View from Australia: Top Ten Songs for #OccupyWallStreet

By Jonathan Bradley

The New York Times recently published a curious piece by James C. McKinley Jr. titled "At the Protests, the Message Lacks a Melody." Curious, because to anyone paying attention, its central thesis is entirely incorrect. American music, says McKinley, has lacked for songs expressing the frustration at inequality that has fueled the Occupy Wall Street protest, and other related movements across the country:

[T]he protesters in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan have yet to find an anthem. Nor is the rest of the country humming songs about hard times. So far, musicians living through the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression have filled the airwaves with songs about dancing, not the worries of working people.

Where have all the protest songs gone?

 If McKinley cannot find any protest music in modern America, he can't be looking very hard. Indeed, he seems to be looking in the wrong places. He mentions, as exceptions to his rule, artists whose heyday has long passed, such as Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello or the '90s blues-rap novelty Everlast. He appears more concerned with protest genres of previous decades, such as soul, folk, or punk, than in trying to engage with popular music as it exists today. And, worst of all, he ignores entirely the two forms of contemporary American songwriting that are explicitly by, for, and about working class America: hip-hop and country.

I encourage discussion about popular culture because music, movies, and television often approach important subjects that traditional media sources are unable or unwilling to discuss. Sometimes this is because these are ideas that matter to marginalised groups who lack access to newspapers or cable television, other times it's because these ideas are better understood through narrative or experience than quotes from experts. But bad discussion about popular culture is unhelpful to everyone.

As such and without further ado, I present ten songs the Times overlooked in its search for the tunes of this economic downturn. Tales of debt, unemployment, poor working conditions, and housing stress abound.

1. Young Jeezy - Circulate [Click to listen]

Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy had his finger on the national pulse better than anyone in 2008. The same week that Republican presidential candidate John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate and before McCain had suspended his campaign to deal with the financial crisis, Jeezy put out an album called The Recession. (It featured a prescient song about McCain's opponent, called "My President is Black.") The record is suffused with economic uncertainty, and no tracks reflects the dire state of the times as well as "Circulate." Sampling a stagflation-era soul tune urging "let the dollar circulate" the track pairs Jeezy wanly regretting his profligacy while the chorus, for all intents and purposes, begs for looser monetary policy. 

2. John Rich - Shuttin' Detroit Down

I discussed this song last year at the USSC blog, but it's still relavant. The video features a factory worker getting fired while a newsreader announces a new round of Wall Street bonuses. "My daddy taught me in this country, everyone's the same/You work hard for your dollar, and you never pass the blame," is the opening couplet, and the feeling that sentiment no longer applies in the US is the driving force behind the Occupy protests. "D.C.'s bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground," goes the chorus. "While they're living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town, here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down." Incidentally, Rich also wrote "Raising McCain," the theme song for John McCain's presidential campaign. More recently, though less enjoyably, Toby Keith has written a similar peaen to American jobs called "Made in America." 

3. Cam'ron - I Hate My Job

Cam'ron's a cult New York rapper best known for tongue-twisting lyrics and absurd claims of consumption: He once reckoned his jewellery to be worth the cost of several townhomes. So this 2009 song was an abrupt change in style made for an abrupt change in his audience's work prospects. "My Job" featured the rapper voicing first a working woman and then an unemployed man, neither happy with their limited opportunity. The former character has lousy working conditions — "lunch break, gimme a break: a damn half an hour" — a miserable paycheck — "All this for $12 an hour?" — and bills piling up — "Internet, cable, and the phone all connected; Food, gas, tolls... oh, now it's getting hectic." The man, an ex-felon, is even worse off. He heads for interviews only to be told, "No, we're not hiring." That's a brush-off far too familiar for too many Americans these days.

