketing.

Wu Tang - The Heart Gently Weeps

"I brought my bitch out to Pathmark"

Wu-Tang are probably the best rap group of all time but this song is absolute garbage. The Heart Gently Weeps is an interpretation of The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps featuring Dhani Harrison, Erykah Badu and John Frusciante and it fucking sucks.

That said, in the second verse Ghostface flips supermarket boredom on its head as he dodges bullets in the aisles with his girlfriend. See? Supermarket lyrics are not just the reserve of whiney white blokes from small British towns.

Parquet Courts - Stoned And Starving

"I was reading ingredients / asking myself 'Should I eat this?'"

This song doesn’t mention supermarkets directly but the narrative takes place on a stoned afternoon in New York, browsing magazines and reading food labels. Bamboozled by choices and sweatily clutching a wad of bank notes the narrator ends up confused, wasted and standing in a store. We’ve all been there? Right?

Crack Magazine Issue 58 is out now across the UK and Berlin. See our feature with Trust Fund here

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