Pop music to explore and endure hard times

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Pop music to explore and endure hard times by
April 19, 2009
By Dan DeLuca
philly.com

No money that's why I'm mad

Need a livin' that's why I rap . . .

I'm cheap, can't brag about what I got

My five-star meals come from IHOP.

- Rugged N Raw, "I'm Broke and Proud"



You're losin' your job, your house and your car

Hittin' rock bottom don't feel that far

Nothin' good is gonna come along

All I can do is play this song.

- Loudon Wainwright III, "Times Is Hard"



Pop music escapism isn't about to go out of fashion, but hard times are back in style.

On "Fork in the Road," the title track to his new album, Neil Young stirs the anti-Wall Street pot: "There's a bailout coming, but it's not for you," the Canadian rocker sings. "It's for all those creeps hiding what they do."

With his hit "Shuttin' Detroit Down," country singer John Rich stokes blue-collar rage: "While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town, and D.C.'s bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground / Here in the real world, they're shuttin' Detroit down."

And even funk-rock explorer Prince has emerged from his purple alternate universe to voice concern for the common man. On his new recession-ready, budget-priced 3-CD set ($11.98 at Target), he rhymes, "Everybody talkin' bout hard time like it just started yesterday, people I know they been strugglin', at least it seems that way / Fat cats on Wall Street they got a bailout . . . in my old neighborhood, ain't nothin' changed but the date."

It's not clear whether it's good economic policy for artists to go on about bad news. The No. 1 song in America is the Black Eyed Peas' assiduously meaningless club track "Boom Boom Pow." Lady Gaga's party tune "Poker Face" is hot on its tail, and Britney Spears' unabashedly inane "If You Seek Amy" is rapidly climbing the charts.

Though pop music's defining purpose has always been (and always should be) about providing three-minute thrills, singing about hard times is a tradition that reaches back as least as far as, well, "Hard Times Come Again No More." The 1854 Stephen Foster song is being covered by Bruce Springsteen on his current concert tour, which arrives at a sold-out Spectrum April 28 and 29.

That tradition carries forward across musical genres to "Hard Times," by rapper Jadakiss and Jamaican dancehall artist Barrington Levy, which samples President Obama's economic pep talks and drops lyrics like "foreclosures all over, when it's gonna stop, only the Lord knows this."

Philadelphia hip-hopper Mr. Lif, whose album I Heard It Today is released Tuesday, starts off with a mock news announcer saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, the headlines today should simply read: American Dream Shattered."

Other anti-bling rap acts have joined the chorus, including the laugh-out-loud funny "I'm Broke and Proud," by New York rapper Rugged N Raw. The psychedelic duo Willie Isz, consisting of Atlanta rapper Khujo and Philadelphia producer and vocalist Jneiro Jarel, have recorded "In the Red," a song that isn't too proud to evoke "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" - a chart-topper for Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee - when it asks, "We starvin' down here, can you spare some bread?"

Economic anxiety is reflected all across the spectrum of pop culture. In Kelly Reichardt's indie movie Wendy and Lucy, money is so tight that Michelle Williams is moved to shoplift to feed her dog. In the second season of MTV's Paris Hilton's My New BFF, contestants must live in a house half as expensive as the mansion used in Season 1. And in a forthcoming episode of Marvel Comics' Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter Parker loses his job as a newspaper Web designer and goes to work at McDonald's.

It's also finding its way into the thoughtful consumerist pop songs of Lily Allen, the Brit wit who recently admitted, "I've been hit big time by the credit crunch. Actually, I just had to sell my car because I'm so broke." On "The Fear," the first single from her album It's Not Me, It's You, Allen calls herself "a weapon of massive consumption" and implicitly critiques soul-sucking materialism, drolly rhyming, "It doesn't matter, cause I'm packing plastic, and that's what makes my life so fantastic."

Rock-and-roll is built on the blues. Every topical songwriter who owes a debt to Bob Dylan - who, himself, cracks wise about blind optimism on "It's All Good," from his new album out April 28 - also owes a debt to Woody Guthrie. The iconic Dust Bowl troubadour's Depression-era songs about being skint, like "Do-Re-Mi" and "I Ain't Got No Home," provide the template for harmonica-rack social commentary that Dylan modernized during the '60s folk revival.

Guthrie's cracked-voice protest songs offer a ready-made model for authentic expression that, for decades, has been serving singer-songwriters like Springsteen, Billy Bragg, John Mellencamp, and Loudon Wainwright III. You can add to the list Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the 77-year-old cowboy troubadour (born Elliott Adnopoz) who was a key figure linking Guthrie and Dylan in the Greenwich Village folk scene. Elliott's new album, A Stranger Here, is a haunting collection of Depression-era blues that's a perfectly timed expression of the zeitgeist.

For folk and country and blues artists, singing about struggle and strife has often lent their music not just an air of historical authenticity, but also a touch of romance. Hop on board Jimmie Rodgers' "Waiting on a Train," and be transported back to a carefree time when the world was as rough and rugged - and as beautifully black and white - as a Walker Evans photograph.

Now that bank failures and bread lines have reentered the popular consciousness, stepping out of a mythical past into a frightening present, Depression-era songs like Josh White's "One Meat Ball" don't seem quite so quaint anymore. With every economic downturn, topical songwriting takes an upswing; Springsteen and Mellencamp both prospered during the Reagan-era recession of the '80s.

With the global economic free fall following the music business' dress-rehearsal collapse, it's no big surprise that the layoff and foreclosure blues have had an across-the-board effect on pop music.

Some of the commentators are unsurprising, like the old-timey country swinger Wayne Hancock, who moans about "holes in my roof and holes in my shoes" on "Working at Working" on his new Viper of Melody. On her forthcoming album The Loving Kind, Texas songwriter Nanci Griffith drives "Across America," chronicling hardships but coming to the upbeat conclusion that "you can't foreclose on hope." And political punk band Anti-Flag, whose The People or the Gun comes out in June, is full up with agit-prop salvos like "Sodom, Gomorrah, Washington D.C." and "The Economy Is Suffering . . . Let It Die."

A less predictable voice is dancehall singer Al Moodie, who uses a jaunty ska beat on "Everything Crash" to run through the litany of collapsing financial institutions ("WaMu crash, Lehman Brothers crash, Wachovia crash, down to AIG crash, too!"). And then there's Atlanta thug-rapper Young Jeezy, who called his topical album The Recession way back in the good old days of July 2008, when people were still debating whether the downturn was in fact a recession.

(Jeezy's surprisingly serious-minded tone hasn't been universally echoed through the genre: "Economy, schmeckonomy," Lil Wayne told Rolling Stone this month. "I'm ballin' through the recession.")

The most historically resonant of the new recession songs is the lead track off the new album by the storied Texas country trio the Flatlanders. Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore are heirs of a sort to the Guthrie tradition, and on "Homeland Refugee" they turn the idea of a westward migration from the Depression-era heartland on its head.

"I'm leaving California for the Dust Bowl," Ely sings, over an accordion-fired folk-rock tune. "The pastures of plenty are burning by the sea."

The song connects to the Guthrie hard-time balladry of another era, as the singer recalls his grandfather's Grapes of Wrath tales of heading west after losing his home in the crash of 1929. But eight decades later, as he travels through a desert full of "container trains, casinos, and canals," that American dream has turned back on itself. The song conjures the mythic imagery of the Great Depression, but this time, it's all too real.