4. Ke$ha - Tik Tok

Ke$ha? Protest music? Perhaps not, but her songs demonstrate the problem with McKinley's dismissal of "songs about dancing." It isn't just that dancing has always been one of the cheaper forms of entertainment available to anyone caught in recession — the Great Depression certainly didn't lack for "songs about dancing" for exactly this reason — it's that even dance music can capture the zeitgeist. Ke$ha's trashy aesthetic is notable for the way it turns its back on high-rolling decadence. "Ain't got no money in my pocket but I'm already here," she sings in this song, and other tunes have her gatecrashing parties and sneaking into concerts to get her kicks. A half decade previous, club hits were more likely to talk about expensive champagne than having a good time on the cheap. 

5. Kanye West - All of the Lights

West may be known for his opulent tastes, but his music of late has been filled with references to the tough times facing the average American. "All of the Lights" has him playing the character of a father in trouble with the law and estranged from his family. It's a portrait of the stresses placed on a breadwinner who's lost his ability to win bread. A guest verse from Fergie makes this even clearer by voicing a female counterpart. "Unemployment line," she raps. "Credit card declined; did I mention I was about to lose my mind?" 

6. Jamey Johnson - Poor Man Blues

"He thinks his money rules the world, and he don't give a don't give a damn," goes this song from Johnson's #1 country album The Guitar Song. That record also features another down-on-your-luck honky-tonk in the form of "Lonely at the Top." ("But it's a bitch at the bottom," is the kicker.) Country music, coming from one of the poorest regions of the country, has always had sympathy for the working class, but over the past few years it's shown a notable increase in tales of class resentment. Johnson's Alabama good ol' boy might not have much in common culturally with the protesters in Zucotti Park, but Occupy Wall Street has been unexpectedly successful thus far in emphasising that economic interests can sometimes trump cultural ones.

7. Brad Paisley - A Man Don't Have to Die

A common narrative among these tunes involves a struggle with a loan, be it credit card debt or the threat of foreclosure. It's a story that resonates particularly vividly in the current downturn — a lot of Occupy Wall Street protesters, for instance, complain bitterly of steep and unpayable student loans. "A Man Don't Have to Die" is from Paisley's This is Country Music, which reached #2 on the Billboard chart and has sold more than 500 000 copies. "...to go through hell" is how the West Virginian singer completes the title, and his vision of the underworld is an underwater mortgage: "It's payments that you can't make on a house that you can't sell."

8. Ace Hood - Go N Get It

Florida has been hit harder by the housing crash than most places, and you can hear the desperation in native Sunshine State rapper Ace Hood's music. "Hustle Hard" was a bigger hit — top ten on Billboard Rap/R&B charts — but "Go N Get It" was the better song. Both, however, are steeped in hard times. "Go N Get It" has the rapper trying to scrape a few bucks together and asking "What you do when you got seven days to move out?" The video, above, features him coming home to an eviction notice. Its plot smartly subverts stereotypes of the urban poor, too. Watch it; I won't give away the ending. Like a lot of these tunes, it's a song about lived experience rather than a Dylan-esque diatribe against a figure of authority, but that doesn't make its political message any less potent.

9. Danny Brown - Scrap or Die

Detroit is familiar with urban blight in the form of vacant buildings, but rapper Danny Brown's method of earning a buck — breaking in and stripping the property of its pipes and wiring — is becoming ruinously common across the Midwest. "A family live there, they got put out last month," Brown relates while casing a potential target. The tale could be true, as this New York Times story on Cleveland explains; banks across the country have been foreclosing on properties but leaving them empty and unmaintained. The result: Entire neighbourhoods get overrun by criminals and vagrants. Brown plays the bad guy in this song, but he's also an anti-hero stuck in an economy that offers him no legal way to earn a living.

10. The Pistol Annies - Lemon Drop

Alex Macpherson suggests this one; the band uses "the titular sweet as a metaphor for mortgage payments," he writes. "I'm sucking on the bitter to get to the sweet" is the tune's hopeful refrain, though the situation sounds more dire than that optimism implies: "I got thriftstore curtains in the windows of my home/I'm paying for a house that the landlord owns/Bought a TV on the credit card/It'll take me ten years to pay it off." Hard times indeed.

28 October 2011